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Lost for 37 Days: The Man Who Did Everything Wrong and Still Helped Create Yellowstone
He didn’t learn a thing, but we can
Wyoming. October 16, 1870.
Two men scour the unmapped wilderness for the remains of a third. Their dog is on the scent of bear when they see an odd, shuffling shape on the nearest hillside. One of them raises his rifle, takes sight — and pauses.
Then he lowers his rifle, in disbelief.
Looking back at them is the hollow, leathery face of an emaciated man who no longer looks human. A man badly scarred by fire and steam, frostbitten and starved away.
He’s been lost for 37 days, alone on 2 million acres.
One of the last unmapped places
Truman Everts was a 54-year-old unemployed tax assessor for the Montana Territory, who in late summer 1870 inked and bolded his name into the annals of capital-B bad decisions: he joined an expedition of 19 men and 40 horses into Yellowstone.
It was an adventure he was unqualified for, but Yellowstone was a delicious mystery. Why not see it? he thought.
The land had been frequented for over 10,000 years by Native Americans, before it was eyed as one of the United States’ last unmapped places in the years after the Civil War. And in the habit of unmapped places, it attracted white explorers.
The first organized expedition, in 1869, came back reporting geysers and fantastical things: steam springs and multihued mud, like paint pots — white, pink, red, violet. The rumors were hard to credit. And Truman, between jobs and with plenty of time, wanted to see for himself.
(though “see” is doing some real work — he was so near-sighted he couldn’t make out the ground from horseback, which would cause him heartache later)
No one else in the group could have suffered so many mishaps — at just the right time. He was national news that ignited public interest like coal in the westward-racing railroads of the time. Single-handedly, his story…
