A Bat Out of Hell

If there was such a thing as a Time Machine and you could step inside
of it, set the controls for the winter of the year 1856, and set the
destination for one of the highest peaks of the Sierra Nevada
Mountains; and then if you were to flip the switch, hang on, and
anticipate just what view might lay waiting before you when your Time
Machine skidded to a stop, you might well look out of the machine’s
window to see a tall, blonde Nordic man, his face rubbed black with
fire soot, dressed in a Mackinow jacket and a wide and well-worn hat
who was laughing as he danced a centuries-old Norwegian jig on a broad
flat rock as the snow fell around him, all alone out on a high Sierra
mountainside, miles from any other soul in this frozen world. And then
you would probably think that your Time Machine had malfunctioned and
you would curse H.G. Wells for even giving you this rash notion of
time travel, or you might think that you had lost your sanity and
begin to wonder what the current state of psychological therapy was
back there in mid-1800’s California where you had landed. But you
would be wrong on both assumptions, for the man, and the place, and
the strange Nordic dance taking place in the snow in front of you were
all quite real. For you and your Time Machine would have just dropped
in to glimpse the very private and seldom seen world of a little known
Norwegian immigrant named Jon Torsteinson Rue, known to us on the
other side of the Looking Glass as Snowshoe Thompson.

Jon was born in Norway in 1827. His father died when he was only ten
years old and his mother felt that she’d had enough of the family farm
near the village of Tinn and decided to emigrate to America for a
fresh start. To leave home, family, and everything familiar was a
courageous decision for a woman who had just been widowed. Upon
arriving in the United States she settled her family on a farm in
Illinois but then soon moved on, first to Missouri and then to Iowa.
Soon after Jon and his brother moved to Wisconsin and worked with
dairy cows. But Jon had heard about California and the wealth of gold
that was to be had there just free for the taking, so under the guise
of bringing a herd of dairy cows west he made the trip to the Golden
State and by 1851 he had settled into the Sierra foothills near
Placerville. By now he had Americanized his name, changing it to John
Thompson. He worked in a mine for a brief period, and with the small
amount of money he saved he then bought a ranch and settled into the
agricultural life that had for generations been engraved into his
Nordic genes.

But Thompson was young, restless, and full of energy. He loved the
Sierras. Even though he had left Norway at a young age he still had
fond memories of cold, frigid air and falling snow. By 1855 he was 28
years old, a tall muscled man with a shock of blonde hair and a
strength that emanated from every pore of his body. He couldn’t
understand why Californians dreaded the onset of winter and why they
considered life in the snowy mountains to be a hardship; a living
hell. Jon loved it.

1855 was the year in which the local mail carrier for the United
States Postal Service in the Placerville area just disappeared. No one
suspected foul play – on the contrary, it was just assumed that he’d
gotten tired of trudging through the mountain winters and had moved on
to gentler climates. So John Thompson went into the local post office
and applied for the job. And he was turned down. He applied again, and
was turned down again. And again. And again. The problem was that the
former mail carrier had just disappeared. He hadn’t resigned; he
hadn’t transferred his contract; and he hadn’t died. That left the
local postmaster in a Legal Limbo. Finally, either fed up with or
impressed by Thompson’s perseverance, he told the Norwegian that he
could have the job if he really wanted it but that he had no authority
to pay him for it. Perhaps, the postmaster added hopefully, perhaps at
some time in the future . . .

That was good enough for Thompson, so he took the job.

But one of the major problems with this particular mail route – and
probably the reason that the former carrier had disappeared – was that
the route took the carrier all the way across the Sierras into western
Nevada, and then back. The roads were impassable during the winters –
too deep for horses or wagons, and the railroad was just a hopeful
gleam in the eyes of wealthy entrepreneurs and would have to wait for
many years. The snow was also too deep, it was generally felt, for men
to make a passage on foot. That was where Thompson was sure they were
wrong.

Thompson had memories from his childhood in Norway of times when snow
was not feared, but welcomed; when it didn’t drive people from the
hills but drew them to the higher elevations; when his family and
neighbors thought of cold, ice, and snow not as a frozen hell but
rather as a winter playground. So the first thing he did was to
fashion some new footwear for himself. Out of tough oak timbers he
carved two long skis about ten feet in length and four to five inches
in width. He rubbed fireplace soot on his face to absorb the glare of
the sun. Then he cut a long pole for stability, and he was ready to
go. Early Californians had seen a lot, but they had never seen
anything like this. And when Thompson told them that not only could he
pass across the deep Sierra snowpack easily and safely but that he
could make the crossing in just two to three days – well, they liked
Thompson, so they tried not to laugh in front of him. But they did,
and he laughed right back. Then he took off on his first trip. Legend
has it that a crowd of townspeople gathered to see him off, and that
one of them shouted out, “Snowshoe Thompson – Good Luck!”

And thus a legend was born.

Thompson was as good as his word. He made the trip east across the
Sierras in three days, climbing to an elevation of almost ten thousand
feet and then racing down the far side. He did it with a pack on his
back which would, over the years, vary in weight from fifty to a
hundred pounds, and he did it with solid oak skis strapped to his feet
which weighed in at an additional twenty five pounds. That single long
pole which he had cut wasn’t used as modern skiers use their poles.
Instead of banging it into the snow as he went along his method
differed in that he held it horizontally out in front of him, parallel
to the ground, as would a tightrope walker use a pole to maintain his
balance. When he reached the town of Genoa on the far side of the
Sierras the entire town would gather to watch him slide down the slope
of Genoa Peak, where he would careen into the valley at speeds of over
fifty miles per hour. Then he would pick up another mail sack and head
back, making the return trip in only two days.

Thompson was happy with his accomplishment and said he’d like to keep
doing it. ‘Okay’, repeated the postmaster, ‘just as long as you know I
can’t pay you.’ And then he would add, hopefully, ‘maybe some time in
the future.’

So Thompson continued to deliver the mail every winter for the next
thirteen years, crossing the Sierras with a pack of letters and
packages on his back on an average of once every week or two. He
didn’t carry much food – just a little jerky to keep him going. He
never carried a weapon, saying that he needed every ounce of his kit
for the all-important packages he carried. Using that logic he didn’t
even bring along a blanket. To keep warm, he kept moving. He skied
past mountain Grizzlies, twice his height and five times his weight.
He skied through packs of wolves, ravenous to find a meal in the stark
landscape. He encountered mountain lions but went right on by them,
for to stop would have been to show fear. Thompson followed a trail
now largely paved over by Route 50. He never once lost his way, and
scoffed at the idea that such a thing was even possible in a mountain
range he knew like the back of his hand.

Sewing needles, medical supplies, cooking utensils, books – all of
these and more made their way across the Sierras on Thompson’s back.
He even carried an entire printing press made out of steel, one piece
at a time, across the mountains from Placerville to Genoa where it was
reassembled and produced Nevada’s first regular newspaper. Never worn
out from his regular trips across the mountains he would often give
skiing demonstrations, flying down the slopes at unbelievable speeds
and then jumping completely over his audiences. One such jump was
measured to be 180 feet in length. He would sometimes follow these
demonstrations by giving skiing lessons, and it’s said that is how he
met his wife Agnes in 1866, by giving her a skiing lesson. Their only
child, whom they named Arthur Thomas, was born the following year, but
died of diphtheria at the age of eleven.

Snowshoe Thompson is credited with saving the lives of several
stranded men whom he stumbled upon during his many crossings of the
mountains. One such occasion was especially notable because it eerily
foretold Thompson’s own fate. He was crossing the mountains one day
when the snow grew particularly bothersome in that it was limiting his
view more than normal. Thompson knew that he was near an old miner’s
cabin – an unused cabin in which he thought he might temporarily take
shelter, so he began poking around in the snow to find the buried hut.
So exact was his knowledge of the local geography that, even though it
was hidden beneath several feet of snow, his pole soon touched the
buried roof and, after digging down, he let himself inside.

Imagine his surprise when he found a man lying on the floor of the cabin.

Thompson quickly lit a match and examined the prone body, finding the
man was still alive. Like Thompson the man had also taken shelter in
the cabin several days before. But unlike Thompson he had been
ill-prepared for the winter storm and his feet had frozen. The man was
a trapper, and he had burned all of the furniture in the cabin over
the past several days in a futile attempt to keep warm and when that
had run out he’d laid down to die, his boots frozen to his feet and
the black color of rotting flesh inexorably making its way up his
legs.

Thompson tried to warm the man but was unable to even cut his boots
off, so he chopped some firewood, started a fire in the fireplace,
promised to bring back help and set off for Genoa. Once in Genoa he
found plenty of men eager to help, but none of the men owned skis or
even knew how to use them. So Thompson had to take the time to carve a
set of skis for each of the would-be rescuers and then taught the men
the basics of their use, and the party finally set off back up into
the mountains to the buried cabin. There they found the trapper, still
alive thanks to the firewood Thompson had cut and left within reach
for him, but still with frozen feet and unable to walk or ski. So the
men fashioned a sled and dragged him back down to the doctor in Genoa.

This would seem to be enough of a rescue to make a hero out of any
man, but once in Genoa Thompson found that his role as rescuer was not
even close to being complete. The doctor told Thompson that the
trapper’s feet couldn’t be saved; that even if there was a tenuous
chance of saving the man’s life then the feet would have to both have
to be cut off. That, the doctor added, was going to be an extremely
painful operation, and the doctor had no chloroform or any other
anesthetic. So Thompson immediately set off, back up the mountains and
across to Placerville to get some chloroform so the doctor in Genoa
could operate and save the man’s life. But, as Fate would have it,
there wasn’t a bottle of chloroform to be had in all of Placerville.
So Thompson continued on to Sacramento, where he finally found a
doctor who had some to spare. Packing the bottle carefully, Thompson
then returned to Placerville where he donned his skis and set out
again for Genoa. When he arrived back on the eastern side of the
Sierras the trapper with the frozen feet was, amazingly, still alive.
The doctor doused the trapper with chloroform and proceeded to saw off
both of his feet. Again, surprisingly, the trapper survived the
operation and lived to tell the tale, all because Snowshoe Thompson
spent ten days going back and forth across the snowbound Sierras
several times in the dead of winter to bring in rescuers, drag out the
injured man, then find and deliver the medicine that was needed.

Snowshoe Thompson never got paid for delivering all that mail or
saving those lives, but he continued to do so until 1868 when the
newly completed railroad took his job from him. Thompson then appealed
to Washington for financial compensation for thirteen years of
delivering the mail without salary, but the postal department told him
that he had no contract with them so they had no obligation to pay him
for those years of work. He appealed to Congress for redress but
Congress, not willing to devote even a penny to a cause which was not
nationally popular, dismissed Thompson and refused to acknowledge the
worth of his services. In May of 1876 Thompson developed appendicitis
and took to his bed. Without treatment the infection spread to his
chest, and he developed pneumonia as his lungs filled with fluid. On
May 15th he died, with no one near to go for medicine, to fetch a
doctor, to save his life; to do for him as he had done for so many
others.

During those thirteen years of winter crossings Thompson was tireless
and would usually pause only briefly, never stopping to sleep. But on
those inevitable occasions when the night would fall from a
cloud-filled sky to block all light from the moon and the stars, and
the wind howled around him and the snow fell so heavily that no man,
not even Snowshoe Thompson, could see even the tips of his skis – then
Snowshoe Thompson would stop, and brush the fresh snow from the
surface of a large flat rock, and to keep warm the young Jon
Torsteinson Rue from years before would emerge from the past to dance
a Norwegian jig, all alone on a mountainside in a world far from any
other man.  When a hint of light shone Snowshoe Thompson would
continue on to his destination, skiing down the last slope into town
at breakneck speed, like a bat out of hell.

Then he would laugh, and do it all over again.