"Thirty-Seven Days of Peril" by Truman Everts

It is a story that would be considered a comedy of errors if it were not so dangerous and potentially tragic.  Truman Everts’ tale was, in fact, a big seller for Scribner’s Monthly, a general interest magazine that thrilled readers with his lost-in-the-wilderness epic called “Thirty-Seven Days of Peril” (Project Gutenberg Ebook), published in November, 1871.

This whole exploration for Everts could be attributed to boredom.  Finding himself at loose ends and newly unemployed, he decides to visit “the remarkable region” he has heard so much about in Montana but has never had the time to visit:  Yellowstone.  He wants to see the “stupendous scenery of the Rocky Mountains,” and explore the places he has read about in “all the strange stories” told of this land well on its way to becoming a National Park.  He joins the Washburn-Langford-Doane Expedition (1870) and sets off on horseback into the wild country.

“I engaged in the enterprise with enthusiasm,” our intrepid explorer writes, “feeling that all the hardships and exposures of a month’s horseback travel through an unexplored region would be more than compensated by the grandeur and novelty of the natural objects with which it was crowded.”  He has no idea he will be stranded there, on foot, alone and without any of the resources for survival in the difficult terrain.

Separated from his colleagues, Everts loses his packhorse with all of his supplies.  When he dismounts to look at several vistas that might offer a path back to the main group, his horse promptly runs away.  He loses his blankets, gun, pistols, fishing tackle, and matches, leaving him with only two knives, opera glasses and the clothing on his back.  The opera glasses add a nice cultured touch:  not binoculars or a spyglass but opera glasses!  He fully expects to be laughed at by his comrades once he finds the expedition again, for they must still be in the area, he reasons.  He just has to find them.  He thinks getting lost might make a “thrilling episode” in a journal of the trip.  No matter how he retraces his steps, though, he cannot find the expedition again.

His second night alone, sans horse and supplies or even a way to light a fire, he hears every sound in the forest come alive.  Coyotes, wolves, owls, big cats, bears—all these hidden demons terrify him, and the gravity of his situation begins to sink in.  He consoles himself with the thought that “a thousand times afterwards in my wanderings, and I record this experience here, that any person who reads it, should he ever find himself in like circumstances, may not despair.  There is life in the thought.  It will revive hope, allay hunger, renew energy, encourage perseverance, and, as I have proved in my own case, bring a man out of the difficulty, when nothing else can avail.”

It seems as if the landscape taunts him.  General Washburn, leader of the expedition, names a nearby mountain after him:  Mount Everts.  He circles this prominent feature looking for a sign of his fellow travelers.  The mountain stands throughout his wandering, always in the distance:  Mount Everts.  Its namesake shivers from the cold, tries to ignore his hungry stomach, and assuages his hunger by eating thistle root, finding it “palatable and nutritious.”  He beds down for the night only to awaken to the screams of a mountain lion looking for him in the brush.  Everts scrambles up a tree and spends the rest of the night trying to avoid being eaten.  He breaks off branches from the tree and hurls them at the big cat until he is finally driven off.

His problems do not end with the mountain lion.  Sleeping near a hot spring for warmth, he is burned badly on the hip from a late night eruption of scalding water when he breaks through the shallow crust of earth.  On another occasion, he goes to sleep sitting next to his fire only to fall over into it and burn his hand.  He suffers frostbite on his feet which begin to fester.  He loses his knives but learns to start a fire with his opera glasses until he loses those as well and must retrace his steps to find them again.  He starts not one, but two forest fires accidentally.  He begins to experience hallucinations and visitations in the night, imaginary but just as real as the mountain lion to him.  One of them speaks to him:  “While there is life there is hope; take courage,” the disembodied voice whispers  He loses sense of time and place, realizing he is starving and near death.

Throughout his journey, Everts never loses his sense of awe and wonder at this most ethereal place.  He does not allow his pain and suffering to “obliterate all sense of natural grandeur and magnificence” that is Yellowstone  When he is found, he weighs barely fifty pounds and is nearly out of his head with fever and starvation.  Yet, he tells the reader he would gladly go back “to revisit scenes fraught for me with such thrilling interest” and to stand under the shadow of his own Mount Everts.  He never waivers in his belief that the region’s “power to delight, elevate, and overwhelm the mind with wondrous and majestic beauty” is well worth the dangers and injuries he suffers.

President Grant designated Yellowstone a National Park March 1, 1872, offering Truman Everts the position of the first park superintendent.  Everts declined because it was a job without a salary.  He went to work instead for the post office and died in 1901.  He is buried in Maryland, far away from the magic of Yellowstone and the land he loved that one time in history, nearly killed him.