Listening to Yellowstone, Day 4: Truman Everts's Ear

On September 9, 1870, Truman Everts lost sight of his fellow travelers while attempting to navigate his horse around a thicket of fallen trees on the southern shores of Yellowstone Lake. Such windfalls regularly hampered the company of the now-famous Washburn Expedition, so Everts felt no concern when he realized he had become separated from the rest of the party. He simply steered his ride in the direction he assumed the others had taken and pressed forward.

He emerged from the Yellowstone wilderness thirty-seven days later starving, severely burned, and near death.

From Wikipedia

Everts's story is the most famous tale of survival in the Yellowstone wilderness and regularly gets retold in published histories of the park. The details by now are well known: the day after Everts became separated from the expedition, his horse startled while he was surveying the area in hopes of determining his position. Everts turned just in time to witness the horse fleeing into the forest, carrying away most of his supplies save an opera glass and a couple of knives, the latter of which he managed to lose. With no food, he lived off thistle roots for the next six weeks. While warming himself beside a hot spring one night, he fell through the thin crust and suffered severe burns on his legs and hip. He hallucinated. He escaped being mauled by a mountain lion by taking refuge in the limbs of a tree.    

Everts later published his tale in Scribner's Monthly (you can download it here), and though I'd read the article several times over the years it struck me only recently how attuned Everts was to the sounds of Yellowstone's wilderness. After being awoken by a forest fire, which he started, his senses were overwhelmed not by the sight or smell of the burnings woods but rather by their sounds. Everts wrote, "How long I slept I know not, but I was aroused by the snapping and cracking of the burning foliage…The roaring, cracking, crashing, and snapping of falling limbs and burning foliage was deafening."

THESE SOUNDS, FAMILIAR BY THEIR CONSTANT OCCURRENCE THROUGHOUT THE JOURNEY, WERE NOW FULL OF TERROR

From the outset, sounds that had once seemed so familiar to Everts became haunting manifestations of the peril he faced: 

Naturally timid in the night, I fully realized the exposure of my condition...The forest seemed alive with the screeching of night birds, the angry barking of coyotes, and the prolonged, dismal howl of the gray wolf. These sounds, familiar by their constant occurrence throughout the journey, were now full of terror, and drove slumber from my eye-lids.

Night was particularly terrifying as Yellowstone's sounds revealed unseen dangers looming just beyond Everts's makeshift camps. While peering into "an impervious canopy of somber foliage," Everts wrote, "the shrieking of night-birds; the supernaturally human scream of the mountain lion; the prolonged howl of the wolf, made me insensible to all other forms of suffering." Later, Everts would sleep while surrounded by a circle of small fires (which, naturally, started another forest fire) in order to keep predators at bay.

Of all the ordeals Everts faced, his nocturnal escape from a mountain lion attack near the beginning of his wanderings relies the most on descriptions of sound to convey Everts's feelings of terror. 

How long I slept I know not; but suddenly I was roused by a loud, shrill scream, like that of a human being in distress, poured, seemingly, into the very portals of my ear. There was no mistaking that fearful voice. I had been deceived by and answered it a dozen times while threading the forest, with the belief that it was a friendly signal. It was the screech of a mountain lion, so alarmingly near as to cause every nerve to thrill with terror.

At first, Everts attempted to frighten the animal by matching it scream for scream. When this managed merely to antagonize the mountain lion, he resorted to silence which only increased his tension before, finally, the predator fled: 

Just at this moment it occurred to me that I would try silence. Clasping the trunk of the tree with both arms, I sat perfectly still. The lion, at this time ranging round, occasionally snuffing and pausing, and all the while filling the forest with the echo of his howlings, suddenly imitated my example. This silence was more terrible, if possible, than the clatter and crash of his movements through the brushwood, for now I did not know from what direction to expect his attack...After a lapse of time which I cannot estimate, the beast gave a spring into the thicket and ran screaming into the forest. My deliverance was effected.

Near the end of his ordeal, Everts began to hear the voices. He first heard the counseling voice of an old friend who warned him from venturing higher into the mountain range that forms the western border of the Yellowstone valley. Everts then began a daily conversation with his limbs and stomach, urging his body to continue searching for a way out of the wilderness. Though troubling to read, Everts acknowledged that without these conversations, he most likely would have died. "The legs implored me for rest, and the arms complained that I gave them too much to do. Troublesome as they were, it was a pleasure to realize their presence….had I felt myself alone, [I] would have remained undone."

On October 16, Everts was discovered by "Yellowstone Jack" Baronett and George A. Pritchett, two guides from Helena, near what is now the northern border of the park. He rested in a miner's camp for several days before he was able to return to Helena. In 1872, because of his role in the Washburn expedition and the fame he accrued after his story's publication, the Department of the Interior offered the job of park superintendent to Everts, who declined because the position offered no salary. 


Everts eventually moved to Hyattsville, Maryland, were he worked in a post office. He died there in 1901.