author
Truman Everts
1816–1901
Best remembered for surviving 37 harrowing days lost in the Yellowstone wilderness, he turned a near-fatal ordeal into one of the park’s most memorable early stories. His account helped fix Yellowstone in the American imagination as a place of wonder, danger, and endurance.
1 Audiobook
Thirty-Seven Days of Peril from Scribner's Monthly Vol III Nov. 1871
by Truman Everts
About the author
Born around 1816, Truman C. Everts was an American government official who served as the first federal tax assessor for the Montana Territory. He is most closely linked with the 1870 Washburn–Langford–Doane Expedition, an early journey through the region that soon became Yellowstone National Park.
During that expedition, Everts became separated from the party and survived alone in the wilderness for 37 days. The episode made him widely known, and his later written account of the experience became an important part of early Yellowstone history.
Everts died on February 16, 1901. Today he is remembered less for public office than for endurance: the man who got lost in Yellowstone, survived against the odds, and left behind a firsthand story of the American frontier.