SNOWSHOE THOMPSON: The Legendary Skiing Mailman (PART ONE)
Thompson farmed in the summer and cut firewood during the winter. About this time, he Americanized his name to John Albert Thompson after the family name of his stepfather, Arthur Thompson. After the Gold Rush, the increasing demand for communication between California and the eastern United States resulted in the establishment of an overland mail route between San Francisco and Salt Lake City. (The nation’s first transcontinental railroad was still 18 years away.) The lucrative
by Mark McLaughlin Of all the skiers who have carved turns on the snowy slopes of the Tahoe Sierra, the most famous is undoubtedly John “Snowshoe” Thompson, the legendary skiing mailman. When it came to traveling through the wintry mountains, this indomitable Viking was a master — precursor to the pack train, the stagecoach, and the locomotive. Ultimately, Thompson is America’s first pioneer of freestyle skiing, an expert downhiller who exploited terrain jumping cliffs, slipping through trees (on 9-foot-long boards) and popping off the roofs of snowbound houses.
Historians have credited Thompson with first skiing across the Sierra in 1856, but my research suggests that he probably made the trek earlier than that. In 1852, Thompson took a job in a Placerville store owned by Thomas Knott, and the following year worked with him constructing a sawmill at Genoa (Utah Territory), about 90 miles east of Placerville on the other side of the Sierra. In his memoirs, Knott wrote that during the winters of 1853 and 1854, he paid the Norwegian two dollars a trip to carry mail and messages over the snow-covered mountains, a feat he said Thompson accomplished on homemade skis.
Snowshoe Thompson was born Skiing Long Pole - Courtesy Denver Public Jon Tostensen in the Telemark library district of Norway on April 30, 1827. When he was a little boy, his father made him his first pair of skis (which he called snowshoes) and taught but dangerous mail contract was worth him the means of survival in snow country. $14,000 a year when George Chorpenning Jon was 10 years old when his father died and Absolom Woodward accepted the job and the family immigrated to the American in 1851. In order to cross the Sierra, large Midwest in 1837. In 1851, the 24-year-old wooden hammers were needed to beat farm boy was afflicted with gold fever and down the crusty snowpack, to create a trail ran off to California. He worked briefly as a for the heavily laden pack animals. It was miner in the Mother Lode and then moved risky and exhausting work that became to near Placerville, about 30 miles east deadly when Indians killed Woodward in of Sacramento on the Sierra west slope. November 1851.
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During December 1851 and January 1852, Chorpenning tried to maintain mail delivery, but blizzards and deep snow in the Sierra turned him back. By February, the mail was rerouted north up the Feather River Canyon and over Beckwourth Pass into Utah Territory, but the detour increased the harrowing journey to 60 days, which proved too much for men and animals. Chorpenning finally gave up the route, at which point small communities like Mormon Station (later renamed Genoa) in the lower valleys near the Carson Range just east of Lake Tahoe, were cut-off from communication, medicine and supplies during the long winter months.
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Regional newspapers published accounts of the dangerous difficulties and failed commercial attempts to deliver mail over the mountains during the winter months. In 1855, Thompson saw an ad published in the Sacramento Union: “People Lost to the World: Uncle Sam Needs Carrier.” The Placerville postmaster desperately wanted someone to carry the mail over the Sierra, 90 miles east to the Carson Valley, in the dead of winter. There weren’t any takers until Thompson decided to answer his new country’s call to duty. continued on page 6
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