Of all the skiers who have carved the slopes around Lake Tahoe, the most famous is undoubtedly John “Snowshoe” Thompson, the legendary skiing mailman of the Sierra Nevada. When it came to traveling in the wintry mountains, he was the precursor of the pack train, the stagecoach and the locomotive. It required years before any other form of transportation succeeded him.
Born Jon Tostensen in the Telemark district of Norway on April 30, 1827, “John” was 10 years old when his father died and the family immigrated to the American Midwest in 1837. In 1851, the 24-year-old was bit by gold fever and ran off to California. He worked as a miner in the Sierra foothills and then later moved to Putah Creek, near Placerville, about 30 miles east of Sacramento. Tostensen took up farming in summer and cutting commercial firewood in the winter. About this time, he Americanized his name to John Albert Thompson after the family name of his stepfather Arthur Thompson.
Neither rain, nor sleet nor ... death?
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 lucrative, but dangerous, mail contract was worth $14,000 a year when George Chorpenning and Absolom Woodward took on the job in 1851. It took the men 16 days to pack the mail by mule 910 miles to the Great Salt Lake. It was exhausting work and became deadly when Indians killed Woodward in November 1851.
Newspapers published accounts of the dangerous difficulties and failed attempts to carry the mail over the mountains during the winter, but it seemed there was nothing anyone could do. In 1855, Thompson saw an ad published in the Sacramento Union: “People Lost to the World: Uncle Sam Needs Carrier.” The Placerville postmaster needed someone to carry the overland mail 90 miles east, up and over the Sierra range to the Carson Valley, in the dead of winter. There weren’t any takers until Thompson, whose father had made him “snow-shoes” to ski to school as a child in Norway, decided to answer the call to duty.
Snowshoe and skis
Thompson remembered that as a young boy in Norway he and his friends had used skis to travel quickly over the snow-covered landscape and his Viking spirit was aroused to the challenge. He stood six feet tall and weighed a solid 180 pounds. With his blonde hair and beard, fair skin and piercing blue eyes, he looked every bit the fierce Norseman of his ancestry.
On his first attempt to ski from Placerville to the Carson Valley via the Markleeville route south of Lake Tahoe, his rucksack was packed with letters and packages. The hefty load weighed between 60 and 80 pounds. Initially Thompson’s friends and neighbors feared he would never survive the trek, but the skiing mailman conquered the hazardous journey east in just three days. The return trip up and over the Sierra’s eastern escarpment took only 48 hours.
Thompson’s pack eventually exceeded 100 pounds when newspapers, medicine, and ore samples were stuffed into it. At least twice a month for 20 years, Snowshoe Thompson hauled his heavy rucksack through the mountains. Fair skies or storm, rain or snow, Snowshoe Thompson always delivered.
Snowshoe Thompson died May 15, 1876, at age 49, from appendicitis. He is buried in the historic Genoa cemetery. Three months before his death, Territorial Enterprise journalist Dan De Quille interviewed the popular Norwegian. De Quille asked Thompson whether he had ever lost his way in the mountains. “No,” Snowshoe quietly replied, “I was never lost. There is no danger of getting lost in a narrow range of mountains like the Sierra, if a man has his wits about him.”
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Mark McLaughlin’s column, “Weather Window,” appears every other week in the Sierra Sun. He is a nationally published writer and photographer whose award-winning books, “The Donner Party: Weathering the Storm,”
“Sierra Stories: True Tales of Tahoe, Vol. 1 &
2,” and “Western Train Adventures: The Good, the Bad & the
Ugly” are available at local stores. Mark, a Carnelian Bay resident, can be reached at mark@thestormking.com.
