The Winter of 1838 When Mountain Men Slept Outside in -50°F and Outlived the Men in Cabins

Added: 2026-05-15

[00:00:00]The winter of 1837 rolling into 1838 was one of the coldest the Rocky Mountains had seen in living memory. By late November, the thermometers nailed to the outside walls of the American Fur Company trading posts were [music] reading 40° below zero Fahrenheit. By Christmas, some of them were reading 50° below zero Fahrenheit. Trees were exploding from the cold. The sap froze, the wood split, and the sound carried across the valleys like rifle shots in the dark. In the months that followed, two very different groups of men were trying to survive that winter in the same mountains. One group built log cabins, sealed the doors, and waited the cold out. The other group slept outside in the open snow, sometimes with nothing but a buffalo robe and [music] a fire.

[00:00:53]When the spring came, the men in the cabins were dying. The men in the snow walked out healthy. This is the story of how that happened and why everything you have been told about surviving the cold is exactly backwards.

[00:01:08]To understand what made that winter so deadly, you have to go back six months.

[00:01:14]In the summer of 1837, on the banks of the Green River in what is now Wyoming, the fur trade had thrown its second-to-last rendezvous. There were three to 400 white trappers, around 3,000 native people from five different tribes, and fur company caravans loaded with whiskey, powder, and steel traps.

[00:01:36]They gathered for several weeks of trading, [music] drinking, and racing horses. The artist Alfred Jacob Miller was [music] there to paint it. Joe Meek was there. Jim Bridger was there. So was a young trapper named Osborne Russell, who would later write one of the most [music] detailed journals of mountain man life ever recorded. When the rendezvous broke up in late summer, [music] those men scattered. Some headed for the Wind River country, some pushed west toward the Snake, some went south into Utah territory. They were going on what they called the fall hunt, the season when beaver pelts [music] were thickest and most valuable. They expected to be out there for months. Most of them would not see another white settlement until [music] the following summer.

[00:02:23]At the same time, in the trading posts and the small log forts strung along the Missouri and the Platte [music] and the Yellowstone, a different kind of frontier population was settling in for the winter.

[00:02:35]>> [music] >> Soldiers stationed at the army outposts, new company employees who had only been in the west for a season [music] or two, travelers and missionaries who had gotten caught by the weather. These were men who had been told all their lives >> [music] >> that survival meant four walls and a stove. They built their cabins. They chinked the gaps with mud. They stockpiled [music] barrels of salt pork, sacks of flour, dried beans, and hard biscuit. They closed the doors against the wind, [music] and then the cold came down. A trader at one of the upper Missouri posts wrote [music] in his journal that the air outside was so cold a kettle of boiling water thrown into it [music] would freeze before it hit the ground.

[00:03:19]Inside the cabins, men crowded around iron stoves [music] that glowed red.

[00:03:24]They stopped going out except to fetch firewood and water. They stopped riding.

[00:03:28][music] They stopped hunting. The whole point of the cabin in their minds was that you did not have to.

[00:03:36]By late January, the first symptoms started appearing. Men complained of being bone tired. They could not get warm even pressed up against the stove.

[00:03:46]Their legs began to swell. Their gums turned purple [music] and started to bleed when they ate.

[00:03:51]Old wounds, scars from years before, opened up again as if they had never healed. One trapper at a post is recorded as having a leg break under his own seen weight from sitting down on a bench too hard. The bones had gone soft.

[00:04:07]This was scurvy.

[00:04:09]It is what happens to a human body when it is denied vitamin C for about 90 days. Salt pork has none. Hardtack has none. Dried beans have none. The men in the cabins eating the food they had been told would last them through the winter were slowly coming apart [music] at the cellular level. The collagen in their bodies was failing. Skin, gums, blood vessels, bone, all of it was held together by something they had stopped putting in their mouths. And it was worse than that.

[00:04:42]>> [music] >> Those tightly chinked cabins with the doors shut and the stove pouring out smoke through a poorly vented pipe [music] were filling with carbon monoxide. Not enough to kill a man in a single night, but enough to give him a constant headache, enough to confuse his judgment, enough that after a few weeks of it he could not think clearly enough to recognize he was being slowly poisoned in his own home. There was a third thing happening inside [music] those cabins and it might have been the worst of all. There was no light. The windows, [music] if there were any, were small squares of oiled paper or scraped rawhide that let in a yellow gloom even at noon. The men stopped seeing the sun. Their bodies stopped making vitamin D. Their moods began to crater. Tempers got short. Old grievances between bunkmates turned into fistfights and sometimes worse. A handful of cabin parties that winter ended with men shooting each other over arguments that nobody outside the cabin would have understood. Cabin fever was not a metaphor in 1838. It was a clinical condition and it had a body count. So, picture what was happening inside a typical cabin by February of 1838, three or four men, sometimes more, all weak, all [music] bleeding from the gums, all foggy-headed from the air, too tired to chop wood, >> [music] >> too tired to hunt, living on the same dwindling sacks of cured meat and flour, too sick to recognize they were dying.

[00:06:18]Now, picture 200 miles deeper into the mountains what Osborne Russell was doing. Russell wintered that year in a small valley with a handful of other trappers. They did not build a cabin.

[00:06:29]The mountain men almost never did.

[00:06:31]Cabins were heavy, slow work, >> [music] >> and they tied you to one place. What Russell built was a lean-to, a frame of green willow poles covered with stretched buffalo hides and canvas with the open side facing a long, narrow fire. The fire was not inside the shelter. It was in front of it. [music] The heat came in and the smoke went up and away. The carbon monoxide never got near him.

[00:06:55]>> [music] >> Some nights he slept in something even simpler, a snow cave dug into the side of a deep drift. [music] The packed snow on the outside might have been at 50° below zero, but the inside of the cave, warmed by his own body heat and a small candle of buffalo tallow, sat steady at around 20° above zero. That is a 70° difference between the air outside and the air on his face.

[00:07:21]Snow is one of the best insulators on the planet. [music] The Sami, the Inuit, the Plains tribes had all known this for thousands [music] of years. The mountain men learned it from them. He slept fully clothed, wool shirt, buckskin [music] leggings, wool blanket, then a buffalo robe over the top, a wool cap pulled down over his ears, >> [music] >> mittens on his hands, he slept with his rifle, his knife, and his moccasins inside the [music] robe with him so they would not freeze stiff. In the morning, he would crawl out, build the fire back up, and check his traps. That was the other thing. He moved. Every single day, Osborne Russell got up and moved his body [music] through the cold. He ran trap lines along the frozen creeks. He hunted. He dragged dead elk back to camp on a sled made of bent willow. [music] He chopped wood. He skinned beaver and stretched the pelts. The motion was not optional. [music] The motion was the survival.

[00:08:18]And then, there was what he ate. Every few days, somebody in his camp killed a buffalo or [music] an elk or a deer, sometimes a moose. The meat was eaten fresh, often the same day, not cured, not salted, [music] not boiled to gray, roasted on a stick in front of the fire and [music] eaten almost rare with the juice still in it.

[00:08:39]The liver came out first, [music] sometimes eaten raw on the spot, the way the Plains tribes ate it. That single organ contains more vitamin A than almost any other food on Earth, plus iron, plus B vitamins. One bite of fresh elk liver replaced what a whole crate of salt pork could not give a man. Then there were the boudine. The mountain men loved them and the greenhorns hated them. A boudine was a sausage made from the intestine of a freshly killed buffalo or elk. The intestine was turned inside out, the contents stripped [music] only part way, and the whole thing was tied off and roasted over the fire. The contents [music] were the half-digested grasses and forbs the animal had been eating before it died. Mountain meadow plants, wild onion, sage, lamb's quarter, prairie clover, plants packed with vitamin C.

[00:09:31]The trappers did not know what vitamin C was.

[00:09:34]>> [music] >> The word would not exist for almost another century. They just knew that men who ate boudin [music] did not get the gum disease. Men who ate liver did not go blind in the dark. Men who chewed on rose hips and fur tips and the inner bark of certain trees did not bleed when they bit down. It was empirical knowledge. Generations of it, mostly borrowed from native wives and native trading [music] partners, written into the bodies of men who had survived in the absence of men who had not.

[00:10:04]A lot of the credit for what kept the trappers alive that winter belongs to women whose names never made it into the history books.

[00:10:12]Shoshone wives, Crow wives, Flathead wives, Bannock wives. They [music] knew which roots to dig out from under the snow with a sharpened stick. They knew which pine needles could be brewed into a sour, [music] vitamin-rich tea.

[00:10:27]They knew how to pound dried meat with melted fat and crushed chokecherries to make pemmican that would keep a man fed and reasonably healthy for months. The mountain men who had taken native wives, and there were many, came through that winter in noticeably better shape than the bachelors did. The ones who had not married in were still drawing on the same accumulated knowledge, [music] just one step removed. Now compare that to what was happening in the cabin 200 miles east.

[00:10:57]The cabin man had walls. He had a stove.

[00:11:00]He had a stockpile. On paper, he had [music] everything the trapper did not.

[00:11:05]But the cabin man was not moving, so his circulation was failing. His extremities [music] were colder, not warmer, than the trapper running a trap line at 30° below zero. He was eating dead food, cured, salted, dried, and [music] stripped of every nutrient that mattered. He was breathing the same recycled smoke-laced air for weeks at a time. He was getting almost no sunlight because going outside was painful and pointless. His vitamin D collapsed. His immune system collapsed with it. He was not cold exactly. He was decomposing in a warm room. By the time the worst of the weather broke in late February and early March, reports started drifting back into the forts and posts. A cabin party of five on a tributary of the Yellowstone had lost three men. A wintering camp of soldiers near the upper Missouri had buried four of its eight. A group of new trappers who had built a snug little cabin on a creek and stopped [music] venturing out on the theory that the cold was the danger had all four of them died without anyone laying a hand on them. And the trappers, the men who had slept in the snow at 50° below zero, [music] Joe Meek walked out of the mountains in the spring of 1838 lean and weather burned >> [music] >> and very much alive. So did Osborne Russell. So did Jim Bridger. The casualty rate among experienced [music] mountain men that winter, by every account that survives, was almost nothing. They lost some horses. [music] They lost some traps to the ice. They did not lose each other.

[00:12:49]>> [music] >> The 1838 rendezvous was held that summer on the Wind River near where the town of Riverton, Wyoming sits today. The trappers came in for it, traded their pelts, [music] drank what they could afford, and listened to the news from the east. The news [music] was not good.

[00:13:07]The fur trade was collapsing. The price of beaver was falling because European [music] fashion had started to favor silk hats over felt. The Hudson's Bay Company was undercutting the American outfits at [music] every turn. The big supply company, Pratt, Chouteau and Company, was rumored to be done with the rendezvous trade [music] entirely. By 1840, the rendezvous would be over for good. Most of these men were about to lose the only [music] profession they had ever known. But what they had learned out there in the snow that [music] winter did not die with the fur trade. It walked east with them. Joe Meek became the first sheriff of Oregon and later the first United [music] States marshal of the territory. Robert Newell, his trapping partner, was [music] elected to the first Oregon legislature. Kit Carson, Jim Bridger, Joe Walker, and Tom Fitzpatrick, all of them ended up guiding the wagon trains that followed the Oregon Trail across the same country [music] they had once trapped. And the pioneers who listened to those guides lived through winters that killed the ones who did not.

[00:14:16]The settlers who built tight, sealed cabins and stockpiled salt pork and stayed inside because that was what their grandparents back in Pennsylvania had taught them, those settlers got sick and sometimes died for the same reasons the cabin men of 1837 had. The settlers who took the mountain men's advice, who hunted fresh through the winter, who slept in well-ventilated shelters with the fire in front and not enclosed, who chewed wild greens and ate the liver before it could spoil, those settlers tended to walk out in the spring. The lesson the mountain men had paid for in dead friends [music] was simple, and it ran against everything the settlers and soldiers had been told about cold weather.

[00:15:03]The cabin was not the shelter, and neither were the walls or the stove. The shelter was motion. The shelter was fresh food, open air, a clean fire, and the meat of an animal killed that morning. The cold itself at 50° below zero Fahrenheit was not actually the killer. The cold was just the weather.

[00:15:25]What killed men was sitting still inside a sealed box eating dead food breathing their own smoke waiting for the world to come back. The mountain men did not wait. That is why they came out the other side.