How Did Trappers Survive Nine Days With Nothing to Eat but Beaver Skins?

In the winter of 1831–32, twenty-one fur trappers were trapped in a valley of the Laramie River when the only pass closed three weeks early. They had houses, stables and a winter's supply of dried buffalo meat. Then every horse they owned starved to death — because they had made camp under the wrong kind of cottonwood tree. In January, seventeen of them set out on foot for Santa Fe, eight hundred miles away, to buy horses. On a mountain summit, in a snowstorm, the food ran out. They cut up their own trousers to make snowshoes, hung a season's worth of beaver skins on a tree, and for nine days ate nothing but dried beaver pelts. One of them was a twenty-two-year-old clerk from Pennsylvania named Zenas Leonard, and he wrote it all down. This video follows his account day by day: the bitter bark, the New Year's feast with the horses dying outside, the vote on the summit, the fire sinking into the snow, the man who sat down under a spruce and said "here I must die" — and the rifle that misfired at the only buffalo for miles. CHAPTERS 00:00 A fire at the bottom of a hole 01:34 Who they were 04:15 The wrong tree 07:53 Eight hundred miles 11:32 Trousers, skins and a sinking fire 15:01 Two shots 17:21 What it was for 19:52 Which way would you walk? #history #mountainmen #frontier