Survival in the Wynoochee Snow
Four hunters face starvation in the mountain snow, surviving for a month on nothing but elk and eagle meat.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
A Tacoma paper of recent date says: Four hunters returned here today, after having been snowbound five weeks in the mountains at the headwaters of the Wynoochee River. They had used up their provisions when the storm came, and had killed eleven elk. They were three days without food, when they killed an eagle and found an elk powerless in the deep snow. They lived over a month on elk and eagle meat alone. Finally they reached a deserted camp, finding an ax, with which they split wood for snowshoes, and escaped by means of them. The snow was eight to fifteen feet deep. The hunters were W. L. Banta, A. G. Morrison, George Day and W. H. Wood.
“They lived over a month on elk and eagle meat alone.”
The rugged interior of the Olympic Peninsula remains a daunting, untamed landscape. This 1893 survival story underscores how quickly even experienced outdoorsmen could be overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the wilderness—a sentiment that continues to define the region's relationship with its mountains.
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