Harry Truman Buried: Innkeeper Defied Mt. St. Helens

Harry R. Truman, the eighty-three-year-old owner of Mount St. Helens Lodge on Spirit Lake, refused every plea to evacuate in the weeks before the eruption of May 18, 1980. The former bootlegger and Korean War veteran had lived on the mountain for fifty-four years with his sixteen cats and told reporters, scientists, and the Washington National Guard the same thing: he would not leave his home. "That mountain's part of Truman and Truman's part of that mountain," he told one interviewer. Truman became a folk hero as the eruption threat grew. Television crews hiked to his lodge for interviews. Children wrote him letters begging him to leave. He received fan mail and marriage proposals. He appeared on national news broadcasts, whiskey in hand, dismissing the geologists' warnings with the confidence of a man who had watched the mountain his entire adult life. He told one reporter the mountain might "blow her guts out" but that the lodge would be safe by the lake. When the north face collapsed at 8:32 AM on May 18, a wall of rock and debris traveling at 150 miles per hour buried Spirit Lake under 600 feet of volcanic material. The lodge, the lake, the surrounding forest, and Harry Truman were entombed in an instant. His body was never recovered. The debris deposit over Spirit Lake was so deep that the lake's surface elevation rose 200 feet. Truman's defiance resonated with a public that admired stubbornness in the face of authority, even when that authority was the force of geology. Country songs were written about him. His name appeared on memorabilia. The National Geographic documentary about the eruption devoted significant time to his story. For scientists, he represented the deadly consequences of underestimating volcanic hazards. For everyone else, he was an old man who loved his mountain and died with it.