Placerville, California

John really wanted to have the job of a mailman, he returned to the postmaster every day, on the fifth day after his rejection the postmaster gave in and let John try to carry the mail. John was very good at his job and soon was making trips over the Sierra peak and to Placerville in only one day. Soon people began to call him Snowshoe Thompson. Thompson was very determined, once he carried a printing press over the mountain section by section, and moved through a pack of wolves looking for dinner. John had no bug spray, no sleeping bag, nothing except some biscuits and jerky for his trips over the mountains.

Thompson had even saved a mans life, When he was forced to seek shelter inside an old cabin due to freezing temperatures. He found an unconscious man inside, with no furniture, realizing that the furniture was burned for heat and that the man was developing gangrene. He sped down the mountain were he got a rescue team; they wanted to amputate his legs from gangrene. But they needed a certain chemical or they could not go on with the operation. He went down the mountain again and searched Placerville, they had none there so he went all the way down to Sacramento, and got a bottle of the chemical. Then he went back up the mountain to the old cabin and the operation saved his life and so did John.

Eventually, the train had come along and Thompson was run out of a job, and out of all the 13 years Thompson delivered mail, he did not receive one penny for his efforts. Thompson decided to go Washington D.C; he carried with him a petition of 1,000 of his postal customers signatures. Congress was in a tight budget for it was the reconstruction period, and told him without a contract he could not be paid. Returning to Placerville, his postal customers had raised enough money to buy him his own ranch near his hometown.

He died four years later; there is now a statue in Placerville of John Thompson.