LaConte: White death, sweet death and no death

Waking up to zero-degree weather is not fun, but when it’s this cold, I guess we should feel lucky to wake up at all.

Stories of people falling asleep and dying in the cold are abundant in fiction. Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Match Girl” is probably the best example, although it’s so heart-wrenching it’s hard to recommend that story. Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” is a little easier to stomach.

The unfortunate occurrence is sometimes called “the white death” for the presence of snow often found among the bodies and pale condition they’re found in. It’s also known as “sweet death” for the hallucinations experienced, which is what Andersen and London’s stories explore.

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Fictional tales aside, we have plenty of true stories of white death and sweet death here in Eagle County, going back to the stories of the first settlers in the area.

In January of 1904, the Eagle County Blade reported on the death of Mrs. John L. (Delia) Scott, who was assumed to have died the night of Jan. 10, but was not found until Jan. 18. She was found between two cabins in the Taylor Hill area of Tennessee Pass, where “it was evident that she was thinly clad when she went out into the storm,” the Eagle County Blade reported. “The theory of the disappearance was that Mrs. Scott had left the lower cabin to go to the upper one and had gotten off the trail … The snow was fully two feet deep and all trace of the woman was soon obliterated by the wind drifting the snow.”

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Later that year, a man named Emille Thomas died after being found alongside the railroad tracks near Red Cliff on two consecutive mornings, the Eagle County Blade reported. After being found near the railroad tracks the first morning, he was nursed back to health, but was found in the same location again the next night “and the night had been quite cold with a slight fall of snow,” the Blade reported. “The authorities again took charge of him and made him comfortable and provided him with a nurse. But all attempts at resuscitating him a second time proved unavailing and about midnight on Sunday he died.”

In both incidents, alcohol was also suspected to have played a role in the bad decision-making and death.

But neither of these white death cases showed the presence of hallucinations, the sweet death scenario described by Andersen and London. To find one of the most well-known examples of that in Eagle County, we have to move forward in history more than 100 years to the story of Jim McGrogan, a doctor from Wisconsin who went missing while attempting to hike to the Eisman Hut north of Vail.

He disappeared on March 14, 2014, but was not found until April 3. And when he was located, he was reported to not be wearing his coat, gloves or boots. He is suspected to have succumbed to hypothermia and engaged in something called paradoxical undressing before he died, a type of hallucination in which the person becomes confused, thinking they are overheating when the reality is the opposite. Many hypothermia victims are found with their clothing removed from this condition.

Some of the most famous examples of white death have come in warfare. During the Second Punic War in 218 B.C., the Carthaginian general Hannibal was feared due to his use of war elephants, which played a role akin to a tank in the wars of antiquity. But after a cold winter killed many of his elephants and half of his men, Hannibal and Carthage were no match for the Romans.

But the most famous example of the white death in war occurred when Napoleon’s armies attempted to retreat from Russia in 1812 and an estimated 30,000 men died. The worst of it came on Dec. 6, when temperatures reached negative 37 degrees Celsius.

“It was now so cold that men died walking,” wrote Erick Brenstrum for New Zealand Geographic. “Blood suddenly streaming from mouth and nose and sometimes eyes and ears, they would stagger a few steps like drunkards before falling. Many now had dementia, some so disorientated that they would walk into fires in bare feet and lie down.”

It was with all that in mind that the men of the 10th Mountain Division here in Eagle County trained for winter warfare in the 1940s. They studied the then-recent campaign launched by Italy against Greece in 1940, where men fought in the rugged mountainous terrain and the extreme cold of the Dinaric Alps.

“Both Greeks and Italians lacked the special clothing and materiel required for prolonged fighting in high mountains and deep snow,” the 10th Mountain Division’s newspaper, the Camp Hale Ski-Zette, reported in 1944. “Apparently they also lacked the training for operations in the snow. As a result, neither the Italians nor the Greeks realized their programs, whereas the winter war between Russia and Finland earlier that same year had proved that it was actually possible to conduct military operations even in arctic climates, despite snow and cold, when the opponents had the proper clothing, materiel and training.”

In the battle between Russia and Finland, a sniper named Simo Hayha was believed to have killed more than 500 enemy soldiers, the highest number of sniper kills in any major war. As a result, he earned a particularly apt nickname — Hayha became known as The White Death.

Eighty years ago, on Jan. 20, 1945, all of the 10th Mountain Division’s regiments were reported to have reached the front line between the Serchio Valley and Mt. Belvedere in Italy. In the ensuing battles for Riva Ridge and Mt. Belvedere, 213 10th Mountain Division soldiers were killed, 782 were wounded and four were taken as prisoners of war. But none of the casualties were due to the white death.

In the Camp Hale Ski-Zette, Major General Lloyd E. Jones praised the 10th Mountain Division troops for their ability to prepare for the extreme cold at Camp Hale, saying that the 10th “endeavored to prove that American soldiers can be made into a formidable, hard-hitting organization in spite of the difficulties arising from extreme cold and mountainous terrain.”

Throughout their training at Camp Hale, which included “isolation, cold, snow, and lack of comfort for several weeks at a time,” the generals announced that “only 195 cases of frostbite occurred — most of them light.”

But best of all, “I am glad to announce that no fatalities occurred from any cause whatsoever during the entire series of problems,” Jones said. “Considering the many thousand men in the Division … this is a proud record.”

John LaConte is a reporter at the Vail Daily who authors the weekly Time Machine feature that runs on Mondays. Email him at jlaconte@vaildaily.com