Snowshoe Thompson

This has little to do with sugar but is about one of the people that brought skiing to the US.

A famous Norwegian immigrant skier was born in Telemark, Norway. His name, at birth, was Jon Torsteinson Rue. He was only ten years old when he immigrated to the United States with his family in 1837. In 1851 the family came to California to join the gold rush, without apparent success. Jon had changed his name to the more easily pronounceable John Thompson, and he was to become a legend as a one-man postal service carrying heavy mail sacks over the Sierra Nevada on skis in the winter.
Nobody in California and Nevada had seen skis before, so they called John's boards snowshoes, and he became known to everyone in the Sierra Nevada as Snowshoe Thompson. His service in speeding up mail deliveries was invaluable, since letters from one coast to the other frequently took a whole year. Skiing the 90-mile route through the wild mountains from Placerville, California, to Genoa and Virginia City, Nevada, Snowshoe Thompson was completely on his own. He maintained his route for twenty years, rarely if ever getting paid. He would accept food and other goods from some of the people who asked him to carry special packages for them and would even get shopping lists from people in the mountain communities who needed things from Sacramento stores. On several occasions, he saved the lives of snowbound and wounded miners because of his speed and skill on skis. During the summer he tried to supplement the income from his little farm outside Placerville by driving a stagecoach. On the whole, there were many people who depended on Snowshoe Thompson. He died in 1876. A memorial stone on his grave in Genoa, Nevada, has a pair of crossed skis chiseled into the granite.