his family after the eruption. He caused a media frenzy, appearing on the front page of The New York Times and The San Francisco Examiner and attracting the attention of National Geographic, United Press International, and The Today Show. Many major magazines composed profiles, including Time, Life, Newsweek, Field & Stream, and Reader's Digest. A historian named Richard W. Slatta wrote that "his fiery attitude, brash speech, love of the outdoors, and fierce independence… made him a folk hero the media could adore." Slatta pointed to Truman's "unbendable character and response to the forces of nature" as a source of his rise to fame, and the interviews with him added "color" to reports about the events at Mount St. Helens. Truman was immortalized, according to Slatta, "with many of the embellished qualities of the western hero", and the media spotlight created a persona that was "in some ways quite different from his true character." Death As the likelihood of eruption increased, state officials tried to evacuate the area with the exception of a few scientists and security officials. On May 17, they attempted one final time to persuade Truman to leave, to no avail. The volcano erupted the next morning, and its entire northern flank collapsed. Truman and his 16 cats were alone together at his lodge, and all are presumed to have died in the eruption on May 18. He likely died of heat shock in less than a second, too quickly to register pain, before his body would have been inevitably all but entirely vaporized. The largest landslide in recorded history and a pyroclastic flow traveling atop the landslide engulfed the Spirit Lake area almost simultaneously, destroying the lake and burying the site of his lodge under of volcanic landslide debris. Authorities never found Truman's remains. Truman considered his cats family and mentioned them in almost all public statements. They too presumably perished in similar conditions. Friends hoped that Truman might have survived, as he had claimed to have provisioned an abandoned mine shaft with food and liquor in case of an eruption, but the lack of immediate warning of the oncoming eruption probably prevented him from escaping to the shaft before the pyroclastic flow reached his lodge (less than a minute after it began). Even if Truman had made it there, the aforementioned landslide would likely have suffocated him, and/or prevented his rescue. His sister Geraldine said