A Montana Teen Roped a Drowning Man to Safety on His First Throw

Jory Thomas is 14, and until this summer the most useful thing he figured a rope could do was help him move cattle. He got serious about roping over the past year on the ranch where he was raised, going to brandings to rope live cattle and drilling on a roping dummy most evenings once the heat let up.

On July 5, that same rope pulled a stranger out of the Yellowstone River.

Jory was camping with his family near Greycliff when a raft and a paddleboard hit a bridge pillar upstream, spilling four people into the current. Three reached the bank. One man could not. He kept drifting downstream, holding a cooler, silent. “We all heard, ‘Help, help,'” Jory told KTVQ, the Billings station where reporter Isabel Spartz first told his story. “There’s two or three people floating down the river, one hanging on to the cooler, and he wasn’t saying anything.”

The current was fast, and the man was going with it. Jory emptied his pockets and pushed through a side channel that reached his waist. Then he ran the bank to get downstream, ahead of where the man was heading.

He had his lariat with him that day, a detail his grandmother, Sandy Thomas, still finds striking. The family comes down to that campground a few times each summer, she said, and in all those visits Jory had never once thought to bring the rope. This time he had.

He got in front of the man, shook out his 12-foot loop, and threw. “First instinct I thought was try and rope him and drag him out before he gets too far down the river,” Jory said. “Luckily, I caught him first try.” Then he drew the man in hand over hand, through water up to his chest, and kept him steady until first responders reached them. The man was out of the river, and he was okay.

His father and brothers are on the local fire department, and he was not going to stand on the bank waiting for a truck. It hit him later, back at camp. “He comes up, and he said, ‘I think I just saved a life,'” Sandy recalled. “And we all said, ‘Yeah, you did.'”

The rescue came down to a year of evenings with a roping dummy, a skill meant for cattle, and a rope he had never packed for a camping trip before. Jory has been sitting with it. “I just thought I could help with cattle,” he said. “Not really helping humans and stuff like that. But I’m glad I was here to help.”