Latest / The MeatEater Podcast / Ep. 948: MeatEater’s American History: The Alaskans

Transcript

Ep. 948: MeatEater’s American History: The Alaskans · The MeatEater Podcast

0:08
Speaker 1: This is the meat-eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten,
0:14
Speaker 1: and in my case, underwear-less. We hunt the meat-eater podcast.
0:18
Speaker 1: You can't predict anything. Brought to you by First Light.
0:22
Speaker 1: When I'm hunting, I need gear that won't quit. First
0:25
Speaker 1: Light builds no compromise gear that keeps me in the
0:29
Speaker 1: field longer. No shortcuts, just gear that works. Check it
0:33
Speaker 1: out at firstlight.com. That's F-I-R-S-T.com. L-I-T-E dot com. Alright, everybody.
0:43
Speaker 1: It's that time of year when you get... It happens
0:46
Speaker 1: every year. It's an annual event or so. When you
0:49
Speaker 1: listen to a podcast and learn something that you actually
0:52
Speaker 1: need to know. Not all the normal BS on podcasts,
0:56
Speaker 1: which is like nice to know. Yeah, it's fun. Fun
0:58
Speaker 1: to know. Nice to know. Entertaining. This is where you
1:02
Speaker 1: learn what you need to know. Which is the history
1:06
Speaker 1: of The United States of America, but not just the
1:08
Speaker 1: history of the United States of America, but the history
1:10
Speaker 1: of the United States of America, like frontier history. Mm-hmm.
1:15
Speaker 1: The good stuff. The good stuff. Yeah. The good stuff.
1:17
Speaker 1: The stuff that makes your brain, that makes your head tingle.
1:21
Speaker 2: And the big headline is, Meteor's American History, the Alaskans,
1:26
Speaker 2: 1896 to 1941, is on sale now. It's out now,
1:31
Speaker 2: unless you're listening to this, the day it drops.
1:34
Speaker 1: Mm-hmm.
1:36
Speaker 2: The Alaskans comes out on October 20th, so this podcast
1:39
Speaker 2: is October 19th. You can buy it, pre-order, and then
1:43
Speaker 2: it'll show up tomorrow morning if you're listening on Monday,
1:46
Speaker 2: or on Tuesday you can just dig in.
1:48
Speaker 1: Yeah. And this is a service we provide where we
1:52
Speaker 1: give you, this is the freebie version. Mm-hmm. Every time
1:56
Speaker 1: we come out with the Meat Eaters American History series,
1:59
Speaker 1: we do like the freebie version. Mm-hmm. Where you can
2:02
Speaker 1: listen and we're going to tell you the basic gist
2:04
Speaker 1: of the... We're going to kind of tell you the
2:08
Speaker 1: history of Alaska between two special dates. And then if
2:17
Speaker 1: you're titillated, if it grabs you by the shorts, good enough.
2:22
Speaker 1: We're going to tease you. Then you go listen to
2:24
Speaker 1: the whole full balls deal. I've talked about... I'm going
2:30
Speaker 1: to explain the setup. I'm going to explain the premise.
2:32
Speaker 1: And apologies to people that have heard the premise of
2:36
Speaker 1: Meat Eaters American History a bunch of times, but I'm
2:37
Speaker 1: going to explain the premise. The premise is, in this series,
2:43
Speaker 1: and again, we're going to dive into Alaska and the
2:47
Speaker 1: Alaskans today, but the premise of the series is we
2:50
Speaker 1: look at these windows of time in American history, and
2:57
Speaker 1: we look at wildlife commodities in a window of time
3:03
Speaker 1: and we kind of pick these like start dates and
3:06
Speaker 1: end dates for these often storied periods of american history
3:13
Speaker 1: history that were defined by certain well-known frontier personalities as
3:19
Speaker 1: an example um and this is one we've talked about
3:22
Speaker 1: many times because it's the first one we did the
3:25
Speaker 1: first meat eaters american history did was the long hunters
3:29
Speaker 1: And the Longhunters covered the colonial deerskin trade and often
3:38
Speaker 1: through the story of Daniel Boone. Okay, where here's this,
3:43
Speaker 1: he was a professional deer hunter. He supplied the deerskin market.
3:48
Speaker 1: And that Longhunters series ran from 1763, so imagine sort
3:52
Speaker 1: of the end of the French and Indian War, and
3:55
Speaker 1: that volume ended in 1775. the American revolution. Right. And
4:01
Speaker 1: that was that story. And it was a time when
4:03
Speaker 1: it was a time when deer skins, this kind of
4:09
Speaker 1: blows your mind, but it was a time when deer
4:10
Speaker 1: skins were the number two export out of South Carolina. Yeah.
4:17
Speaker 1: Rice being number one. Yep. So this is like pre
4:20
Speaker 1: cotton boom. It was the number two thing getting shipped
4:24
Speaker 1: to Hundreds of thousands. Getting shipped out of that colony
4:28
Speaker 1: was whitetail deerskins, right? Then we bumped ahead, what, 31 years?
4:37
Speaker 1: And we told the story of the Mountain Men era,
4:40
Speaker 1: which our argument was that the Mountain Men era began...
4:44
Speaker 1: This is a common argument, that the Mountain Men era
4:48
Speaker 1: began with the Louisiana Purchase, when all of a sudden this...
4:53
Speaker 1: Huge opportunity opened up in the western U.S. Lewis and
4:57
Speaker 1: Clark were dispatched out to explore the area. In their wake,
5:03
Speaker 1: on their heels, were all these entrepreneurial trappers moving out
5:08
Speaker 1: into this new area, and they exploited these enormous populations
5:14
Speaker 1: of beavers. And that created the Jim Bridger, Hugh Glass,
5:21
Speaker 1: Jed Smith, john coulter that era of american history um
5:27
Speaker 1: and we wrapped that one up in 1841 when the
5:30
Speaker 1: market the beaver market started to crash and not only
5:33
Speaker 1: that these guys had killed the beavers off which the
5:38
Speaker 1: killing off of is a big part of these stories
5:43
Speaker 1: um we argue that the long hunter era ended with
5:49
Speaker 1: the american revolutions for geopolitical reasons, but at the same
5:55
Speaker 1: time was humming along this idea that these guys were
5:57
Speaker 1: literally not extirpating, but putting a herd on. Putting a
6:06
Speaker 1: herd on. Yeah. Putting a herd on whitetail deer numbers
6:11
Speaker 1: as they marched westward to the point where commercially hunting
6:15
Speaker 1: those areas became not viable.
6:17
Speaker 2: Yeah, and also at the same time, you're starting to
6:20
Speaker 2: see new settlements in their areas of operation that are
6:25
Speaker 2: then having these very significant impacts in the areas around
6:31
Speaker 2: those settlements.
6:32
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a good point. Where these first wilderness frontiersmen
6:37
Speaker 1: that moved into the Appalachians, moved into Kentucky, they would
6:42
Speaker 1: start these little stations, they called them, hunting camps. And
6:46
Speaker 1: the hunting camps would grow and grow and grow. And
6:48
Speaker 1: then people pretty soon are planting corn And then they're
6:51
Speaker 1: like hunting for a living and wiping everything out. And
6:54
Speaker 1: they did wipe out Buffalo. They did wipe out elk
6:56
Speaker 1: in those eras. The mountain men, the market collapsed for beaver.
7:03
Speaker 1: The system changed. And also they were making it that
7:06
Speaker 1: it was no longer profitable in a lot of these
7:09
Speaker 1: areas to pursue beavers because they simply caught them all.
7:13
Speaker 1: From there, we jumped ahead to 1865. So the end
7:16
Speaker 1: of the American Civil War. and we told the story
7:19
Speaker 1: of the Buffalo hide hunters, which we argued ran up
7:23
Speaker 1: to 1883. When I say we argued, I don't mean
7:28
Speaker 1: that there's multiple ways of looking at it. In the
7:31
Speaker 1: case of the hide hunters, it was just that they
7:34
Speaker 1: ran out of stuff to shoot. In some of these
7:38
Speaker 1: other stories, there's like big political things brewing. Yeah, it's
7:41
Speaker 1: more open to interpretation. Yeah, they're like, well, things were
7:44
Speaker 1: kind of changing, and you know, with the American revolution,
7:49
Speaker 1: we weren't exporting to Britain and there was all these,
7:51
Speaker 1: there was these embargoes and trade got really complicated. And
7:55
Speaker 1: also the deer were kind of gone. Um, with the
7:58
Speaker 1: hide hunters, it's one thing and one thing only. And
8:02
Speaker 1: the market didn't crash. Yeah. Um, we didn't like sell
8:07
Speaker 1: or buy the West. There are still guys loading up
8:12
Speaker 1: to go out and shoot Buffalo. It was just one day.
8:15
Speaker 1: They're like, Oh my God, we killed them all. Yeah.
8:18
Speaker 1: And that ended that era. So as, as we work
8:24
Speaker 1: on these, when we're finishing one of these things, we're
8:29
Speaker 1: often talking about what we should do next. So at
8:35
Speaker 1: the end of hide hunters, we were kind of kicking
8:37
Speaker 1: around these different options of like, what should we work
8:39
Speaker 1: on next? And, and Randall, I'd like you to like,
8:44
Speaker 1: Try to reminisce a little bit for a while. We
8:47
Speaker 1: were going to jump into the bird hunters.
8:49
Speaker 2: Yeah. We were going to do the bird hunters, um,
8:52
Speaker 2: like commercial waterfowl hunting, both for, for meat, like sold
8:58
Speaker 2: in restaurants and butcher shops, but also, uh, the, the,
9:04
Speaker 2: the plume trade where they're shooting exotic shore birds for
9:08
Speaker 2: feathers that are being used in hats, supplying, uh, believe
9:12
Speaker 2: the i think it's the millinery industry is hat makers
9:15
Speaker 2: yeah so they're supplying and and this like if you're
9:19
Speaker 2: writing a story of american conservation or a story of
9:22
Speaker 2: american wildlife exploitation like that would be the natural next
9:27
Speaker 2: chapter yeah if you're just focused on wildlife exploitation and
9:31
Speaker 2: how it led to the system of conservation that we
9:33
Speaker 2: have today because that chapter especially the plume trade Like
9:39
Speaker 2: it raised a lot of popular awareness of the impacts
9:42
Speaker 2: on wildlife that these.
9:44
Speaker 1: Consumptive industries have.
9:46
Speaker 2: It led to the creation of the first national wildlife
9:51
Speaker 2: refuge down in Florida, Pelican.
9:53
Speaker 1: Island, I believe.
9:54
Speaker 2: And it led to new laws to protect wildlife. shorebirds
10:02
Speaker 2: and other wildlife. So if you're telling one story and saying,
10:07
Speaker 2: we want to capture just wildlife exploitation as it shaped
10:13
Speaker 2: the broader story of American conservation, the bird hunters was
10:17
Speaker 2: kind of a natural choice.
10:19
Speaker 1: Yeah. The, the, the downside to doing the bird. I
10:22
Speaker 1: want to hear your down. I have two, I have
10:27
Speaker 1: two personal downsides, but I want to hear why didn't,
10:30
Speaker 1: why couldn't you get excited about it?
10:32
Speaker 2: Well, I could get excited about it, but we could
10:37
Speaker 2: always go back and do it. We could go back
10:39
Speaker 2: and do it at some point. I mean, the difference
10:41
Speaker 2: is it's not frontier market hunting. So it's not like,
10:46
Speaker 2: I think, I think one of the fun threads that we've,
10:49
Speaker 2: pulled through long hunters mountain men and hide hunters is
10:53
Speaker 2: this it's an industry that's built around people going out
10:58
Speaker 2: into areas that at that time were pretty much only
11:02
Speaker 2: inhabited by native people i don't want to say they're
11:05
Speaker 2: uninhabited but they were going out into what was then
11:07
Speaker 2: regarded as wilderness and they're living off the land and
11:12
Speaker 2: they're they're hunting their own food and they're building shelters.
11:16
Speaker 2: And so having shootouts, like it's risky business.
11:20
Speaker 1: Um, I mean, one of the things that I thought.
11:22
Speaker 2: About each other, there were shootouts in the bird hunter story,
11:25
Speaker 2: but it's like wardens shooting at poachers.
11:28
Speaker 1: Right.
11:28
Speaker 2: Um, cause you kind of, after conservation laws get in
11:32
Speaker 2: place and you have these early enforcement, uh, efforts, then
11:36
Speaker 2: it becomes a riskier business. But one of the things
11:40
Speaker 2: that we've focused on, throughout the first three, uh, volumes
11:45
Speaker 2: is that these, this is like life and death on
11:48
Speaker 2: the landscape, wild animals, wild landscapes, raging rivers, brutal cold,
11:55
Speaker 2: all that stuff, which is kind of core to our
11:57
Speaker 2: interest in these people as historical actors. And so to
12:02
Speaker 2: go to the bird hunters, all of a sudden you're,
12:04
Speaker 2: you're looking at people that are waking up in their bed,
12:07
Speaker 2: you know, probably before they send the kids off to
12:10
Speaker 2: school heading out you know killing whatever they're killing and
12:15
Speaker 2: then they're they're sitting around a dinner table at night
12:17
Speaker 2: with their families or whatever else or maybe they're just
12:20
Speaker 2: drinking in the bars you know but they're they're in
12:23
Speaker 2: places that at that point in time are not sort
12:25
Speaker 2: of blank spaces in the average american's mental map yeah
12:30
Speaker 2: and so by going to the bird hunters you could
12:33
Speaker 2: have told a story that was historically consequential from the
12:38
Speaker 2: perspective of the development of the North American model, but
12:42
Speaker 2: you lose a lot of the fun, personally appealing aspects
12:49
Speaker 2: of these stories, which is the wilderness survival and just
12:53
Speaker 2: people enduring terrible, terrible shit.
12:58
Speaker 1: I don't want to sound glib. We might come back
13:02
Speaker 1: to the bird hunters. a big thing that weighed on
13:06
Speaker 1: my mind is we, I couldn't think of a cool
13:08
Speaker 1: name for it. Yeah. Now the bird hunters is a
13:10
Speaker 1: great turn. Great. Great turn. Pike Troubadour song. And they got,
13:13
Speaker 1: they got like the bird hunters. Sure. There was, I
13:15
Speaker 1: couldn't think of a cool name for it. That really
13:18
Speaker 1: like set you at a place. Yeah. Um, and the,
13:22
Speaker 1: the big thing was like, you're saying it wasn't, it's
13:24
Speaker 1: not a frontier story. You know, it's not a frontier story.
13:28
Speaker 1: Now we're going to talk about the Alaskans, which is
13:30
Speaker 1: very much a frontier story. Yes. Um, And then now
13:34
Speaker 1: we're kicking around an idea that I don't want to
13:36
Speaker 1: get into yet, but we're kicking around an idea that
13:38
Speaker 1: in terms of like, it's got a lot of frontier,
13:41
Speaker 1: but what the next one we're going to do is
13:44
Speaker 1: very heavy on shootouts. It'll probably be the most shootout rich,
13:52
Speaker 1: maybe the most shootout rich era of American history. But,
13:56
Speaker 1: you know, I don't know. I don't think that like,
13:57
Speaker 1: cause you look at the rate at which the long
13:59
Speaker 1: hunters died violently. Yeah. I don't know that you're going to,
14:03
Speaker 1: that the one we want to do next, we'll, we'll
14:05
Speaker 1: match that. Yeah. Shoot out rich. The long hunters. Yeah.
14:09
Speaker 1: The long hunters.
14:10
Speaker 2: There's a lot of death, a lot of dying, a
14:12
Speaker 2: lot of violence. Um, same for hide hunters too, at
14:15
Speaker 2: least like on the Southern Plains, especially in Texas. Um,
14:20
Speaker 2: not so much in Alaska. I mean, I think the
14:23
Speaker 2: Alaskans and maybe we should, before we go further, maybe
14:26
Speaker 2: we should just define what we're talking about when we
14:28
Speaker 2: say the Alaskans are.
14:30
Speaker 1: No, that was the next thing I was going to
14:33
Speaker 1: ask you. Walk everyone through... Walk everyone through... What is
14:41
Speaker 1: the period of history in Alaska? And it's a big window.
14:46
Speaker 1: But walk everyone through... When we think about Alaska and
14:50
Speaker 1: this formative period of Alaska and what was going on
14:53
Speaker 1: in Alaska, walk people through where we landed. Yeah, so we.
15:01
Speaker 2: So it's called the Alaskans, but obviously it's referring to
15:04
Speaker 2: a specific group of Alaskans. And we really, when we
15:11
Speaker 2: started this process, you were aware of a number of
15:18
Speaker 2: individuals whose memoirs you'd read and who you read about
15:22
Speaker 2: just sort of in your extracurricular reading who lived as
15:28
Speaker 2: full-time fur trappers. in the first few decades of the
15:32
Speaker 2: 20th century in Alaska, supplying fine furs to furriers in
15:39
Speaker 2: places like Chicago and New York. And one of the
15:43
Speaker 2: things that's really interesting about this period of time is
15:49
Speaker 2: that the experiences they're describing are sort of frontier experiences
15:54
Speaker 2: that could have come right out of like the age
15:57
Speaker 2: of Jim Bridger or Daniel Boone. But at the same time,
16:03
Speaker 2: they're living in an era that we associate like the 1920s.
16:07
Speaker 2: You think about the roaring 20s. This is an era
16:10
Speaker 2: of unparalleled economic growth and rising standards of living and
16:17
Speaker 2: the age of mass consumption. And when you picture the 1920s,
16:21
Speaker 2: you picture flappers and you picture you know, sort of
16:24
Speaker 2: the aristocrat, like, Gatsby types at, like, a cocktail party.
16:29
Speaker 2: And they're all wearing these very over-the-top fur, uh, accessories.
16:35
Speaker 2: I mean, fur coats, but also, like, mink stoles. You know,
16:39
Speaker 2: you can picture the imagery from the 20s of a
16:43
Speaker 2: woman with, like, a fox with the head and feet
16:46
Speaker 2: on it wrapped over her shoulders.
16:48
Speaker 1: And so there's this... And I'm sort of skirting around.
16:54
Speaker 2: who we're talking about here, and like the nitty-gritty of it,
16:58
Speaker 2: but one of the things that drew us into this
17:01
Speaker 2: story is this connection between what's going on along the
17:04
Speaker 2: Yukon River in the 1920s, and then what we think
17:08
Speaker 2: about when we think about American history more broadly in
17:11
Speaker 2: the 1920s. And so there's like this really interesting sort
17:16
Speaker 2: of duality that is.
17:18
Speaker 1: At the core of, of what we got into here. Yeah.
17:21
Speaker 1: All the, all these stories about these like wildlife commodities
17:24
Speaker 1: that we've explored have that there is a, there, there's
17:30
Speaker 1: something that, that, um, oftentimes seems out of sync, meaning
17:36
Speaker 1: these wildlife things combine these different worlds. So, so for instance,
17:41
Speaker 1: with the colonial deerskin trade, you think of a buckskin
17:44
Speaker 1: clad guy like Daniel Boone. But he's shooting deer and
17:50
Speaker 1: those deer could wind up being white leather pants worn
17:55
Speaker 1: by the aristocracy, worn by the King of England.
18:00
Speaker 2: Captured in a portrait painted of some dandy posing with.
18:05
Speaker 1: His He's got the powdered wig on. He's got the
18:09
Speaker 1: shirt with all the brass and gold and whatever. But
18:12
Speaker 1: he's got these white pants on. Once you know what
18:14
Speaker 1: you're looking at, you're like, those are buckskin pants. And
18:18
Speaker 1: so there's this difference. Like this guy living in a
18:21
Speaker 1: little half, in a little dugout shelter. Maybe he's got
18:25
Speaker 1: elm bark over his head and he's hunting deer. And
18:29
Speaker 1: those deer are being worn by people far away. Mm-hmm.
18:33
Speaker 1: The same thing occurs with the mountain men. So you
18:35
Speaker 1: got these guys that are literally out on the plains,
18:38
Speaker 1: getting tomahawked and scalped by plains tribes, catching an animal
18:44
Speaker 1: that is being worn by people in Boston, people in
18:50
Speaker 1: New York, like fine hats. People in London, people in Paris,
18:54
Speaker 1: far away. The Buffalo trade, it's like they're shooting an animal,
18:58
Speaker 1: and it's being used to drive the Industrial Revolution, leather belting.
19:03
Speaker 1: But with the Alaskans, it was something kind of like,
19:06
Speaker 1: I don't know, it just struck me more when I
19:08
Speaker 1: read about these frontier trappers from the early decades of
19:13
Speaker 1: the 1900s, that the imagery of who they're supplying is
19:18
Speaker 1: so fresh in your mind. Yeah. Because we don't watch
19:23
Speaker 1: a lot of movies about industrial belting. We don't sit
19:27
Speaker 1: and watch a lot of movies about English kings in 1773.
19:34
Speaker 1: But your whole life you've been watching mobster movies. Al
19:38
Speaker 1: Capone stuff. Prohibition stuff. Your whole life you've been looking
19:44
Speaker 1: at photographs. That's another thing is like all these other
19:48
Speaker 1: stories are kind of mostly pre-photography. Right? But all of
19:53
Speaker 1: a sudden, like your whole life, you've been looking at
19:56
Speaker 1: photos of flappers. Yeah. You've been watching mobster movies from
20:00
Speaker 1: the 1920s. And you've been seeing these arrows when all women,
20:05
Speaker 1: virtually all American women are adorned in fur. Yeah. The
20:12
Speaker 1: other day I was at university of Nebraska and we
20:13
Speaker 1: were touring this, the meat lab at university of Nebraska.
20:17
Speaker 1: And they had this like wall of photos of these
20:21
Speaker 1: trustees or board members or something going back in time.
20:25
Speaker 1: And I'm not kidding you. I walk back. Okay. I
20:29
Speaker 1: walk back, back, back. And I get to the part
20:32
Speaker 1: where every woman in every photo. is wearing a coat
20:39
Speaker 1: or a hat trimmed with fine fur. Yeah. Every woman.
20:42
Speaker 1: And I commented on it right there. I'm like, look,
20:45
Speaker 1: notice the year, you'll not find a woman who's not
20:47
Speaker 1: wearing fur. Yeah. And that these, that these, that the flappers,
20:53
Speaker 1: the roaring twenties, this sort of emergence of American wealth
20:56
Speaker 1: and opulence is being fueled by these guys that are
21:02
Speaker 1: like living out in the Alaska frontier of dried salmon. And,
21:06
Speaker 1: and just, the distance between these two people. Yeah. And
21:14
Speaker 1: the sort of cultural difference between them, but the spatial
21:19
Speaker 1: difference is so small. This is happening in Seattle, Washington. Yeah. Right.
21:27
Speaker 1: And it really became like, um, it just became remarkable.
21:31
Speaker 1: But then, and, and, I'd like you to explain the
21:35
Speaker 1: process of then we got to look and be like, okay,
21:37
Speaker 1: there's something there. There's something crazy there. But when did
21:41
Speaker 1: it begin and when did it end? Because it's very
21:45
Speaker 1: hard to identify when it began and when it ended.
21:47
Speaker 1: And how significant was it?
21:52
Speaker 2: In all these books or in all these research projects,
21:57
Speaker 2: we obviously have a handful of characters who are emblematic
22:00
Speaker 2: of a broader experience. industry yeah like you could you
22:05
Speaker 2: know we could tell the story of jim bridger and
22:08
Speaker 2: you wouldn't doubt that there was a whole thing behind
22:14
Speaker 2: him meaning that he was one of a type yeah
22:17
Speaker 2: right and so part of this story then when we
22:21
Speaker 2: think about the alaskans is is wondering like are these
22:24
Speaker 2: just anecdotes like are these couple of people here and
22:27
Speaker 2: there and and they happen to write some great memoirs
22:30
Speaker 2: and and maybe we're making more of something than it
22:34
Speaker 2: is because one of the interesting things about this project
22:37
Speaker 2: was that there aren't really any historical monographs, meaning like
22:46
Speaker 2: a study of a single subject that focus on this
22:50
Speaker 2: economy at this particular moment in time in this place.
22:54
Speaker 1: And so.
22:57
Speaker 2: Beginning with some of the, individuals that you came across
23:01
Speaker 2: in your reading and this was all like a blank
23:03
Speaker 2: spot in my mind like i didn't have any specialized
23:07
Speaker 2: knowledge of this i started reading more broadly about the
23:10
Speaker 2: fur trade and more broadly about alaskan history and started
23:15
Speaker 2: digging in on a couple little wrinkles here and there
23:17
Speaker 2: you begin to see mentions of the seattle and you'll
23:20
Speaker 2: see this in some of the memoirs they'll say i
23:22
Speaker 2: sold that year I sent my first to the Seattle
23:25
Speaker 2: Fur Exchange. And so then I started digging in on
23:28
Speaker 2: the Seattle Fur Exchange. And then you start digging in
23:31
Speaker 2: on sort of local histories of interior Alaska, which is
23:35
Speaker 2: really where we focused for this story. And you sort
23:41
Speaker 2: of start chasing leads and following them out from this
23:44
Speaker 2: kernel that had really caught our interest. And by chasing
23:49
Speaker 2: enough of those leads, you kind of fill in the
23:51
Speaker 2: world around these people and truly there was, um, this
23:57
Speaker 2: was like a, a golden era of American trapping. Um,
24:02
Speaker 2: there's ups and downs because we were looking at such
24:04
Speaker 2: a long window and I'll talk about that. Um, there's
24:08
Speaker 2: ups and downs in the market over the course of
24:10
Speaker 2: this story. It's not the case that we're following one
24:12
Speaker 2: big boom and then it collapses like we are with
24:15
Speaker 2: say the mountain men or the hide hunters. Um, the
24:18
Speaker 2: market fluctuates a little bit, but you could go out, uh,
24:24
Speaker 2: you know, if you're someone in the lower 48 and
24:26
Speaker 2: you don't have, uh, you, maybe you have a taste
24:30
Speaker 2: for adventure. Maybe you just don't have anything keeping you
24:35
Speaker 2: at home. Like you don't have a trade, you don't
24:37
Speaker 2: have a profession, you don't have property. You could go
24:39
Speaker 2: up to Alaska and, you know, borrow a grub stake
24:45
Speaker 2: and go out and make a living as a wilderness
24:47
Speaker 2: fur trapper.
24:49
Speaker 1: Um, In the 1920s. Yep. And beyond, and beyond.
24:53
Speaker 2: Because this world also didn't necessarily collapse. And maybe I'll
24:57
Speaker 2: talk about the dates now.
24:58
Speaker 1: But you could go out and make a good, you
25:02
Speaker 1: had the potential to make a good living. We talk
25:05
Speaker 1: about the buffalo hide hunters, that at a time when
25:07
Speaker 1: you could sell a buffalo hide for three or four dollars,
25:11
Speaker 1: if you worked at a tannery in Pennsylvania and you
25:15
Speaker 1: were a foreman, you'd make maybe a dollar a day.
25:21
Speaker 1: If you were a Buffalo hide hunter on the great plains,
25:24
Speaker 1: you might shoot 20 of them and get three or
25:28
Speaker 1: $ 4 a piece. Yeah. Now there's a theme here that
25:34
Speaker 1: happens is that the types of people that are always
25:38
Speaker 1: the frontier types that are always drawn to this are
25:41
Speaker 1: always very poor. They're very bad at getting rich. Yes.
25:46
Speaker 1: And every one of these stories, it's like, you look
25:49
Speaker 1: at the basic layout. If you work in a factory,
25:52
Speaker 1: you make a dollar a day. If you're a buffalo
25:53
Speaker 1: hide hunter, you sell buffalo hides for three bucks a piece.
25:57
Speaker 1: You can kill 20 a day. That guy must be rich.
25:59
Speaker 1: And it's always like, but he's not rich. Yeah. But
26:04
Speaker 1: it doesn't work. No. It doesn't work out.
26:07
Speaker 2: And I mean, we talk in this book, we talk
26:11
Speaker 2: about Frank Glazer, who's maybe perhaps the most recognizable of
26:16
Speaker 2: all the individuals that we discuss.
26:18
Speaker 1: And he... He really made his rep, he sort of lived.
26:22
Speaker 2: 10 different lives in Alaska, but he came up to
26:25
Speaker 2: Alaska at the age of 26, I believe.
26:30
Speaker 1: In 1915.
26:31
Speaker 2: And there was a period of time when he was
26:34
Speaker 2: focused primarily on fur trapping. He was a market hunter
26:39
Speaker 2: supplying meat for construction crews. Later, he became a government
26:44
Speaker 2: wolf hunter and trapper, and that was sort of really
26:47
Speaker 2: how he made his name. Um, but for a while
26:51
Speaker 2: he was, he was focused on fur trapping and he
26:53
Speaker 2: says at some point when prices were good, I could
26:57
Speaker 2: buy anything I wanted. He's like, I could have, I
27:00
Speaker 2: could have lived off a couple hundred bucks a year
27:03
Speaker 2: and I was making $ 5, 000 a year. Yeah.
27:06
Speaker 1: Um, so yeah, like there was real opportunity there. Um,
27:12
Speaker 1: and this is a time we get into, this is
27:14
Speaker 1: a time when fur exports, um, out of Alaska are
27:19
Speaker 1: competitive against timber exports, competitive against mineral exports, competitive against
27:25
Speaker 1: fisheries exports. It was a major business. It was a
27:30
Speaker 1: major business.
27:31
Speaker 2: And so I guess at this point, we've kind of
27:34
Speaker 2: been dancing around the dates. So with a story like
27:39
Speaker 2: this one, you always need to figure out a beginning
27:43
Speaker 2: and an end, right? And one of the commonalities that
27:46
Speaker 2: we saw in a lot of the individual stories during
27:51
Speaker 2: this research project is that their origin story as a
27:55
Speaker 2: trapper was in some way tied to the klondike gold
27:59
Speaker 2: rush so in 1896 a man named george carmack and
28:05
Speaker 2: his a couple indigenous guides or companions discovered gold uh
28:13
Speaker 2: that was all ended up in, in San Francisco, sent
28:16
Speaker 2: back on ships and it triggered this massive stampede to
28:20
Speaker 2: the Klondike goldfields. Now the Klondike is in Canada. Um,
28:25
Speaker 2: and the way they're accessing this area at that time
28:28
Speaker 2: is you'd take a steamer up like Skagway, Southeast Alaska,
28:33
Speaker 2: and you'd climb over the coast mountains and get to
28:36
Speaker 2: the headwaters of the Yukon, um, which are in Canada.
28:40
Speaker 2: And then they're floating down to the gold fields and
28:44
Speaker 2: You have this huge explosion of settlement and all of
28:48
Speaker 2: this intense economic activity around Dawson, which is the main
28:55
Speaker 2: hub there. But we're talking more than 100,000 people in
28:59
Speaker 2: a couple years are attempting this journey. Not all of
29:02
Speaker 2: them make it. When they get there, not all of
29:04
Speaker 2: them actually get into mining. Some end up working odd jobs.
29:10
Speaker 1: Some end up opening a saloon, things like that.
29:13
Speaker 2: And then of those that actually made it into mining, very,
29:16
Speaker 2: very few struck it rich. And what ends up happening
29:23
Speaker 2: is as this flood of people continues to roll into
29:30
Speaker 2: the headwaters of the Yukon, a lot of folks are
29:33
Speaker 2: getting there and seeing that the good claims are already taken.
29:38
Speaker 2: And so they're continuing.
29:40
Speaker 1: On downstream.
29:41
Speaker 2: And there's sort of this ripple effect that rolls back across.
29:45
Speaker 2: So these guys are starting in Alaska, going over into Canada,
29:50
Speaker 2: and then going back into Alaska via the Yukon into
29:54
Speaker 2: the interior. And the Yukon itself is this huge river
29:58
Speaker 2: that goes from you know, if you're going to draw
30:02
Speaker 2: sort of a line dividing the main chunk of Alaska
30:05
Speaker 2: in half, the Yukon just sort of bisects it.
30:08
Speaker 1: Yeah. Between. Yeah. We may just geographically, we make the
30:11
Speaker 1: point in here that you can imagine Alaska, a good
30:14
Speaker 1: way to start understanding Alaska topography, geography, whatever, is to
30:17
Speaker 1: imagine it occurring in like five bands, East to West
30:22
Speaker 1: running bands, the North slope of the Brooks range, right?
30:26
Speaker 1: The Brooks range. everything south between the Brooks Range and
30:31
Speaker 1: the Alaska Range, then the Alaska Range being another layer
30:35
Speaker 1: of the cake, and then south of the Alaska Range being,
30:38
Speaker 1: that's like a five-layer cake, or you could imagine as
30:40
Speaker 1: a three-layer cake, and.
30:42
Speaker 2: It's... Stuff that, by watershed, stuff that flows north, roughly,
30:49
Speaker 2: I mean, this is all very crude, but basically, if
30:53
Speaker 2: rain falls in Alaska or snow melts in Alaska, if
30:56
Speaker 2: it's north of the Brooks Range, Brooks range.
30:59
Speaker 1: It's rolling out to the Arctic sea. Yeah. Yeah. Arctic ocean, whatever.
31:04
Speaker 2: Um, in between the Alaskan range and the Brooks range,
31:10
Speaker 2: it's in the Yukon watershed and it's flowing east to
31:14
Speaker 2: west across Alaska out into the Bering sea. And then
31:19
Speaker 2: south of the Alaska range, they gets messier, but this
31:23
Speaker 2: is sitting as a big one out going out to
31:25
Speaker 2: cook in lid. And then, um, But basically what we're
31:29
Speaker 2: looking at in this story is that center of the cake.
31:33
Speaker 1: Yeah, I kind of screwed us up, Randall. I should
31:36
Speaker 1: have never done the five-layer cake. Yeah. It's a three-layer cake. Sure.
31:40
Speaker 1: It's a three-layer cake. And I want to get back
31:43
Speaker 1: to the dates, but this is about the layer everybody wants, man. Yeah, yeah.
31:49
Speaker 1: The middle layer of the cake. The middle layer. And
31:51
Speaker 1: it's the Yukon, it's called Interior Alaska. Yeah.
31:54
Speaker 2: And it's the Yukon drainage. And so that's where we
31:57
Speaker 2: focus in our story. So from this big rush to
32:03
Speaker 2: the Klondike goldfields in Canada, there's sort of subsequent, it's
32:09
Speaker 2: like a runoff of people down the Yukon. And there's also-
32:13
Speaker 2: Subsequent strikes of gold up and down the Yukon, um,
32:17
Speaker 2: all the way from Nome, which is near the mouth
32:20
Speaker 2: of the Yukon Fairbanks. Um, there's smaller strikes up the Koyakuk.
32:26
Speaker 2: There's there's strikes and all these feeder drain feeder rivers
32:29
Speaker 2: that some of them are hundreds of miles long. Like
32:32
Speaker 2: the Yukon has tributaries that hold their own against what
32:38
Speaker 2: we would think is like major.
32:39
Speaker 1: River systems in the lower 48. Yeah.
32:42
Speaker 2: Um, and, and what happens with the gold rush like
32:48
Speaker 2: this is that not everybody strikes it rich and, and
32:54
Speaker 2: heads out some people. And these are the people that
32:57
Speaker 2: we look at in this story. They, they end up
33:00
Speaker 2: in a new place and they figure out how to
33:03
Speaker 2: make a living there. And in interior Alaska at that time,
33:08
Speaker 2: you could make a real decent living trapping for. And
33:11
Speaker 2: it also was sort of a lifestyle, I think, that
33:13
Speaker 2: appealed to some of these characters. But if you think
33:16
Speaker 2: about one of the guys we talk about a lot
33:21
Speaker 2: in this is James Carroll. And he was born in 1893.
33:26
Speaker 2: He came up north to Alaska in 1910. So he's
33:31
Speaker 2: 17 years old. His brother had gone up chasing gold
33:35
Speaker 2: and had written to James Carroll saying, hey, there's gold
33:39
Speaker 2: nuggets the size of your fist. Get up here, it's
33:42
Speaker 2: easy pickings. So James Carroll follows in his brother's footsteps.
33:46
Speaker 2: And within a year, more or less, he's just a
33:49
Speaker 2: full-time fur trapper. There's a family that we look at,
33:54
Speaker 2: the Berglund family. And there's two brothers who come up
34:02
Speaker 2: in 1898, Oscar and George Berglund. They go up chasing gold.
34:10
Speaker 2: They kind of wash out, end up back in the
34:12
Speaker 2: lower 48. But according to his daughter, Evelyn, who wrote
34:16
Speaker 2: this memoir later of her childhood, she said that the
34:20
Speaker 2: North country got its hooks in them. And they went
34:23
Speaker 2: basically back to Oregon. George got married to.
34:26
Speaker 1: A woman named Maude. And then they all went back
34:29
Speaker 1: up to the interior.
34:31
Speaker 2: And George and Maude then raised a family in the
34:34
Speaker 2: interior of as trappers and the daughters are like this
34:41
Speaker 2: really remarkable story. They're all born in the interior and
34:44
Speaker 2: they grow up, you know, as soon as they can walk,
34:47
Speaker 2: they're sort of learning how to trap first with sort
34:50
Speaker 2: of like messing around with squirrels and stuff around the
34:54
Speaker 2: home cabin. But they end up just being as badass
34:57
Speaker 2: as any trapper that we've covered in this series. So
35:02
Speaker 2: there's another one is Sidney Huntington and Sidney Huntington is
35:06
Speaker 2: an interesting one. Um, he and his brother, Jimmy, they're
35:12
Speaker 2: the sons of a gold rusher from Buffalo, New York,
35:16
Speaker 2: who came up to the interior, sort of found out
35:21
Speaker 2: that he wasn't going to strike it rich as a
35:23
Speaker 2: gold miner. And then he ended up marrying a native woman.
35:27
Speaker 2: And so Sidney and Jimmy are both, um, the products
35:31
Speaker 2: of this collision of, I don't know if collision of
35:35
Speaker 2: cultures is the right term because it's, there's not a
35:38
Speaker 2: ton of conflict between the native Athabascan people and.
35:44
Speaker 1: Yeah, hold that thought for me because I want to
35:46
Speaker 1: talk about that.
35:46
Speaker 2: Yeah, but again, in each of those stories, like the
35:48
Speaker 2: James Carroll, the Berglunds, the Huntingtons, like all of those
35:53
Speaker 2: origin points stem from this discovery of gold that drew
35:58
Speaker 2: people together to interior alaska at a time when most
36:01
Speaker 2: of them couldn't have found it on a map yeah
36:03
Speaker 2: and that's really why we begin our story with that
36:07
Speaker 2: 1896 date which is the discovery of gold in the klondike.
36:10
Speaker 1: You know it's an interesting parallel that didn't even occur
36:12
Speaker 1: to me until right now how many people lewis and
36:14
Speaker 1: clark was like what about 40 people yeah the expedition
36:17
Speaker 1: it's kind of it's kind of funny about the ratios
36:19
Speaker 1: so you imagine the lewis and clark expedition sends 40
36:22
Speaker 1: people into the american west and into the rockies They
36:25
Speaker 1: come back, and one of them, one of them, at
36:28
Speaker 1: least immediately, one of them, John Coulter, is like, I'm
36:32
Speaker 1: going back. And there's a similar thing when you think
36:36
Speaker 1: about Alaska and the gold rush. I think we have
36:41
Speaker 1: some better concrete numbers in here, but perhaps for every
36:46
Speaker 1: 100 people that rushed up into the gold fields along
36:53
Speaker 1: the Yukon, For every 100 that rushed up there, one
36:58
Speaker 1: stuck around. Yeah.
37:01
Speaker 2: I mean, if that, you know, it's like this, it's
37:05
Speaker 2: almost like a funnel, right? Or I guess that I'm
37:10
Speaker 2: not coming up with the right, there's this huge number
37:13
Speaker 2: of people that come up. Some of them don't even
37:15
Speaker 2: make it because the journey is too difficult. Of those
37:18
Speaker 2: that get there, some of them can't even get into
37:20
Speaker 2: the business of mining. Of those that get into the
37:23
Speaker 2: business of mining, some of them get a claim originally
37:28
Speaker 2: where they intended to mine. Most of them end up
37:31
Speaker 2: rolling downstream and mining somewhere else. Of those guys, few
37:37
Speaker 2: of them find gold, even fewer of them find enough
37:40
Speaker 2: gold to make a difference. And not all of them give,
37:44
Speaker 2: I mean, this is another point too where we sort
37:47
Speaker 2: of need to draw a distinction between the Alaskans and
37:50
Speaker 2: some of the other volumes. A lot of these guys
37:53
Speaker 2: still are, you know, in their summers looking for gold.
37:57
Speaker 2: You know, they sort of keep a toe in that world.
37:59
Speaker 2: They keep a foot in that world. But fur trapping
38:03
Speaker 2: and hunting for subsistence is how they actually make their living.
38:07
Speaker 2: It's how they pay their bills. It's how they feed themselves.
38:10
Speaker 2: It's how they stay alive in this place.
38:14
Speaker 1: I think another way to describe that beginning date of
38:17
Speaker 1: the gold rush would be that It initiated a huge
38:25
Speaker 1: change in interior Alaska where there had always been Europeans
38:32
Speaker 1: or there had always been whites kind of poking around
38:35
Speaker 1: the edges of Alaska for a couple hundred years. I mean,
38:39
Speaker 1: Captain Cook came and explored the coastline of Alaska. The
38:43
Speaker 1: Russians had been fur trading around sea otters and other
38:48
Speaker 1: pelts along the coast. But there was this big hole
38:51
Speaker 1: in the middle that just hadn't really been filled up
38:54
Speaker 1: by frontier-type people. There was a constant, of course, like
39:00
Speaker 1: everywhere in North America, there was a constant Native American,
39:04
Speaker 1: or in this case, Native Alaskan, Alaska Native presence in
39:09
Speaker 1: the landscape. But it's what brought in, it initiated a
39:14
Speaker 1: push of frontier people. Yeah. As... Many of them came
39:20
Speaker 1: and fell in love with the landscape and decided to
39:23
Speaker 1: make a life there. The, the gold rush, it was,
39:28
Speaker 1: a fleeting enterprise and it forced these individuals to the
39:36
Speaker 1: ones that wanted to stay and wanted to make a
39:39
Speaker 1: life they had to sort of find a more consistent
39:46
Speaker 1: way to make a living on the landscape And they
39:50
Speaker 1: turn to a form of like a subsistence lifestyle. They
39:55
Speaker 1: turn to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle in order to stay. And
40:02
Speaker 1: then that life way, this hunter-gatherer life way, this frontier
40:07
Speaker 1: life way, then went on to exist for decades. Yeah.
40:11
Speaker 1: And in some cases, as we'll get into, in some
40:13
Speaker 1: cases still exists today in interior Alaska. Yeah. And so
40:17
Speaker 1: that's the start because prior to that, they weren't there,
40:21
Speaker 1: you know? Yeah. Yeah.
40:23
Speaker 2: And it's, it's kind of like the first, not this
40:27
Speaker 2: maybe isn't the right analogy, but it's kind of like
40:29
Speaker 2: the beachhead.
40:30
Speaker 1: It's like that.
40:31
Speaker 2: The Klondike gold rush is the moment that people from
40:34
Speaker 2: the outside start pouring into the interior in unprecedented numbers.
40:38
Speaker 1: And, and it begins this whole.
40:41
Speaker 2: Sort of this evolutionary process by which people from the
40:45
Speaker 2: outside adapt themselves to that environment and figure out how
40:48
Speaker 2: to make a living.
40:49
Speaker 1: In a way, it's a little bit of a weird
40:52
Speaker 1: twist on some of these other stories we've told in
40:56
Speaker 1: that the first people, if you go to the first
41:01
Speaker 1: far west, so everything beyond the Appalachian range, the first people,
41:08
Speaker 1: the first whites to go in there are going in
41:11
Speaker 1: there to hunt deer. Yeah. Like a hundred percent. Yeah.
41:14
Speaker 1: Like the first whites to go into those areas are
41:16
Speaker 1: going into hunt deer out of that activity becomes farmers,
41:23
Speaker 1: people engaged in other industries, but it was like, they
41:25
Speaker 1: were there first, the Rocky mountains, the first whites to
41:31
Speaker 1: really push into all these remote areas of the Rockies
41:33
Speaker 1: are going there to trap out of their activities comes
41:38
Speaker 1: immigrants and settlers and People establishing agriculture. Ski resorts and breweries. Yeah.
41:43
Speaker 1: Craft breweries. Yep. And here's an interesting one where it's
41:49
Speaker 1: the initial push, at least in this case, the initial
41:52
Speaker 1: push into these areas isn't the hunters and trappers. Yeah.
41:57
Speaker 1: A lot of the guys going into these areas are
42:00
Speaker 1: gold miners. Mm-hmm. And out of that, instead of the
42:05
Speaker 1: hunters and trappers being sort of the forebears. Yeah. They're
42:09
Speaker 1: kind of the afterwards.
42:15
Speaker 2: We've sort of covered this throughout the discussion, but there's
42:20
Speaker 2: a lot of way, there are a lot of parallels
42:22
Speaker 2: between the Alaskans and these earlier volumes. And then there's
42:25
Speaker 2: also these real key distinctions that separate it. But real quickly,
42:32
Speaker 2: as you mentioned, we could have, they're we might not
42:37
Speaker 2: necessarily have had to put an end date on our
42:40
Speaker 2: story if it weren't for, uh, the fact that we
42:42
Speaker 2: need to keep it to 12 chapters or 10 chapters
42:45
Speaker 2: or something. So at some point we had to pick
42:49
Speaker 2: a date to end our story. And for that, we
42:52
Speaker 2: picked 1941. Um, 41 is obviously, uh, when Japan attacks
42:59
Speaker 2: the United States at Pearl Harbor and the United States
43:02
Speaker 2: enters the second world war. Um, There's several reasons why
43:08
Speaker 2: that upends the world that these trappers are living in.
43:16
Speaker 2: One is all of a sudden the federal government starts
43:19
Speaker 2: pouring tons of money and people into Alaska as part
43:22
Speaker 2: of the war effort. Alaska is actually invaded by Japan
43:26
Speaker 2: and then retaken by America. and its allies in the
43:31
Speaker 2: Aleutian campaign.
43:31
Speaker 1: This is a thing not widely understood. There were combat
43:35
Speaker 1: operations in the Aleutians during World War II.
43:38
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's an amphibious assault where American forces retook part
43:44
Speaker 2: of Alaska from the Japanese.
43:48
Speaker 1: Allow me on this subject because if you're a big
43:53
Speaker 1: World War II guy and you go and look at
43:57
Speaker 1: how did we What was our long-term play on Japan
44:04
Speaker 1: in the Pacific Theater during World War II? And you
44:11
Speaker 1: know all these battles we fought on all these islands, okay? Guadalcanal, Okinawa,
44:17
Speaker 1: Iwo Jima. Like, our play was, we can't just go
44:21
Speaker 1: invade Japan. Right. You need to get islands. And you
44:25
Speaker 1: need to get islands closer and closer and closer and closer.
44:29
Speaker 1: And you need to take these islands. establish rebuild or
44:33
Speaker 1: establish air bases on these islands. And so you can
44:36
Speaker 1: get your aircraft there and your aircraft can have greater
44:39
Speaker 1: accessibility to bomb the mainland. Yeah. And, and that was
44:45
Speaker 1: the strategy is like the island hopping. But, but think
44:49
Speaker 1: about that, that we weren't the only ones doing this
44:53
Speaker 1: Japan as well as like, what is some remote ass islands? Yeah.
44:57
Speaker 1: Where's some remote ass islands that we could go nab. Right.
45:01
Speaker 1: And like take their air base and potentially set up
45:04
Speaker 1: to bring the fight to those sons of bitches. Atu, Kiska,
45:06
Speaker 1: these islands in the Aleutian.
45:08
Speaker 2: And we're going to go bomb them bastards in San Francisco.
45:11
Speaker 2: And so there's this huge, there's, as the war gets underway,
45:17
Speaker 2: the U.S. realizes the strategic importance of Alaska and the
45:21
Speaker 2: federal government starts spending unimaginable sums of money developing infrastructure
45:27
Speaker 2: in Alaska. Um, building airfields, communications, like all of the
45:35
Speaker 2: stuff that sort of built Alaska into what it is today,
45:40
Speaker 2: that really starts with this huge influx of money in
45:43
Speaker 2: World War II, and it continues during the Cold War.
45:46
Speaker 2: But part of this story is that those big construction
45:52
Speaker 2: projects draw a lot, and also military service pulls a
45:56
Speaker 2: lot of these trappers out of the bush. to go
45:59
Speaker 2: either work in Anchorage or Fairbanks, these very high paying
46:05
Speaker 2: construction jobs. Sidney Huntington is one of these individuals who,
46:10
Speaker 2: he goes to Anchorage to enlist in the military. And
46:14
Speaker 2: because he's so handy, they actually end up, he gets
46:17
Speaker 2: sort of recruited away to work on construction projects.
46:20
Speaker 1: Yeah, because these are dudes that can make anything by themselves.
46:25
Speaker 2: He's been building boats by himself or just with his brother.
46:29
Speaker 2: They've been building boats on the banks of the Yukon
46:32
Speaker 2: for years.
46:32
Speaker 1: Yeah, tearing outboards apart, putting them back together, fabricating components.
46:36
Speaker 1: And they come down to enlist and they're like, buddy,
46:38
Speaker 1: you're going into the trades, man.
46:40
Speaker 2: Yeah and so you see i mean you see in
46:41
Speaker 2: some of these studies of the area they talk about
46:44
Speaker 2: a lot of a lot of people just sort of
46:46
Speaker 2: getting drawn away from what they've been doing before the
46:49
Speaker 2: war to go have a stable high paying income during
46:53
Speaker 2: the war and what ends up happening too is is
46:59
Speaker 2: the the fur economy when those guys try to go
47:02
Speaker 2: back to fur trapping after the war the fur economy
47:06
Speaker 2: takes a slump that carries on through the 50s and 60s. And,
47:11
Speaker 2: you know, there's a huge renaissance in the 70s, and
47:15
Speaker 2: there's a ton of great memoirs and books of people
47:17
Speaker 2: who have gone to the Yukon in the 70s to
47:20
Speaker 2: take part in this big fur renaissance, the late 70s,
47:23
Speaker 2: early 80s. But we ended up at 1941 because also
47:28
Speaker 2: the technology is changing at the time, and that's another
47:32
Speaker 2: aspect of this.
47:33
Speaker 1: Like, World War II.
47:36
Speaker 1: Um, catalyzes this.
47:37
Speaker 2: Huge advancement in aviation, manufacturing, aerospace technology, um, and trains
47:46
Speaker 2: a huge number of pilots. And so general aviation, meaning,
47:50
Speaker 2: you know, like private aviation and people flying small planes
47:54
Speaker 2: around that existed in Alaska before 1941, like the, the
48:00
Speaker 2: real pioneer aviators definitely predate world war two, like the, the,
48:06
Speaker 2: The real groundbreaking Bush pilots definitely predate World War II
48:12
Speaker 2: into the 20s, right? But after World War II, the
48:16
Speaker 2: scale of aviation, both in the United States in general
48:20
Speaker 2: and in Alaska, is on a totally different level. And
48:23
Speaker 2: you have some of the most iconic airplanes of Alaska
48:28
Speaker 2: Bush aviation trace their origins to the 1940s, like the Beaver.
48:36
Speaker 2: canadian but the the the super cub um the cub
48:40
Speaker 2: is the plane that almost every world war ii aviator
48:43
Speaker 2: is learning to fly in and so after the war
48:46
Speaker 2: um aviation which in alaska transforms sort of the nature
48:50
Speaker 2: of remoteness and what it means to get in and
48:53
Speaker 2: out of town get out to your camp get back
48:55
Speaker 2: into your camp and so there's a lot of um
48:58
Speaker 2: it's not like in 1941 after that point there are
49:02
Speaker 2: no more interior fur trappers but it's just an era
49:05
Speaker 2: had ended for a number of different reasons.
49:08
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's a crazy thing that I didn't know until
49:10
Speaker 1: we started on this, but when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor,
49:19
Speaker 1: the first... few casualties of that attack were guys out
49:23
Speaker 1: flight seeing in a cub. Yeah. Yeah.
49:26
Speaker 2: It was two, two soldiers, um, who had learned that
49:31
Speaker 2: the U S in the lead up to the war,
49:33
Speaker 2: the U S had started a, a civilian pilot training program, just,
49:38
Speaker 2: just in order to turn out people who could, they
49:40
Speaker 2: could put behind the controls of an airplane. And so
49:43
Speaker 2: a lot of people just learned to fly, even if
49:45
Speaker 2: they weren't necessarily going to be flying a, flying a.
49:50
Speaker 1: Mustang, exponential growth in pilots.
49:52
Speaker 2: And so, um, yeah, there's, there's a couple of folks,
49:56
Speaker 2: I believe in a California national guard regiment, and they're
49:59
Speaker 2: about to be transferred back to the mainland. And before
50:02
Speaker 2: they do that, they have pilot credentials.
50:04
Speaker 1: So they rent.
50:06
Speaker 2: A pair of Super Cubs, I'm sorry, a pair of Cubs,
50:09
Speaker 2: and go for a flight scene tour. And then they're
50:12
Speaker 2: actually shot down by Mitsubishi Zeros, by Japanese fighter pilots.
50:17
Speaker 2: And so it's the first, I believe it's the first
50:19
Speaker 2: American military personnel killed in the attack on Pearl Harbor
50:23
Speaker 2: were flying Cubs.
50:25
Speaker 1: Flight scene tour in a Cub.
50:27
Speaker 2: It doesn't have this great historical significance, but there's something
50:30
Speaker 2: there that it's like, here's this aircraft that will transform
50:34
Speaker 2: Alaska into in the second half of the 20th century
50:37
Speaker 2: and it plays this, it's in the moment that we
50:42
Speaker 2: identify as this turning point in Alaska's history.
50:46
Speaker 1: So there's sort of like a poetic symmetry there. Yeah,
50:50
Speaker 1: we talk about in the piece on Alaska, we talk about,
50:55
Speaker 1: we begin one of the chapters and talking about that
50:57
Speaker 1: there is a, every generation will tell you what ruined Alaska. Mm-hmm. Okay.
51:05
Speaker 1: The Bush plane ruined Alaska. It's always from some perspective.
51:08
Speaker 1: The Bush plane ruined Alaska. The snowmobile ruined Alaska. Satellite
51:12
Speaker 1: communications ruined Alaska. Whatever. There's always something ruined Alaska. I
51:21
Speaker 1: don't want to use the word ruined, but undeniably it
51:25
Speaker 1: was World War II and the events around World War
51:28
Speaker 1: II and the events surrounding World War II that didn't
51:31
Speaker 1: ruin it, but stripped away, we still call it the
51:35
Speaker 1: last frontier, but mostly stripped away. It's frontier persona. It's
51:43
Speaker 1: frontier reality. And you just talked about like the, the
51:48
Speaker 1: world war two of it all, but an, a offshoot,
51:52
Speaker 1: like an outcome of world war two was the cold war. Right. Right.
51:57
Speaker 1: And so not only were we using Alaska to supply
52:00
Speaker 1: the Russians, in fighting the Nazis. But even after we
52:05
Speaker 1: beat the Nazis, Alaska transitioned immediately to a... The front lines. Yeah,
52:12
Speaker 1: to an area of enormous strategic importance in holding off
52:17
Speaker 1: the Red Menace. Yeah. If Russia's going to invade, where
52:21
Speaker 1: are they going to invade from? Right? And so all
52:25
Speaker 1: of a sudden it became like airfields. Bomber squads, early
52:29
Speaker 1: warning devices, running a highway.
52:32
Speaker 2: Weather forecasting.
52:34
Speaker 1: Just very basic stuff like that. Strategic petroleum reserves. Running
52:40
Speaker 1: a highway to connect Alaska through a highway system. And
52:43
Speaker 1: putting a highway in. Putting in these military bases everywhere.
52:47
Speaker 1: It just, like, again, it didn't ruin it, but it
52:50
Speaker 1: just brought it into the global... consciousness yeah as a
52:57
Speaker 1: place of enormous geopolitical significance and it just changed the
53:03
Speaker 1: place it.
53:05
Speaker 2: It really like prior to world war ii alaska was
53:10
Speaker 2: an american territory and it was sort of floating out
53:14
Speaker 2: there you know like you see on on a map
53:16
Speaker 2: that doesn't include all of north america alaska is just
53:19
Speaker 2: sort of floating out there right but world war ii
53:21
Speaker 2: really cemented a brand new type of link between the
53:26
Speaker 2: American mainland in Alaska, and even the Alcan Highway, the
53:31
Speaker 2: physical linkage between the U.S.
53:34
Speaker 1: And Alaska, that is an outgrowth of World War II.
53:38
Speaker 1: At that Klondike time, we argue this, at that Klondike time,
53:44
Speaker 1: there were men, young men, rushing up to Alaska to
53:52
Speaker 1: join the gold strike that that it sounds funny that
53:55
Speaker 1: would have been unable to pinpoint it, that, that a
54:00
Speaker 1: year prior would have been unable to show you where
54:03
Speaker 1: it was on a map. Yeah. It was not, it was,
54:06
Speaker 1: it was on the periphery of American consciousness, but it
54:09
Speaker 1: was not the center of American consciousness. Yeah.
54:13
Speaker 2: And so I think like that you can make a very,
54:17
Speaker 2: and that's what we're doing ultimately in, in, telling history
54:21
Speaker 2: is you're making an argument about the past, right.
54:23
Speaker 1: And you're interpreting the evidence.
54:25
Speaker 2: And so I think our argument is that world war
54:29
Speaker 2: two marked the end of an era for trapping in
54:32
Speaker 2: the interior of Alaska. Um, even though trapping in the
54:37
Speaker 2: interior didn't obviously end with world war two.
54:40
Speaker 1: And I feel like it didn't begin with the Klondike. Right.
54:42
Speaker 2: And I, so I feel like, I feel like we've
54:44
Speaker 2: covered a lot of this except for that trapping part.
54:48
Speaker 2: And so maybe, maybe at this point, like we want
54:50
Speaker 2: to flesh out what this lifestyle looked like on the ground.
54:55
Speaker 1: Yeah. Um, yeah, let's talk about those, those decades of
55:00
Speaker 1: frontier culture and a frontier subsistence hunter gatherer lifestyle that
55:07
Speaker 1: was happening in this vast area of Alaska during this time.
55:11
Speaker 1: And again, just a thing I like to do is
55:14
Speaker 1: always put it in the context of these, these other areas.
55:16
Speaker 1: Like if you go into, uh, during Boone's deer hunting phase,
55:21
Speaker 1: during his deer skin part of his life, how did
55:27
Speaker 1: those guys work? What did they do? You hunted with
55:30
Speaker 1: a group of people, your brothers, your brothers-in-law, your cousins,
55:35
Speaker 1: your dads. You formed these little parties of hunters. You
55:39
Speaker 1: would outfit yourself with pack trains, saddle horses, and pack horses.
55:47
Speaker 1: You would work up enough supplies, primarily salt, lead, gunpowder,
55:53
Speaker 1: and you would go on these big expeditions. And these
55:55
Speaker 1: expeditions could be six months. They could be sometimes a year.
55:58
Speaker 1: And you would push into these wilderness areas until all
56:01
Speaker 1: those pack horses were loaded with dried deer skins, bundles
56:05
Speaker 1: of dried deer skins. You'd pack them back and sell it,
56:09
Speaker 1: and that was your cash. The mountain man era was...
56:13
Speaker 1: generally brigades of guys that did not know each other,
56:16
Speaker 1: that did not grow up together. But they were organized
56:19
Speaker 1: and financed by investors who would put together a group
56:24
Speaker 1: of guys, some of them on salary, and send them
56:28
Speaker 1: out on these extended trips to trap Beaver. And then
56:33
Speaker 1: they would settle up with these guys in a salary
56:36
Speaker 1: sense or a basis of a per-fur basis. And that
56:41
Speaker 1: drove the economy. Buffalo hide hunters were these small organizations
56:45
Speaker 1: where you had like kind of a principal figure. He owned, uh, wagons.
56:50
Speaker 1: He owned livestock to pull wagons. He was able to
56:53
Speaker 1: go and buy all the lead and powder and everything.
56:57
Speaker 1: He would hire guys to work in his camp and
56:59
Speaker 1: he would be the financier and they would go out
57:01
Speaker 1: and shoot Buffalo. He would pay them their day rates.
57:05
Speaker 1: He would, he would pay them percentages on the take.
57:07
Speaker 1: And it was his business. And he wasn't backed by
57:10
Speaker 1: corporate interests the way early mountain men brigades were backed
57:14
Speaker 1: by corporate interests. With the Alaskans in this era, it
57:19
Speaker 1: became a really small little thing. These are, by and large, individuals.
57:27
Speaker 1: They're small families. They're a couple of partners together operating
57:32
Speaker 1: in a very small scale sense in the Alaskan frontier.
57:36
Speaker 1: And the way their lifestyle would work, is they would
57:41
Speaker 1: operate on an annual cycle. The annual cycle would involve,
57:47
Speaker 1: in the summer, you would go to a, we use
57:51
Speaker 1: the term roadhouse, there's roadhouses in Trading Post, which we
57:54
Speaker 1: explain in great detail where they are, but you would
57:57
Speaker 1: go to these population centers, usually located at the confluences
58:02
Speaker 1: of major rivers in Alaska. And a guy that wanted
58:06
Speaker 1: to get into the biz, okay, would go to one
58:10
Speaker 1: of these trading posts, go to one of these roadhouses, whatever,
58:13
Speaker 1: and he would try to work up financial backing and
58:16
Speaker 1: work up a thing called a grub stake or a stake.
58:19
Speaker 1: And he would need to go and get, to join
58:21
Speaker 1: in the biz, to become a frontiersman, he would need
58:25
Speaker 1: to go and get almost a year's worth of supplies,
58:29
Speaker 1: a winter's worth of supplies, meaning he would need to
58:31
Speaker 1: be able to afford a rifle, a shotgun perhaps as well,
58:36
Speaker 1: a bunch of traps. a bunch of food, clothing, and
58:41
Speaker 1: other equipment. The way his season began is he would
58:47
Speaker 1: then either go up and down rivers. And it's funny
58:53
Speaker 1: when I say up and down rivers, but it would
58:55
Speaker 1: often be you leave a little frontier depot and maybe
59:01
Speaker 1: you descend the Yukon. And then you come to a
59:04
Speaker 1: Yukon tributary and you maybe then ascend by dragging Holy. whatever,
59:10
Speaker 1: your watercraft, oftentimes homemade watercraft.
59:13
Speaker 2: Yeah.
59:14
Speaker 1: Boats built out of whipsawed planks these guys would make themselves.
59:18
Speaker 1: Maybe very primitive outboards. Yeah. This is the early outboard era.
59:23
Speaker 1: And this was also when winter travel was done by
59:25
Speaker 1: sled dog. And that's an important thing. Yeah. In the summer,
59:30
Speaker 1: late summer, you're striking out to your area. And you
59:33
Speaker 1: might go up the Yukon and then up another river.
59:35
Speaker 1: You might go down the Yukon and up a river.
59:38
Speaker 1: But you would go potentially hundreds of miles by yourself
59:43
Speaker 1: or you and a partner. And you've got your boat
59:46
Speaker 1: loaded with all your gear, your trapping equipment, your hunting equipment, canvas,
59:51
Speaker 1: some tents, whatever, nails, basic wood tools. and a ton
59:57
Speaker 1: of dogs running along on the bank, and you would
1:00:00
Speaker 1: find your way up to an area where you thought
1:00:03
Speaker 1: you could establish a trap line and have an exploitable
1:00:09
Speaker 1: number of fur-bearing animals and also an exploitable number of
1:00:13
Speaker 1: animals to hunt and eat. Once you found this place,
1:00:17
Speaker 1: you would build a small cabin. You would then establish
1:00:20
Speaker 1: a bunch of line cabins on your trap line. You'd
1:00:24
Speaker 1: lay out trap lines, and it could be a couple
1:00:25
Speaker 1: different Loops through the forest, loops of maybe 40 miles,
1:00:31
Speaker 1: loops of up to 60 miles where you knew you're
1:00:33
Speaker 1: going to go out and run traps. And then you
1:00:36
Speaker 1: need to start building in on supplying your food. And
1:00:39
Speaker 1: so September, October would be hunting and fishing months. Maybe
1:00:46
Speaker 1: August as well. Catching, at times these guys would catch
1:00:52
Speaker 1: hundreds of salmon. Yeah. Because that's how they're going to
1:00:56
Speaker 1: feed their dogs. And so they'd have a fishing season
1:00:58
Speaker 1: where they're catching and drying literally hundreds of salmon. They're
1:01:05
Speaker 1: shooting black bears. They're shooting moose. They're shooting caribou. They
1:01:09
Speaker 1: would try to do their hunting right around the time
1:01:11
Speaker 1: when you started to get freeze up at night. So
1:01:15
Speaker 1: if you're hunting around mid-September, by that point, by late September,
1:01:19
Speaker 1: early October, it was possible that you could kill a
1:01:22
Speaker 1: moose or kill five or six caribou, whatever. And put
1:01:26
Speaker 1: it up in a cache where bears couldn't get at it.
1:01:29
Speaker 1: And the stuff would start to freeze up and you
1:01:32
Speaker 1: build up enough food to last you through the whole winter.
1:01:35
Speaker 1: At that point, once November comes, then you were into
1:01:39
Speaker 1: your money-making phase and you would start running these trap lines.
1:01:44
Speaker 1: You would build a sled. You would use your dog
1:01:48
Speaker 1: team and you'd start running trap lines. And what were
1:01:51
Speaker 1: they trapped before they were trapping for Martin? They were
1:01:54
Speaker 1: trapping for lynx. They were trapping for wolf. They were
1:01:58
Speaker 1: trapping for red fox, different color phases of red fox.
1:02:02
Speaker 1: They trapped a lot of mink. They trapped small numbers
1:02:05
Speaker 1: of beaver. They trapped small numbers of otter. In the spring,
1:02:08
Speaker 1: they would trap enormous numbers of muskrats. You did that
1:02:14
Speaker 1: all through the winter, oftentimes with no interactions with the
1:02:17
Speaker 1: outside world. So when you left a trading post or
1:02:22
Speaker 1: left a roadhouse, in July or early August or whenever
1:02:25
Speaker 1: you took off, you'd go into the bush, and you
1:02:29
Speaker 1: might have from that point next to zero interaction. Because
1:02:33
Speaker 1: the way this system worked, you really couldn't have neighbors
1:02:38
Speaker 1: closer than 40 miles. The land was so, I hate
1:02:43
Speaker 1: to say it, people have this idea of Alaska as
1:02:45
Speaker 1: being so rich in wildlife, which we explain, it is
1:02:49
Speaker 1: at times. But these are windows of seasonal abundance. Salmon runs,
1:02:54
Speaker 1: like there's nothing more staggering than looking at a river
1:02:56
Speaker 1: where it's just like you could walk across on salmon,
1:02:59
Speaker 1: but you could also go there 11 months out of
1:03:01
Speaker 1: the year and there ain't shit in that river. It's
1:03:04
Speaker 1: full of salmon today. It ain't tomorrow. Yeah. And it
1:03:07
Speaker 1: wasn't yesterday, right? There's a bunch of caribou passing through.
1:03:10
Speaker 1: Like I've sat there in Alaska and watched hundreds of
1:03:13
Speaker 1: caribou pass by every day for three days, but there's
1:03:18
Speaker 1: 11 months out of the year when you might sit
1:03:20
Speaker 1: there and never see a single caribou. Yeah, and that
1:03:24
Speaker 1: shapes how these guys.
1:03:27
Speaker 2: And women lived their lives because when they needed to
1:03:31
Speaker 2: stock up on food, they got after it and they
1:03:34
Speaker 2: put it away for when the caribou moved off or
1:03:37
Speaker 2: when the fish went away, right? And so it's like
1:03:40
Speaker 2: this life cycle of stocking up on food when it's
1:03:45
Speaker 2: there and then sort of slowly and very deliberately working
1:03:51
Speaker 2: your way through that stockpile until the next window of abundance.
1:03:58
Speaker 1: Deer in Appalachia, like in Kentucky, whitetail deer resources were
1:04:03
Speaker 1: so good that 10 or 20 long hunters could go
1:04:05
Speaker 1: into an area and kind of hunt off different directions
1:04:08
Speaker 1: out of a, out of a station and all have
1:04:11
Speaker 1: good hunting. Mountain men brigades could be 20 or 30
1:04:16
Speaker 1: trappers that just would rove along and they'd come into
1:04:18
Speaker 1: a new valley. They'd break off in groups of two
1:04:22
Speaker 1: and they'd trap the piss out of that area. But
1:04:24
Speaker 1: there's a gang of them. Yeah. And they're like a
1:04:27
Speaker 1: roving war unit. Like there's so many of them that
1:04:30
Speaker 1: they can hold off native nations coming after them. Hide
1:04:36
Speaker 1: hunters would talk about that in your camp, you're listening
1:04:40
Speaker 1: to the distant booms. of other hide hunter camps. And
1:04:45
Speaker 1: you'd kind of space yourself just by the sound of
1:04:47
Speaker 1: how far the booms were, but you'd wake up in
1:04:49
Speaker 1: the morning. It's boom, boom, the next camp over. This
1:04:53
Speaker 1: is a solitary existence, man. Like in Alaska, it is
1:04:57
Speaker 1: not a rich resource area. So these guys would go
1:05:00
Speaker 1: that long. And then they, when they had, when they
1:05:03
Speaker 1: went up to these areas to trap, to get there,
1:05:07
Speaker 1: they're reliant on open water because they need to get
1:05:11
Speaker 1: their boats up to these areas. shortly after they get
1:05:13
Speaker 1: there everything would freeze up yeah and then they had
1:05:17
Speaker 1: to wait and stay there because they couldn't then take
1:05:20
Speaker 1: their furs down to market until breakup so once you
1:05:24
Speaker 1: got there and things locked up you could do these
1:05:26
Speaker 1: extraordinary dog sled trips and people did in emergencies travel
1:05:29
Speaker 1: enormous distances in the winter to go get help or
1:05:32
Speaker 1: whatever but generally once it froze you stayed put yeah
1:05:37
Speaker 1: it froze up in october whatever in november You stayed put.
1:05:41
Speaker 1: You weren't going anywhere until breakup in the spring. And
1:05:45
Speaker 1: in that spring breakup, you would come down your tributary, whatever.
1:05:50
Speaker 1: You'd go up the Yukon, down the Yukon to get
1:05:53
Speaker 1: to a place to settle your debts. You'd go in.
1:05:57
Speaker 1: You'd pay back the guy that fronted you. Not cash.
1:06:01
Speaker 1: You'd come in with your furs, and you'd settle up.
1:06:04
Speaker 1: And you'd wind up generally, and this is like, this
1:06:07
Speaker 1: is what happens to these market hunters. This is what
1:06:09
Speaker 1: happens to these frontier guys. You come down and you
1:06:12
Speaker 1: get like, if you're lucky, you got a balance, you're
1:06:16
Speaker 1: positive some money. What did they do with the money?
1:06:20
Speaker 1: Did they, did they invest it in Roth IRAs? Did
1:06:24
Speaker 1: they like, did they, did they go and buy a stock? No,
1:06:31
Speaker 1: they generally drank. they gambled they hired prostitutes they partied
1:06:41
Speaker 1: generally whatever they would just again and again and again
1:06:45
Speaker 1: there are exceptions but again and again and again they
1:06:49
Speaker 1: would they would later more as we're gonna do they
1:06:51
Speaker 1: would later marvel about i don't understand what happened to
1:06:54
Speaker 1: my yeah what happened to my money there's a yeah
1:06:57
Speaker 1: there's um.
1:06:59
Speaker 2: And then in the summer they're working odd jobs basically
1:07:02
Speaker 2: until they can go out and trap again and make
1:07:05
Speaker 2: real money.
1:07:06
Speaker 1: Yeah.
1:07:06
Speaker 2: You know, they're cutting firewood or, or tending a garden
1:07:10
Speaker 2: and selling vegetables in town.
1:07:12
Speaker 1: Yeah. They're maybe they're going out and looking for gold.
1:07:15
Speaker 1: Or a lot of them got into the freight business. Yeah,
1:07:17
Speaker 1: like hauling freight up and down to different mining camps.
1:07:20
Speaker 2: Because they already had a boat, so they had suppliers.
1:07:22
Speaker 2: And there's still like, there's other people out on the landscape.
1:07:24
Speaker 2: I mean, not that they're running into them, but there's
1:07:27
Speaker 2: a mining camp here, a mining camp there. So these
1:07:29
Speaker 2: guys have boats, they have knowledge of the rivers, they
1:07:31
Speaker 2: know how to run them. And so they'll take a
1:07:33
Speaker 2: contract in the summer running goods up to a mining
1:07:36
Speaker 2: camp or something. But one of my favorite images from the,
1:07:41
Speaker 2: I think it's James Carroll describes Like in the springtime,
1:07:45
Speaker 2: you'd come down after break up and you'd pull up
1:07:48
Speaker 2: into Fort Yukon or one of these places and all
1:07:51
Speaker 2: the old timers would be standing on the bank waiting
1:07:55
Speaker 2: to see who the next one.
1:07:56
Speaker 1: In would be.
1:07:57
Speaker 2: And they're all greeting one another and saying, how's your season?
1:08:01
Speaker 2: You know, how'd you do out there? But it's like
1:08:03
Speaker 2: this annual tradition that they all spend months out on
1:08:07
Speaker 2: their own and then they all sort of return to
1:08:10
Speaker 2: town around the same time. And it's this like welcome
1:08:13
Speaker 2: party of you made it another year. And some of
1:08:16
Speaker 2: these guys, I mean, necessarily don't need to list them all,
1:08:20
Speaker 2: but there's also cases where those guys are standing on
1:08:23
Speaker 2: the riverbank waiting for someone to come in and he
1:08:26
Speaker 2: never comes in.
1:08:27
Speaker 1: And then they go out and try to figure out
1:08:29
Speaker 1: what happened to him. Yeah, we get into that a
1:08:31
Speaker 1: lot of the ones that don't come. And in this era...
1:08:38
Speaker 1: in all these we like to do ways they died
1:08:39
Speaker 1: and there's a way there's the there's a ways they
1:08:42
Speaker 1: died in here but in this because of the solitary
1:08:45
Speaker 1: nature yeah of this occupation so many of the names
1:08:52
Speaker 1: um there's just a question mark next to the name
1:08:54
Speaker 1: yeah because if you're out with a brigade of mountain
1:08:57
Speaker 1: men and you get arrowed and die, it's captured. Someone
1:09:03
Speaker 1: later tells somebody you died here or there.
1:09:06
Speaker 2: Or like you can read in a journal, you know,
1:09:08
Speaker 2: we're all crossing the river and so-and-so came in on
1:09:11
Speaker 2: his horse and the horse lost its footing and we
1:09:14
Speaker 2: all watched him drown.
1:09:16
Speaker 1: That's not what you get.
1:09:18
Speaker 2: In the interior of Alaska when somebody is out trapping
1:09:20
Speaker 2: by themselves for months on end.
1:09:22
Speaker 1: Yep. It's they, they go through the ice, their boat capsizes, whatever. Yeah.
1:09:28
Speaker 1: And it just winds up being that they're just missing.
1:09:31
Speaker 2: Someone found their canoe in a place that wasn't supposed
1:09:34
Speaker 2: to be. They never saw him again.
1:09:36
Speaker 1: And that, and in that way, the air about how
1:09:39
Speaker 1: the Alaska, the chapter about how the Alaskans died is
1:09:42
Speaker 1: a little bit less fun. unless you have a good
1:09:46
Speaker 1: imagination because there's a lot of like, no one knows. Yeah.
1:09:49
Speaker 1: No one knows where this person is. No one knows
1:09:51
Speaker 1: what happens to this person.
1:09:52
Speaker 2: There's still, there's a couple of them where the, the, the,
1:09:56
Speaker 2: the scene or the evidence is, leads you to a
1:10:01
Speaker 2: fairly compelling explanation of what happened. And, and in those cases,
1:10:05
Speaker 2: the stories are just so wrenching, you know, like they
1:10:11
Speaker 2: find a guy, who laid down in bed and shot
1:10:14
Speaker 2: himself and he had a broken leg and they realized
1:10:17
Speaker 2: he broke his leg while trapping, ate through all of
1:10:20
Speaker 2: his food, couldn't go hunting and eventually gave, you know,
1:10:24
Speaker 2: things of that nature. There's some stories where we're able
1:10:27
Speaker 2: to piece together what happened. And that just makes you
1:10:30
Speaker 2: wonder about all the other ones that we'll never know.
1:10:33
Speaker 1: Yeah. There's a thing too, that in this, in this time,
1:10:37
Speaker 1: a thing you see less of earlier is I think
1:10:41
Speaker 1: the darkness is, the loneliness yeah um you see the
1:10:47
Speaker 1: emergence of i should say the emergence i don't think
1:10:50
Speaker 1: it was always lacking but we encounter references to suicides
1:10:55
Speaker 1: within this story yeah a guy that puts a snare
1:11:00
Speaker 1: around his neck hooks the other end of the snare
1:11:02
Speaker 1: to a to a dog team and has his dog
1:11:06
Speaker 1: team take off um some strange things like that. Do
1:11:10
Speaker 1: you wonder about that loneliness and that cold, but I
1:11:13
Speaker 1: wanted to touch on the thing about this, this, this,
1:11:15
Speaker 1: this annual life cycle is when these guys are coming
1:11:20
Speaker 1: down during, after the river ice breaks up and they're
1:11:25
Speaker 1: coming down to trade, there's also this, this funny thing
1:11:29
Speaker 1: where it's your chance now to go get actual food,
1:11:35
Speaker 1: but The towns and the trading posts and the roadhouses
1:11:38
Speaker 1: are supplied by river as well. And there's this interesting
1:11:41
Speaker 1: thing that would happen is you bust your ass to
1:11:44
Speaker 1: get down to a roadhouse or trading post. And you
1:11:49
Speaker 1: go in there expecting you're going to be eating this
1:11:50
Speaker 1: and eating that and eating this, but the place hasn't
1:11:53
Speaker 1: been supplied yet.
1:11:54
Speaker 2: Yeah, the boats coming up river with all the store
1:11:57
Speaker 2: goods haven't made it there yet.
1:11:59
Speaker 1: Yeah, there was a guy we talk about here. There
1:12:01
Speaker 1: was a guy that when he would come in from
1:12:03
Speaker 1: muskrat trapping in the spring, he would bring a big
1:12:06
Speaker 1: bag of dried muskrats to live off if he got
1:12:09
Speaker 1: to town quick enough and there was nothing there. Yeah.
1:12:12
Speaker 1: But then you would wait there for these supply things
1:12:14
Speaker 1: to come and then you'd get your supplies and you'd
1:12:18
Speaker 1: have a couple months to kill. And like you said,
1:12:21
Speaker 1: they would engage in different activities during that couple months,
1:12:24
Speaker 1: always in anticipation of come late summer, you just do
1:12:28
Speaker 1: the whole thing over again. And the thing you see
1:12:32
Speaker 1: within this era, um, earlier Randall started talking about it
1:12:37
Speaker 1: and I kind of paused him because I wanted to
1:12:39
Speaker 1: touch on it is all of these other eras we've
1:12:43
Speaker 1: spoken about are marked by extraordinary conflict between white Americans
1:12:54
Speaker 1: Euro-American figures and native peoples um the long hunters were
1:13:03
Speaker 1: uh killed off and killed off by native Americans who
1:13:10
Speaker 1: resented them coming into their homeland and shooting all their
1:13:17
Speaker 1: food resources cause tons of friction, right? The, the mountain
1:13:22
Speaker 1: men are fighting like, like the number one cause of
1:13:26
Speaker 1: death for mountain men is absolutely the black feet, hide hunters, Comanche, right?
1:13:34
Speaker 1: But here you have, and you should talk about it
1:13:37
Speaker 1: a bit because you spent a lot of time researching
1:13:40
Speaker 1: this as we worked on this project. Here you have
1:13:42
Speaker 1: a really different engagement between whites and Native Alaskans.
1:13:52
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think one thing that we haven't pointed
1:13:54
Speaker 2: out yet is that the Native people along the Yukon
1:14:00
Speaker 2: border had actually gotten into the fur trade before all
1:14:04
Speaker 2: these guys arrived. So the Hudson's Bay Company actually established
1:14:09
Speaker 2: an outpost that would become Fort Yukon, the town that's
1:14:16
Speaker 2: sort of the heart of this trading.
1:14:20
Speaker 1: Network.
1:14:22
Speaker 2: And they began buying furs from the native people of
1:14:25
Speaker 2: the area who were Athabascan.
1:14:30
Speaker 1: And so... when.
1:14:34
Speaker 2: Would-be gold prospectors or would-be gold miners arrived with the
1:14:38
Speaker 2: Klondike gold rush, they were sort of entering an area
1:14:41
Speaker 2: that had already been remade by the fur trade. And
1:14:45
Speaker 2: trapping was a way of life. In many cases, these guys,
1:14:47
Speaker 2: when they're deciding to trap, they're looking at how the
1:14:51
Speaker 2: native people they're encountering are making their livings. And a
1:14:55
Speaker 2: lot of them are trappers. And so in some ways,
1:14:58
Speaker 2: they're sort of adopting... this lifestyle that had already been, um,
1:15:04
Speaker 2: that had already evolved before their arrival. And like I mentioned,
1:15:10
Speaker 2: Sydney Huntington and Jimmy Huntington, they're the, the sons of
1:15:15
Speaker 2: a gold rusher and an Athabascan woman. Um, they, their, their,
1:15:23
Speaker 2: their father, James Huntington was not the only, um, sort
1:15:28
Speaker 2: of cross-cultural, um, marriage or relationship during this time. James
1:15:33
Speaker 2: Carroll also married a Native woman. And in a lot
1:15:38
Speaker 2: of cases, the towns where these guys are going to
1:15:42
Speaker 2: trade their furs and spend their time, they have significant
1:15:47
Speaker 2: Native populations that are living in these areas. Fort Yukon
1:15:52
Speaker 2: essentially is a mostly Native town at this point. And
1:15:57
Speaker 2: there's a lot of instances too where because one of
1:16:01
Speaker 2: the sources that we looked at, um, that you have
1:16:05
Speaker 2: Robert Marshall, the, the wilderness advocate as we best know him,
1:16:09
Speaker 2: but he traveled to, uh, interior Alaska in the late twenties,
1:16:15
Speaker 2: early thirties, and sort of wrote about it from an
1:16:18
Speaker 2: anthropological sense. There are other anthropologists who go up in
1:16:22
Speaker 2: the twenties and thirties to study this place. Um, and,
1:16:28
Speaker 2: What was striking to me is oftentimes they'd be describing, oh,
1:16:31
Speaker 2: you know, we met this trapper named.
1:16:35
Speaker 1: Jimmy, say.
1:16:37
Speaker 2: And he told us this story and he stayed for
1:16:39
Speaker 2: dinner and whatever. And oftentimes you don't know if that
1:16:44
Speaker 2: person is Native or non-Native, if they're of Euro-American ancestry
1:16:50
Speaker 2: or if they're Athabascan, until it's actually specified by.
1:16:55
Speaker 1: by the observer.
1:16:56
Speaker 2: And that's, I guess I bring up Marshall and these
1:16:59
Speaker 2: other anthropologists because from an outsider's perspective, um, they're just
1:17:05
Speaker 2: sort of describing the world as they see it. And
1:17:08
Speaker 2: you just don't, as the reader, you're not aware of
1:17:11
Speaker 2: if they're talking about a native person or because they're living,
1:17:14
Speaker 2: which is.
1:17:14
Speaker 1: Not a problem when you're reading about the mountain man era. Yeah,
1:17:17
Speaker 1: you know, exactly. Any story from the mountain man area.
1:17:19
Speaker 1: It's abundantly clear. Yeah. Who's white. And who's Indian.
1:17:23
Speaker 2: And they're, and they're living, they're living very, um, similar
1:17:27
Speaker 2: lives in terms of their, their annual calendar. I mean,
1:17:32
Speaker 2: a lot of what the, um, a lot of what
1:17:35
Speaker 2: the sourdoughs, a lot of what the Alaskans are doing, um,
1:17:39
Speaker 2: as trappers they've learned from, uh, at the Baskin culture,
1:17:45
Speaker 2: like the cash hiding all of your food on an
1:17:48
Speaker 2: elevated platform, um, so that bears and Wolverines and other
1:17:53
Speaker 2: critters don't get your food stuffs. That's something they learned
1:17:58
Speaker 2: from Athabascan people. Um, the way that they're splitting their
1:18:03
Speaker 2: fish and drying their fish and storing the salmon for
1:18:07
Speaker 2: winter and feeding their dogs, like that's all stuff that
1:18:10
Speaker 2: they're picking up from Athabascan people. So there's this really
1:18:13
Speaker 2: interesting exchange of, of knowledge and culture that's going on.
1:18:19
Speaker 2: And it's, you still see evidence of, you know, like
1:18:24
Speaker 2: maybe interpersonal conflict. Like certainly there's, we're not saying it's
1:18:28
Speaker 2: this harmonious world where there aren't biases, you know, but
1:18:32
Speaker 2: it's not nearly as, there's no like Indian wars as
1:18:37
Speaker 2: we see on the Great Plains. It's just a very different, yeah,
1:18:42
Speaker 2: it's a very different just context when it comes to
1:18:45
Speaker 2: Native and non-Native relations.
1:18:47
Speaker 1: I don't want to brush over or pass up that
1:18:51
Speaker 1: Alaska has its fair share of atrocities. Oh, yeah. The atrocities,
1:18:59
Speaker 1: when I say that with the Russians or others, the atrocities,
1:19:05
Speaker 1: like the massacres, wound up being a coastal thing. And
1:19:13
Speaker 1: it was a lot of conflict around the coastal fur trade,
1:19:17
Speaker 1: which was driven in large measure by sea otter hunting.
1:19:21
Speaker 1: You have, I mean, there are stories of native villages
1:19:27
Speaker 1: on the coast of Alaska getting artillery barrages. Terrible things.
1:19:34
Speaker 1: And then you have as well, like the coast was
1:19:38
Speaker 1: a rich enough resource where it could support Large groups
1:19:42
Speaker 1: of people. And so then you have the epidemics. Yeah.
1:19:47
Speaker 1: European diseases, which is a, it's an, it's an atrocity
1:19:56
Speaker 1: on its own, but it's not an intentional trial atrocity
1:19:58
Speaker 1: where we're like European diseases. We're killing enormous numbers, influenza,
1:20:04
Speaker 1: killing enormous numbers of native Alaskans. So I'm not trying
1:20:07
Speaker 1: to act like this. This is a place where, white
1:20:10
Speaker 1: culture and native culture came together and it was all
1:20:13
Speaker 1: like daisies and parades. It wasn't, but the interior was
1:20:18
Speaker 1: kind of its own thing. Yeah. And it was, um,
1:20:24
Speaker 1: it was relative to other frontier collisions. It was remarkably
1:20:30
Speaker 1: harmonious relative to other relative to the American West. Yeah.
1:20:35
Speaker 1: Relative to Appalachia relative to these other, the great Plains.
1:20:39
Speaker 1: all these other places we've done, it was like a
1:20:43
Speaker 1: low densities of people coming together in a pretty peaceful fashion,
1:20:49
Speaker 1: seemingly much less aware of, of that your race identified you. Yeah.
1:20:57
Speaker 1: You know? Yeah.
1:20:59
Speaker 2: And, and again, it's just, you, you, you run into
1:21:03
Speaker 2: it again and again, as you're reading individual stories on
1:21:06
Speaker 2: the ground, that this is a world of, of intermixture between,
1:21:10
Speaker 2: you know, it's not like a segregated world. Um, it's not,
1:21:16
Speaker 2: it's people living sort of the same lives. Obviously there's
1:21:20
Speaker 2: very different contexts for each given the history of their,
1:21:24
Speaker 2: their ancestry, whatever. But, um, it, that's one of the
1:21:28
Speaker 2: things that's stuck out to me in this and Sydney
1:21:31
Speaker 2: Huntington like is, is, you can't say that he's, you know,
1:21:37
Speaker 2: he's a fur trapper. Like he trapped for a period
1:21:39
Speaker 2: of time. It was very influential as he tells it
1:21:42
Speaker 2: in his memoir of, of how he became a man
1:21:45
Speaker 2: and how he learned, uh, who he was. But then
1:21:49
Speaker 2: he goes on to this, this long, long life where
1:21:51
Speaker 2: he's a very respected elder. Um, he's a very accomplished individual. Uh, he,
1:21:57
Speaker 2: he served on the Alaska game commission like you can't
1:22:01
Speaker 2: reduce him to a fur trapper, but during this period,
1:22:04
Speaker 2: when we're talking about this, this world along the interior,
1:22:08
Speaker 2: he's participating in it in much the same way that
1:22:11
Speaker 2: a guy like James Carroll was participating in it.
1:22:14
Speaker 1: Yeah. Hit me with one of your favorite, um, from
1:22:18
Speaker 1: this era, hit me with one or two of your
1:22:21
Speaker 1: favorite anecdotes before we go into the, uh, before we,
1:22:25
Speaker 1: before we go into a sample chapter. Hmm.
1:22:29
Speaker 2: Um, You know, this isn't, this isn't necessarily an anecdote,
1:22:37
Speaker 2: but I think one of the things that I enjoyed
1:22:41
Speaker 2: researching the most was the market in furs.
1:22:47
Speaker 1: And one of the.
1:22:50
Speaker 2: Unexpected things that we highlight in here is the 1920s
1:22:56
Speaker 2: are really the era of one modern advertising, meaning you're
1:23:01
Speaker 2: you're not just listing an item by its, its qualities or,
1:23:06
Speaker 2: or what someone might look for when they're going to
1:23:09
Speaker 2: purchase something, but they're saying like, you know, you're an
1:23:12
Speaker 2: idiot if you don't wear, Hey dudes shoes, you know,
1:23:15
Speaker 2: like they're, it's trying to like the, the, the advertising
1:23:18
Speaker 2: for the first time is trying to elicit an emotional
1:23:21
Speaker 2: reaction in people. And so that's, what's used to drive
1:23:25
Speaker 2: the sale of fur and, you know, things like, uh,
1:23:28
Speaker 2: a woman is only as beautiful as the fur on
1:23:31
Speaker 2: her shoulders is an ad that you see in the twenties. Right.
1:23:34
Speaker 2: And then at the same time too, um, this is
1:23:38
Speaker 2: the dawn of the age of consumer lending where, um,
1:23:43
Speaker 2: you know, previously, like you had, you know, you could
1:23:46
Speaker 2: go to a store and you'd sort of having, have
1:23:48
Speaker 2: a revolving credit account, something like that. Um, but this
1:23:52
Speaker 2: is an age where you could go out and, and
1:23:55
Speaker 2: get it because this is the age of mass consumption
1:23:57
Speaker 2: and appliances and things like that automobiles there's a huge
1:24:01
Speaker 2: shift in the 20s from the number of automobiles that
1:24:04
Speaker 2: are purchased with cash versus purchased on credit and so
1:24:07
Speaker 2: all of a sudden in american life these goods that
1:24:11
Speaker 2: might have been unattainable previously people are people are signing
1:24:17
Speaker 2: for them on credit and making payments And so that
1:24:21
Speaker 2: all of a sudden renders a luxurious fur coat that
1:24:25
Speaker 2: once was just like a marker of very high status.
1:24:29
Speaker 1: It makes it accessible to workaday folks.
1:24:34
Speaker 2: And so there's all these references in the material to
1:24:38
Speaker 2: like shop girls in New York wearing furs or clerks
1:24:41
Speaker 2: wearing furs. And there's this great sort of moral anguish
1:24:46
Speaker 2: about people buying a fur coat with a mortgage. But
1:24:50
Speaker 2: all of a sudden, it's like this fur becomes achievable.
1:24:56
Speaker 2: It becomes attainable to a much wider swath of the
1:24:59
Speaker 2: American population. And connecting those two, like the advertising and
1:25:04
Speaker 2: the credit, to someone like James Carroll being able to
1:25:09
Speaker 2: make this primitive frontier life work out was really, I
1:25:14
Speaker 2: think for me, that was one of the things that
1:25:17
Speaker 2: kind of made me giddy. And it's not as exciting
1:25:21
Speaker 2: as someone getting charged by a bear, but.
1:25:23
Speaker 1: No, but it's good. I like, I'll do a bear one. Okay. Uh,
1:25:26
Speaker 1: I was digging.
1:25:29
Speaker 2: Evelyn, Evelyn Berglund and her sisters come back to the
1:25:32
Speaker 2: cabin one night and, the door is a jar and
1:25:37
Speaker 2: they can hear something in there. And they say, it
1:25:40
Speaker 2: sounds sort of like ice skates on the floor. And
1:25:43
Speaker 2: they realize it's bear claws on the walking around on
1:25:46
Speaker 2: the wood floor of their cabin. And they go in
1:25:48
Speaker 2: and it's all trashed. And, She, uh, she gets the
1:25:51
Speaker 2: gun and she pokes her head in and, um, there's
1:25:56
Speaker 2: a bear just sitting on their bunk bed and she
1:25:58
Speaker 2: shoots the bear and kills it. And then she describes,
1:26:02
Speaker 2: we took all the sheets and bedding and stuff and
1:26:05
Speaker 2: brought it outside. So it would freeze solid until we
1:26:09
Speaker 2: could actually go through all the work of cleaning it.
1:26:11
Speaker 2: So there's a lot of like really interesting. Here's another
1:26:14
Speaker 2: Evelyn Berglund line. Evelyn Berglund Shore is her, her married
1:26:17
Speaker 2: name later that her memoirs published under, but She describes,
1:26:23
Speaker 2: talking about how her family would keep their meat in
1:26:25
Speaker 2: the cache and they'd bring it in and cut steaks.
1:26:29
Speaker 2: They'd let it thaw, then cut steaks, then bring those outside,
1:26:31
Speaker 2: let them refreeze, and that's sort of what they'd eat
1:26:33
Speaker 2: for the week. And that's sort of how they, and
1:26:35
Speaker 2: she has a line because she's writing in the 1950s,
1:26:38
Speaker 2: in the era of people having freezers and refrigerators. She said,
1:26:43
Speaker 2: our family learned how to eat from a deep freeze
1:26:46
Speaker 2: well before most other Americans did. And we didn't have
1:26:50
Speaker 2: to thank GE for it.
1:26:51
Speaker 1: Yeah. So that was, she's, she's a really clever writer.
1:26:54
Speaker 1: So that was a fun one. Uh, one of the
1:26:57
Speaker 1: ones that most like doing the research, one of the
1:27:00
Speaker 1: things that, that I hit on that I knew would
1:27:03
Speaker 1: be in here and would have to be in here
1:27:04
Speaker 1: is the guy, the James Carroll, who, who like an
1:27:08
Speaker 1: early job of his was as a camp cook in
1:27:10
Speaker 1: lumber camp. Mm-hmm. So he had kind of an eye
1:27:13
Speaker 1: for food. One of these guys he describes, one of
1:27:16
Speaker 1: these Alaskans he describes, would be standing there cooking for
1:27:19
Speaker 1: other people. Oh, God, yeah. And he would use a
1:27:21
Speaker 1: fork to flip everything. And he would flip something. He
1:27:24
Speaker 1: had a nervous whatever where he would flip something and
1:27:27
Speaker 1: then stand there and comb his mustache with the fork. Yeah.
1:27:32
Speaker 1: Between flips.
1:27:33
Speaker 2: We have a whole section of these descriptions of these
1:27:36
Speaker 2: cooks at the different roadhouses. And one guy, his biscuits
1:27:40
Speaker 2: always had cat footprints on them because to make help
1:27:44
Speaker 2: his dough rise he would cover his bread with a
1:27:46
Speaker 2: towel and then his cat would get up on there
1:27:48
Speaker 2: and keep it warm walk paw around and then lay
1:27:51
Speaker 2: down and sleep on the bread.
1:27:53
Speaker 1: He he describes another guy he would go into he
1:27:57
Speaker 1: would actually cross the international border um to go trap
1:28:02
Speaker 1: muskrats in the crow flats Which is this whole thing,
1:28:08
Speaker 1: but it was like after the regular trapping season, he
1:28:10
Speaker 1: would do the muskrat season. And he would travel enormous
1:28:13
Speaker 1: distances by dog sled and boat and go trap across
1:28:16
Speaker 1: the border. And you'd have to find a Mountie, a
1:28:19
Speaker 1: Canadian Mountie, to like check in and tell him you
1:28:21
Speaker 1: were going into Canada. Yeah. But he would trap near
1:28:25
Speaker 1: this old, like real rugged old guy that he regarded
1:28:29
Speaker 1: as being an old rugged guy. And the guy would,
1:28:32
Speaker 1: he preferred to live off muskrats. And he didn't really
1:28:36
Speaker 1: like to cook. And so he had a he would
1:28:39
Speaker 1: cook a head so to speak and he would take
1:28:42
Speaker 1: an old oil can and he would take whole skinned
1:28:46
Speaker 1: out muskrats head tail and everything and he'd stick them
1:28:49
Speaker 1: head down in the oil can because the oil can
1:28:51
Speaker 1: wouldn't hold them the whole way he'd put 10 of
1:28:54
Speaker 1: them in there head down and boil them for a
1:28:58
Speaker 1: while and then he'd flip them Head up. So the
1:29:01
Speaker 1: heads are sticking out of the can. So now the
1:29:02
Speaker 1: heads are out of the can and boil them for
1:29:04
Speaker 1: a while. And that would give him his three days
1:29:08
Speaker 1: of food. Yeah. Whenever he went to do it, he
1:29:11
Speaker 1: would take a muskrat out. He would mix a little
1:29:14
Speaker 1: flour in the water. And that is what the guy
1:29:18
Speaker 1: would live off. And he, as he ate these muskrats,
1:29:20
Speaker 1: he would put the bones behind his wood stove in
1:29:23
Speaker 1: his tent. And this guy observed that he had accumulated
1:29:26
Speaker 1: by the end of the muskrat trapping season, he had
1:29:29
Speaker 1: accumulated A pile of muskrat bones the size of a
1:29:34
Speaker 1: muskrat hut. And this is the guy that was so
1:29:38
Speaker 1: reliant on muskrats. This is the guy that would bring
1:29:42
Speaker 1: bags of dried muskrats back to town with him. Yeah.
1:29:47
Speaker 1: For his food. And he observes that one time James
1:29:50
Speaker 1: Carroll was running low on supplies. He goes to visit
1:29:54
Speaker 1: this guy, this old guy that ate muskrats. And the guy...
1:29:59
Speaker 1: gave him his supplies yeah like he just felt more
1:30:02
Speaker 1: comfortable not having them he said take my extras yeah
1:30:06
Speaker 1: which is just like his his coffee and sugar yeah
1:30:09
Speaker 1: he just he just just wanted to eat his muskrats
1:30:12
Speaker 1: simple man he just liked it simple and it was
1:30:16
Speaker 1: and again to to juxtapose that with the roaring 20s
1:30:24
Speaker 1: gangster mall dressed in fur yeah you know and the Like,
1:30:29
Speaker 1: where was the fur coming from? It was coming from
1:30:31
Speaker 1: that guy. Yeah. No, it's really interesting. Just creates like
1:30:35
Speaker 1: the rich story that it is.
1:30:36
Speaker 2: It's a really, really interesting chapter in this American frontier
1:30:42
Speaker 2: history that.
1:30:44
Speaker 1: I knew nothing about going into it.
1:30:46
Speaker 2: And the more and more I read, the more it
1:30:49
Speaker 2: just like brought me joy and fascinated me.
1:30:52
Speaker 1: Tee up the chapter. We're going to jam in here.
1:30:55
Speaker 2: So we're going to share a preview of a chapter.
1:30:58
Speaker 2: from the alaskans which is available anywhere you get your
1:31:02
Speaker 2: audiobooks um apple books audible you can listen on spotify
1:31:07
Speaker 2: premium um this is this is chapter it's called feast
1:31:13
Speaker 2: and famine and it is about uh sort of the
1:31:18
Speaker 2: annual cycle of food acquisition and storage and preparation.
1:31:23
Speaker 1: And And also the lack thereof. And also the lack thereof.
1:31:27
Speaker 1: When things go bad, they go real bad. Yeah. So enjoying, again,
1:31:31
Speaker 1: Meat Eaters American History, the Alaskans, 1896 to 1941. Thank you.
1:31:37
Speaker 1: Chapter 5, Feast or Famine? Everyone pictures Alaska as a
1:31:56
Speaker 1: place overflowing with wildlife, a place where moose and salmon abound.
1:32:02
Speaker 1: What that picture leaves out is timing, because in the
1:32:05
Speaker 1: last frontier, abundance arrives in a fleeting rush and vanishes
1:32:11
Speaker 1: just as fast. The men and women who learned to
1:32:14
Speaker 1: recognize that rhythm and abide by it were the ones
1:32:18
Speaker 1: who lived to see spring. I want to tell you
1:32:22
Speaker 1: one of the most harrowing stories of wilderness adventure that
1:32:26
Speaker 1: I've ever heard, with the acknowledgement that it takes place
1:32:29
Speaker 1: outside of the political boundaries of this story's focus, though
1:32:35
Speaker 1: well within its timeline. During the first few decades of
1:32:38
Speaker 1: the 20th century, at the same time the Alaskan sourdoughs
1:32:42
Speaker 1: were building their lives, hunting and trapping up and down
1:32:45
Speaker 1: the Yukon, the same process was playing out in western
1:32:49
Speaker 1: and northern Canada. Fine furs were a global commodity, and
1:32:54
Speaker 1: the same habitat, vast tracts of wild country, and ecological
1:32:59
Speaker 1: conditions that made Alaska a trapper's dream existed across the
1:33:04
Speaker 1: boreal forests extending eastward from there across the international border.
1:33:10
Speaker 1: There are a number of outstanding memoirs and books produced
1:33:15
Speaker 1: by these Canadian trappers, but one in particular stands apart
1:33:19
Speaker 1: from all the rest. In May of 1926, a three-man
1:33:25
Speaker 1: party set out from Edmonton to trap in northern Canada.
1:33:29
Speaker 1: The members were 17-year-old Edgar Christian, his 49-year-old cousin John Hornby,
1:33:37
Speaker 1: and 28-year-old Harold Adlard, an acquaintance of Hornby. The party's
1:33:43
Speaker 1: destination was a patch of spruce trees along the Filon River,
1:33:48
Speaker 1: that Hornby had discovered on a previous trip to the
1:33:51
Speaker 1: far north. The site was north of the tree line,
1:33:56
Speaker 1: which meant that it was something of an oasis of timber,
1:33:59
Speaker 1: where a group of trappers could build a cabin and
1:34:02
Speaker 1: stock up on firewood in what was otherwise barren tundra.
1:34:08
Speaker 1: Hornby had observed that the area was rich in fur-bearing animals,
1:34:12
Speaker 1: and the plan was to hunt a herd of migrating
1:34:15
Speaker 1: caribou that passed through there in the fall in order
1:34:19
Speaker 1: to stock up on food before settling in for a
1:34:22
Speaker 1: winter of trapping. When they did not return by the
1:34:27
Speaker 1: summer of 1928, as they told family members they would,
1:34:31
Speaker 1: the Royal Canadian Mounted Police instructed a party of geologists
1:34:36
Speaker 1: headed out in the same vicinity to keep an eye
1:34:39
Speaker 1: out for signs of the men. Six weeks later, those
1:34:43
Speaker 1: individuals found a small cabin and reported that they'd found
1:34:48
Speaker 1: the missing trappers all dead. It would be another year
1:34:54
Speaker 1: before Canadian law enforcement made it out to the site
1:34:57
Speaker 1: to conduct an investigation. Upon arrival, they found a note
1:35:03
Speaker 1: that instructed them to look inside the wood stove where
1:35:07
Speaker 1: they discovered, among a few letters and notebooks, Edgar Christian's diary.
1:35:14
Speaker 1: That document shed light on the fate of the men
1:35:17
Speaker 1: and the harsh realities of living off the land in
1:35:21
Speaker 1: the far north. For reasons unknown, the trappers had been
1:35:26
Speaker 1: delayed in reaching the site on the Thelon River where
1:35:29
Speaker 1: they intended to build their cabins. The only explanatory clue
1:35:34
Speaker 1: was a note found in a can by a portage
1:35:38
Speaker 1: along the route, in which John Hornby wrote simply, quote,
1:35:43
Speaker 1: Owing to bad weather and laziness, traveling slowly, one big
1:35:48
Speaker 1: migration of caribou passed. By the time they built their cabin,
1:35:53
Speaker 1: it was early October, and winter was setting in. They
1:35:58
Speaker 1: established their trap lines and began to put away fur
1:36:02
Speaker 1: on the constant lookout for the caribou migration they believed
1:36:06
Speaker 1: would be inevitable. But before long, it becomes clear that
1:36:11
Speaker 1: they'd missed the big herds, which had already passed through.
1:36:15
Speaker 1: By mid-November, the entries in Christian's diary remain focused on
1:36:20
Speaker 1: their somewhat normal day-to-day activities, but they do begin to
1:36:25
Speaker 1: mention By December, Christian notes they are hunting less and
1:36:34
Speaker 1: less to avoid burning calories unnecessarily. He describes them as
1:36:40
Speaker 1: denning up to, quote, They did what they could to
1:36:46
Speaker 1: get some ptarmigan, small game, and fish, but Christian and
1:36:51
Speaker 1: his companions were already looking ahead to the spring when
1:36:55
Speaker 1: they anticipated the caribou would migrate back through their area.
1:37:01
Speaker 1: In January, the men began to boil bones from their
1:37:05
Speaker 1: previous kills to get, quote, a nice cup full of grease.
1:37:10
Speaker 1: In February, Hornby brought back to the cabin some frozen
1:37:15
Speaker 1: blood he'd found, which they mixed into a paste with
1:37:19
Speaker 1: their remaining flour. March's entries become increasingly desperate. The three
1:37:25
Speaker 1: men manage to get a wolverine in their traps from
1:37:28
Speaker 1: time to time and the occasional snowshoe hare, but their
1:37:32
Speaker 1: mental and physical decline is unrelenting. they begin eating the
1:37:38
Speaker 1: hides from the furs they'd cached and digging down into
1:37:42
Speaker 1: the snow to retrieve fish scraps and bones from the
1:37:46
Speaker 1: bait piles they put up in the fall. By April,
1:37:50
Speaker 1: the men are, quote, bound up by the accumulated bone
1:37:55
Speaker 1: fragments and animal hair in their digestive tracts. Simply lying
1:38:00
Speaker 1: in bed causes them to cramp up and they grow
1:38:03
Speaker 1: weaker and weaker. Hornby's condition deteriorates until he finally passes
1:38:09
Speaker 1: away in his sleep. Adlard and Christian rig up a
1:38:13
Speaker 1: makeshift enema in hopes of clearing their rectums of plugged
1:38:18
Speaker 1: animal hair so that they'll be able to hunt when
1:38:21
Speaker 1: the weather improves and the caribou return. On the 21st,
1:38:27
Speaker 1: Christian is heartened when he manages to clear a big
1:38:30
Speaker 1: blockage of wolverine hair and his appetite returns. He notes that, quote,
1:38:37
Speaker 1: the procedure, meaning the enema, takes every atom of energy
1:38:42
Speaker 1: and willpower to carry out. He and Adelard continue to
1:38:47
Speaker 1: dig through the snow for whatever frozen blood and rancid
1:38:51
Speaker 1: fish guts they can find. Sometime between April 28th and
1:38:57
Speaker 1: May 4th, Adelard passed away. Christian, now alone, wrote simply, quote,
1:39:05
Speaker 1: I cannot hunt as walking around in soft snow is
1:39:09
Speaker 1: beyond my powers now, not a sign of animal life around.
1:39:15
Speaker 1: Christian noted that his joints no longer moved smoothly, but
1:39:21
Speaker 1: instead were clicking and jerking in and out of position.
1:39:25
Speaker 1: He began suffering nosebleeds and sleeping more and more. The
1:39:30
Speaker 1: makeshift enema continued to clear lump of bone after lump
1:39:34
Speaker 1: of bone from his digestive system, but his fate was sealed.
1:39:39
Speaker 1: Sometime around Wednesday, June 1st, 1927, Edgar Christian crawled into
1:39:45
Speaker 1: his bunk and pulled a wool blanket over his head.
1:39:50
Speaker 1: There he died a few days shy of his 19th birthday.
1:39:55
Speaker 1: He had been alone, trapped with only his thoughts and
1:39:59
Speaker 1: his failing body for nearly a month. It's worth holding
1:40:04
Speaker 1: that story up against a very different kind of excess.
1:40:09
Speaker 1: The hide hunters and long hunters of an earlier era.
1:40:13
Speaker 1: working the buffalo herds farther south, were drowning in meat.
1:40:19
Speaker 1: Theirs is a story of waste, not want. Mountains of
1:40:23
Speaker 1: rotting flesh left behind on the American Great Plains. A
1:40:28
Speaker 1: mountain man might shoot a buffalo at night, eat a
1:40:31
Speaker 1: few pieces, and shoot another the next evening for supper.
1:40:36
Speaker 1: Five or ten pounds taken out of an animal that
1:40:40
Speaker 1: weighed a thousand pounds. Alaska and the sub-Arctic were the opposite.
1:40:47
Speaker 1: There are no stories here of dozens of moose shot
1:40:51
Speaker 1: just for their tongues. I want to tell you something
1:40:55
Speaker 1: about my own relationship with Alaska because I think it
1:40:58
Speaker 1: helps illuminate the underlying truth that explains this contrast. I've
1:41:05
Speaker 1: been going to Alaska for many years. I've hunted there,
1:41:09
Speaker 1: fished there, spent time in the interior and along the coast.
1:41:14
Speaker 1: The Alaska I know is a place of staggering biological richness.
1:41:20
Speaker 1: Salmon stacking up in river mouths by the thousands. Caribou
1:41:25
Speaker 1: moving across the tundra in herds that pass for days
1:41:28
Speaker 1: at a time, sometimes hundreds in a single group. Patches
1:41:33
Speaker 1: of berries so thick you can pick them by the gallon.
1:41:36
Speaker 1: This is the Alaska that gets written about and filmed
1:41:40
Speaker 1: and talked about. And it is real. However, like most
1:41:45
Speaker 1: people who visit Alaska, I time my trips carefully. It's
1:41:49
Speaker 1: all about timing. I go when the salmon are running
1:41:53
Speaker 1: or when the caribou are migrating or when the bears
1:41:57
Speaker 1: are feeding heavily on berries or fish from dawn till dusk.
1:42:02
Speaker 1: I go, in other words, during the windows of abundance.
1:42:06
Speaker 1: I show up for the feast. I leave before the famine.
1:42:11
Speaker 1: I go up to Alaska hoping that I might see
1:42:14
Speaker 1: 300 caribou pass through my campsite in one day. A
1:42:18
Speaker 1: concentration of wildlife so intense you can hear their collective
1:42:22
Speaker 1: breathing and feel their hooves beat across the tundra. Here's
1:42:27
Speaker 1: the thing. I know that you could sit at that
1:42:30
Speaker 1: same campsite for 200 days in a row and watch
1:42:34
Speaker 1: nothing pass by. But I had a bush plane drop
1:42:37
Speaker 1: me off ahead of the action. And I know I
1:42:40
Speaker 1: have it waiting to pick me up when I'm ready
1:42:43
Speaker 1: after seven days or 10 days or whenever the action
1:42:46
Speaker 1: dies down. And because of that, my experience of Alaska
1:42:51
Speaker 1: is fundamentally different from the experience of the men we're
1:42:55
Speaker 1: talking about in this volume. The trappers who lived in
1:43:00
Speaker 1: interior Alaska year-round, who couldn't leave when the windows of
1:43:04
Speaker 1: abundance closed, knew a different version of the same landscape.
1:43:10
Speaker 1: They knew what it looked like in February, months after
1:43:14
Speaker 1: the last caribou had moved through and months before the
1:43:18
Speaker 1: first salmon would push upriver. They knew what it felt
1:43:22
Speaker 1: like when the grub stake was running short and there
1:43:24
Speaker 1: weren't any fresh moose tracks and the dogs were looking
1:43:28
Speaker 1: at you with hungry eyes. What they lived in was
1:43:32
Speaker 1: not a wilderness pantry. It was a feast and famine
1:43:37
Speaker 1: system with long stretches of famine between the feasts. And
1:43:42
Speaker 1: the men who survived it long term were the ones
1:43:44
Speaker 1: who understood that distinction completely. they adopted the seasonal rhythm
1:43:51
Speaker 1: of preparation and preservation. Arctic and subarctic Alaska stand in
1:43:58
Speaker 1: stark contrast to ecosystems near the equator. In places where
1:44:04
Speaker 1: seasonal changes are minimal or effectively non-existent, animals become arrhythmic.
1:44:12
Speaker 1: Rutting seasons are very long or occur all year. Fawns
1:44:16
Speaker 1: can drop during any month of the year. Axis deer,
1:44:19
Speaker 1: for instance, which are native to India but found now
1:44:22
Speaker 1: in Hawaii, don't have a strict or synchronized rut and
1:44:26
Speaker 1: fawning season like whitetail and mule deer do. Likewise, some
1:44:31
Speaker 1: equatorial trees, such as certain fig trees, will bear fruit
1:44:35
Speaker 1: without any noticeable seasonality. At any given time, you've got
1:44:40
Speaker 1: a good chance of finding a harvestable crop. In the
1:44:45
Speaker 1: far north, however, biological rhythms are extremely tightly regulated and
1:44:51
Speaker 1: occur within very narrow temporal windows. Wild berries like blueberries
1:44:57
Speaker 1: and salmon berries ripen all at once and not for long.
1:45:02
Speaker 1: Salmon show up and then go away. Candlefish spawning runs
1:45:07
Speaker 1: are matters of days, not weeks. Geese eggs are laid
1:45:12
Speaker 1: at virtually the same time across the whole nesting ground.
1:45:17
Speaker 1: Nothing trickles in gradually or subtly ebbs and flows. It
1:45:22
Speaker 1: arrives in a rush and then it's gone, and the
1:45:25
Speaker 1: landscape sits empty and waiting until the next rush a
1:45:29
Speaker 1: year later. For that reason, the sourdough trappers had to
1:45:34
Speaker 1: become equally disciplined and seasonal in their food acquisition and storage.
1:45:41
Speaker 1: Long before white trappers figured it out, usually the hard way,
1:45:46
Speaker 1: the Athabascan people had already solved the central problem of
1:45:50
Speaker 1: the interior, how to turn a few weeks of abundance
1:45:54
Speaker 1: into a winter's worth of survivals. The Athabaskan seasonal round was,
1:46:01
Speaker 1: at its core, a system for converting the brief windows
1:46:05
Speaker 1: of abundance into stored calories that could sustain a family
1:46:10
Speaker 1: group through the long windows of scarcity. The big event
1:46:15
Speaker 1: of the year arrived in the summer, when the salmon came.
1:46:20
Speaker 1: Salmon are anadromous fish, meaning they live their lives in
1:46:23
Speaker 1: the saltwater of the ocean and run up into freshwater
1:46:27
Speaker 1: river systems to lay their eggs. When those eggs hatch,
1:46:31
Speaker 1: the juvenile fish head downstream and now into the ocean
1:46:36
Speaker 1: where they remain until, as adults, their own biological clock
1:46:41
Speaker 1: tells them to head back to their spawning grounds and
1:46:45
Speaker 1: repeat the cycle. In the case of the five species
1:46:49
Speaker 1: of Pacific salmon, which are all native to Alaska, each
1:46:53
Speaker 1: generation of adults dies after completing their reproductive act. Each
1:47:00
Speaker 1: of those five species of Pacific salmon have at least
1:47:04
Speaker 1: two different common names. You've got king salmon, also known
1:47:09
Speaker 1: as Chinooks, silver salmon, also known as Coho, sockeye salmon,
1:47:15
Speaker 1: also known as reds, pink salmon, also known as humpies,
1:47:21
Speaker 1: and chum salmon, also known as dogs. Each of these
1:47:25
Speaker 1: species has its own migratory calendar, meaning that they begin
1:47:30
Speaker 1: their upstream journey at different times and move up the
1:47:33
Speaker 1: river system at different speeds toward their different spawning grounds.
1:47:40
Speaker 1: Each major run of fish packed the rivers with an
1:47:43
Speaker 1: unimaginable abundance of protein. In turn, entire communities mobilized to
1:47:49
Speaker 1: catch and process fish in quantities that went far beyond
1:47:54
Speaker 1: any immediate day-to-day need. Salmon were eaten fresh for sure,
1:48:00
Speaker 1: but were mainly preserved, dried, or fermented, or cured in
1:48:05
Speaker 1: a bath of alderwood smoke. The work during salmon season
1:48:09
Speaker 1: was relentless and deliberate, but every fish caught and stored
1:48:13
Speaker 1: away was a buffer against the shortage that February would
1:48:18
Speaker 1: inevitably bring. In the fall, before freeze-up, came the berry harvest. Crowberries, blueberries, cranberries,
1:48:27
Speaker 1: salmon berries, picked and stored away, sometimes mixed with fish
1:48:31
Speaker 1: oil or rendered fat to help preserve them through the winter.
1:48:36
Speaker 1: Then came the caribou hunt, timed to the migration and
1:48:39
Speaker 1: sometimes involving communal hunting techniques. Fences of brush and stakes
1:48:45
Speaker 1: built to channel animals toward wading hunters. That could produce
1:48:49
Speaker 1: a large number of animals in a short window of time.
1:48:53
Speaker 1: Then freeze up in the long winter when travel was
1:48:57
Speaker 1: possible but food was scarce and communities dispersed into smaller
1:49:03
Speaker 1: family groups spread across their territories. Winter was a time
1:49:08
Speaker 1: for conserving resources and disciplined calorie consumption. In short, winter
1:49:14
Speaker 1: meant conservation. The arrival of the fur trade in the
1:49:19
Speaker 1: 1800s led to an upending of this age-old system. Furs
1:49:24
Speaker 1: are only valuable as a commodity during the winter months,
1:49:28
Speaker 1: which meant that trapping demanded peak physical activity and thus
1:49:33
Speaker 1: calorie consumption at exactly the time of year when the
1:49:37
Speaker 1: old pattern called for rest. This was truly a genuine
1:49:42
Speaker 1: departure from how people had lived in this country for generations.
1:49:47
Speaker 1: So while the sourdoughs would adopt and emulate many of
1:49:51
Speaker 1: the food acquisition strategies, and storage techniques of their Athabascan neighbors,
1:49:57
Speaker 1: they would use the resources with an entirely different set
1:50:02
Speaker 1: of goals in mind. Nonetheless, they were bound by those
1:50:06
Speaker 1: same biological cycles and narrow windows of animal activity. For
1:50:12
Speaker 1: months at a time, they and their dogs had to
1:50:16
Speaker 1: rely on stored foods, and so they stored away as
1:50:20
Speaker 1: much as humanly possible. They fished when the fish were available.
1:50:25
Speaker 1: They hunted when the game was. They picked berries when
1:50:28
Speaker 1: they were ripe. They took credit at the roadhouse to
1:50:32
Speaker 1: buy a grub steak when the rivers were open for
1:50:35
Speaker 1: boat traffic. Every calorie they managed to get into a
1:50:39
Speaker 1: cache or a cabin before freeze-up was a calorie they
1:50:44
Speaker 1: wouldn't have to worry about later. Then, come winter, They
1:50:48
Speaker 1: ran their trap lines and supplemented from the land as
1:50:51
Speaker 1: best as they could, but the whole time they were
1:50:55
Speaker 1: gradually depleting their stores with little hope of rebuilding them
1:51:00
Speaker 1: until the following summer. Even with a careful system of
1:51:05
Speaker 1: food preservation and management, and even with a supplement of
1:51:10
Speaker 1: some store-bought goods, acquiring a full winter's worth of food
1:51:15
Speaker 1: and dog food would from the Alaskan wilderness was not
1:51:19
Speaker 1: an easy task. Let's start with an obvious assumption. You're
1:51:24
Speaker 1: in Alaska. Anyone who's seen a postcard rack in a
1:51:28
Speaker 1: Fairbanks tourist shop knows that the place is packed full
1:51:32
Speaker 1: of moose, right? They're tangling their antlers and laundry lines.
1:51:36
Speaker 1: They're harassing students on college campuses in Fairbanks and Anchorage.
1:51:41
Speaker 1: They can't keep them off the airport runways. So why
1:51:44
Speaker 1: not just go shoot a moose when you're hungry? It's
1:51:48
Speaker 1: a reasonable question, and the answer is more complicated than
1:51:53
Speaker 1: it sounds. First, moose are not and never were uniformly
1:51:58
Speaker 1: distributed across the interior. The popular image of Alaska as
1:52:03
Speaker 1: a place crawling with moose is, again, a product of
1:52:07
Speaker 1: our modern-day ability to visit the exact right places at
1:52:12
Speaker 1: the exact right times and to coincide with peak moose abundance.
1:52:17
Speaker 1: And the moose aren't just distributed sporadically in a spatial sense,
1:52:22
Speaker 1: meaning from one valley to the next. They're distributed sporadically
1:52:27
Speaker 1: in a temporal sense. Places where moose are abundant and
1:52:31
Speaker 1: thriving today, such as the remote upper drainages of the
1:52:35
Speaker 1: upper Koyukuk River, are periodically devoid of moose. There are
1:52:41
Speaker 1: accounts from old sourdoughs, including Sydney Huntington, where seeing a
1:52:46
Speaker 1: moose track around the Koyukuk was, quote, an event to celebrate.
1:52:53
Speaker 1: People got excited about it and gossiped about it. Nowadays,
1:52:58
Speaker 1: you could go to those same areas and have a
1:53:00
Speaker 1: hard time finding a gravel bar that doesn't have a
1:53:04
Speaker 1: moose track on it. The reason has to do with habitat.
1:53:08
Speaker 1: Moose are browsers. They need the willow, birch, and alder
1:53:13
Speaker 1: that grows up in river bottoms, burns, and other disturbed ground. Deep,
1:53:18
Speaker 1: old-growth spruce forests simply does not support them in large numbers.
1:53:23
Speaker 1: A man running a line through mature timber country might
1:53:26
Speaker 1: go weeks without seeing a moose, not because Alaska doesn't
1:53:30
Speaker 1: have moose, but because the specific piece of Alaska he
1:53:34
Speaker 1: was working had the wrong habitat for them at that
1:53:38
Speaker 1: particular time of year. To add to that challenge, big
1:53:42
Speaker 1: game animals like caribou and moose roam over much greater
1:53:47
Speaker 1: distances than fur bearers like martin. So if big game
1:53:52
Speaker 1: hunting is your priority, you have a much more sprawling
1:53:55
Speaker 1: area of the map to choose from. For the sourdoughs, though,
1:53:59
Speaker 1: the priority was fur bears. You wanted to be where
1:54:03
Speaker 1: the marten were, regardless of whether there was better big
1:54:07
Speaker 1: game hunting on the other side of the mountain. On
1:54:10
Speaker 1: top of the uneven distribution of moose, there was the
1:54:14
Speaker 1: simple fact that moose were not as abundant in the
1:54:17
Speaker 1: first few decades of the 20th century as as they
1:54:20
Speaker 1: are today. Their populations are highly affected by predation. The
1:54:26
Speaker 1: combined effect of wolves, grizzly bears, and black bears can
1:54:31
Speaker 1: result in what's called a low-density dynamic equilibrium for an
1:54:36
Speaker 1: extended period, meaning that the number of moose on the
1:54:41
Speaker 1: landscape is far below whatever the nutritionally determined carrying capacity
1:54:47
Speaker 1: of that landscape might be. government programs to reduce wolf
1:54:52
Speaker 1: and bear populations in Alaska in the 1940s and 1950s
1:54:57
Speaker 1: produced the abundance of moose that comes to mind when
1:55:02
Speaker 1: you hear stories about the golden age of big game
1:55:05
Speaker 1: hunting in Alaska. One landmark study showed that substantial reductions
1:55:11
Speaker 1: in predator populations could result in a quadrupling of moose densities.
1:55:18
Speaker 1: Frank Glazer, after his days trapping full-time, got heavily into
1:55:22
Speaker 1: the work of predator control during the middle of the
1:55:26
Speaker 1: 20th century. In fact, he is better known for this
1:55:30
Speaker 1: part of his career than any other, which goes to
1:55:33
Speaker 1: show you how prominent, intensive, and impactful that work was. So,
1:55:40
Speaker 1: in short, areas along the Yukon that today are considered
1:55:43
Speaker 1: world-class moose hunting locations were, at the time of the sourdoughs,
1:55:48
Speaker 1: the kinds of places where you'd race home to tell
1:55:51
Speaker 1: your trapping partner if you found a single moose track.
1:55:56
Speaker 1: I'll mention, too, that this historical comparison of resource availability
1:56:01
Speaker 1: works both ways. Back then, salmon were found in far
1:56:07
Speaker 1: greater numbers all along the Yukon, salmon of every variety,
1:56:12
Speaker 1: that is, than they are today. Even when you did
1:56:16
Speaker 1: find a moose, the timing and logistics of getting one
1:56:20
Speaker 1: from the landscape into the cache were never trivial. A
1:56:24
Speaker 1: moose is a thousand-pound animal. Ideally, you would hope to
1:56:29
Speaker 1: kill it on a riverbank where it could easily be
1:56:31
Speaker 1: loaded into a boat. If you killed one five miles
1:56:35
Speaker 1: from your cabin in October before the snow was ripe
1:56:39
Speaker 1: for sledding, getting that meat home was a seriously challenging task.
1:56:44
Speaker 1: Sidney Huntington mentioned that when moose were scarce and he
1:56:48
Speaker 1: couldn't manage to kill one next to the river, he
1:56:51
Speaker 1: wouldn't even attempt to pack the meat back to his
1:56:54
Speaker 1: cache until the snow fell. Instead, he would wrap the
1:56:58
Speaker 1: meat in canvas to protect it from scavenging birds, hang
1:57:02
Speaker 1: it all in a tree, and then return to the
1:57:05
Speaker 1: kill site once he could drive his dog sled right
1:57:08
Speaker 1: up to that tree. The effort of retrieval wasn't really
1:57:13
Speaker 1: about raw distance. It was about terrain and season, and
1:57:17
Speaker 1: the sheer mechanical difficulty of moving heavy dead weight through
1:57:22
Speaker 1: a landscape that was, more often than not, actively working
1:57:27
Speaker 1: against you. Given all of that, moose hunting rewarded patience
1:57:32
Speaker 1: rather than raw effort. Much of the fall hunting, when
1:57:36
Speaker 1: trappers would put away serious amounts of protein for the
1:57:39
Speaker 1: winter ahead, was undertaken opportunistically. Before freeze-up, they were always
1:57:45
Speaker 1: on the lookout for a moose or caribou that wandered
1:57:49
Speaker 1: out onto an exposed riverbank or gravel bar. James Carroll
1:57:53
Speaker 1: practiced a float hunting technique, where he would pull up
1:57:57
Speaker 1: river aways and then float back to his cabin. He said, quote,
1:58:01
Speaker 1: floating down a stream, one has a chance to spot
1:58:05
Speaker 1: game easily. Going upstream is all work, or you don't
1:58:10
Speaker 1: go forward. He'd stop to hunt small islands where he
1:58:14
Speaker 1: knew moose like to feed and he carefully approached stretches
1:58:18
Speaker 1: where he knew bears like to fish. When the river
1:58:21
Speaker 1: level dropped in the late fall, drying out some side
1:58:25
Speaker 1: sloughs and back channels, the Bergland sisters used their dogs
1:58:29
Speaker 1: to drive moose out of thick willows and brush into
1:58:32
Speaker 1: those openings, where they could get a shot at them.
1:58:36
Speaker 1: Carroll also used to call for bull moose in the
1:58:39
Speaker 1: rut with a scapula or shoulder blade from another moose
1:58:43
Speaker 1: he'd killed previously. Scraping and rattling the scapula against the
1:58:48
Speaker 1: willows mimics the sound of a bull raking his antlers,
1:58:53
Speaker 1: encouraging any bull within miles to come check out his
1:58:56
Speaker 1: competition for mates. They'll come in all pissed off, issuing
1:59:01
Speaker 1: a guttural grunt every few steps that sounds pretty much
1:59:04
Speaker 1: like this. Grunt. Grunt. Grunt. A shrewd hunter will make
1:59:12
Speaker 1: that sound right back at him. If a sourdough heard
1:59:15
Speaker 1: a bull grunting close by at night, he might release
1:59:18
Speaker 1: his dogs to give chase, hoping that they'd bait up
1:59:21
Speaker 1: and hold the animal nearby until shooting light. In areas
1:59:26
Speaker 1: where moose were scarce, any sign of their presence was
1:59:29
Speaker 1: an opportunity too good to pass up. Sidney Huntington wrote that, quote,
1:59:35
Speaker 1: whenever a moose showed up in the Koyukuk, someone would
1:59:39
Speaker 1: find its trail and stay with it until he killed
1:59:42
Speaker 1: the animal. He described his family cutting a single cow
1:59:46
Speaker 1: moose track in 10 degree weather. His great uncle and
1:59:51
Speaker 1: aunt tracked that animal for a couple of days. Soon after,
1:59:55
Speaker 1: when Huntington visited the kill site, there was nothing left.
1:59:59
Speaker 1: Every scrap of hide, hair, and meat had been packed
2:00:03
Speaker 1: off and cached. But one big game animal, even one
2:00:08
Speaker 1: as big as a moose, wasn't enough to keep a
2:00:11
Speaker 1: trapping operation in meat over the long winter. You needed
2:00:15
Speaker 1: to deal in numbers. The writer Seth Kantner, who was
2:00:20
Speaker 1: raised in a dugout in the 1970s near the Kotzebue
2:00:24
Speaker 1: River in western Alaska, living a lifestyle very closely resembling
2:00:30
Speaker 1: that of 50 years prior, recalled how his family would
2:00:34
Speaker 1: go through 15 or more caribou in a single winter
2:00:39
Speaker 1: in order to feed themselves and their dogs. With caribou,
2:00:44
Speaker 1: you weren't looking for a single track like you were
2:00:47
Speaker 1: with moose. You were looking for a huge mass of
2:00:50
Speaker 1: animals moving across the landscape. When they were in a
2:00:54
Speaker 1: trapper's vicinity, he knew it and he made the most
2:00:57
Speaker 1: of it. James Carroll described caribou herds so massive it
2:01:02
Speaker 1: looked like the mountains were moving and steamboats having to
2:01:06
Speaker 1: tie up on shore because their captains were too afraid
2:01:10
Speaker 1: of damaging their stern wheels because the river channel was
2:01:14
Speaker 1: choked with migrating animals. Evelyn Berglund described, quote, the timber
2:01:20
Speaker 1: moving with caribou, and, quote, flats that looked like thickets
2:01:25
Speaker 1: because of the horns. When hunting caribou, you want to
2:01:30
Speaker 1: get in front of a group of animals as they
2:01:32
Speaker 1: move across the landscape. This can be a little bit
2:01:35
Speaker 1: of a game of cat and mouse, as the herds
2:01:38
Speaker 1: will drift one way and swing back another. Once they
2:01:42
Speaker 1: were within shooting range of some sourdough hunters, it was
2:01:46
Speaker 1: typically an all-out volley of fire to see how many
2:01:50
Speaker 1: they could get down before the herd got away. With
2:01:54
Speaker 1: big game animals like moose and caribou, you weren't going
2:01:57
Speaker 1: to drag them out whole, and you weren't going to
2:02:00
Speaker 1: get far dragging quarters either. My buddies and I regularly
2:02:04
Speaker 1: weigh the back legs off bull moose, and they average
2:02:08
Speaker 1: around 110 pounds. to 130 pounds for one leg. Now
2:02:13
Speaker 1: imagine toting that for 10 miles across Muskeg and Tussock
2:02:17
Speaker 1: and then having eight more trips to get the rest
2:02:20
Speaker 1: of the usable parts. You really needed to get your
2:02:24
Speaker 1: meat to a boat or a sled as quickly and
2:02:27
Speaker 1: efficiently as you could, especially when you consider that grizzly
2:02:31
Speaker 1: bears wanted that meat even more than you did and
2:02:34
Speaker 1: would fight or kill you for it when they found it.
2:02:38
Speaker 1: And getting meat to a sled or boat, the sourdoughs
2:02:42
Speaker 1: packed quarters with the hide on, making cuts through the
2:02:45
Speaker 1: skin to pass a rope through for carrying straps. There
2:02:49
Speaker 1: are also photos from this time of Elsie and Hazel
2:02:52
Speaker 1: Berglund packing a bear out on a pole over their shoulders.
2:02:57
Speaker 1: You have to imagine that they might have done the
2:03:00
Speaker 1: same to move a pair of moose or caribou quarters.
2:03:04
Speaker 1: After you got your meat to the river, as with
2:03:07
Speaker 1: all things in interior Alaska, the job was a lot easier.
2:03:11
Speaker 1: You could simply put it in your boat and move
2:03:14
Speaker 1: it to your cabin the same way you'd done with
2:03:16
Speaker 1: all of your other worldly possessions just a few weeks earlier.
2:03:21
Speaker 1: In order to prevent the meat from getting too wet
2:03:24
Speaker 1: along the journey, sourdoughs would stack their quarters on top
2:03:28
Speaker 1: of bundles of willows placed in the bottom of the boat,
2:03:31
Speaker 1: another trick we still use today. Temperatures were cold enough
2:03:37
Speaker 1: by late September or early October that meat stored in
2:03:40
Speaker 1: a cache would freeze overnight. Trappers would put away their
2:03:45
Speaker 1: animals in large chunks like that, not all cut up
2:03:48
Speaker 1: into steaks and roasts, and then they'd bring a chunk
2:03:52
Speaker 1: at a time into the cabin to thaw out as
2:03:55
Speaker 1: they needed it. Evelyn Berglund joked that her family, quote,
2:03:59
Speaker 1: discovered the deep freeze a long time before it became
2:04:03
Speaker 1: popular in the States. And we didn't have to depend
2:04:07
Speaker 1: on General Electric for it either. She described bringing a
2:04:11
Speaker 1: big hunk of moose and caribou inside, letting it thaw
2:04:15
Speaker 1: out enough to cut stakes, and then laying those stakes
2:04:19
Speaker 1: out on some canvas and putting them outdoors to let
2:04:22
Speaker 1: them refreeze for more immediate use. Of course, a trapper
2:04:27
Speaker 1: couldn't depend on moose and caribou alone. That was especially
2:04:32
Speaker 1: true because, in addition to feeding themselves, they also had
2:04:36
Speaker 1: to keep their dogs fed all winter, and they needed
2:04:39
Speaker 1: a robust supply of bait for their traps. For that,
2:04:43
Speaker 1: they turned to small game and fish, which they themselves
2:04:47
Speaker 1: did enjoy on occasion, but these foods played a more
2:04:51
Speaker 1: significant role in terms of these secondary uses. Rabbits were
2:04:56
Speaker 1: one source of food that was never overlooked by the trappers,
2:05:00
Speaker 1: And when they wrote rabbits in their journals, they meant
2:05:04
Speaker 1: snowshoe hares. They could be easily trapped with wire snares
2:05:08
Speaker 1: attached to willows or other vegetation. Marshall noted that when
2:05:12
Speaker 1: snowshoe hare populations were high, it was common to snare
2:05:16
Speaker 1: 50 in a single day and thousands in a season.
2:05:21
Speaker 1: He observed that a good harvest of hares made it
2:05:24
Speaker 1: possible to feed one's dogs almost entirely on them alone.
2:05:29
Speaker 1: Snowshoe hares also made an ideal bait for just about
2:05:33
Speaker 1: any type of carnivore in the North Country. Something we'll
2:05:37
Speaker 1: touch on more in the next chapter. As you might guess,
2:05:41
Speaker 1: fishing provided another important source of protein for human and
2:05:46
Speaker 1: dog diets alike. It was a constant chore, though it
2:05:49
Speaker 1: took on different forms depending on the target species and technique.
2:05:55
Speaker 1: Salmon fishing was typically done with gill nets, but there
2:05:58
Speaker 1: were other techniques that proved effective. James Carroll preferred to
2:06:03
Speaker 1: use a gaff hook to catch chum salmon as they
2:06:06
Speaker 1: sat on their spawning beds. After laying her eggs, a
2:06:10
Speaker 1: female salmon will hover over her nest and defend it
2:06:13
Speaker 1: with reckless abandon, making for easy pickings by anyone trying
2:06:18
Speaker 1: to snag as much protein as they can. Carroll's gaff
2:06:22
Speaker 1: hook was obviously effective. He figured about 500 fish was
2:06:28
Speaker 1: a decent amount for four dogs, and in 1915, he
2:06:32
Speaker 1: stocked up on 800 chums for his six dogs. Sidney
2:06:37
Speaker 1: Huntington similarly hoped to catch around 100 salmon for each
2:06:42
Speaker 1: of his dogs. Most trappers split and dried their salmon
2:06:47
Speaker 1: the way they observed native Athabascans doing in places like
2:06:51
Speaker 1: Fort Yukon. This technique involved running your knife down the
2:06:55
Speaker 1: backbone from just in front of the tail towards the head,
2:06:58
Speaker 1: and then splitting the head in two. The result is
2:07:02
Speaker 1: two halves of a salmon held together at one end
2:07:05
Speaker 1: by the tail. Next, you score the fillets with your
2:07:08
Speaker 1: knife so that you essentially have a row of strips
2:07:12
Speaker 1: on each side attached to the skin. The fish can
2:07:15
Speaker 1: then be hung on a drying rack by its tail,
2:07:18
Speaker 1: each side balancing the others. Whitefish and suckers were commonly netted.
2:07:24
Speaker 1: Carroll described setting out a six-foot gill net on floats,
2:07:28
Speaker 1: and as he said, quote, in no time at all,
2:07:31
Speaker 1: the floats would be bobbing up and down. The suckers
2:07:35
Speaker 1: were too bony for Carroll and his partner to eat,
2:07:38
Speaker 1: so they fed those to the dogs. Northern pike were
2:07:43
Speaker 1: netted as well, or caught with primitive spinners and spoons.
2:07:47
Speaker 1: Evelyn Berglund recalled that she and her sisters would take
2:07:50
Speaker 1: a small poling boat and head upriver, pike fishing their
2:07:54
Speaker 1: way back down towards the cabin. One of the girls
2:07:57
Speaker 1: ran a net from the boat as it drifted in
2:08:00
Speaker 1: the current, while the rest of them worked the riverbanks
2:08:03
Speaker 1: with fishing poles, targeting weedy patches and swampy sloughs that
2:08:07
Speaker 1: connected to the main river. She said, quote, Some days
2:08:11
Speaker 1: we caught 60 or 70 pike with hook and line,
2:08:15
Speaker 1: and a third that many more with the net. At
2:08:18
Speaker 1: that time, they needed 20 or so pike to feed
2:08:22
Speaker 1: their dog teams each day, so a good afternoon fishing
2:08:26
Speaker 1: like that would only cover them for a few days.
2:08:30
Speaker 1: Grayling could be caught on dry flies in prodigious numbers.
2:08:35
Speaker 1: Evelyn Berglund remembered a spot half a mile from their
2:08:38
Speaker 1: cabin where she and her sisters could catch as many
2:08:41
Speaker 1: grayling as they could carry in just a couple hours.
2:08:45
Speaker 1: Later in the season, instead of smoking fish, they would
2:08:49
Speaker 1: simply let them freeze overnight for preservation. Up the Koyukuk,
2:08:54
Speaker 1: grayling were so thick that Robert Marshall witnessed the sourdough
2:08:58
Speaker 1: just killing them with a shovel. That same guy later
2:09:02
Speaker 1: caught 24 grayling in 25 minutes using a fly and
2:09:07
Speaker 1: a willow stick as a pole. Frank Glazer simply left
2:09:11
Speaker 1: a couple fly rods near the creek by his cabin.
2:09:14
Speaker 1: Anytime he needed a fish, he just had to wander
2:09:17
Speaker 1: down and pick up as many grayling as he wanted.
2:09:21
Speaker 1: August fishing expeditions often doubled as scouting trips for berry
2:09:26
Speaker 1: picking before the first hard frost of the year. Alaska
2:09:30
Speaker 1: is known as a popular hunting and fishing destination, obviously,
2:09:35
Speaker 1: but it also has some trophy berry picking all over
2:09:38
Speaker 1: the state, and the interior is no exception. Lowbush cranberries, blueberries, bearberries, crowberries,
2:09:46
Speaker 1: and currants were all favorites. Put away for winter, They
2:09:50
Speaker 1: added variety and flavor to a diet of fish and moose.
2:09:54
Speaker 1: The Berglunds would cook them down and can them in
2:09:57
Speaker 1: quart-sized mason jars, more than 100 gallons every year. James
2:10:03
Speaker 1: Carroll preferred to make as much cranberry jam as he
2:10:06
Speaker 1: could with whatever sugar he had in his grub steak.
2:10:11
Speaker 1: In addition to salmon and berries, there were other seasonal
2:10:15
Speaker 1: opportunities to add variety to one's diet throughout the year.
2:10:19
Speaker 1: In the spring, When trappers were targeting muskrat, waves of
2:10:23
Speaker 1: waterfowl heading north for the summer arrived on the Yukon,
2:10:27
Speaker 1: one of the world's largest breeding grounds for migratory birds.
2:10:32
Speaker 1: Duck eggs were consumed by dozens. Geese and swans were
2:10:36
Speaker 1: easy targets for the sourdough shotguns. and accounts suggest that
2:10:41
Speaker 1: these birds weren't wary at all of human presence. Carol's
2:10:45
Speaker 1: wife Fanny boiled geese whole and saved the water for
2:10:49
Speaker 1: a makeshift soup. The trapper Joe Ward's duck preparation technique
2:10:54
Speaker 1: was rather straightforward. Throw them in a metal drum with
2:10:58
Speaker 1: some water in it, put it over the fire, and, quote,
2:11:03
Speaker 1: let them go all night. Similar cooking styles were employed
2:11:07
Speaker 1: for smaller furred game as well. A trapper named Curtis
2:11:11
Speaker 1: had a system in which he stuck 10 muskrats in
2:11:14
Speaker 1: a five-gallon oil can, heads down at the bottom with
2:11:19
Speaker 1: their tails hanging over the side. He'd fill the can
2:11:22
Speaker 1: with water and put it on the stove where he
2:11:25
Speaker 1: let it boil for an hour. At that point, he
2:11:29
Speaker 1: flipped the muskrats so they were boiling heads up and
2:11:32
Speaker 1: tails down. After another half hour of boiling, He added
2:11:36
Speaker 1: some flour to the can in order to make a
2:11:39
Speaker 1: thick white gravy. Those 10 muskrats were his food for
2:11:44
Speaker 1: three days. At breakfast, lunch, and dinner, Curtis forked a
2:11:48
Speaker 1: whole muskrat out of the can, dressed it with his
2:11:51
Speaker 1: special gravy, and savored every bite. Behind Curtis' stove was
2:11:56
Speaker 1: a pile of muskrat bones described by an observer as
2:12:00
Speaker 1: being as big as a large muskrat house. The old
2:12:04
Speaker 1: trapper loved it so much, he took sacks of dried
2:12:07
Speaker 1: muskrat downriver with him to eat all summer while he
2:12:11
Speaker 1: was in town. Even though James Carroll described Curtis' muskrat
2:12:16
Speaker 1: oil can delicacy with some degree of skepticism or mild disgust,
2:12:22
Speaker 1: He was not averse to muskrat, noting that eight muskrat
2:12:26
Speaker 1: tails with a piece of bannock is a solid meal
2:12:30
Speaker 1: for a hungry trapper. And other trappers ate muskrats as well.
2:12:35
Speaker 1: The anthropologist Robert McKinnon described a similar cooking method used
2:12:40
Speaker 1: by a group of trappers on the Tanana. Claws and
2:12:44
Speaker 1: heads still on, and still with rings of fur around
2:12:47
Speaker 1: their feet, the muskrats were laid in a pan of
2:12:50
Speaker 1: grease and thrown in an oven. McKinnon described the scene
2:12:55
Speaker 1: with some horror. Quote, out they came, nice and brown
2:12:59
Speaker 1: to be sure, but looking frightfully alive to me. The
2:13:03
Speaker 1: huge incisor teeth gave a diabolical grin to the head. Indeed,
2:13:08
Speaker 1: the whole picture was much the same as though a
2:13:12
Speaker 1: fire had swept through a cavalry. He noted that the
2:13:16
Speaker 1: rats were so greasy, a shared rag to wipe one's
2:13:21
Speaker 1: fingers was constantly being passed around the crew. Some trappers
2:13:26
Speaker 1: were no doubt pickier eaters than others, and that dividing
2:13:30
Speaker 1: line was often determined by the type of animal. Bear,
2:13:33
Speaker 1: for instance, split opinion sharply. Robert Marshall noted that only
2:13:39
Speaker 1: about half of the white people he met up the
2:13:42
Speaker 1: Koyukuk would eat bear meat willingly if nothing else was available.
2:13:47
Speaker 1: James Carroll, however, incorporated it into his diet regularly. He
2:13:52
Speaker 1: noted that he never brought any bacon or lard out
2:13:56
Speaker 1: on his trapline as he figured he would be able
2:13:59
Speaker 1: to kill a bear and make his own. He described
2:14:02
Speaker 1: the best-tasting bear as a year-old black bear that had
2:14:06
Speaker 1: been fattened on berries. Ideally, its stomach contents looked like
2:14:11
Speaker 1: cranberry jam when you cut it open. Link's provoked an
2:14:16
Speaker 1: even more visceral divide, one that definitely had less to
2:14:19
Speaker 1: do with taste than with psychology. At one point, a
2:14:24
Speaker 1: trapper named Fred served a group of fellow sourdoughs steaks
2:14:28
Speaker 1: made from Link's burger, so basically burgers, Link's burger patties,
2:14:32
Speaker 1: but was reluctant to tell his companions what they were eating.
2:14:36
Speaker 1: The men all agreed that it was delicious, but once
2:14:39
Speaker 1: they found out Fred had fed them links, they wouldn't
2:14:42
Speaker 1: touch the meat he served at breakfast the next morning.
2:14:46
Speaker 1: Carol didn't share their squeamishness, noting that fat links were
2:14:50
Speaker 1: good to eat as long as they were fresh. If
2:14:53
Speaker 1: left in a trap too long, they were no good.
2:14:56
Speaker 1: If you could stomach the idea of eating a cat,
2:14:59
Speaker 1: Carol observed, Lynx makes for a nice pot roast. This
2:15:04
Speaker 1: variation in what a man could stomach extended beyond me entirely.
2:15:09
Speaker 1: Some trappers just needed more variety and more civilized fare
2:15:14
Speaker 1: than others. Even though he ate bears and lynx without
2:15:17
Speaker 1: a second thought, Carol, like other trappers, kept a long
2:15:21
Speaker 1: list of grocery items they considered indispensable. But at one point, Curtis,
2:15:27
Speaker 1: the guy with a taste for muskrat, offered Carol what
2:15:30
Speaker 1: he called his extras or his store-bought grub steak and
2:15:34
Speaker 1: didn't want anything in return. Carol realized that his neighbor
2:15:38
Speaker 1: just plain didn't want the stuff. The contrast is telling.
2:15:43
Speaker 1: Where Carol and others needed certain store-bought items to feel provisioned,
2:15:48
Speaker 1: Curtis was content with rats and flour alone, and, as
2:15:52
Speaker 1: Carol observed, seemed to relish it. Whether a man needed
2:15:57
Speaker 1: variety or could get by on the bare minimum, the
2:16:00
Speaker 1: underlying problem was the same. All of it had to
2:16:03
Speaker 1: be stored somewhere before the season began. The results of
2:16:07
Speaker 1: all that fishing and hunting and food preservation ended up
2:16:11
Speaker 1: in a trapper's cache. Or more accurately, a trapper's caches, plural,
2:16:17
Speaker 1: because each of his line cabins would need to be
2:16:19
Speaker 1: stocked up with food so he wouldn't go hungry while
2:16:23
Speaker 1: running his lines that winter. This brings us back to
2:16:26
Speaker 1: the importance of food security. The cache was a physical
2:16:30
Speaker 1: manifestation of the need to always have something tucked away
2:16:35
Speaker 1: from when times got lean. The need for a cache
2:16:39
Speaker 1: was necessitated by the fact that the trappers themselves weren't
2:16:42
Speaker 1: the only hungry carnivores roaming the interior. Bears certainly could
2:16:47
Speaker 1: get into your food storage, as they still do today,
2:16:51
Speaker 1: but the one animal that loomed largest in trappers' minds
2:16:55
Speaker 1: was the wolverine. Any account from this period describes the
2:16:59
Speaker 1: wolverine and its propensity to ravage your precious food supplies,
2:17:03
Speaker 1: ruin hard-earned furs, and generally get into your stuff and
2:17:07
Speaker 1: raise hell in a way that makes it seem like
2:17:10
Speaker 1: a sworn enemy of the Yukon trapper. Wolverines were known
2:17:15
Speaker 1: to rip the stovepipe out of an unoccupied cabin in
2:17:18
Speaker 1: order to gain access and then destroy everything inside. The
2:17:23
Speaker 1: results were compared to the type of damage that could
2:17:26
Speaker 1: only otherwise be achieved by a group of soldiers, or
2:17:30
Speaker 1: as one account puts it, quote, all the fiends of hell.
2:17:35
Speaker 1: James Carroll called the wolverine a natural-born thief that wouldn't
2:17:40
Speaker 1: touch an easy meal left out in the open, as
2:17:43
Speaker 1: if Carroll figured the animal suspected a trick, but would
2:17:47
Speaker 1: work its ass off to get into a highly suspicious
2:17:50
Speaker 1: secured cache just for the satisfaction of stealing its contents.
2:17:55
Speaker 1: A wolverine once made off with Carol's own double-bitted axe,
2:18:00
Speaker 1: apparently mistaking the blood on the blade for something edible,
2:18:04
Speaker 1: and packed it 300 yards into the brush before dropping it.
2:18:10
Speaker 1: When Robert Marshall lost most of the moose he'd shot
2:18:13
Speaker 1: the previous fall to a wolverine, he blamed the inadequacy
2:18:18
Speaker 1: of the cache. There was an understanding that anyone stocking
2:18:22
Speaker 1: up for the winter without a secure cache was asking
2:18:26
Speaker 1: for trouble. I'll tell you a story that illustrates just
2:18:31
Speaker 1: how seriously trappers took their caches and how they could
2:18:35
Speaker 1: mean the literal difference between life and death. In early
2:18:39
Speaker 1: December of 1943, a U.S. military aircraft, a B-24 bomber,
2:18:45
Speaker 1: was flying with a crew of five over a tributary
2:18:48
Speaker 1: of the Yukon when one of its engines failed. At
2:18:52
Speaker 1: 25,000 feet, the plane entered a violent spiral before tipping
2:18:57
Speaker 1: into a nosedive from which it would not recover and
2:19:01
Speaker 1: burrowing into a mountainside. I've seen the wreckage from the
2:19:05
Speaker 1: air that is still there. Only one of the crew members,
2:19:09
Speaker 1: co-pilot Leon Crane, survived, having somehow jumped through the bomb
2:19:15
Speaker 1: bay doors with a parachute before the aircraft impacted the
2:19:20
Speaker 1: ground in a fiery explosion. Crane then found himself alone
2:19:26
Speaker 1: in waist-deep snow. He was only equipped with a pocket knife,
2:19:30
Speaker 1: two packs of matches, and his parachute. After nine days
2:19:35
Speaker 1: of waiting at the crash site, Hoping for a rescue party,
2:19:39
Speaker 1: he decided he needed to take matters into his own hands.
2:19:44
Speaker 1: After a day of following the nearby river, the Charlie River,
2:19:48
Speaker 1: he came across a trapper's cabin in an elevated cache.
2:19:52
Speaker 1: There he found food, a rifle, and moose hide mittens.
2:19:57
Speaker 1: He stayed at the cabin for a week, attempting to
2:20:00
Speaker 1: recover from the frostbite that had set in on his
2:20:03
Speaker 1: hands and feet. After some additional exploration in hopes of
2:20:08
Speaker 1: finding a village, he discovered other cabins and caches. Finally,
2:20:14
Speaker 1: after weeks of isolation in the frozen interior, Crane set
2:20:18
Speaker 1: out for good in early February. When his supplies nearly
2:20:22
Speaker 1: ran out, he stumbled upon yet another trapper's cabin and cache.
2:20:28
Speaker 1: On March 10, he cut the trail of a dog
2:20:31
Speaker 1: sled crossing the river and followed it into the timber.
2:20:35
Speaker 1: Shortly thereafter, he encountered a native trapper, Al Ames, who
2:20:41
Speaker 1: helped Crane make his way via dog sled to the
2:20:44
Speaker 1: mining camps on Woodchopper Creek where there was a roadhouse.
2:20:49
Speaker 1: More than 11 weeks after the crash and long given
2:20:52
Speaker 1: up for dead, Leon Crane was finally able to radio
2:20:57
Speaker 1: for help. Later, Crane in fact met the man whose
2:21:01
Speaker 1: cabin had initially saved his life. Phil B. Rail, an
2:21:06
Speaker 1: old trapper and miner who had come north as a
2:21:09
Speaker 1: young man in 1904, who spent his winters running a
2:21:13
Speaker 1: trap line up near the headwaters of the Charlie River.
2:21:18
Speaker 1: Leon Crane also happened to meet Evelyn Bergland. Yes, the
2:21:23
Speaker 1: same Evelyn Bergland who we've been talking about this whole time,
2:21:27
Speaker 1: who was waiting for the plane at Woodchopper. she actually
2:21:31
Speaker 1: flew with the stranded airman back to Fairbanks, where she
2:21:35
Speaker 1: gave birth at the end of March. Although it was
2:21:39
Speaker 1: a fortunate stroke of luck that led Leon Crane to
2:21:43
Speaker 1: that cache and cabin on the Charlie River, it would
2:21:46
Speaker 1: not have been unthinkable to an experienced trapper like Phil B.
2:21:51
Speaker 1: Rail that someone he'd never met might need to use it.
2:21:55
Speaker 1: there was an unspoken understanding among the sourdoughs that the
2:22:00
Speaker 1: sheer danger of their environment made it possible, even likely,
2:22:04
Speaker 1: that the best equipped, most wood-savvy trapper would someday find
2:22:09
Speaker 1: himself in a pickle that was out of his control.
2:22:12
Speaker 1: And it was difficult to judge someone for being in
2:22:15
Speaker 1: a situation that you knew yourself would eventually find yourself in.
2:22:20
Speaker 1: Anyone who spent time in interior Alaska was painfully aware
2:22:25
Speaker 1: that of how desperate things could get. As a result,
2:22:29
Speaker 1: there was a culture of hospitality and reciprocity among the sourdoughs.
2:22:35
Speaker 1: Frank Glazer noted that he never locked his trapping cabin
2:22:39
Speaker 1: at Savage River. Any trapper passing through could stop by,
2:22:44
Speaker 1: even if Frank wasn't home, and eat some of his
2:22:47
Speaker 1: food and get out of the weather. Nothing ever went missing,
2:22:51
Speaker 1: Glazer claimed, and typically his visitors would split some kindling
2:22:55
Speaker 1: and leave it by the wood stove, a gesture that
2:22:58
Speaker 1: acknowledged the mutual dependency of two lone trappers out in
2:23:03
Speaker 1: the wilderness. Evelyn Berglund noted that there was, in her words, quote,
2:23:10
Speaker 1: a kind of a law which nobody ever broke. that
2:23:13
Speaker 1: if anyone stopped overnight in someone else's cabin, he always
2:23:18
Speaker 1: left a note saying who he was and what he
2:23:20
Speaker 1: had taken, if anything. Some trappers would keep a diary
2:23:25
Speaker 1: near the door for this purpose, and so a stranger
2:23:29
Speaker 1: passing through would know where they were staying, paper and
2:23:32
Speaker 1: pencils being in short supply. It was not uncommon for
2:23:36
Speaker 1: a trapper to use the protruding lead bullet at the
2:23:40
Speaker 1: tip of a. 22 cartridge as a makeshift writing instrument.
2:23:46
Speaker 1: It was also taboo among the sourdoughs to kill a
2:23:49
Speaker 1: porcupine unless you were really in need. The rationale was
2:23:54
Speaker 1: that porcupines were so easy to kill, even with just
2:23:58
Speaker 1: a stick, that they were the perfect target for a
2:24:01
Speaker 1: hungry trapper. especially one who might be out of ammo.
2:24:06
Speaker 1: Like all things in interior Alaska, the origins of that
2:24:10
Speaker 1: porcupine tradition boiled down to the rhythms of scarcity and abundance.
2:24:17
Speaker 1: In a land of feast and famine, the slightest and
2:24:21
Speaker 1: most innocent lapses in judgment could lead to the most
2:24:26
Speaker 1: mightily horrific sets of circumstances.