A LAND GONE LONESOME

Dawson City, Yukon Territory

It is a fine Saturday morning in mid-August. I am hammering in my boat stake among a row of riverboats at the Dawson City beach on the Yukon River. Whack. Whack. Whack. Suddenly something large and very near me moves. It had been lying so inert in the bottom of an open skiff next to my canoe that I hadn’t seen it. It is a wild thing with matted black fur. Irritated now, it props itself up, half in and half out of a canvas tarp that contains in its folds remnant pools of last night’s rain. It—he—is pale to the point of bloodless. Through his beard, parched-looking lips suggest cotton-mouthed dehydration. The morning light is not welcome either. Only one eye is cracked a slit, just enough for him to determine the source of his torment. For a moment, I hold the ax head suspended. He stares. He does not speak, but I hear him wondering if it is absolutely necessary for me to be here, pounding that goddamned stake through his brain. I take it as a wordless “Welcome to Dawson.” Nodding to the town greeter, I give the stake one last skull-cracking wallop and leave him soaking in remnant pools of last night’s partying.

The discovery that launched the Klondike gold rush came on August 16, 1896. That day, Discovery Day, is a holiday in Canada’s Yukon Territory. Coincidentally, today is August 16, and as I stroll into Dawson, the Discovery Day parade rolls through the center of town. At the head is a detachment of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP). A half dozen scarlet-jacketed Mounties march in step behind a handsome, square-jawed officer riding a glossy, black, prancing horse. Cameras snap as the troop files past the still-operating hundred-year-old post office, with its door set into a turret in the corner of the building. Past Diamond Tooth Gertie’s, where Dawson’s signature cancan girls perform nightly. Past the restored three-story Palace Grand Theatre, built in 1899 by an old Indian fighter who entertained patrons by shooting glass balls from between his wife’s thumb and index finger. Next, the silver-haired members of the Yukon Order of Pioneers proceed in quaint and stately grace in vintage automobiles, like an old photo colorized and come to life. A flatbed truck serves as a mobile stage for Barnacle Bob Hilliard, the local piano player, an important personage in a gold camp of any era. He is hunched over the keyboard, clawing out ragtime, his face hidden by a mass of tangled hair that bounces emphatically in time. Making sure no one is sucked into a time warp, a file of decibel-dueling muscle trucks brings up the rear. They hang back and rev their unmuffled engines until we spectators have to cover our ears. When their attention spans catch up with them, they pop clutches and lurch back into position. The parade is a little gold rush river of humanity, every character a nugget tumbling by.

Not just on parade day, Dawson is colored by the gaudy circumstances of its birth, comfortable in its skin, happily marketing itself as a raucous frontier town. Walking its streets is like walking through the set of a beer commercial, running now for a hundred years. Here at Second and Queen is the false-fronted Downtown Hotel, home of the “World-famous Sourtoe Cocktail,” a tourist favorite. Dawsonites say that during the 1920s, when Alaska was suffering under Prohibition, a pair of local bootleggers named Louie and Otto Liken made a run with their dog team across the border. Deliberately, they mushed into a blizzard, bad weather being in a smuggler’s favor. But on this trip they broke through some ice, and Louie soaked one of his feet. There was no time to stop and build a fire because the boys suspected the Mounties were, so to say, dogging their trail. When they finally did stop, Louie’s big toe was frozen solid. There was nothing to do but to take the toe off before gangrene set in. Fortunately, the boys were traveling with the surgical essentials: a sharp ax and a sled-load of painkiller.

Half a century later, Captain Dick Stevenson (who has written up this bit of history) was cleaning out the old cabin of the long-gone Liken brothers when he found the toe preserved in a masonry jar under the floorboards. Stevenson, a former wolf poisoner for the department of game, had turned to trapping tourists. He operated a little tour boat, an imitation of a stern-wheeler. Perhaps it was a happy convergence of these two professions, poisoner and tourist host, that led Stevenson to invent the Sourtoe Cocktail. The directions were simple: drop the toe into a beer glass, fill it with champagne, then “drink it fast, or drink it slow, but the lips have gotta touch the toe.”

In “The Ballad of the Ice-Worm Cocktail,” gold rush poet Robert Service sketched the boys gulling a newcomer into downing a repulsive worm, which by poem’s end turns out to be colored spaghetti. The current Dawsonites have gone Service one better, as the toe is not a fake. It resides at the Sourdough Saloon in the Downtown Hotel. So far, 18,000 people have earned a certificate of membership in the Sourtoe Club, including British Columbia prime minister Gordon Campbell. Of course, among 18,000 rowdies there are going to be a few swallowers. The first was a placer miner named Garry Younger who, in 1980, was shooting for the Sourtoe record. As Younger tossed down his thirteenth toe champagne, his chair fell over backward, and with a gulp the toe was gone. Had it been recovered when Younger passed it, the original Louie Liken toe might still be in use. But a replacement was sent in by a Mrs. Lawrence of Fort Saskatchewan, who’d had it amputated because of a corn. For a while, her toe resided in a jar of salt at the Eldorado Hotel, but it disappeared during renovations. Toe Three was a more traditionally obtained part, having come from a trapper in Faro who lost it to frostbite. Lost to the cold, and lost again to a thieving soldier who set it up as an attraction in a tavern in London, Ontario. The military helped to track down and return the toe in 1983, but it made its final journey soon thereafter when it followed a shot of booze down the gullet of a baseball player from Inuvik. Toe Four had a longer run but met with foul play while on tour at Watson Lake. A Texas big game hunter took it home and refused to give it up until the Watson Lake police asked the Yank how he’d like to face extradition proceedings for transporting human body parts across an international border. Toes Five and Six came as a set from a Yukon old-timer too modest to have his philanthropy recognized. Three women drove all the way from Sudbury, Ontario, to deliver Toe Seven, donated by a diabetic who’d read about Dawson’s cultural traditions in the newspaper. The latest toe came from someone who no longer mows the lawn in sandals.

 

IT IS LIKELY THAT The Pit was the town greeter’s undoing. The Pit is the “Beer Parlour” in the Westminster Hotel, which was established in 1898. It’s a half-a-block’s-worth of false-fronted buildings in the middle of town, all tarted up in pink and purple and strung with Christmas lights, several of which work. Everyone calls it The Pit, even the Parks Canada people at the visitors’ center. In its fundamentals, a night at The Pit is not so unlike a night in this same bar during the gold rush. I imagine the atmosphere was the same then as now: charged with a heavy layer of smoke, clothes reeking with sweat and creosote from leaky stove pipes, a volatility fed by testosterone and jangly music. One night a friend of mine saw a scuffle break out over a provocatively dressed inflatable doll. I guess there weren’t many other women in the bar at the time, and the doll had attracted two patrons, one staggering through a two-step with her, the other trying more and more insistently to cut in. Push came to shove, but not much more. The last time I was there, the prettiest girl in the place was dressed in Carhart coveralls with tire tread marks running diagonally across the front. I wondered if she’d peeled the clothes off an accident victim, like a thrifty trapper might skin a roadkill. People say The Pit’s regular band, the Pointer Brothers, has a bar tab so enormous that the group has become essentially indentured servants, having to work for years into the future without compensation to square up on the bill.

The Pit is also a venue where Elvis Presley once headlined. That’s not Elvis Aaron Presley from Tupelo, Mississippi, but Elvis Aaron Presley from Tagish, Yukon Territory. Tagish Elvis. Before the aliens visited, he was known as Gilbert Nelles. Visited, yes, but he insists he was not abducted, according to a story in the Yukon News by Karan Smith. Rather, a passing UFO bathed him in a harmonic beam of light that suffused his soul with the “conscious awareness” of the rocker, who was then thirteen years dead. That night, the Ghost of Elvis Past appeared in a maroon suit studded with rhinestones. In the morning, Nelles sang a few tunes and decided that he was, essentially, the Elvis Channel. He dyed his hair black and staked out large sections of his cheeks as reserves for sideburns. Later, he legally changed his name to Elvis Aaron Presley and acquired a pink Cadillac, which he adorned with plastic cherubs.

Elvis’s career was taking off like a starship, what with gigs in clubs like The Pit and appearances in homemade music videos, when disaster struck. An argument with a neighbor in Tagish resulted in a visit from an RCMP officer who recommended a psychological evaluation. That was defamation, said Elvis, and he sued the Mounties for ten million dollars. It was “The King versus the Queen,” as the Yukon News had it. And the trial, coming at the end of a long winter, did not disappoint entertainment-starved Yukoners. It was a little like A Miracle on 34th Street, with Elvis trying to prove he was the Elvis. For a while, Elvis seemed to enjoy the proceedings. He represented himself, showing up at court in a white jumpsuit with multicolored sequins and an embroidered eagle and bear on the back. He brought as exhibits 439 documents about flying saucers, videotapes of his performances, and surveys he’d conducted himself. Several exchanges between Elvis and his fellow officers of the court are possibly among the more memorable in the annals of Yukon jurisprudence. When at one point Elvis referred to the government’s distinguished attorney, a Mr. Willis, as his “colleague,” Willis leapt to his feet in protest, “I am not his colleague!”

Things got worse when Elvis tried to introduce hearsay evidence, specifically a list of people he’d contacted who thought, yes, Elvis did seem a bit odd. This proved his, not the government’s, point, he figured, because if folks thought Elvis odd, it must be because of the government’s campaign of character assassination. The judge, Lucien Beaulieu, attempted to explain the concept of hearsay. He asked Elvis to imagine his honor running around Whitehorse shouting, “I am an egg! I am a hard-boiled egg!” Now, he asked, “Would that prove I am an egg?” Elvis replied evenly, “I am going to have to ask you to step down from this case,” and he began to pack up his papers. Judge Beaulieu warned him that leaving the proceedings would mean an end to the lawsuit. “No,” said the King to his court, “It is the end of you, your honor. I have dismissed you.” With that, Elvis left the building.

 

DOWNTOWN DAWSON, with its parade and with its tourists—wide as Winnebagos and just as difficult to pass on the narrow wooden sidewalks—can be wearying. You feel vaguely ill, like after a day at the carnival—too much confected sugar and manufactured fun. The river is the antidote, but before pointing myself toward the beach, I head over to Klondike Kate’s for a feed. On my way out, I pay with an American twenty-dollar bill and, with the good exchange rate, receive a Canadian twenty in change. “It’s like eating for free,” I tell the cashier. “No,” she says, dropping some coins on top of the twenty, “It’s like we paid you to eat.”

Dawson’s boats could be plotted along the same entropic arc as its people. Just below on the far bank is a steamboat graveyard, where the Julia B’s 159-foot deck undulates like a sinusoidal curve, its massive hull relaxing into the contours of the ground beneath it. If you poke around in the brush over there, you can find seven boats, their great paddle wheels looming up amid the leafy willows and alders, boilers and stacks rusting, graying boards peeling away from cabins and decks. During the 1898 stampede, sixty of these wood-fired sternwheelers worked the Yukon. They carried an amazing assortment of goods: the necessities for extracting gold and sustaining the miners (bacon and beans, hand tools and dynamite), alongside the superfluities that gold could buy (evening gowns and canned oysters, vintage wine and crystal glasses). Tough men—some from the Mississippi, some sea captains—captained the boats, reading the shifting channels of the silty water, dodging the hidden snags and bars. For nearly ninety years, from 1867 to 1955, the great wooden boats were the apotheosis of technical and commercial accomplishment on the Yukon.

Tied up at the Dawson dock today is a cartoon version of a steamboat, a burlesque of the glory days, with a bright red paddle wheel ready to churn for the tourist dollar. Opposite this lies a flat-bottomed, plywood riverboat, its owner aiming for a down-market niche in the tour-boat game: an overstuffed chair perches in the bow, a bench seat from a pickup truck faces sideways out over the gunwale. Finally, off by itself is an authentic re-creation, if that’s not an oxymoron. It is a sailing dory constructed the way Klondike stampeders might have done on the shore of Lake Bennett in 1898. Her hull is of whipsawn spruce planks dripping with tar. The boom is a forked birch tree, its crotch riding a spruce-pole mast. For the cabin, what else? A white canvas wall tent.

I spin my canoe around and step into the stern, shoving off. I had forgotten to notice if the town greeter had left his post, but it is too late to see now. The river sweeps along at five to eight miles per hour, and Dawson unzooms behind me. My own vessel is a nineteen-foot canoe, a square-stern Grumman Freighter. It was shiny silver when I bought it used in Fairbanks twenty-odd years ago, but I’ve painted it a light, flat green. It has a thirty-nine-inch beam and will haul up to eleven hundred pounds. That is, it will haul two guys, gas, grub, camping gear, and a cut-up moose. Mounted on a lift is a fifteen-horse Evinrude outboard motor that I bought new in 1982. The canoe can do about fifteen miles an hour downstream on the Yukon, ten miles per hour upstream. It is the pace of a Sunday drive in the country in the days of the Model T. It’s slow enough that you can feel where you are—you aren’t sealed up inside a streamlined bubble, like in a modern car or inside the cab of a riverboat, streaking through the country faster than you can properly take things in.

 

WHO WAS THE FIRST TO DISCOVER the gold that launched the Klondike gold rush and built Dawson? The answer may depend on your loyalties, or how much of a social lesson you want your history to teach. The Canadians say it was a Canadian; the Americans say it was an American; the Indians say it was an Indian; and a female Indian said it was a female Indian, namely herself. Robert Henderson, the Canadian, did find decent pay (at a not-too-shabby eight cents to the pan) on a creek he named Gold Bottom, a tributary of the Klondike River. But it was George Washington Carmack, the American (obviously), who, after one pan yielded an unheard-of four dollars, filed the discovery claim on Rabbit Creek. Carmack wasn’t the first person to spot the gold, however, according to Carmack’s Indian sidekicks who had been packers on the Chilkoot Trail. Skookum Jim Mason and Tagish Charley say the white man was snoozing under a birch tree when Jim noticed gold in the creek. Last, Carmack’s Indian wife Kate ended her days (after Carmack abandoned her for a white woman) claiming that it was she who found the gold and showed the others.

Robert Henderson knew Carmack wasn’t much of a prospector. He knew that the American had sunk a few shafts up in the Fortymile River country but that he preferred the life of the Indian. Carmack did a little fishing, cut a little wood, but clearly was not one of the driven souls working himself into an early grave, hoping to strike it rich. Still, Henderson abided by the code of the prospector and made a point of stopping at Carmack’s camp at the mouth of the Klondike in the summer of 1896 to pass the word that decent pay could be found on Gold Bottom Creek. Carmack was only mildly interested. After a bit, he and his friends decided to scout for timber that they might raft up and float down to the sawmill at Fortymile.

If Carmack, the white man, romanticized Indian ways, Skookum Jim was moved by modernity. Money appealed to him. He might have fit in well with such ambitious men as Robert Henderson, but Henderson’s dismissive attitude toward the Native people had been apparent from their first meeting. In any event, Carmack, Skookum Jim, and Tagish Charley eventually hiked over the hill above Rabbit Creek, off the Klondike River, to visit Henderson and check out his diggings on Gold Bottom. Henderson was optimistic about the area and encouraged Carmack to prospect Rabbit Creek. He made a point of asking Carmack to come back and let him know if he found good color, even offering to pay Carmack for his trouble. Shortly after they left Henderson busting his hump for pennies, Carmack (or was it Jim or Kate?) discovered gold by the spoonful in Rabbit Creek. Then, for one reason or another, Carmack and his party decided not to walk back the few miles to let Henderson in on the news.

Utterly unaware of the discovery, Henderson toiled away the rest of the summer. He figured he was doing pretty well when he came onto ground producing thirty-five cents to the pan. Meanwhile, Carmack had gone down to Forty Mile¹ and tilted a shotgun shell casing full of nuggets onto the bar at Bill McPhee’s saloon. In no time, men were flooding in from all over the district to Rabbit Creek, and a town—Dawson—was springing up just a few miles away, at the confluence of the Klondike and Yukon rivers. Eventually, a prospector wandered over the hill, and Henderson learned that Rabbit Creek was now called Bonanza Creek; that it was already staked for fourteen miles; and that Bonanza and its feeder pup, Eldorado Creek, were the richest placer gold streams in the world.

One can imagine Robert Henderson aiming a scorching string of hat-stomping profanities at George Carmack that day. It is said, however, that he simply dropped his shovel and walked to the creek bank, where he sat speechless.

Moosehide

On the right bank a couple of miles below Dawson, I see a pretty little church with a bell tower sitting amongst a few cabins on a grassy hillside. This is the Indian village of Moosehide. No people live here, though it is still used periodically as a “culture camp,” where Indian traditions are celebrated and passed on. By the fall of 1896, stampeders were filling up Dawson and sprawling into the Tr’ondek Gwech’in village, which was located just across the Tr’ondek River (the Stone-for-Driving-in-Fish-Trap-Poles River). The Gwech’in came to the Tr’ondek River every summer to fish the salmon runs, pounding sticks into the riverbed to make a weir and trap. The newcomers didn’t just appropriate the Indians’ name for the river, modifying it to “Klondike,” they muscled in on the village site, successfully pressuring every one of the Indians to sell. The Gwech’in attempted to relocate across the Klondike on the Dawson side, but the Mounties claimed forty acres there and did not want Indians as neighbors. With most of the rest of the land having been bought up by speculators, the Indians found themselves dispossessed on their traditional ground. Tens of thousands of newcomers poured into the Gwech’in territory. The strain on food sources alone was terrific. In one account, a Native hunting party “killed in all about eighty moose and sixty-five caribou, much of which they sold to the miners in Dawson.”

There were five or six hundred tents at the mouth of the Klondike in the early summer of 1897 when Frederick Fairweather Flewelling struck a deal with the RCMP on the Natives’ behalf. Flewelling, an Anglican missionary, bought forty acres at Moosehide, the nearest unclaimed land. He constructed mission buildings, then gave the remainder of the land to the Tr’ondek Gwech’in. St. Barnabas Church went up in 1908, but with a glittering boomtown just two miles away, Native souls were inevitably sucked into a vortex of music halls and saloons packed with gamblers, lawyers, newspapermen, and other sharps and scammers.

By 1923, Native dancing during Christmas celebrations at Moosehide occurred “only as an exhibition during an evening of modern entertainment,” according to the Dawson Weekly. Jobs lured some of the people away. Disease ravaged the holdouts, as diphtheria and influenza epidemics took hold in the isolated community. One observer in 1922 noted that the village was seldom free of sickness and that mothers had more children in the graveyards than at home. The population of Moosehide dwindled until, by 1957, it became too expensive to maintain the virtually empty school. As a pamphlet published by the Dawson Indian Band put it, when the last of the Moosehide people moved back to Dawson, “integration of the two groups was complete.”

 

WITH NO ONE AROUND, I tie up the canoe at a new-looking dock probably built to accommodate a tour boat and climb the hill for a peek inside St. Barnabas Church. Beyond the unlocked door, I find a lovely old space suffused with a rosy light from the stained-glass windows. On the walls, cream-colored paint tops off a wainscoting that has darkened nearly to black, the two tones suggesting the strata of a glass of Guinness. The wood floor has buckled in waves so that the pews and rails are cocked this way and that. An old barrel stove stands stolid as a boar, smitten and turned to steel. It reminds me that I do not wish to tempt a vengeful God, and I let my trespassing self out. Out, and at the same time into another holy space. The great slab of liquid slides by below me. Silent. Luminous. At water level, it is big. From the hill, it is monstrous. In a minute, I will be borne by it down another sort of aisle, into another sort of mythic realm.

 

WHERE DOES IT ALL BEGIN? There isn’t much agreement. And it isn’t a simple question. At its headwaters, the Yukon’s tributaries finger out dendritically, tapping lakes scattered over the high country of northern British Columbia, in back of Southeast Alaska’s Coast Mountains. How to decide which stream should be designated the main trunk and which the feeders? Should it be the branch that would yield the greatest total length for the river, regardless of flow volume? Or the one that drains the greatest area? Or maybe the one that best aligns itself with the Yukon’s general geographic trend? Or the stream that begins farthest to the south? Or the one that drops from the highest elevation? The hydrologist, the geographer, the mapmaker, each may have his preference.

If it were up to me, I think I’d work my way upstream from what is incontestably the main stem and turn up every fork that spills the most water annually. I reckon that takes me up a little unnamed creek that terminates at the face of the Llewellyn Glacier, on the east side of the Coast Mountains. And then into it. The glacier, I would conclude, is water after all. A stream of sorts. Its water is colder than the rest of the river’s, but not much colder. If frozen, the glacier is still flowing, slowly, downhill and so behaves in this respect like a river. Glacial ice is something like its pellucid cousin, glass. Glass does not have a crystalline structure, as nearly all solids do. Of the two, glass and ice, glass is more like a liquid. Water molecules do form a crystalline structure when they freeze, but molecules deep in a glacier nonetheless warp and creep past one another in response to pressure from the weight above. Glaciers don’t just lurch down the mountainside like a skidding block. The ice flows over itself, like a super-viscous liquid. In a sense, glaciers are the stained-glass windows of mountain cathedrals: not quite liquid, not quite solid; not quite wall, not quite sky. I like the idea that the Yukon descends from this borderland between earth and heaven, between science and myth.

 

THE REMARKABLE THING is that the Yukon launches its journey just over the hill from the object of every river’s desire: the sea. Fifteen or twenty miles away, the river is near enough to smell the salt. But it is nonetheless drawn inland, the first voyageur to push through this wild country, two thousand miles to the Bering Sea coast. And like the later trekkers, it packs its load. The White River, so named because it transports a light-colored volcanic ash and silt, rolls down from the vast snowfields of the Wrangell-St. Elias Mountains and joins the big river above Dawson. There, the relatively clear Yukon becomes a pearly gray and stays that color for the rest of its length. The Tanana River, which is somewhat wetter than a horizontal mudslide, delivers twice as much silty sediment from the rock-grinding glaciers plastered onto the north side of the Alaska Range. Each summer, these two rivers haul about eighty million tons of mountain down to the main conveyor belt, which dumps most of it into the sea. Only one percent of the land drained by the Yukon River is permanently covered in ice, but it is enough to cloud the river for about fourteen hundred miles of its length. Except when we can’t see it. From October to April, freezing temperatures shut down the glaciers’ silty outwash, and the Yukon runs clear under its frozen surface.

Within a seventy-five mile stretch above Dawson, the White, the Stewart, the Sixtymile, the Indian, and the Klondike all join. The Yukon swells to tremendous proportions, over a mile wide in spots. It can be terrifying just to look at the thing. This river doesn’t roll or tumble or dance. It slides like slurry down the chute of a concrete truck. It foments surging boils and sucks itself into whirlpools. It is ponderous, inexorable, and silent, except for the hiss of grinding silt. Robert Service, the Klondike poet, got at it in a poem called “The Woodcutter”:

 

By day it’s a ruthless monster, a callous insatiable thing, with oily bubble and eddy, with sudden swirling of breast. ... it cries for human tribute.

 

The Yukon River drains about a third of a million square miles. Along its upper reaches, it receives the output of drainages that each could hold states. The Teslin drains a land area the size of Massachusetts and Connecticut combined. The Pelly and the Stewart each contribute the runoff from drainages the size of Vermont and New Hampshire. The White adds a Maryland and a New Jersey’s worth. Downstream, where the Yukon arches its back across central Alaska, it collects its three largest rivers, the Porcupine, Tanana, and Koyukuk, picking up drainages the size of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Maine, respectively. With a little jigsawing, the drainage basin of the Yukon River could contain all of Texas and California, the largest of the contiguous states, or sixteen of the little ones.

Between Dawson and Circle, the Yukon alternately pinches and bulges, mostly between about three-tenths and half of a mile wide. In some places the river splits around groups of islands and dilates into an aneurysm a mile and a half across. At Circle, the hills recede, and the channels of the Yukon spraddle like a fat woman’s legs released from their stockings. The Yukon Flats. Three miles from bank to bank. Not for another two hundred miles do the hills finally manage to gather the river back into a distinct channel. Water sliding past Circle has more than a thousand miles to go to the sea, but only six hundred feet of elevation from which to fall, which means that for the last half of its length, the Yukon drops only 6.8 inches per mile. One third of all flowing water in Alaska ends up in the Yukon. And a fifth of the river’s volume is brought to it by the Tanana, which presents its tribute at the geographic center of the state. In this way, the Yukon River discharges twelve million cubic feet of water and a hundred tons of silt each minute into the Bering Sea.

Vast, grassy lowlands containing many divergent, sluggish, and meandering channels conceal the Yukon’s mouth. From a boat on the river, it is nearly impossible to see which way the main channel goes. The shoreline all around appears like a pencil line drawn horizontally across the middle of a blank sheet of paper. The hills are too far away to offer any reference. From a ship offshore, there is even less, visually, to suggest that you are alongside one of the great rivers of the world. Besides the low relief of the land, the Yukon’s channels empty into the sea at many different points along an arc of coastline about eighty miles broad.

 

MOOSEHIDE, if not exactly a suburb of Dawson—it isn’t road-connected—is nonetheless on the outskirts of town. But from here a traveler breaks free of Dawson’s orbit and launches into an immense wild land. There is no town, no phone, no link to the rest of the world until Eagle, one hundred four miles away. But for me it will be a stroll in the park compared to the treks of the early explorers. Russian traders in the west of Alaska, both south and north of the Yukon’s mouth, and English traders in the east, each had heard Native stories of a great river that lay between the two powers’ territories. But it took an ambitious Russian named Aleksey Ivanov to finally locate the Kwikhpak (big river), as the coastal Eskimos called it. Sometime in the early 1790s, in midwinter, Ivanov’s Native-led party set out from Iliamna Lake at the northern base of the Alaska Peninsula. He skied north until he hit the broad river and returned at Easter, probably covering six hundred miles or more altogether. A better-documented “discovery” resulted from an expedition organized by Baron Ferdinand von Wrangel, governor of Russian America. In 1833, he sent Andrei Glazunov, an Eskimo-speaking Russian creole, overland in winter from Saint Michael Redoubt on Norton Sound. Glazunov reached the Yukon where the Anvik River joins it, three hundred miles from the Yukon’s mouth.

But the Arctic explorer and historian Vilhjalmur Stefansson is inclined to credit the discovery (by white men, anyway) to one who didn’t so much behold the river as infer it. “To discover a river as large as the Yukon, it is not necessary to see it,” Stefansson writes. Navigators can detect the presence of a great river while still well out to sea, even before sighting land. The tremendous volume of water delivered by such a river may freshen the sea detectably before land is visible from a ship’s bridge. And the sediment, too, is carried far offshore, creating shoals that large ships must look out for. “A passing ship, then, becomes aware of such a river without seeing it, through the immemorial custom of navigators, particularly exploring navigators, of guarding against the unexpected grounding of their ships by the twin methods of sounding for depth and tasting the water for saltiness.” Captain James Cook (according to H. H. Bancroft, according to Stefansson) suspected the presence of a great river in the fall of 1778, as he proceeded southward along the Alaska coast. But he didn’t see it.

After Ivanov’s and Glazunov’s reports, the Russians began ascending the river in summer. In 1838, Vassili Malakof reached Nulato, nearly five hundred miles from the Yukon’s mouth. Four years later, L. A. Zagoskin explored as far as the Rapids, more than seven hundred river miles from the coast. At this same time, a Scotsman named Robert Campbell in the employ of the Hudson’s Bay Company punched west from Canada. Campbell for years had hoped to find a river-and-portage route to the Pacific. In 1840, he and his party paddled up a branch of the Liard River in Yukon Territory, hiked over a pass that he correctly suspected was the Continental Divide, “descended the west slope of the Rocky Mountains, and on the second day . . . had the satisfaction of seeing from a high bank a large river in the distance flowing North-West.” He named it the Pelly, and though no one knew it at the time, the river is one of the Yukon’s principal sources. Campbell had discovered an inland approach to the Yukon river system, but neither he nor his Hudson’s Bay superiors knew where the Pelly went. At various times, traders suspected it drained into in the North Pacific near Juneau as did the Taku River, or into the Arctic Ocean as did the recently discovered Colville River, or into the Bering Sea as did the Kwikhpak, the Great River of the Russians.

Meanwhile, to the north, another Hudson’s Bay officer called John Bell (also a Scotsman) crossed the mountains from the Mackenzie River in 1845 (some accounts give 1844 or 1846), ascending first the Peel, then the later-named Bell River, built canoes from birch bark that he’d packed in, and floated down the Porcupine River to where it entered a river big enough to rival the Mackenzie. Approximating the Gwech’in Indian word for it, Yu-kun-ah, Bell wrote its name as “Youcon.” Yet another Hudson’s Bay Company Scotsman, Alexander Murray, built a fort at the confluence of the Porcupine and the Yukon in 1847: Fort Youcon. Not until 1851 did Robert Campbell, floating in a canoe from the Pelly, confirm that his original conjecture was correct: the Pelly, which he had discovered far to the south; Bell’s Youcon, at the mouth of the Porcupine; and the Russian’s Kwikhpak, which emptied into the Bering Sea, were all the same river.

 

NOT SURPRISINGLY, the Yukon was the last major river system in North America to be discovered, explored, and settled by outsiders. The river’s mouth is elusive. Its interior regions are nearly inaccessible, with the highest mountains on the continent walling it off from the sea. The climate is harsh in winter, and the river is thousands of miles distant from supply centers on the West Coast. For many of the same reasons, the Yukon River drainage is hardly settled now. Discounting two densely populated pinpoints within the Yukon basin—Whitehorse (23,000) and Fairbanks (84,000)—there are only 19,000 people living in an area the size of Pakistan. To compare densities, one might imagine decreeing land reform for the 141 million Pakistanis and dividing that country up equally among them. Each would own a plot of ground the size of a football field, counting the end zones and sidelines. Doing the same for the bush residents of the Yukon basin would give every man, woman, and child a spread of about seventeen square miles. Between Dawson and the next village downriver—Eagle, one hundred six miles away—only one person lives year-round.

 

THE AIR IS COOL AND NICE. No need for a jacket. Across the channel from Moosehide and up against the left bank is Sister Island. A clearing on the north end of it marks where the Sisters of St. Ann once operated a farm to provision their hospital in Dawson. Beyond it looms Dog Island, tapered at each end and proportioned like the issue of a husky who is getting a fair bit of meat in his diet. Mike Rourke in his Yukon River says the island was used to isolate cases of smallpox. The steamer Whitehorse sat in quarantine here for seventeen days in the summer of 1902. Spiral-bound Rourke is one of my guides. His book offers good line drawings of the river channels and does a better job with bars and cut banks than do the national geologic surveys. Also included are bits of history and rough photocopies of archival photographs. I keep it in a clear plastic bag under a bungee cord on top of my gear.

 

THERE IS LITTLE TO SIGNIFY THE SITE of long-gone Fort Reliance, three miles below Moosehide on the right bank, where the temperature was once authoritatively recorded by the U.S. Geological Survey at eighty degrees below zero. In 1874, on this spot across the river from a Han Indian village known as Nuklako, Jack McQuestin and eventually his partners Al Mayo and Arthur Harper ran a trading post, exchanging trade goods for furs. They had situated themselves just six miles from the richest gold-bearing creeks in the world, but it would be twenty-two years before that became known, and by then they would have moved. The first on the scene, the strike would never make them rich.

After twelve years in the relatively stable business of fur trading with the Indians, the custom shifted to supplying the increasing number of miners in the country. When the Stewart River produced a modest strike, nuggets replaced furs as the currency of the region. With that shift came the imperative to relocate to wherever the diggings showed promise and the miners had aggregated. The traders must have felt they had become as erratic and stampede-prone as the prospectors who chased hunches all over the country. In 1886, McQuestin, Mayo, and Harper abandoned Fort Reliance and rebuilt at Stewart River, seventy-odd miles upstream. But that same year, news arrived that prospectors had found coarse gold on the Fortymile River. Once again, McQuestin and his partners abandoned their post and rebuilt, now at the mouth of the Fortymile, one hundred twenty miles downstream. Then a strike at Birch Creek in the early 1890s prompted McQuestin to build at Circle City, two hundred four miles below the Fortymile. Finally, at the end of the decade, the traders rushed two hundred fifty-five miles back upstream to build at Dawson, nearly to the spot where they’d started twenty-two years earlier. Notwithstanding all this itinerating, the three merchants were a steadying influence. They promoted a systematic exploration of the country’s mineral potential. They were unfailingly willing to outfit the miners on credit, supplying the bacon and beans, the picks, shovels, and pans. And as the resident old-timers of the Yukon, they dispensed tips, advice, and encouragement. They didn’t make the big strike, but they made it possible.

The buildings of Fort Reliance are gone. They do not exist even as a burial mound of rotted logs under a blanket of moss. They were cremated in the boilers of steamboats—atomized and mingled with the atmosphere. Another account says some of the logs were used by Indians to make a raft to carry them to Fortymile. But what does endure is the reputation of the three traders who started here at this site. McQuestin, Harper, and Mayo, with their blend of toughness, optimism, and generosity, are remembered as the gold standard of the pioneer spirit. And Fort Reliance contributes another benchmark, too. It is Mile 0 of the upper Yukon River. Twelvemile River, Fifteenmile River, and Fortymile River are so named because of their estimated distance downstream from this spot. And the scale goes in the other direction, too, accounting for the Sixtymile River upstream.

Chandindu River

I’ve heard there is a fish weir a little over a mile up the Chandindu River, so I swing the canoe into the beach below its mouth. The Chandindu joins the Yukon on the right bank about nineteen miles below Dawson and roughly twelve miles below Fort Reliance (hence, its other name, Twelvemile River). In 1883, military explorer Lt. Frederick Schwatka named the river Chandindu after an Indian word, the meaning of which he did not record. I want to see the weir and the biological investigations going on there, but I am a little nervous. I am not sure if this is the place where Richard Smith and Faye Chamberlain were attacked by a huge grizzly bear a few years ago. I don’t have my handgun along because of Canada’s strict laws against them. And I hadn’t wanted to pay the fifty dollars for a permit to bring a rifle. I decide to walk up the trail with my Hudson’s Bay ax. That way, I’m thinking, if a grizzly bear charges me, I can knock myself on the head. But just then I see a riverboat streak around the bend and pull into the cobbley beach. It is Tommy Taylor, a Native man of about 65, his two adult sons Mike and John, their nephew Clinton, and a couple others from Dawson. They say they are going up to relieve the crew at the weir. Tommy decides to wait in the boat, and I join this two-rifle escort.

John is no sooner up the bank than he stops abruptly. He says he heard an animal chomping its teeth off to our left. Mike levers a shell into the chamber of his rifle. John does the same. We stand still and stare hard into the willows and fireweed but see nothing. Mike motions for Clinton and me to go ahead of him, putting the guns at the head and rear of our column. We move quickly and quietly up the trail single file, all eyes left. But as soon as we move, a low throbbing sound fills the woods. For a moment, I think it is the Yukon Queen, the tourist boat that now runs between Eagle and Dawson. But it is too early in the day for the Queen. It is obvious this rumble comes from a bear, warning us. We walk ahead, but with frequent looks rearward. The bear does not charge, and we do not see it. Not far along, we side-step a pile of bear shit, pink and tan and studded with cranberries. It’s big enough to fill a shovel and soft to the press of my boot. No accident, I think, that he placed his calling card in the middle of the humans’ trail.

Clinton is a pleasant, chubby kid about twelve years old, and brisk walking appeals to him less than enjoying the scenery at a leisurely pace. As he lags behind, Mike and I stop to let him catch up. The rest of the party continues on, stopping periodically to wait for us. Thus we advance like one of those spring-bodied dachshunds on wheels, with the head of our troop stretching us apart until our elastic limits are reached and tension pulls our hindquarters back into position. Perhaps in his thirties, Mike is slim and tan and engaging. A model of avuncular kindness. Stopping often for Clinton creates a certain level of unease, but Mike never utters a syllable of admonishment to his nephew.

Eventually we reach a clearing in the spruce forest hard by the tumbling Chandindu. The well-ordered camp consists of a little log cabin and several ten-by-twelve wall tents stretched over wood frames with plywood floors. As we step over an electrified wire, a very pretty young woman named Catherine greets us. The electric fence is in response to a recent—and uneventful—visit from a bear, and it might deter one who is merely curious. Catherine seems to be in her twenties. In order, one notices striking green eyes, a ponytail, a gray sweater, and carpenter jeans. She seems to smile a lot. Mike smiles a lot too. I suspect that they are happy to see each other, and I move off to check out the weir noisily straining the river.

The Indians used to hammer sapling stakes into the river bottom a hundred years ago at the mouth of the Klondike. Now they work in steel. Tripods made of four-inch channel iron (steel members, U-SHAPED in cross section) sit in the stream, ten feet apart. Rails of the same iron connect the tripods, and pipes of heavy-gauge electrical conduit are attached to the rails, like pickets in a fence, except that they lean downstream at about a forty-five-degree angle. The river threads between the pipes, but the migrating salmon cannot. Against the near shore, a gap in the weir allows the milling fish to penetrate the fence and enter a “live box.” From a tree platform above the box, a worker can look down on the fish. If he is merely counting, he can pull a rope to open a door, and the fish swim through. This year, besides counting, the crew is doing a biopsy procedure to procure a DNA sample of the Chandindu chinooks. They scoop each king out of the box and with a punch tool remove a small plug of tissue from the tough gill plate.

The program began four years ago, Mike says, a partnership between the Tr’ondek Gwech’in and the Yukon River Commercial Fishing Association. The idea was to count the fish, take tissue and scale samples, determine genetic differences between early and late run spawners, and then look at the feasibility of restoring salmon stocks on the Chandindu. Of principal interest are Chinook salmon, or “kings,” as the Americans say. The run has not been impressive in recent years. Mike thinks this year’s king run is about done, as the count is falling off and the frontrunners of the fall chum salmon run are showing up. The crew has counted only one hundred twenty-five kings so far. Four years ago there were two hundred. But some recent evidence suggests the count may not be highly accurate. Twenty kings that spawned upstream and then died (as they normally do) later washed up on the weir. When the crew looked at these fish, they found that only three had been biopsied. In other words, seventeen of a random sample of twenty had made it past the weir uncounted. Mike thinks the problem can be traced to a fire that burned on the Chandindu three summers ago. Since then, heavy rains bring flash floods. The water level rises against the weir until the salmon can jump over it. Many fish probably make it past undetected, he says.

There has been a mix-up, and Catherine is not scheduled to be relieved for another day. Mike decides to stay over and return with her tomorrow. I walk out with Clinton and his uncle John and a couple of the relieved crew heading up to Dawson for R&R. John, who carries the rifle, does not frequently wait for his straggling nephew. He is less easygoing than Mike, more inclined toward tough love. “Hurry up there, Chubs.” And, “That bear will think you’re a big round berry.” And, “Let’s go. TODAY!” Later, when he himself is probably tiring: “Young fellow like you should be carrying the rifle for your uncle.”

Neither Mike nor John knew where, exactly, their father Tommy was born, except to say, “Somewhere around here.” So when I reach the boat, I ask him. “Right there,” says Tommy, nodding to the willowy bank where the bear had snapped and growled. I look where he indicates, but all I see is the bones of a pole-framed greenhouse where bits of tattered Visqueen (polyethylene sheeting) flutter like Tibetan prayer flags. In the late 1930s, when Tommy became its newest resident, there was a small community here. “We had a row of cabins down there,” he says. Apparently this settlement, known as Twelve-Mile, began in 1896 when some of the displaced Han Indians moved here from the mouth of the Klondike. At one time, there may have been more than ten families at this place, which the Han called Tthedëk. Over the years most of the people moved up to Dawson. In 1957, a flood destroyed the remaining houses.

Tommy comes here often in the summer, returning like the salmon to the natal ground they share. Waiting for his sons, he pokes around among his memories. He notices things. One day he noticed that the Yukon Queen had no sooner cleared the upriver bend, a good four miles away, when seagulls seemed to appear from out of nowhere and gather at the mouth of the Chandindu. It happened every time the big boat steamed by. If he stays out of sight, Tommy says, the boat won’t slow down but will roar through, and a good-sized wave will curl up and splash down on the stony beach below the mouth. Heaved up too and stranded among the rocks will be the little salmon fry that inhabit the shallows. Twice each day, the Queen sets this banquet table for the gulls. And if the salmon run is faltering, as it seems to be, Tommy figures this can’t help. One survey estimates the Queen strands between thirteen and fourteen thousand fry each season. Of course every fry doesn’t normally live to become an adult fish. The typical mortality rate for fry may be as high as ninety-nine percent. Still, this loss is on top of that natural mortality.

As an afterthought, John asks his father if anything came out of the woods.

“Oh yeah. A little bear.”

“Black?” I ask.

“Yeah.”

I am glad to hear it was a little blackie because it is time to camp, and I’d rather not share the area with a grizzly bear. After I shove the Taylors’ boat off, I motor up to a little island above the mouth of the Chandindu. It has a nice long sandy point on the downstream end, and the upriver breeze should keep the bugs in the brush. It is a perfect campsite, with a patch of dry sand just big enough for the tent, surrounded by damp sand that won’t blow around if the wind kicks up. Where the island proper begins, there’s a fast-eroding bank, and there a little copse of alder has keeled over onto the beach. With the roots dangling in air, the wood has dried to snap-offable perfection. I’ll have a good campfire.

Along the beach on river left, twelve feet up from the waterline, I see a tiny brown object. It looks like an amulet made of sand. A little washing reveals a miniature salmon, two inches long, perfectly formed with bright silver sides. It’s about the right size to have leapt off the label of a can. In fifty feet of beach, I find four of his mates. I can imagine the Queen sweeping through, brushing these lesser mortals aside. There is a little scarp, maybe a foot high, cut into the sand well up from the water’s edge. It appears the boat’s wake is cutting down the sandy point along this line, tossing the fry up on the beach and undercutting the alders where the bank is steeper.

Of course, we all make a wake, I’m thinking, as I break off a few alder sticks. I guess the important thing is: how big a one, and to what purpose?

I’ve had no lunch, and suddenly I am aware that I am hungry. The camp goes up quickly, and soon I have a fire snapping under a cast-iron frying pan. A small cutting board takes up no room on the side of the grub box, and I make a lot of use of it, now whacking up a couple spuds from a big bag of precooked ones. Into the pan with them, along with a splattering shot of squeeze-bottle margarine. I draw a nice sizzle from a couple handfuls of chopped onions and set on the grill a few links of my own homemade moose sausage, redolent of sage and boosted with pork fat. I want them to char a bit and pick up some of that lovely alder smoke before I add them to the pan. The rising aroma is almost a cruelty when I am in this state. But I am reassured by the size of the pile. It looks enough for two and wants to spill over the sides when I give it a stir.

I am one of those people upon whom hunger leaps out of the shadows like a mugger. I am all right one minute, and then it’s on me, riding my back hard. I am so hungry that I am angry. My brain fogs. The absolute best I can do is just be silent. When, irritatingly, people speak to me, I reply with an economy of speech that my wife, my mother-in-law, and certain friends and co-workers identify instantly. Cars are pulled over. Meetings are interrupted. Sandwiches are produced and pressed upon me. The effect is like that of filling the empty tank of a sputtering engine. I come right back up to the proper RPM. Tonight, I survive the crisis. Half a pound into the tucker, I know I’ll be all right and try to slow myself. But I cannot. I dig my spoon into the mound like an excavator. I try to talk myself down: you can stop gobbling; you can stop hunching your shoulders like a hoarder. The pan is empty and my bowl is scraped clean before any effect has registered. I know I just need to wait. Soon a rusty switch in my stomach will finally trip and flash the “full” signal to my brain. I’ll be all right.

As satiety sets in, relaxation settles over me like a surging wave. I am suffused with both by the time I turn to dessert: a cup of coffee and a slab of Irish soda bread, raisin-studded and generously buttered. It’s been a generous day. There is time now to linger in my chair and watch the sky and the water experiment with colors.

After a bit, I take care of the dishes and pack the grub box and galley gear back into the canoe. Finally, dessert’s dessert: a ration of ardent spirits and a good long stare at the fire.

As the gloaming advances, clouds move in from the west. Before dinner, a T-shirt was perfect. But the breeze keeps rising in stages, and the temperature dips with the sun. A flannel shirt keeps things perfect. A little later, I add a nylon windbreaker. Pretty soon my hood is up, and one hand is jammed in a pocket. Only the hand that holds the cup is on the cool side of perfection. I am inclined to see it as a little tax on the whiskey. Not burdensome. Happy to pay.

I am captivated by the living painting before me. As the sun goes down, the sky first ambers, then concentrates into an intense, blazing orange. Below, the river plays out, shining like a satin ribbon unreeling. It absolutely glows. It is as if it has absorbed light all day and now begins to fluoresce. What a crazy blue. It’s like the blue of the noon sky but mixed with mercury and electrified. A color intrinsically agreeable to the human heart, and the more exquisite for being the chromatic opposite of the neon-orange sky. Sometimes when my concentration wanders, the scene slips into two dimensions. A composition blocked into thirds. Across the middle, a black band—the hills—without depth or texture. A jagged black crack between the two luminous regions, sky and water. An allegory of night: the dark between the day that’s done and the day that’s coming.

The crack widens, and I fall into it.

All night, the breeze holds steady. All night, the tent walls pulse, and a half-dozen zipper pulls tinkle like a carillon of tiny bells.

Fifteenmile River

It’s a warm, blue-sky day. There is just the odd friendly looking cloud here and there. Puffs of white that boost the blue and tweak the composition to please a painter’s eye. T-shirt weather. Even my life vest is too warm. A mild upriver breeze tousles the leaves of the aspen, and they shiver their silvery undersides, flashing gray-green-gray-green, a thousand flashes a second. Trembling. Shuddering. Quivering. Quaking aspen. Populus tremuloides. The most widely distributed tree in North America. The only tree in these woods you will also find in Mexico. Fast-growing and short-lived, it’s kind of the reckless teenager of tree society.

Just around a broad bend and three miles below the Chandindu, the Fifteenmile River emerges almost undetectably from the Ogilvie Mountains and seeps into the north-flowing Yukon. Today it does, anyway. But if the rocks hereabouts could talk, they might tell a different story. For Allejandra Duk-Rodkin, who is a Chilean-born, Russian-educated Canadian geologist—and who is, perforce, good with languages—the rocks do talk. They say that millions of years ago the Yukon flowed the other way. For two million years, it flowed south into the Gulf of Alaska, probably debouching somewhere northwest of Juneau. And the headwaters of the paleo-Yukon, according to Duk-Rodkin, was this unprepossessing little stream opposite me. Upriver from this point, prior to about three million years ago, the Fifteenmile River was the Yukon.

I met Duk-Rodkin once in Fairbanks, along with fellow Canadian geologist Rene Barendregt. Duk-Rodkin is an energetic and voluble middle-aged woman with short black hair and bright, dark eyes that shine when she is having fun. For her, revealing the solutions to geologic puzzles is clearly fun. In 1996 and 1997, she says, she and colleagues followed a hunch and went searching up the Fifteenmile for old gravelly terraces—floodplains, essentially, of the ancient Yukon River. Most of Duk-Rodkin’s searching took place from her office, as she is more an expert interpreter of aerial photographs than a field geologist. Perhaps because terrace remnants present a hilly topography today—having been weathered, eroded, and covered with wind-blown silt for millions of years—other investigators had not found them. But using aerial photos first, and a helicopter second, she tested the most terrace-like features in the hills here and found what she was looking for: old river terraces stepping down the Fifteenmile River and away to the south—that is, up the main channel of the Yukon River. The farther south she found them, the lower were the terraces’ elevations (from six hundred seventy meters high at the mouth of the Fifteenmile, to four hundred sixty meters at the mouth of the Stewart River), proving, Duk-Rodkin says, that the Yukon once flowed the other way.

Where the Indian River joins the Yukon, she also found bits of argillite, a form of shale found in the Ogilvie Mountains, north of Dawson. But the Indian River joins the Yukon south of the Ogilvies, putting the found argillite upstream from its source. Upstream today, but downstream eons ago when the Yukon transported it. Yet another clue came from a core drilled into the Yukon Flats, a ten-thousand-square-mile catchment below Circle where an ancient lake once existed. Here sediments consisted of silt and clay until about three million years ago, when gravels appear. It marks a change from lake to river.

A RIVER IS MATHEMATICS come alive. Liquid logic. A vector plotting the sum and total of all the forces acting on the surface of the earth—insolation and gravity, tectonics and topography, climate and vegetation. One of the amazing things about a river, says Duk-Rodkin’s colleague Barendregt, is that it responds to external stimuli like a sentient thing. If the main channel drops, the side tributaries cut their way down to it, reestablishing equilibrium. If the main channel is high, the side creeks accrete, or fill in sediment until the levels are in balance again. So, when a glacier in the late Pliocene (between 2.9 and 2.6 million years ago) pushed its way out of these mountains and across the south-flowing Yukon, damming it, the river backed up, hunted for a chink, and wiggled through. Like many a subsequent renegade, it escaped to the north.

This glacier came down the valley of the Fifteenmile River. And when the dammed water spilled out to the northwest, it carved a canyon. The deepening channel established a new, north-flowing drainage that survived the melting of the ice dam. These high hills I see on either side of the Yukon, stretching away downriver from the Fifteenmile toward Alaska, are the now-rounded walls of that canyon. “The most incredible thing is that the Yukon River is incised in the northern part of the Dawson Range,” says Duk-Rodkin. The Tintina Trench nearby to the east would have been a more logical channel for the river, as it was lower and made of softer material. But because it was filled with ice, the river couldn’t follow the Trench, she says. The Yukon ambled north and, like a runaway hopping a freight, jumped aboard the Kwikhpak, as paleogeographers now call the ancient river. They rolled all the way to the Bering Sea. Meanwhile, tectonic forces lifted up what is now the Wrangell-St. Elias Mountains, cutting off the old southern exit and tilting the Canadian portion of the Yukon until it spilled into Alaska. Voila: the modern river.

Halfway House

Twenty-six miles below Dawson, on the left side, a high grassy bank is growing up in brush. On this site Percy DeWolfe built his Halfway House. An archival photo in Rourke’s book shows a trim cabin, with Percy standing on the porch alongside three of his smiling girls in identical starched white jumpers. Another photo taken by Rourke, perhaps in the mid-1980s, shows it cockeyed, with the roof caved in. Today it is a pile of boards in an open grave, the remains of the structure having collapsed into the cellar hole.

DeWolfe and a partner built the place in 1901 as a base for their fishing, woodcutting, and freighting operations. He may have grown hay, too. In the 1920s and 1930s, he ran a fur farming business. But mainly, Percy DeWolfe carried the mail. From 1915 to 1950, the “Iron Man of the Yukon” ran his route between Dawson and Eagle. Besides a team of big, 100-pound huskies, he kept two horses to pull sleds. In the course of thirty-five years on the trail between Dawson and Eagle, DeWolfe drowned five pairs of horses. Running on the frozen Yukon River, the horses sometimes broke through the ice and perished, but each time Percy managed to escape with his own life and walk to the next cabin. Once he saw three horses and a sled get sucked under the ice and swallowed up by the Yukon. Still, he managed to save not only himself but also the mail. He walked into Dawson. It wasn’t a much safer proposition during the boating season, especially because he would push the seasonal limits. One year, in mid-October, with the river building up ice along the shore, he flipped his canoe and lost the mail near this spot. The shore-fast ice prevented him from climbing out, and he only just managed to do so before the near-freezing water sapped his strength. After a while, Percy made the summer mail runs in thirty-foot boats with twenty-five-horsepower marine motors. But one fall, as he was trying to squeeze one more run out of the season, the river clogged up with ice. He had to abandon his boat at Fanning Creek and make his way upriver on foot. When he reached the bluff just below Forty Mile, he traversed the icy face of it in stocking feet so he wouldn’t slip. But he did slip and fell a hundred feet. “Dazed but no bones broken,” says one account. When the sternwheelers took over summer mail service, DeWolfe continued to use his boats for freighting and hauling passengers. But in 1951, when he was seventy-four, the airplane—air mail—put an end to DeWolfe’s career as a mail carrier. He died the same year.

Still today you will hear people in Eagle say, “When Percy carried the mail, it took four days from Dawson to Eagle, regardless of the weather. Now it takes twice as long.” Eagle is just one hundred miles away to the northwest, but the Canadian and U.S. postal services will send a letter mailed between the two points an extra three thousand miles on a great tour of the Pacific Northwest. First, it will head off in a direction exactly opposite to its destination, fourteen hundred miles via Whitehorse and Vancouver to Seattle. Then it will turn around and head back north, fifteen hundred miles via Anchorage to Fairbanks, before finally traveling east two hundred fifty miles to Eagle. Of course, the letter sits for a bit in each of the five intermediate cities en route. As a test, before I left Dawson I sent a postcard to a friend in Eagle. Ten days. It is a marvel and a measure of how far we’ve come that the technological innovations of airplanes, computers, and mechanical sorting devices—not to mention the developments in “human resource management,” like team-building exercises and motivation seminars—have resulted in a mail service two-and-a-half-times slower than that delivered by Percy DeWolfe one hundred years earlier by dog team.

Cassiar Creek

No boat is tied up where Cassiar Creek spills musically into the Yukon, and where Quebec native Cor Guimond built a home in 1976. It was named in the 1880s by miners who had worked the Cassiar District in the Stikine River country of British Columbia. No one ever found gold in paying quantities here, though the valley was once the focus of a stampede. It seems a Dawson miner known as Nigger Jim, who was actually a white man, set out for this creek in the middle of the night, in the middle of winter, in the middle of a cold snap that bottomed out at sixty degrees below zero. Jim had made a fortune on the Klondike, so rumors began to fly when he started acting as if he’d tumbled onto a strike. Quietly, people got their gear in order. It was about eleven o’clock on the night of January 10, 1899, when Jim put down his glass at the Aurora Saloon, climbed on his dogsled, and pointed the team downriver.

Fifty sleds followed him into the night, with more on foot behind. Jim led all on an anything-but-merry, hundred-mile chase, first to Cassiar Creek and then up the valley and over the hills to a most unlikely spot where he staked a claim. Only when the exhausted stampeders had staked claims and returned to Dawson did the word go around that the whole thing was a hoax. Meanwhile, several men suffered severe frostbite, one losing both feet. Some say Jim had bought a map from an old sourdough. Others figure it was his way of commenting on Dawson’s susceptibility to rumor. Quite likely it was the sort of perversity that sometimes stands in for humor when it’s sixty below and dark and nothing much else is going on.

 

CASSIAR CREEK has not proved to be the end of the rainbow for Cor Guimond, either. I have missed him this trip, as I missed him the last time. But I talked to him once on the phone. After finishing college with a degree in agriculture and mining technology, he came out to the Yukon. But he came to trap. His uncles were trappers. They had taught him the craft from the age of five, as soon as he was big enough to set a small trap. When he arrived in the Dawson area in 1974, he discovered his other great passion, dog mushing. The two activities fit well together and suggested a third: fishing to feed the dogs. Guimond established a fish camp here at Cassiar Creek and liked the place so much he spent most of twenty years here, full time.

But in Canada, the government tightly regulates who can trap. The rules allow trapping only by a registered concessionaire or by his assistant. Each concessionaire is given the exclusive use of an area, and he can renew his concession for life for about ten dollars a year. Some do that, even if they do not trap seriously. Guimond worked on various lines in the area as an assistant trapper, but when a concession opened up, the game warden, with whom Cor did not see eye to eye, passed him over. Eventually, he was able to buy a trapline above Dawson at the Sixtymile River. Upriver, the country is better for trapping with a dog team because the terrain is less steep and has more trails. Cassiar Creek remained a better base for his fishing operations, though, because there are more good eddies and fishwheel sites around here than upriver. So Guimond and his new wife Agata have been hauling their household and twenty dogs back and forth seasonally by boat. The dogs are so used to the drill that Agata can turn them all loose, and they will run down the bank and jump into the boat, where Cor clips them into place on short chains. But with ten years of disastrous fish runs, some summers Cor did not make the trip. Today a piece of plywood propped up on the bank reads “For Sale.”

 

THERE ARE THREE good-sized and nicely built log cabins here. One has a loft and a covered porch with burled spruce columns. A note posted there invites travelers to stay in the last cabin. It’s too early for me to stop, but I partake of the place. There is a blue bench positioned so that its occupant can take in the view and catch the sun, which is just what I do. Someone has tacked a plywood heart on the bench. Blue birdhouses for the swallows sway atop high spruce poles. Cassiar Creek gurgles behind the harmonic shushing of birch leaves tossing in the breeze. Rose hips, ripe and heavy, bend their stems and bob in the sun. But for all its lovely serenity, the place has a melancholic air. You feel a void at the stomach. The three cabins here, but they are as forsaken as the tumbled-in ruins of Percy DeWolfe’s Halfway House. There’s a story behind the joyful little heart on this bench. But a visitor can only wonder what it might be.

 

I REMEMBER GUIMOND sitting one winter’s night at the table at Slaven’s Roadhouse—one hundred sixty-odd miles downriver—when he came through on the Yukon Quest Sled Dog Race. He is a solid man, not tall, with fingers thick as sausages. He had a creased, stub-bled face that showed some mileage. Not highway miles, either. Not even gravel road miles, but trail miles. I guess I noted the fingers and face because that was all the flesh that could be seen. He must have sat for an hour eating at the table, but he did not remove his big green parka with its glossy wolverine ruff, nor his beaver hat and headlamp. He just sat hunched over a bowl of moose stew in the lantern light, his back to the woodstove. In its essentials, the scene was not different from a thousand other nights that the roadhouse had seen. Roadhouses were built all along the trail system, usually a day’s journey apart. They offered a bunk for two dollars and wild game stew for another two dollars. Guimond could have been a mail carrier or a trapper or a missionary, stopping to give his dogs a rest on a cold night, to crumble a little hardtack into a bowl of Frank Slaven’s slumgullion, to listen to the gossip of who was where on the trail.

Looking at Guimond from the back dispelled the illusion. Across the table from him sat a brace of intently focused Quest paparazzi who had flown in to cover the race, landing in a bush plane on skis on the river ice out front. There were two photographers (one Swiss, one American) and a two-man Japanese film crew. The photographers were each peering through a camera while holding aloft a flash apparatus. From his shoulder, the video cameraman aimed what looked like an electronic bazooka while his soundman pointed a long tubular microphone. Six wicked-looking black instruments pointed at a man who’d just stepped out of the nineteenth century. When the Canadian spoke, which was almost not at all, it was to the Swiss in French.

He can’t really afford it, as he has no sponsor, but Cor plans to run the Yukon Quest again in 2006. The Quest is billed as “The Toughest Sled Dog Race in the World,” and that is probably the truth. It borrows its route from many historic gold rush and mail trails, one thousand miles between Fairbanks, Alaska, and Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, with the two towns alternating as hosts for the start and finish. Several rules make the Quest very different from the more famous Iditarod Sled Dog Race, which runs eleven hundred miles from Anchorage to Nome. A musher may start the Quest with a maximum of fourteen dogs (compared to sixteen in the Iditarod) and must finish with at least eight (compared to a minimum of five in the Iditarod). Consequently, an Iditarod musher can burn through better than two-thirds of his dog team, while the Quest musher must keep the majority of his starting team healthy enough to finish. In addition, the Quest has half the number of checkpoints, meaning that the distances between them are about twice as far on average. One stretch between two Quest checkpoints is more than two hundred miles long. This means that more dog feed and camping gear must be hauled, which in turn means the loads are heavier, the sleds stouter, and the pace slower. All this makes for a race that is harder on the musher but results in more humane treatment of the dogs. Cor has run the Quest six times, finishing as high as fourth. Agata ran the race in 2004 and placed seventeenth as a rookie.

Another dog race goes through Guimond’s front yard as well: the Percy DeWolfe Memorial Mail Race. Run since 1977, it follows the Yukon from Dawson to Eagle and back, with a brief six-hour mandatory layover in Eagle. The winner covers two hundred ten miles in less than a day’s running time. Guimond is always a threat to win this race. He might have done so the year he finished second by two minutes had he not used a big, seventy-pound Quest sled.

Hammer Bar/Sunset Creek

Gray clouds slink in over the hills from every direction, it seems, but are never quite upon me. It is as if I am towing a small high-pressure zone down the river, a spotlight of sunlight tracking my shuffle across the stage. Nine miles below Cassiar Creek on the right bank I see the mouth of Sunset Creek opposite a low mud island called Hammer Bar on my map. I land below and bust through the willows until I hit a trail and soon find a tiny log cabin. Inside, it’s little bigger than a king-size bed: about six feet wide by eight feet long, maybe six feet tall at the ridge. Plucked out of these woods and set down in a suburban back yard, it would be instantly recognizable as a playhouse. But this diminutive structure does not humor some precious notion. Here, it addresses a few common imperatives of the North. Limited money. Limited time. Short logs are easier to handle. A small space is easier to heat. And when the temperature hits 50 or 60 degrees below zero, that means something. As a stopover on such a night, it is a sanctuary.

Fortymile River and Forty Mile

A few minutes later, rounding a bend that takes me from heading slightly south of west to heading slightly east of north, I see a pointy hill centered in the notch of a valley. Frederick Schwatka noted it in 1883 as marking the mouth of the largest Yukon River tributary for several hundred miles. The local Natives called it the “Zit-zen-duk,” which anglicized is the lovely and assonant “Creek of Leaves.” But tin-eared Schwatka, the first man to explore the Yukon River from headwaters to mouth, and who renamed practically everything he encountered along the way, replaced the Athabascan name with “Cone Hill River.” Happily, it didn’t stick. The early miners called it the Fortymile in consequence of its approximate distance below Fort Reliance.

The town of Forty Mile, on the left bank just above the mouth of the Fortymile River, is a genuine ghost town. Log buildings with doors and windows agape line a riverbank now choked with willows. There’s a two-story Mounties’ barracks and a log cabin Anglican church. A huge, high-ceilinged shop is still fairly plumb and level, but people with more interest in lumber than history are deconstructing it in stages. Someone has chainsawed out every other collar tie, the horizontal board that makes a rigid triangle of a pair of rafters and keeps the nongabled walls from collapsing outward. And they’ve removed the siding to the point where the walls will go one day when there’s a snow load on the roof and the wind kicks up. Oddly, there is an excellent barrel stove with stout legs and a welded cooktop sitting unmolested here. Odder still, it’s hooked up to a stovepipe. There are four stumps set around it, as if the boys from the shop still settle here for their lunch break, to light their pipes and swap a few lies. But it’s a curious installation because the entire near side of the building consists of bare studs sheathed with nothing but the great beyond.

The Fortymile River owes its place in history to the fact that the first coarse gold in the Yukon watershed was found here in 1886. Miners didn’t want to fool with gold dust when they could find the stuff that “rattles in the pan,” as they said. The find launched the first Yukon stampede; established the Yukon as a major mining district; and built this town, the first in the upper Yukon. It all started when Howard Franklin and his partner Harry Madison lined their boat up the Fortymile at the suggestion of the trader Arthur Harper. On the evening of September 7, 1886, Franklin was off by himself when he pulled a shovelful of gravel out of a crevasse in exposed bedrock along the river’s edge. Panning this, he found about half an ounce of coarse gold. The code of the prospector required he pass the word, so in October, Franklin and Madison poled their boat one hundred miles upstream to tell the boys at Stewart River. The hundred or so miners digging thereabouts were averaging eight hundred dollars a year, which was considered good pay. Notwithstanding, the news of coarse gold on the Fortymile substantially emptied the Stewart River creeks.

The traders Jack McQuestin and Arthur Harper had just that summer abandoned Fort Reliance and built their new trading post at the mouth of the Stewart, sixty miles farther upriver. For the second time in a year, they shrugged, abandoned their buildings, and followed on the heels of the fickle miners, this time to rebuild at Forty Mile. It turned out that the early Fortymile miners would average eight hundred dollars a year, the same as they had been making at Stewart River.

It was here on the Fortymile that a man named Fred Hutchinson developed the technique of sinking a shaft during the winter. He started by building a fire on the ground big enough to burn all night. In morning he shoveled away the ashes and what dirt had thawed, then built a new fire in the depression. He continued that way, deepening the shaft in stages, day by day. Before that, the miners used to let the summer sun do the work, scraping away the few inches that thawed each day. But it might take the better part of a summer to reach bedrock and the gold-bearing gravels that lay just on top of it. And it meant the men were idle over the long winter. Occasionally, a hole would collect water due to subsurface aquifers. By morning, the upper several inches of this water would have frozen in the cold air. Hutchinson found that he could use his ax to chip away at the layer of ice, being careful not to punch through to the liquid water below. If he broke through, his hole would fill up again with water, back to the top of ice. But if he was careful and stopped short of chipping all the way through the ice, then the next day the ice would have frozen deeper, and he could chip down a bit more, again stopping before breaking through to water. In this way, he could force the freezing deeper and deeper, until he got past the aquifer. Then he could continue to burn his way down to bedrock.

Apparently, the prospectors ribbed Hutchinson as he toiled away during the winter of 1887 on Franklin Gulch. But his shaft kept getting deeper. And he noticed that he didn’t need to shore up the hole with timbers as the miners did in summer. The below-freezing temperatures kept the permafrost walls rock-hard and stable. Fortunately, bedrock is not very deep in Fortymile country. Once he reached it, Hutchinson began to “drift” laterally, hauling the excavated gravel up to the surface in the usual way, with a bucket and windlass. But without water to sluice it, he simply heaped up the gravel in a dump pile where it froze hard. Each day, or a few times a day, he would take samples from the face of his tunnel. He would pan these samples with a little water inside his cabin, and in this way he could keep track of the pay and adjust his drift to follow a streak. Hutchinson stockpiled the gold-bearing gravels in a separate area from the barren overburden. By spring, when the other miners were just starting their shafts, he had a sizable pile of gravel ready to sluice and a lot of converts to his innovative methods.

With regular steamboat service in the summers, the settlement at the mouth of the Fortymile River grew to more than three hundred inhabitants. There were ninety log cabins; half a dozen saloons, restaurants, and hotels; a library; and even an opera house (however, of this establishment one writer notes that “the entertainment provided by the camp’s hurdy-gurdy girls was something other than its name suggested”). The town was well within Canadian territory—forty-five Yukon River miles inside the border—but it was an American town. The flagpoles flew the American flag. American steamboats brought supplies from American ports and took out mail bearing American stamps. There was no formal law, no sheriff, no top-down administration of justice until the North West Mounted Police arrived in 1894, just two years before everyone abandoned Forty Mile and stampeded to the Klondike.

What kept the community functioning was a sort of code. Pierre Berton, a Canadian chronicler of the gold rush who grew up in Dawson and whose father came over the Chilkoot Pass in 1898, writes about it in his book The Klondike Fever. Forty Mile thrived on an unwritten law grounded in “a curious mixture of communism and anarchy,” he says.

 

By the peculiar etiquette of the mining camp, a man who bought a drink bought for everyone in sight, though such a round might cost a hundred dollars; while a teetotaler who refused a drink offered a deadly insult—unless he accepted a fifty-cent cigar in its place. Hooch, like everything else, was paid for in gold dust, and the prospector who flung his poke upon the bar always performed the elaborate gesture of turning his back while the amount was weighed out, since to watch this ritual was to impugn the honesty of the bartender.

 

A true-blue sourdough was open and trusting and generous. He never locked his cabin. It was understood that any traveler could enter an empty cabin, eat, and spend the night. The only expectation was that he should make sure that he left tinder and kindling and wood, ready to light, so a man in trouble might save himself. (The hands refuse to function when they are very cold, and it can be difficult to grasp a hatchet—let alone to pluck and strike a match.) If a prospector had a bit of luck, he told one and all the location of good ground. A group of early miners wintering on an island at the mouth of the Fortymile elected to stake claims of only 300 feet, instead of the 1,500 feet permitted, so as to allow room for latecomers. Another magnanimous practice on Forty Mile allowed prospectors who had not found enough pay on their claims by the first of August to dig on someone else’s paying claim until they took out enough gold to buy their next year’s outfit. And a prospector never speculated in food, but sold a needy man food at cost.

Occasionally, selfish or lazy or misanthropic men ignored these conventions. A couple hundred miles downriver, in the Circle mining district, Deadwood Creek was known as Hog-Um Creek because of the greedy way that early arrivals staked it all. And a miner’s meeting once convened in Circle City at the Pioneer Saloon when a black prostitute brought suit against a white miner for failing to pay her for boarding his dog team. The jury deliberated in the saloon’s storeroom, where they, as the foreman later wrote, “drunk at least two gallons of the very best and all staggered out to report.” Not only did they throw out the case and fine the woman court costs, but they had arranged for the dog team to be taken from her property while the trial was going on. Finding the team gone, the woman refused to pay the judgment. In response, the jury moved to sell her house, intending to “spend it all with her.” Eventually, “wiser heads stopped this idea,” said the foreman, but the woman was essentially forced out of town.

In its heyday, Forty Mile was home to a population that may have reached a seasonal peak of 1,000. But it emptied almost totally in less than three days in August 1896 as the miners rushed to the Klondike. Some, finding the good ground on the Klondike already taken up, returned. But Dawson City overshadowed Forty Mile thereafter. Ten years after the Klondike strike, the town limped along, sustaining a two-man RCMP detachment, a store, a roadhouse, the customs house, and the Anglican church. The police and the missionaries finally left in the 1930s. Bill Coulter, an old French Canadian miner and trapper who hung on after everyone else pulled out, was Forty Mile’s last resident. In 1958, he sent a little raft down the Yukon with a note saying he guessed he was about done in. An Eagle resident found the note, and Coulter spent his final few weeks looked after by the nuns in the Dawson hospital.

 

PERHAPS, THOUGH, Coulter is not Forty Mile’s last resident. In a clearing, I see a little cabin, the fixed-up former store, where folks named Sebastian and Shelly sometimes stay. I gather they are informal caretakers, that they live here in winter but work up in Dawson during the summer. They come by to keep an eye on things and to beat back the brush so the floaters can see something of the buildings. Their cabin is open, and a note invites travelers to come in, sign the ledger, make tea, spend the night. I’m tempted to do that, actually. It’s looking like rain, and this snug little cabin—with its checked tablecloth, oil lamp, and quilty bunk—is damned inviting. But I can’t bring myself to intrude on this couple’s homey nest. I wish they had been around today, though. Then I could have met one hundred percent of Forty Mile’s population and fifty percent of the winter population of the entire Yukon River drainage for a hundred miles between Dawson and Eagle. I should meet the rest of the population downriver.

Before I get back to my canoe, I hear her eerie thrumming, hear it for a good while before I see the upriver-bound Yukon Queen. She cruises by with her sleek, swept-back lines reminiscent of absolutely nothing associated with this country. I’m not sure how defensible my reaction is. Would I rather see steam-fired sternwheelers out in the channel? Hell, yes. And the denuded hillsides that were the consequence of their operation? Well, no. Still, the Queen seems to push its way into quiet company, like a noisy tourist charging up the aisle in an old cathedral where local people come to pray. I linger out of sight in the willows until she passes. I just don’t care to be a prop in anyone’s tableau. I’ve seen the Queen’s brochure: “Wave to rugged homesteaders as you pass their stakes.” (A wave in another sense is what people on the river get, as the boat’s wake rolls dangerously toward them and tears up fishing gear.) “Today the river is a magnet for those who love wild, untamed scenery virtually untouched by the hand of man.” Without irony, the advertisement invites you, at one hundred and ten U.S. dollars each way, to streak through the “untouched” country in custom-upholstered reclining chairs, behind oversized viewing windows, on a four-million-dollar, one-hundred-four-passenger, high-speed catamaran sightseeing vessel with full-service galley, snack bar, captain’s lounge, and gift shop.

But then, I must acknowledge that the slow, stately, and steam-powered sternwheelers were in some instances as palatial as the grand packets of the Mississippi. With observation salons and plush dining rooms outfitted with chandeliers and Persian rugs, the boats must have been mighty luxurious in their day.

One pull, and the old Evinrude starts and gurgles. I poke up the Fortymile a little, just to have a look at it, then swing around and slip out into the Yukon, chugging down a northeast reach.

THIRTEEN MILES BELOW Forty Mile, Night Island looms aptly, offering four-star luxury: a sandy point on the downriver end, graciously littered with driftwood, and an upriver breeze dialed for bug control. To a mammoth bowl of Zatarain’s New Orleans Style Red Beans and Rice I add a couple of juicy moose links, nicely blackened over the fire, then cut up and mixed into the pot. For several days my dinners will center on sausage. This is partly due to the obvious ascendancy of this food, but also because, without refrigeration, one eats the fresh meat first until it is gone. For dessert: boiled coffee and a couple trick-or-treat-sized chocolate bars. At times like this, when things are perfect, especially if we are sprawled in the dirt somewhere, a friend of mine will say, “Oh, I feel sorry for the rich people tonight.” Finishing up a little after 11:00, I manage to get the camp squared away while dancing between the first few rain drops that descend from ranks of dark clouds now marching in over the western hills—great gray troops scattering silver coins to us street urchins below. As I duck into the dry, snug tent, I find that tonight I feel sorry for all the salad people. It doesn’t seem fair. Me with a three-pound bolus of honest chow radiating well-being within me; they, making do with a meal of leaves. We must do something nice for the salad people, I resolve, next chance we get.

 

IN THE MORNING it is still raining when I wake up, so I lie abed thinking about the old-time sourdough and his code—his honesty and generosity and communal spirit. I’m thinking about when I first came to Alaska thirty-three years ago and stopped in Ketchikan and saw the people’s easy way with money. I was staying on a small boat with a fellow I met on the ferry, a welder named Pat Haley, and an Indian kid whose name I forget. One day the three of us went off to buy showers. We stopped at a little store to pick up some things like soap and toothpaste, and whoever reached the counter first paid for everything. I tried to give him my share, but he waved it away. Then the other fellow bought the showers and likewise wouldn’t accept my money. I wasn’t at all used to this, and I began to feel like a freeloader. I was accustomed to trading rounds in bars, but apparently the Alaskans handled all transactions this way and couldn’t be bothered with keeping accounts.

I remember something like the same thing going on during the pipeline days in Fairbanks in the mid-1970s, when the big construction boom hit, and a table full of total strangers would buy drinks for your table too. Of course, in those days everybody was awash in money. Now, the only vestige of this brotherhood I notice is that people who have been here a while will almost always stop when it’s cold out and they see a vehicle by the side of the road. The old-timers will roll down their windows and say, “Have you got everything you need?” The young ones will say, “I’ve got a cell phone. . . .”

But the big Klondike gold rush of 1898 must have radically changed the ethos of the pre-Klondike Yukon miner. Maybe 30,000 stampeders, ninety percent of them Americans, poured into the country in one of the more singular instances of mass hysteria in human history. If the experience at Forty Mile was illustrative of the brotherhood and the general competence of the old-time prospectors, the Dawson scene was a monument to foolishness and cupidity. For one thing, hordes of the stampeders were wholly ignorant of the rigors—and the dangers—they faced. Tappan Adney joined them as a special correspondent for Harper’s Weekly. Adney, an American with considerable experience in the woods of New Brunswick, landed in Dyea with packhorses, climbed the Chilkoot Trail, built a boat at Lake Lindeman, spent the winter of 1897-1898 in Dawson, and altogether was sixteen months in residence along the stampeders’ trail. His book, The Klondike Stampede, is a thoroughgoing, almost anthropological, firsthand account of the madness. He writes that a certain “man of means as well as leisure,” who was not a trader, had brought along a case of thirty-two pairs of moccasins, a case of pipes, a case of shoes, two Irish setters, a bull pup, and a lawn-tennis set. The stampeders came from their desks and counters, he said, and were unaccustomed to hard labor. They were all armed. A horse packer told Adney, “There are more inexperienced men to the square foot than in any place I have ever been to . . . they will be shooting themselves.” No one could be trusted. “We have already learned to place no reliance on any person’s word,” wrote Adney. “Everyone seems to have lost his head and cannot observe or state facts.” A mining engineer said, “I have never seen men behave as they do here. They have no more idea of what they are doing than the horse has.”

One conversation Adney memorialized seems emblematic of Dawson at the height of the Klondike stampede:

Among the throng there was none who interested me more than a tall figure I used to see from day to day. He wore a pair of deer-skin pants fringed on the outer seam, a loose blue-flannel shirt, belted in, and a wide-brimmed gray hat, from beneath which locks as soft as a girl’s straggled to his shoulders . . . [He] began talking to Mr. Hannon. The conversation proceeded for a while, touching matters of general interest. At length, and there was note of sadness in his voice, he looked squarely in Mr. Hannon’s eyes and he said, “You don’t remember me?” “No, I can’t say that I do,” replied Mr. Hannon. “Why don’t you know me? I’m the barber, across from your place in Seattle.”

 

Pierre Berton offers another glimpse of the town filling up with stampeders in the spring of 1898: “Day after day for more than a month the international parade of boats continued. . . . They brought sundowners, shantymen, sodbusters and shellbacks, buckaroos, Gaels, Kanakas, Afrikanders, and Suvanese. They brought wife-beaters, lady-killers, cuckolded husbands, disbarred lawyers, dance-hall beauties, escaped convicts, remittance men, card sharps, Hausfraus, Salvation Army lasses, ex-buffalo-hunters, scullions, surgeons, ecclesiastics, gun-fighters, sob sisters, soldiers of fortune and Oxford dons.”

Forty Mile was none of that. And though overgrown and falling down and hauled off and eroded away, it remains like a lesson unlearned. It hopes to remind us that years before the big Klondike strike, the country had been opened up by a hardy and competent class of pioneers who installed riverboat service, trading posts, roadhouses, mail delivery, law officers, and missionaries; that the early camps were less gaudy and rip-roaring than the Dawson scene, and far less populated with greenhorn stampeders; and that the whole society was supported by an ethical structure, a sourdough code that valued honesty, openness, generosity, and vigor. So what, I wonder, does it mean that Forty Mile lies amoldering, and the side creeks along the Yukon are empty, while Dawson survives, serving up cultural false fronts for the tourist trade, like its celebrated cancan dancers, who were never part of Dawson’s nightlife until the idea occurred to tourism promoters in the 1960s.

Coal Creek

Last night I motored past Coal Creek, five miles below Forty Mile, where Tim Gerberding and James Bouton had a camp some years ago. No one is there now, but I met Gerberding once in Dawson. In 1972, he and Bouton partnered up and established home cabins near Coal Creek. Tim, a native of Wisconsin, came to the Yukon in 1971 after finishing college in New Mexico. He spent seventy dollars building his cabin. Somehow, the partners ended up with the best fishing site for hundreds of miles around. Their eddy at Cliff Creek is said to be more than a hundred feet deep, and they hauled out fish by the thousands. Some people call the road to the mouth of the Fortymile River the “Tim and James Road” because it seems to have been built largely to accommodate all the fish they produced. Tim married, had children, and when his kids became school-aged, he and his family moved to Dawson. He went to work as executive director for the Tr’ondek Gwech’in Tribe in Dawson. James moved to Dawson as well.

Not quite a century before Tim and James showed up, prospectors had located coal seams twelve miles up the creek. Construction of a mining operation began around the turn of the nineteenth century, and a coal-fired power plant operating on the creek supplied electricity to the Klondike gold dredges via thirty-five miles of power line. The mine also served the sternwheelers via a narrow-gauge railway that hauled coal down Coal Creek to the Yukon. A ton of coal brought six dollars at the creek mouth, ten dollars in Dawson. Construction of a hydroelectric powerhouse just outside Dawson on the Klondike River around 1910 put the coal-fired plant out of business.

 

A HUNDRED YEARS AGO, thousands of people bustled along this river. Today, it is a ghost river connecting ghost towns. Dawson is a tiny remnant of the glory days when twenty-five or thirty thousand people resided there or on the nearby creeks. Moosehide is abandoned. Fort Reliance has disappeared. Gone are the Indian camps of Nuklako and Twelvemile Village. Forty Mile is a ghost town. On the American side, the town of Seventymile is no more; Nation City is gone; Star City, Ivy City, Independence, Coal Creek, all gone. Just the road-connected towns of Eagle and Circle survive. Circle’s population is ninety-nine. Eagle is home to 129, while sixty-eight Han Indians live just up the road in Eagle Village, formerly known as Klat-ol-klin or David’s Village.

Outside of these settlements, though, the people who lived out along the river are gone too. In the old days there were prospectors, trappers, freighters, mail carriers, and woodcutters. They all died off or moved away as the mines played out and the steamboats quit. To some extent, their places were taken up by young people in the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s who were interested in living beyond the towns, in the simple and old-time way. Now that cohort has dwindled to just about zero. In the ninety-three miles between Dawson and the U.S. border, there is only one full-time resident. Upriver from Dawson, it is the same story. Torrie Hunter of Yukon’s Department of Environment started working along the river in 1982. At that time, he says, perhaps a dozen households lived on the river above Dawson and below Fort Selkirk, a distance of one hundred seventy miles. Now there is only one full-time resident. It puts me in mind of something the Irish play-wright J. M. Synge heard from a peasant in the west of Ireland a century ago, after English repression and famine forced a great diaspora: “Now all this country is gone lonesome and bewildered, and there’s no man knows what ails it.”

Old Man and Old Woman Rocks

The morning’s rain has freshened the air and lent a bit of sparkle to the world. Motoring along in shirtsleeves, it seems like I can actually taste the air on my skin, like I’m drinking it through my bare arms, breathing it through my pores and picking up something of its spruce-strained, river-moistened flavor. Motorcycle riders know what I’m talking about. It’s like you need the weather—breeze, drizzle, sunshine, snowflakes—to be on your skin, or you don’t feel like you’re breathing.

Just below my Night Island camp is “a remarkable-looking rock,” according to Schwatka, “standing conspicuously in a flat level bottom of the river on the eastern side, and very prominent in its isolation.” He named it, possibly with tongue in cheek, for a French geographer called Roquette. Once again, the miners ignored Schwatka’s fusty appellation, preferring instead a translation of the Indian name, Old Woman Rock. Its counterpart on the left bank is called Old Man Rock. According to legend, a long-suffering old boy finally hauled off and walloped his nagging wife, who fetched up out in the flats. Then, to ensure his peace, he diverted the Yukon to flow between them.

 

I SEE A RUST-COLORED SPOT in a scree slope on the left bank and know it for the site where a giant beaver was killed. That’s what I heard in Dawson last spring from Louise Profeit LeBlanc, a tall, striking-looking First Nations woman from the Yukon Heritage Branch. She told several stories of Traveler (also known as Tu-cha-cho-ki, Sol-gee, and Beaverman), a hero who roamed the country in ancient times. One of his great deeds was to kill a giant beaver. Still today, says LeBlanc, when the old people see a brown spot of earth in a cut bank, they may say, “That’s where a giant beaver was killed.” Of course, cultural myths have all sorts of value and importance apart from the conveyance of empirical truths. But this story got me thinking about the fact that, during the Pleistocene, there were giant beavers in this country. Castoroides ohioensis was the size of a black bear, measuring eight feet in length and weighing more than four hundred pounds. Was it possible that this oral history account dated back that far, that there was an aspect of the traditional story that was literal scientific fact? I asked two anthropologists, Craig Mishler and Bill Simeone, who said they didn’t doubt for a minute that the story might date to the Pleistocene, that it transmitted a fact ten thousand years old. Louise LeBlanc says there is even a Native story to explain the downsizing of the giant animals who roamed this unglaciated refugium during the Ice Age. Traveler killed the animals’ parents and told the young animals, “That’s as big as you are going to be.”

Mel’s Camp

From a long way off, I can see a bright yellow riverboat just below Sharp Cape on the right bank. It has taken seventy miles of river travel below Dawson, but it looks like I am finally to encounter a resident human being. I know that the yellow boat belongs to Mel Besharah and that this is his fish camp. There is a commercial fishing opening right now, and as I get closer, I can see Mel’s net in the water in the eddy in front of his camp. I pull in above the net, and he comes down the cobbley beach to see who the heck I am. He is rugged-looking in a way that suggests a big man, and it takes a while to realize he is not above average in height or weight. He looks like he might have been a middle linebacker in high school who leaned-out after a couple of decades picking fish nets and trapping behind a dog team. He has dark brown hair that is beyond curly. It springs from his tanned face, thicker than sheepskin, upwelling in rosettes, like the boils in the Yukon. The bottom half of his head is covered with a curly brown beard that he keeps trimmed, making it easier to tell which side is up.

Mel says he was just about to knock off and fishes a couple of beers out of the ice in his fish tote and rolls a smoke. He says he came to the Yukon as a “white, suburban kid from Ottawa.” I ask about fishing. “I can’t stand not fishing when there’s an opening,” he says. Apparently he’s one of the lucky ones. With the fish runs declining in recent years, and the Alaskans taking the bulk of the run, people have had to look for regular jobs in town. So now, even when there’s an opening and the fish are in the river, the fishermen can’t get away from their jobs. “I work in construction with an old friend of mine,” says Mel with a chuckle, “and he’s well aware that if he tells me I can’t go fishing, then I’ll quit.”

“When I moved out here, there was probably a dozen different households along the river between Eagle and Dawson, year-round. Now there are three.” One neither traps nor fishes. The other fishes only. And though Mel is counting himself as one of the three, he does split his time on the river with time in town, where his family stays. He’s in town most of the summer, working at his construction job. In winter he traps the Fortymile country, but he spends some time in Dawson during that season too. It used to be that when Mel drove his dog team up to town, he could stop in at a number of places for a cup of tea and a warm-up. But these days there is nobody at all between the Fortymile and Dawson. “Now it’s a long, cold, lonely stretch in December, I’ll tell you that much.”

The reasons for the declining human population involve more than declining fish populations. “Canada is just in the throes of putting our Native land claims together,” he says. “And the Natives are sewing up large blocks of land and basically cutting the white man out. So unless you had a claim—if you’re white—to live in this region, I’d say before 1990, in that area, then you’re pretty much excluded.” In the mid- 1970s, when Mel arrived, it was possible to stake a small homesite and secure title to it. “Young people now—and I’ve met a few—that would like to move out into the bush and try the subsistence lifestyle, it’s simply out of the question. There’s not a chance in hell they can do it.”

The land claims agreement includes race-based regulations with regard to trapping as well. The government has assigned seventy percent of all trapping concessions to the local Native tribal entities. At the same time, and for reasons of their own, the Native people have been voting with their feet: for years they have moved steadily away from trapping and fishing and dog teams and toward the amenities of town life. Notwithstanding, the treaty mandates that when concessionaires wish to sell out, the local Native tribe is given the right of first refusal until such time as seventy percent of the concessions are held by Native people. In the Dawson area, the Tr’ondek Gwech’in tribal entity exercises these options whenever they are presented. Then the tribe tries to recruit one of its members to take the trapline. “All these traplines have been allocated to the Natives, but they don’t want them,” says Mel. Even with this regulation in place, Native-held traplines still amount to less than fifty percent. “So any white guy who wants to come in and wants to go fishing or trapping—forget it. It’s simply not available.”

Meanwhile, there are white assistant trappers who would like to acquire their own concessions, according to Torrie Hunter of the Yukon Department of Environment. But, he says, there are ways to skirt the regulation. Canadians have an impressive knack for “stick handling” around dicey problems. A white concession-holder can’t sell his trapline to another white—say, his assistant—but he can sell him a partnership in the business. Then, if (when) the senior partner decides to retire, the junior partner can buy out the senior partner. Basically, instead of a single-installment deal, it’s done in two installments. The law arches its eyebrow at the practice from one side of its face, and it winks from the other side. Everybody who sees trapping as culturally important in these Northern outposts agrees that it’s better to have trappers trapping than to let the practice disappear. If there isn’t sufficient Native interest, it’s better that the openings are filled with white trappers than that they go unfilled.

Lately, the fishing allocation is goofier still. A couple years ago, anticipating a low king salmon run and the likely closing of the commercial fishery, the fisheries agency asked the Natives to cut back on their fishing, while it paid other local commercial fishermen to fish. Then it gave the catch to the Native people. As part of the deal, the fishermen agreed to take Native kids along to teach them about salmon fishing. And again, everybody was happy.

Still, Mel thinks it’s too bad that the river people are disappearing. “People who are out there doing this kind of thing like what I’m doing, I think you’ve got to have people like that in society, just as a counterpoint.” But, as new people are blocked by government regulations, and with attrition of the established folk, their numbers approach zero. “We’re all getting older. And, you know, it’s a tough life. I’ve been pretty lucky to maintain my health. One of the guys got MS. Another fellow blew his back out. And some of them got married and had kids, and, you know, the bush life is not really suitable to some people in that—you can only do that kind of thing so long.”

It strikes Mel as a little strange that as well-meaning city folks work overtime devising regulations to reestablish Native subsistence lifeways, nonnative subsistence traditions are barely noticed. “Well, you know, I trap along here,” he says, waving his hand across the landscape to the south. “And so I see a lot of the country that people don’t see because I get back across those flats. And there’s trails back in there. There’s old cabins back there. In untold numbers. I mean, they’re all over the place. And there is a history back there that most people don’t really know about.” Mel has spoken with some emotion, and a sheepish look comes across his face, as if he’s suddenly found himself on someone else’s trapline. “OK. That’s enough,” he says, having reached his limit with my interview questions. “Time for more beer.”

 

FISH. SALMON. It is the most important animal in the Yukon River country. “Crucial to life on the river,” Mel had said. For a decade it seemed to be disappearing. Now it seems to be rebounding. King salmon (chinooks) are the cash crop, sold for human consumption. The smaller chum salmon are fuel. They’re like torpedoes of gasoline that motor themselves upriver each summer and fall to be gathered, stored, and later poured into the traditional conveyance of choice: dogs. Of all the animals utilized in a subsistence economy since time beyond memory, the salmon is the most important. It is an enormous quantity of biomass that annually delivers itself from the ocean to the interior regions. It can be counted on to be in predicted places at predicted times, year after year. It can be preserved relatively easily by simple drying in the open air. It is lightweight when dried and makes a highly portable, high-protein, hydratable food, perfect for traveling. Salmon permit dog teams, and dog teams permit general transportation and freighting, which greatly enhances a trapper’s range. Trapping success means cash, and cash buys what the country does not produce. So fish means flour and sugar and tea, kerosene and .30-.06 shells, and a flight to town to see the dentist.

Stan Zuray

A few hundred miles downriver, a fellow named Stan Zuray is working on the problem of assessing the strength of the Yukon salmon run. He is a fisherman, compact and rugged, with hair pulled back into a ponytail that, via the inevitable alchemy, is turning from straw to silver. His face is exactly as weather-beaten as you would expect after thirty years in the Alaska bush. Around the village of Tanana, Stan is known as a smart and tough trapper, fisherman, dog driver, and mechanic. He ran the Iditarod sled dog race about twenty years ago, and not until 2005 had anyone before or after placed higher on their first attempt (except when the race was brand new, of course). People say that he could have had eighth place instead of ninth, but he had been running with Don Honea, the veteran Native dog driver from Ruby, and Stan was content to have the elder cross the line first.

Stan likes working on mechanical things, and he shows so much flare for modifying and streamlining that he is as much inventor as mechanic. The fishwheel is one machine Stan has refined. It is a traditional device that has been catching fish on Interior Alaskan rivers for a century or so. Imagine a sort of waterwheel that turns on an axle mounted on a floating raft. Two opposing baskets pass through the water in a downstream direction, scooping up the migrating salmon swimming upstream. Also radiating from the axle are two paddles, located between the baskets such that they catch the current and keep the wheel turning during the moment when neither basket is in the water. When everything is working properly, it’s a brilliant contraption, constantly rotating, gently intercepting fish. As the basket rises in its rotation, the fish slide into a box beside the raft. And all without human effort. Theoretically. In practice, however, there’s a lot to do besides collecting the fish from the box and processing them. Driftwood can pile up and even jam the wheel. And the baskets need constant adjustment as the river level changes. When the river drops, they have to be raised relative to the raft so that they don’t hit the bottom but continue to sweep near the bottom, where the kings like to swim. If a basket hits bottom and stops, it might back up enough current to break the whole thing apart.

Stan changed the way the baskets are raised and lowered, and his method has been adopted by others all up and down the river for a hundred miles and more. But for all his mechanical wizardry, there was one machine that Stan never had much to do with. The computer. In fact, he had never even used a typewriter until the fall of 1999 when he pecked out a letter concerning trapping regulations on an old manual typewriter. He barely had time to gloat over his mastery of this nineteenth-century technology when the twenty-first century dawned, and a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist named, coincidentally enough, Underwood, (the manufacturer of the first typewriter) dragged him the rest of the way through the keyboard barrier. Stan had been running his fishwheel for the agency and had designed a 12-volt video recording system that spared the fish a lot of trauma. At the end of the season, Tevis Underwood asked Stan to put his innovative ideas down on paper for the Fish and Wildlife Service. He handed Stan a laptop computer with five hours of battery life, saying, “It’s your report. Go do it.” Stanley’s composition began with his name and address. Five hours later, when the battery ran out, he had added the word “Introduction.”

After a recharge, Stan managed to string a few sentences together. But there was one feature of the laptop that he found particularly irritating. It seemed only to be able to type capital letters. Except if he held down the shift key when, paradoxically, it produced a lowercase letter. It seemed completely backward, but what did he know. He plunked away for two hours, his left index finger continuously mashing down the shift key, while his right index finger hunted and pecked. Unless, of course, he needed a capital letter. Then he’d let go of the shift key, just for that one stroke. Finally, he decided there just had to be a better way, so he called up Bill Fliris, who probably knew more about computers than anyone in Tanana. Fliris wasn’t home, so Stan started to explain the problem to Bill’s young son Jesse. Before he got very far, the kid spoke two unfamiliar but exceedingly useful syllables: “caps lock.”

Stan wrote about how he’d modified his fishwheel for the Fish and Wildlife Service. Underwood had begun to notice that tagged fish tended to fare less well than untagged fish. Survival rates declined if the salmon were held in a “live box,” which is a partly submerged wooden pen on the side of the fishwheel (the holding box used by fishermen is not submerged, and the fish die there). Typically, biologists check a wheel a couple of times a day and release the fish once they have been counted or measured or tagged. But in the process, the fish get battered about a fair bit. First, they flop around in the basket when they are caught. Sliding fast down the chute, they slam hard into a crowded live box. Then they mill about for hours, periodically trying to leap over the walls, but mostly smashing their heads on the boards or landing on their bellies on the top of the wall. Last, they are scooped out with a dip net and thrash violently while the worker wrestles the fish into position to tag or weigh it before finally pitching it into the river.

To eliminate much of this abuse, Underwood and Stan considered how a fishwheel might be modified with new, fish-friendly features and with electronics. Instead of wire mesh for the baskets, Stan installed springy plastic webbing. He built a slippery white plastic chute that schusses the fish straight back into the river. Zweeeee-kerplunk. As the fish zoom down the chute, they crash through a lightweight, padded flapper door. A surveillance camera mounted above captures the image. Meanwhile, a magnetic switch on the flapper door sends a signal to a laptop computer inside a dry box on the fishwheel. The computer is programmed to save nine frames of video image before the signal and one frame after. A waterwheel generator lowered into the current keeps the batteries charged. For as long as the fishwheel turns, the computer stores on its one-gigabyte microdrive a film fest’s worth of short, silent movies of slip-and-sliding fish. Caught on the surveillance camera, the salmon look like wide-eyed shoplifters busting out of a 7-Eleven and streaking for freedom. At the end of the day, Stan simply motors over to the wheel, pops out the microdrive, which is like a standard floppy disk but smaller, and takes it back to his camp. In a small white canvas wall tent, he counts the day’s catch—caught on video.

When Stan’s mother-in-law, Helen Peters, an Athabascan elder from Tanana, came to camp for one of her regular visits, Stan’s boy Joey said, “Grandma, go down and look at your tent.” When she poked her head through the flap, she gasped, “That’s my bed!” A piece of plywood on the bunk converted it to a table holding a full-sized desktop computer with nineteen-inch color monitor, a laptop computer, a flatbed scanner, a color printer, a videocassette recorder, batteries, a charger, and an iridium satellite telephone. On the monitor’s screen, king salmon zoom from screen right to screen left. Stanley keys the species, and a synthesized female voice counts, “Chinook, up. Chinook, up,” as a spreadsheet tabulates the census automatically. Fishwheels and wall tents may look the same from the outside, but they have changed in Helen Peters’s time. And, thanks to the wise decision to bring a bushman like Stan Zuray into the biological sampling process, more of the fish intercepted by the Fish and Wildlife Service are reaching the spawning grounds.

Bill Fliris/Ichthyophonus Hoferi

In the summer of 1987, another couple of Tanana people, Bill and Kathy Fliris, were up at their camp cutting strips when they noticed something wrong with the fish. Highly prized all over Alaska, king salmon strips are something like jerky. To make them, the fishermen fillet the kings, then cut the fillets into long strips about half an inch wide. Before brining and going into the smokehouse for a week or more, the strips are first draped over poles and set in the open air to drip some oil and to dry out a bit. It was during this first step in the curing that Bill and Kathy noticed that one pole smelled a little funny. It wasn’t an objectionable smell, exactly, says Bill. Not rotten or anything. But peculiar. That pole of strips—that fish—went into the dog pot. Maybe the strips were all right to eat, but the Flirises weren’t sure.

The next year there were a few more kings like that. If one of them made it into the smokehouse, it didn’t dry correctly. Fliris started asking at other camps around the Rapids, but nobody had noticed anything like he described. The year after that, quite a few of the odd-smelling kings showed up in Bill and Kathy’s wheel. And they noticed something else. They cut their fish in a tent, and in that diffuse, yellow light they were able to see small whitish specks on the hearts of the affected fish. It was like they had been sprinkled with salt. Sometimes the specks showed up on the liver or spleen as well. Fliris tried to interest the biologists at the Alaska Department of Fish and Game in the mystery, but without much luck. When he sent them some tainted strips, they ended up in a freezer at the Fairbanks office. Before anyone got around to scientifically sampling them, they were sampled gastronomically. Some frozen fillets Fliris sent in did make it to a lab in Juneau, but the fact that the meat was frozen limited the tests that could be run, and nothing was learned.

Each year at meetings of the Yukon River Drainage Fishermen’s Association, Fliris tried to drum up interest. But none of the downriver fishermen had seen any of the little white spots, and no one thought the fish seemed sick. At one of these meetings in 1990 or 1991, Fliris succeeded in interesting a federal biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service named Monty Millard. The feds weren’t managing the fishery—the state of Alaska was—but Millard sent Fliris some jars of preserving solution and offered to try to find some funding to get the samples tested. The next season Fliris sent properly preserved samples to Millard, and Millard sent them out to a lab in the Lower 48. The results showed the presence of a parasite called Ichthyophonus hoferi. Along with the lab report, Millard enclosed some biographical literature about the little bug with the long name.

“At that point,” says Fliris, “I started bringing it up at the Yukon River Drainage Fishermen’s Association meetings every year. After a while, people were probably saying, ‘Here goes Fliris again with his sick fish talk. Let’s just let him do it and we’ll get on with business.’” But as time went by, the number of infected fish increased. “Basically I was trying to get through to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game that this was something that was increasing every year. By then I was seeing it in close to twenty-five percent of the fish I was catching. And some of the other people were noticing it, too, that some of the fish smelled funny. And nobody knew what it was. Everybody was thinking, ‘What is it, chemical? Or is it radioactive?’ I kept bringing this up at meeting after meeting for quite a few years and getting no response whatsoever. I talked to several higher-ups in the Fish and Game department and tried to coax them into doing something about it. They’d say, ‘What can we do? It’s natural, you know. We can’t do anything about that. We know what it is, and it will either go away or not.’”

Fliris didn’t know if the agency could cure the infection, but he felt there were a number of important, and frankly rather obvious, things it could do. For one thing, couldn’t the department make a public announcement to the fishermen up and down the river explaining that the odd kings they were catching were infected with a disease? For another, couldn’t they advise the fishermen as to whether the fish were safe for human consumption? Couldn’t they recommend how the fishermen ought to dispose of infected fish? If, as Fliris had read, king salmon had contracted the Ichthyophonus in the first place by eating infected herring at sea, mightn’t the scavenger fish in the Yukon (the whitefish and the lush, for example) become infected if fishermen threw infected king carcasses back into the river? And finally, didn’t the presence of this disease have implications for fisheries management? Fish and Game’s management plan was built around an “escapement” figure, the minimum number of fish that must escape the nets and fishwheels and reach the spawning grounds. If Ichthyophonus killed kings, then wasn’t it possible that up to twenty-five percent of the escapement might not be spawning at all but rather dying en route? And if Fish and Game didn’t know the answer to that question, hadn’t they better find out and if necessary revise their escapement number upward before serious damage was done to the king salmon stock?

As it turned out, every one of these questions could have been, should have been, and eventually would be addressed by the biologists. There was one person at the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, says Fliris, who always gave him a sympathetic ear. “His name was Russ Holder. He was kind of a junior level management biologist at ADF&G at that time, and he kept telling me, ‘You know, I think you’re right. They don’t want to spend any money on this, because they’ve got other pet projects, and they just don’t want to be sidetracked. But I think there’s something that needs to be paid attention to here.’” In 1999, Holder sent Fliris an article about Ichthyophonus occurring in Prince William Sound herring. It was authored by a Dr. Richard Kocan of the School of Aquatic & Fisheries Sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle, whom Holder described as “Mr. Ichthyophonus.” Fliris found more about Kocan’s work on the Internet. “I fired off an E-mail to him right away,” says Fliris. “And I said, ‘I think we’ve got this on the Yukon River in the king salmon because we’ve already had it sampled once. I’m having a real hard time convincing anybody that it’s a problem, but it seems to me that it is a problem.’”

Kocan says he was astonished to hear from a fisherman on the Yukon River asking about his esoteric research into an obscure parasite. After reading the E-mail, Kocan thought to himself that Fliris was wrong about the parasite being in the Yukon River. Ichthyophonus had never been documented in wild salmon. “But I didn’t want to turn the guy down cold,” he said. So he replied that he would be willing to take a working vacation to Alaska and collect the necessary one hundred twenty or so samples if Fliris could find the money for Kocan and an assistant to fly from Seattle to two locations on the Yukon. With that, Kocan assumed he would not hear from the fisherman again. But within a couple days, Fliris had the money. The Bering Sea Fishermen’s Association agreed to fund the sampling, and Kocan started packing. It was already May, and the kings would start entering the mouth of the river during the first or second week of June.

In some ways, the professor’s education was only beginning. When Fliris picked him up at the Tanana airstrip and brought him home, Kocan was stunned: “The guy has more electronics in his cabin than I have at the university.” Fliris happened to have five computers at the time, and miscellaneous peripherals. But the real shock came when Fliris motored him up to his fish camp and pulled a few kings out of the wheel. “He started slicing fish,” says Kocan, “Holy Christ! I couldn’t believe it.” The salmon were teeming with the parasite. Back at his laboratory, the first thing Kocan did was write a proposal to fund a full-blown scientific study of Ichthyophonus hoferi in Yukon River salmon.

Kocan sampled fish at five locations on the Yukon River (Emmonak /Marshall, Tanana, the Rapids, Dawson, and Whitehorse). As a check, he sampled a site on the Tanana at the confluence of the Chena River and collected spawned-out fish on the upper Chena. Preliminary results show that clinical signs of the parasite fluctuate depending on the location of the sampling. At the mouth of the Yukon, the disease is evident in less than ten percent of the fish examined. But the percentage jumps between twenty and thirty by Tanana and the Rapids. By Dawson and Whitehorse, the incidence drops back down to 9.7 percent. So the disease increases as the fish move upriver, then dramatically declines. Kocan’s findings on the Chena River confirmed the pattern. He hypothesizes that Middle and Upper Yukon Ichthyophonus-infected king salmon are dying before they spawn. The disease discovered on the Yukon by Bill Fliris must be having an impact on the king salmon run. How big an effect and what to do about it is still being studied.

Dozen Islands

There is no boat at Chris and Sylvain’s fish camp below Mel’s, but I stop and climb the bank anyway for a self-guided tour. It’s a nice, high spot that catches the sun and the breeze. And it’s more than a fish camp. It is a fish processing plant. I had met Chris Ball in Dawson, and she told me a bit about their operation. She and her husband, Sylvain Fleurant, started fishing here at Dozen Islands in the 1970s. At first, they sold fish to the Dawson market, to various hotels and restaurants, but being genetically entrepreneurial, they gradually expanded the business. Today they fish three king nets, each one sized for its particular eddy. They usually have a crew of five, and any of them might go out to pick the nets. It takes an hour and forty minutes to pick the three nets, and the fish are processed as soon as they arrive back at the plant. Some of the kings are steaked, the rest filleted. They even sell smoked roe. Of the filleted fish, some are smoked, some not, some made into lox, some cut into strips. The thinly cut strips go through a secret four-stage process and come out as thin, smoky, oily pieces of jerky. Northerners go crazy over them—they are the best-selling product, at twenty-five dollars per pound. Everything is commercially vacuum packed and frozen in a gleaming, eighteen-by-thirty-six-foot walk-in freezer.

 

THERE IS NO BOAT either at John Lodder’s camp on the left bank. I hear he has moved into town. Across the river I see that the Department of Fisheries and Oceans’ fishwheel is turning at Ship Rock, which Mike Rourke’s book also lists as Sheep Rock, Cave Rock, St. Paul’s Dome, and Castle Rock. In the channel between Fanning’s wood yard and Hall Island there is a head in the water. Moose? Bear? I cut the motor and drift quietly down toward it. The bear grows as he emerges, dripping, on the beach, though he still looks skinny until he stops at the top of the bank to shake and fling the water from his black coat. He has himself a good look at me before bounding into the woods. I listen to his progress for half a minute before the crashing segues to absolute silence.

Fanning Creek

Fanning Creek comes out to the Yukon right where the bear came out, in a bend behind Hall Island. Rourke tells us that Old Man Fanning bought a roadhouse here from Charles Major in 1912. Twenty-two miles out of Eagle, Percy DeWolfe stopped over here on his mail run. Later, Fanning applied for a one-hundred-sixty-acre homestead. Besides running the roadhouse, he trapped and cut steamboat wood. In 1937 an ice jam and flood wiped out Fanning’s roadhouse and nearly did him in as well. Percy and a Mountie reached him just in time.

Today there is a beautiful green and orange wooden boat tied up at Fanning Creek, and it belongs to Ludger “Louie” Borste, a forty-seven-year-old German immigrant who’s been around Dawson for almost twenty years. Louie comes down to the beach when I pull in, and it doesn’t take much to get him to show off the boat he built himself. It’s a shallow V, stitch-and-glue plywood hull, thirty-three feet long, eight-foot beam, powered by a one-hundred-ninety-horsepower Volvo Penta inboard. Ten feet of its length is occupied by a cabin with windows all around, trimmed out in fir, mahogany, and oak. I’d seen the boat across the river from Dawson a few years ago and motored over just to have a good look at it and take some pictures. It looked to me like the ideal Yukon River cruiser. If it were fitted out with a galley and table and bunks, I could not imagine a more perfect floating cabin. You could tie up wherever it looked pretty and watch the river go by. But that’s my dream. In Louie’s vision, the boat transports passengers. Dawson is developing into an arts center, he says. A brand new art school is being built there at the Klondike Institute of Art and Culture. Artists and those who appreciate the arts might like to come down to spend a night or a couple of days in a quiet retreat at Fanning Creek. Back in the spruce trees, on a rise of land, Louie is building a good-sized, two-story house (twenty-four by thirty-two feet). He has title to about five acres here, thanks to a government program that proclaims that “the desire to reside in a rural environment is recognized as a legitimate land use activity.” He had to have the sale approved by the Tr’ondek Gwech’in band, and by Mel Besharah, who hunts and traps in the area. There’s a review board, and he had to pay market value, less the cost of a survey. There are various requirements, says Louie, all reasonable.

Louie loves the Yukon Territory. “It’s a great place to be. Few places are more real,” he says. He loves Dawson too: “When I first came, I saw all these bearded guys, and dogs lying in the street. I thought it looked good.” And now he has settled further into his niche. “Once I started getting out on the river,” he says, “I realized this is the place to be. I like just being out here. I like the challenge. I like to build.” He hauled seven hundred ten pieces of lumber down here in his boat, then carried each one up the trail to the building site. Louie is not a trapper, not interested in fishing. He likes the idea of Fanning Creek being his sole residence, of living here in the summer, with the bed-and-breakfast idea bringing in some income. But he thinks he’ll continue to travel in the winters. So far, Louie has been to sixty-four countries. “Some people are homebodies. Some of us like adventure.”

I mention to Louie that the very accommodating Canadian land sales programs do not seem to have drawn many takers here along the Yukon. “Along the river, no,” he says, “Along the road system, yes. Up in Dawson I don’t know anybody who wants to live out. They respect it, but nobody does it anymore.” Well, not “nobody.” Louie does. Along the Yukon on the American side of the border, where there are no such programs, one frequently hears expressed two contending explanations: “If the government opened up land to settlement, the country would be overrun with neo-pioneers,” and, “Nobody wants to live out there any more, that was a phenomenon of the 1970s.” I think it more likely, as Louie’s occupancy testifies, that both statements are untrue.

Poppy Creek

At Poppy Creek, eighty-five miles below Dawson, there are a couple of boats, and I climb the bank to meet Gaetan Beaudet, the only full-time, year-round resident along the Yukon River in the ninety-odd miles between Dawson and the Alaska border. He has blue eyes and graying hair that looks professionally cut. Gaetan is the resident artist and philosopher along the river. His cabin walls are lined with books: psychology, philosophy, religion, classical literature, and hundreds of volumes on birds. The latter are mainly for reference. Gaetan is a master carver of birds. In a small addition off the main room of the cabin is his shop, and in it right now is a near-life-sized bald eagle. It is emerging from a block of tupelo, a soft, light wood he imports from the southern United States. Another of Gaetan’s projects, also sculptural in a way, is the structure he is building nearby. It is the biggest log cabin I have ever seen. Nineteen rounds high, not counting the gable ends, dormers projecting this way and that, rooms off of rooms. He’s been working on it for years and is just now getting the roof on. He sees it as a lodge that artists, or writers, or people who like to watch or photograph wildlife and scenery might like to visit.

Gaetan was drawn to this place as a nineteen-year-old. He is now fifty-one. Originally, he was a squatter, though at one point he staked a placer claim. In this, he was not unlike Robert Cameron, a Seattle Native who moved down from Forty Mile to very near this spot three-quarters of a century ago. Cameron filed for a homestead, but over the years grew weary of the paperwork and never received title. With regard to its treatment of people living on the land, the Canadian land managers have taken a more tolerant view than their American counterparts. To quote from Squatter Policy in the Yukon, the Yukon Territorial Government noted that “throughout the history of the Yukon Territory people have occupied land without legal tenure,” that “this form of land occupancy, commonly known as squatting, has traditionally characterized frontier areas.” The government thought that it was time to find “reasonable and practical solutions.”

In consequence, the Yukon government established a number of eligibility criteria, application procedures, and a review panel representing various interested groups. The process took years. “I could relate to Robert Cameron getting fed up with the whole thing,” says Gaetan. But eventually the government granted title to small plots around the homes of a few river people like himself. He had originally applied for the maximum two hectares, about 4.9 acres, but the review panel cut his allotment in half, expressing concern that if he were given the full parcel, he might subdivide. Gaetan still shakes his head at that one. “I’m moving eighty-five miles from town, and I want a neighbor fifty feet away? But that’s OK. That’s fine. They don’t know me.”

Cameron left trails too, as did Old Man Fanning. Gaetan and others continue to maintain the trails as if they were historic artifacts—which, of course, is precisely what they are. But, since coming into this area twenty-seven years ago, Gaetan has not trapped. It struck him as “a strange way of living.” Nor has he run dogs. He didn’t want the full-time commitment dogs require, and he saw little justification in killing thousands of fish to feed them. Nor has he fished commercially, though once in a while he will set a net for a few fish as a change in diet. He shoots a moose every year or two. For the last twenty-two summers, he has earned income by tagging salmon for the Department of Fisheries, which has a fishwheel right across the river from his cabin. In the winters, Gaetan carves birds and earns top prices for them. He takes photographs, he reads, and usually he travels for a month or two. He thinks living away from town permits him to do his best work, that there is less pressure to conform, leaving him freer to find his own creative expression. He believes living out in the woods is a good thing for people. He wishes the American and Canadian governments would allow a limited number of others to do the same. “To allow people to move in just for even a short period of time, just maybe to find themselves, and then go back. Maybe have certain spots, maybe even, I don’t know, have a lottery—you’re allowed to stay there for so many years, like an artist in residence. It’s a unique thing, and we’re losing it. People are becoming alienated from nature.”

Robert Cameron’s Cabin

In 1980, Gaetan was walking a game trail a mile below his place and a couple of hundred yards off the Yukon when abruptly an old log cabin half obscured by vegetation loomed before him. It had been invisible from just fifty feet away. It turned out to be Robert Cameron’s cabin, built a half-century before. And it was in excellent shape, though it had spruce trees ten inches in diameter growing out of its sod roof. It is easy for me to find, because with fires in the area, Canadian government firefighters have set up a generator and pump on the beach and run a hose back through the brushy trail to the cabin, where a sprinkler is mounted on the roof.

The roof design is what saved this cabin. It is much more stoutly built than most. There are two ridgepoles, for example, and three purlins on each side of the ridge. A ridgepole is a large log that spans the interior space between the peaks of each gabled wall. Purlins are parallel to the ridge and help support the poles that run from the side walls to the ridge. Six purlins and two ridgepoles allowed the roof to sustain an increasing load as the trees grew on top. Gaetan cut them down, worrying that they might topple in a windstorm, maybe taking a chunk of the roof along with them. Inside, the logs are in excellent shape. The place is spare and clean, kept up by a Dawson man who comes down for brief stays every so often.

Gaetan thinks Cameron intended to farm, and that fits with the evidence out front. The ground is flat all the way to the river. And it obviously had once been cleared because the trees are not large, and there is hardly a spruce among them. The deciduous trees indicate an earlier stage—and spruce a later one—in the typical boreal forest succession pattern.

Bio Camp

Just below Cameron’s cabin, I stop for a cup of tea with Crane Vangel and Sean Milligan, who are staying all summer at a camp here maintained by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. With Gaetan, they tag the fish caught by the government’s two fishwheels. As it happens, it is time to tag right now, so I join the crew to motor across the river to check the wheel. The captured fish are kept in a live box. One by one, they are scooped out with a square net that matches the shape of the box. Small fish thrash for only a few seconds, but a big one might pound itself against the sides of the box for half a minute, cutting his fins and tail on the net mesh. Crane sets the fish, nose first, into a tarplined trough half-filled with water and tipped forward so that its head is submerged. The fish relaxes here, as Gaetan pokes a large needle through the cartilage at the base of the dorsal fin. He threads through an eight-inch length of orange-pink plastic cord, removes the needle, and ties a quick overhand knot. Crane notes the length of the fish against a yard stick on the side of the box and calls out the number as he drops the fish back into the river. The whole operation takes a few seconds.

The tagging allows the fisheries scientists to get an idea of the size of the king run. In general, the number of tagged fish should bear the same relation to the total run as the number of tagged fish caught later by fishermen bears to the number of all fish caught by the fishermen. For example, say ten percent of the fishermen’s catch shows tags. If the Bio Camp crew had tagged one thousand fish, then one thousand might represent ten percent of the total run. The run might then be estimated to be ten thousand. Various adjustments may be made to account for the location of the wheels and other variables. Tagging the fish also permits the biologists to assess the timing of the run, the speed at which the salmon progress upstream, and the harvest rates by fishermen.

Estimating the strength of a salmon run is an even more iffy proposition when it is done in advance. These estimates are based in part on the strength of the previous year’s run as well as on the “escapement” of the parent run. The parent run is the cohort of fish that spawned the present group, typically three and four years earlier. And the escapement refers to the number that escaped fishermen’s nets and wheels and reached the spawning grounds. In 2001, the run was predicted to be very low, and severe fishing restrictions were imposed all along the middle and upper river. Based on the biologist’s predictions, eighty-five-year-old Native leader Sidney Huntington from Galena in the Middle Yukon decided not to go up to his fish camp for the first time in his memory. That disrupted the whole cycle of summer life. The teenaged kids he normally brought with him to camp stayed home. It was the first time Sidney had not planted potatoes—which he does at camp—since he was three years old. Berry picking activities were thrown off too. Later, the biologists said they may have been wrong. Where people did fish, the run was strong. On the day I visited the Bio Camp up near the Canadian border, the crew told me it had caught five hundred fifty-six chinook, the highest one-day total ever recorded in the eighteen years since the program began. Gaetan thought the run appeared to be triple its normal strength, though much of that abundance must have been due to the restrictions placed on the Alaskan fishermen.

The Border

Crossing the border into Alaska, I am entering “the country,” the stretch of river and side creeks that John McPhee wrote about in his masterpiece Coming into the Country. “I may have liked places that are wild,” he wrote, “and been quickened all my days just by the sound of the word, but I see now that I never knew what it could mean. I can see why people who come to Alaska are unprepared. In four decades being beyond some sort of road, I never set foot in a place like this.” It was a great steaming pile of bear dung, in the wild country along the Yukon, not far from the village of Eagle, that so spooked and inspired John McPhee. If he were left on his own here, he wrote, “I would have to change in a hurry, and learn in a hurry, or I’d never last a year.”

In his 1977 book and in an earlier series of articles for The New Yorker magazine, McPhee had written a sympathetic portrait of a new breed of young voyageurs who, when they decided to leave their counterculture enclaves in urban America and head back to nature, made it farther than the Berkshires or the Sonoma coast. They drove their pickups beyond the interstates, up the thousand miles of gravel road that led north to Alaska, and stopped only when they reached the literal end of the road: the Alaska villages of Eagle and Circle, two of the most remote points on the American road system. From there they headed off into the immense wilderness of the Yukon basin, recapitulating, to the consternation of federal land managers, the historic migrations of trappers, prospectors, and homesteaders.

A lot of water has flowed down the Yukon in the thirty years since McPhee visited here. And it is interesting to see what has become of the young river people. Whither this tribe of woods-wise and well-spoken renegades, now well into middle age?

Steve Ulvi and Lynette Roberts

The first camp to check is here, just below the Canadian border, at a spot Steve Ulvi and his girlfriend Lynette Roberts called Windy Corner. It’s a quiet place today. Neither wind nor people. I know that Steve and Lynette moved off the river years ago, and that Steve has gone to work for the National Park Service in Fairbanks. In 1976, McPhee had found Ulvi to be an articulate embodiment of the neo-pioneer. Though he gets only a mention in McPhee’s book, Ulvi’s story is representative of many of the young people who moved on to the river in the 1970s. He had grown up in the San Francisco Bay Area and attended college in Oregon. There he’d read and pondered several classics of wilderness lore, hiked, backpacked, and camped. He established himself in a tepee in the coast range and commuted to school. But, inevitably, he craved escape from what he regarded as a consumptive and wasteful culture. He wanted a larger and more elemental and primitive space into which his emerging philosophy (which was tending toward Buddhism) and aesthetic (which was distinctly agrarian) might expand. And he was ready to embrace the hard work, isolation, and even danger that might come with it. So, in the summer of 1974, before he quite had completed college, Steve Ulvi headed north to see about living in the deep Alaskan woods. His girlfriend Lynette Roberts joined him, as did his brother Dana and a couple of his like-minded California buddies. They all piled into a rebuilt 1951 Dodge pickup with two canoes strapped on top and the back crammed with tools, gear, and eight or nine hundred pounds of food.

Eagle was an unusual Alaskan village in those days. Almost no one was out on the land. There were those who had come to Eagle because it was a jump-off point for heading into the wilderness. But, for one reason or another, these folks hadn’t jumped. Instead, they picked up seasonal work or, in a few cases, started small businesses. Eagle also attracted a number of comfortably well-off retirees drawing government pensions. Like the first group, they sometimes kept a canoe tied up at the riverbank, occasionally checked their gill net for a salmon for dinner, but they rarely ventured farther into the country. They were the frontier equivalent of gentlemen farmers, and the value of their harvest was best measured in psychological rather than economic terms. The occasional fish had less to do with sustaining the body than sustaining an identity. It was the slender thread that connected the townsfolk to the wilderness and permitted their deeply valued self-image as frontiersmen and -women. And, finally, there was the village of Han Indians just outside Eagle. But these folks, too, had largely given up trapping and fishing and dog teams in favor of paying jobs, government assistance, and store food. Not a single one of the Han were living out in the country in 1974. In 1976, only one moose was taken by an Eagle Village resident, and that was on the Taylor Highway. A few still did some backyard trapping on lines less than a mile long, cut firewood for sale, or fished in the eddies in front of the village. But gone were the days of training good teams of working dogs, of spending a part of the winter out at a trap camp, of spending the summer at a fish camp.

In short, the traditional skills of the old-timers of this region were about to be lost, when a kind of salvation came rolling down the hill into Eagle. They emerged long-haired and smelling of unfamiliar herbs from pickups and vans with license plates from California, Oregon, and New Hampshire. In the main, they were white, urban, hippie kids like Steve Ulvi and his friends.

 

ULVI AND HIS PALS set up their tents at the Eagle campground and strolled downtown to look things over. Perhaps predictably, the inhabitants of Eagle tended to discourage—if not disparage—newcomers. Did they have any idea what seventy degrees below zero felt like? Had they ever lived in a small cabin with no electricity? No running water? Hell, the darkness alone drove people crazy, with the sun not up for much more than the lunch hour. But, as Ulvi would learn later, the most naysaying of the townsfolk tended to be those who had not, themselves, lived out in the country.

The group found a more sympathetic reception at the Native village. At least, they met a man there who would let them move onto land that he claimed just this side of the Canadian border, on the opposite bank of the Yukon. It was five miles off the end of the road, eight miles above the Han village, eleven miles above Eagle proper. There was an old cabin on the site (the one that stands today nearest the river) that two of the party could fix up and live in. The others—Ulvi, Lynette, and Dana—could build a new cabin. The man probably doubted they would last the winter, Ulvi thought, and was figuring that he’d shortly acquire, without cost, one new and one rehabilitated cabin. With a handshake, they concluded the deal, never putting a time limit on the occupancy.

Like old-time sourdoughs, the partners “lined” their outfit upriver. That is, they loaded their gear into the two canoes and, walking on shore, hauled each canoe upstream with a loop of rope, the ends of which were tied to the bow and stern. If the rope was held at just the right point on the loop, the bow would point slightly into the current. That meant it would stand off from shore a bit, instead of tracking right behind the hauler, where it would run aground in the shallows. If they came to a steep, eroded bank or a rock outcrop, they would have to paddle across the river, which might be two-thirds of a mile wide in places. In doing so, they could lose a half mile or more to the current before they climbed out on the other side and resumed lining.

If the group’s approach to transportation seemed labor-intensive, it fit their collective notion of right living. They did not care to use outboard motors. And in constructing their cabins, they had decided they would employ only hand tools: axes, augers, and an old-fashioned crosscut saw. Ulvi had owned a chain saw in Oregon but sold it before heading north. The racket and fumes seemed almost an impiety in the deep silences of the Alaskan wilderness. And he didn’t want to be dependent on gas, oil, and parts. They would cut their house logs, roof poles, and floor poles by hand. And by hand they would ripsaw what lumber they required. No plywood would taint their camp. Once, when a sheet of the stuff drifted down the river and fetched up nearby, they poked it back into the current. (Early-day sourdoughs would have fought each other over it—a great flat board made without whipsaw or adze, perfect as a fish-cutting table or for stretching beaver hides.)

Nor would Ulvi, in selecting a site for the cabin, allow himself the pleasure of a view of the passing river. Instead, he built it a hundred yards back in the trees so as not to violate the river or impose his settlement on travelers. When the fifteen-by-fifteen-foot structure was finished, the occupants settled into a style of housekeeping that suggested the relative opulence of a monastery. As near-vegetarians, and frugal ones, they parceled out their lentils, rice, beans, and pancake mix from fifty-pound sacks. Of course, they baked their own bread, grinding wheat by hand. As a special indulgence, they permitted themselves one can of fruit per week, split three ways. Candles provided the only light during the months of dark winter. And they would forego that inessential artifact of a profligate era: toilet paper. Moss would suffice.

But ascetic purity, even on this impressive scale, had limits. For one thing, there was a six-mil sheet of polyethylene under the roof sod, which was practically the only way to prevent such a roof from leaking. Squares of clear plastic film served as windows, nylon sleeping bags lay on the bunks, and a high-powered rifle hung by the door. Even the mail-order importation of bulk dried fruit or powdered milk implied the sort of industrial infrastructure that the group seemed to spurn. And the philosophy of self-denial, while sincere, seemed tinged with sanctimony: the plaid-shirted pioneers were cultivating their image every bit as assiduously as the blow-dried kids contemporaneously making the scene at America’s shopping malls. Last, Ulvi and his friends modified their canon as the country demanded (or as advancing maturity permitted). It wasn’t long before they hunted for meat, took up trapping, bought kerosene lanterns and eventually an outboard motor, even a chain saw. To a remarkable degree, however, Ulvi and his friends, as well as the other young people living out along the Yukon River in the mid-1970s, approximated the frontier life of the previous century. Like their sourdough antecedents, they lived a life closely connected to the land and one in which simplicity and hard work were both the prerequisites of survival and values in themselves.

As it turned out, the Native man in Eagle Village did not fall heir to two abandoned cabins in the spring of 1975. The other three young men moved off the site, but Steve Ulvi, then twenty-three years old, stayed on until he was a middle-aged man. He and Lynette married and started a family here. During the warm summer months, while Steve and Lynette cut and hung fish to dry or hauled buckets of river water to the garden, the two kids played on the beach with the sled dog pups. When the leaves yellowed and the rank smell of cranberries filled the woods, the kids dug potatoes in the wet earth or headed out with their pails to help harvest tongue-staining blueberries, rose hips packed with seeds and vitamins, and the highbush cranberries that burst in your mouth with a small explosion of sour juice. In winter they sometimes rode in the sled over the trapline trails, spending the night in a wall tent miles from the sight or sound of another human being outside of the family. When the kids became school-aged, Lynette sent away for correspondence school materials and taught them at home.

If Steve Ulvi had jumped headlong into a wilderness life, he returned from it in stages. As the kids grew, Steve and Lynette wanted them to be able to play more with other children. Lynette, too, was beginning to crave more of a social life, and she wanted a job. Steve had begun to reach a point where a declining enthusiasm for trapping was being overtaken by an ascending interest in a regular paycheck. In 1981, he started working for the Park Service as a seasonal hire doing construction work. Two years later, he was offered a permanent position with the Park Service in Eagle, and he took it. The family moved from their snug cabin upriver to an ancient, sagging, and drafty one in town. The kids enrolled in the Eagle school. Lynette served on the school board. Steve worked a steady job.

Steve and Lynette built a nice place of their own near Eagle Village, but soon, as the kids reached junior-high-school age, Fairbanks beckoned. As Interior Alaska’s hub and home of the state university’s main campus, Fairbanks (area population 80,000) could offer libraries and swimming pools; ballet and drama classes; and gymnastics, soccer, and track. Eagle (population 168) could not. And both Steve and Lynette wanted to “exercise the mind,” as Steve said, to finish college, for a start. Now, for the first time, they were ready—eager—to turn their energies and intellects toward some traditional career progress. So, for all the reasons that generally make more sense to people approaching forty than they do to people barely out of their teens, the family moved out of the upper Yukon country in 1990.

The front cabin still stands on a little bluff above the river, and it looks like it is used occasionally. A trail up through the woods behind it leads to Steve and Lynette’s old cabin, now a beautiful, ghostly shell. The roof poles are strangely bare against the sky and painted with a green mold. Someone probably stripped off the roof moss and used it to add insulation to the other cabin. Where some of the original roof remains, a forest of little spruce trees now grows. It is a ruin like other ruins along the Yukon. The mausoleum of a dream. Steve and Lynette’s reasons for coming into the country had been like those of the other river people of their era, and not especially different from those who had come before for generations. Their reasons for coming out of the country were alike as well.

Eagle

Just below the border, my engine sputters, and I point for shore in a rocky spot to land and fill my gas tank. But I don’t lift the motor in time, and a blade breaks off my ancient prop. It’s a sunny day as I wobble into Eagle, and I’m not fretting too much about the prop. I figure there is bound to be a match for this one lying around Eagle somewhere. It’s a matter of being directed to whoever might have an old ten- or fifteen-horse Evinrude or Johnson clamped to a sawhorse among the weeds in the yard, its owner willing to convert it into cash. At the boat landing I meet a fellow named Greg Birchard, who kindly heads home to make some calls on my behalf but returns to report no luck. He points me to Chris Christensen’s cabin near the well house. Chris gives me a soda and takes me on a tour of his backyard. Unfortunately, his relics don’t match mine. A white-bearded fellow named Austin Nelson hops on his four-wheeler and drives eighteen miles round trip to see what he’s got in his junk pile. When he comes back, he tells me he’s got props from the years before mine and from the years after mine. He’s got smaller props and larger props. But he does not have a nine-and-a-half-inch prop for a thirteen-tooth spline. I hike out the road toward the Native village to look for a repair shop that someone thought was still in existence but turns out not to be. On the way, I get a lift from a bearded fellow in camo pants who lives with a very large family in a very large tent compound. It’s fabricated from many, many blue tarps propped up by poles and guyed down with ropes. Some clear plastic patches sewn in serve as skylights. It looks very much like a Bedouin encampment, set down in the sub-Arctic and colored by a child in all the wrong colors. He is a collector of things, this man, notably bicycles, a hundred or two of which await his attention in rusting piles. He lives some kind of Arabian vision, I think, here on his oasis among the scrubby black spruce. His caravan of iron camels rests outside his tent. His begotten play in the shade.

If a house is an expression of self, as I think Jung said, then the range of selves to be found in Eagle, Alaska, is illustrated in a short block along this road. Not far from the tent encampment is a virtual dollhouse, painted an optimistic blue and white, with scalloped fancy work hanging along the eaves like wooden lace. Spick-and-span to the verge of antisepsis, the little house is set, like a precious stone, in a sparkling green lawn ringed by a white picket fence. American flag aflutter, the wide muddy river beyond, it is a vision of Hannibal, Missouri, on the Fourth of July.

From the pay phone in front of the store, I track down a prop at the Boat Shop in Fairbanks. My wife will put it on the mail plane tomorrow. Meanwhile, for the price of a hamburger at the café on the river-front, I take in a million-dollar view. The picture windows look east out over the river to the Ogilvies. For nearly one hundred eighty degrees, one sees nothing but sky and river and mountains and trees, a view that hasn’t changed significantly since the end of the last Ice Age.

Of course, from the other side of the river, looking toward where I am sitting, the view would have changed a lot in the last century and a quarter, as a Han Indian village morphed into a regional hub for prospectors, traders, missionaries, the military, and the government, then shrank to near-extinction, then revived again. All the comings and goings apparently taxed the historians and record keepers, because the names and dates of the various settlements built on or near Eagle vary almost with every published account. Probably in 1880,² near the mouth of Mission Creek, the trader Francois Mercier ³ found on the left bank a Han settlement of one hundred six residents called David’s Village⁴ after its chief. That year, on the same bank, says Mercier, three-quarters of a mile below the village⁵ and toward Mission Creek, perhaps within the present town of Eagle,⁶ he built a trading post for the Western Fur and Trading Company. Mercier is quite specific about this location.⁷ He does not give this first fort a name in his memoirs.⁸ In any event, the 1880 trading post was abandoned the following year when the trader he left in charge pulled out, taking the windows and stove. Mercier returned in 1882 under the auspices of the Alaska Commercial Company to build a new post “nearby,” according to the reliable historian Melody Webb.⁹ He named it Fort Bell at first, and later Belle Isle. Mercier’s chronicler places this trading post both above and below the village.¹⁰ Somewhere in the area, during the 1880s, the Han had a semipermanent winter camp called Nibaw Zhoh, meaning “skin house.”

In May 1898, twenty-eight miners who hadn’t managed to find wealth in the Klondike staked a townsite near Eagle Bluff. Prospectors staked more than two hundred claims on Mission Creek and its tributary American Creek. Eagle City boomed, with more than five hundred cabins built and seventeen hundred residents on site almost overnight. But the next night, figuratively, the town all but emptied with reports of the gold strike at Nome in 1899. The same year, at the downriver edge of the town, the U.S. Army began constructing Eagle City Camp, later called Fort Egbert, to support the construction of a telegraph line intended to cross to Asia at Bering Strait. The fort grew into a complex of thirty-seven buildings housing more than one hundred fifty men. An enormous mule barn had stalls for fifty-eight mules. When the army closed Fort Egbert in 1911, Hudson Stuck, Alaska’s dog-mushing missionary, recalled the scene: “Fort Egbert is abandoned now, another addition to the melancholy of the Yukon; its extensive buildings, barracks, and officers’ quarters, post-exchange and commissariat, hospital, sawmill, and artisans’ shops, a spacious, complete gymnasium only recently built, are all vacant and deserted. In the yards lie three thousand cords of dry wood, a year’s supply; cut on the hills, awaiting the expected annual contracts, lie as many more—six thousand cords left to rot! Some of us perverse ‘conservationists,’ upon whom the unanimous Alaska press delights to pour scorn, lament the trees more than the troops.”

Upon the fort’s construction, either the Han were compelled by the military to move upriver, where they established what is known today as Eagle Village (as local Native people adamantly assert in oral history accounts), or the Native village was upriver from the fort and the townsite at the time the town and fort were built, as other accounts have it. What is known is that the area around the Fort Egbert site, and the area now occupied by Park Service buildings, is littered with chipped stone tool remains, indicating long-term occupancy by Han people before contact.

People came to this place, and they left it. The settlements themselves came and went. Assigned to these encampments at Eagle, at one time or another, by one writer or another, I find twenty-two names: Fetoutlin, Klatolklin, Johnny’s Village, Johnny Village, Johnny’s Indians, John’s Village, David’s People, David’s Village, David’s Camp, Eagle Village, Tthe T’awdlin, Nibaw Zhoh, Niibeeo Zhoo, the Western Fur and Trading Company trading post, Fort Bell, Belleisle, Belle Isle, Belle Isle Station, Eagle City, Eagle, Eagle City Camp, and Fort Egbert. But there’s a good chance that occupancy—and names—trace back all the way to the Pleistocene.

 

THE NEXT DAY, I am eager to jump off from this jumping-off place, so when my prop comes in on the mail plane, I hop into the back of a pickup truck at the store and ride out to the airstrip. I have to say that Percy DeWolfe could not have topped this one-day delivery service, thanks to the telephone and the daily flights of the little bush planes carrying mail, cargo, and passengers. Back at my campsite at Mission Creek, I slap the new prop on the outboard, load my gear, and push off into the river. Once clear of the rocks, I lower the kicker, pull on the starter rope, and set the throttle to a quiet putt. A minute later, I can hardly make out the shapes of human figures standing on shore. Shrinking by the second is the town of Eagle, a couple dozen tin roofs glittering in an afternoon sun shower.

Seymour Able

Leif Able emerges from the woods while I am hammering my stake into the beach at Shade Creek around the first big bend below Eagle. He looks to be in his early twenties and cheerful. I am in luck, he says, when I tell him I was hoping to catch his father in. I’ve wanted to meet Seymour for years and to get his story, which I have only heard secondhand. Pretty soon Seymour comes down to check out the visitor. This is the first stage of bush protocol, akin to a city person opening the door a crack, with the chain in place, to look the caller over before committing to anything more. I pass the preliminaries and am invited up to the cabin.

Seymour is tall and lanky and dressed in a clean T-shirt, shorts, and sandals. A graying mustache sprouts from graying stubble like a swatch of grass the mower keeps missing. His thinning hair funnels back from a tanned forehead into a ponytail so small it would be a proportional fit on a pony the size of a lemming. Seymour’s Tennessee accent is made the more engaging by a couple-tooth gap in the front row that creates a spoiler effect on his fricatives.

He had a rough childhood, emotionally and physically. He didn’t get along with his stepfather and was determined to get away from him. Immediately after high school classes, Seymour and a buddy left Memphis for Alaska. They didn’t even wait for the graduation ceremony. When classes were done, so were they. “One day we walked out of the high school doors, the next day we loaded the truck, and the day after that we left.” He worked for a while in Anchorage, mostly as a carpenter, but soon moved to the town of Delta on the Alaska Highway. Delta began to boom in 1975 with work on the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, and Seymour found he wanted to move again. “I felt like Delta was not really what I’d come for after the pipeline started, and it just got really crazy. It wasn’t my thing, and I didn’t quite cotton to the whole concept of that pipeline and all the oil and all the waste and everything, and I just wanted to get further away from it.”

With some friends he launched at Eagle and headed downriver. “I was totally green. I didn’t know what I was getting myself into.” The motor broke down and the group ended up at the mouth of Nation River. There wasn’t much river traffic in those days, and three weeks passed before they were able to flag down a boat and hitch a ride to town for parts. His friends were going to help him build a cabin, but now, having frittered away three weeks, they had to get home. Seymour, his girlfriend Janice Waldron, and nine dogs motored downriver to a spot just about midway between the Nation and Kandik Rivers. They set up camp on a slough behind Catham Island below Glenn Creek. “The reason that I ended up where I was is because if I’d have went any further I wouldn’t have had enough gas to get back to town. It was a gas thing, but it turned out to be a really nice place.” They had no idea how long they would stay, and they had only a modest outfit.

Having bailed from contemporary society, Seymour and Jan jumped into the woods and survived under a sheltering canopy. That statement is only partly metaphoric. “I just had an army parachute and some Visqueen and just put up a little frame and made a tent out of all that and added some moss and stuff. And I tentatively kind of started a cabin, but after I seen that I wouldn’t get it done in time for winter—and I was just so excited about everything else—we figured we’d just live in the tent. And one year led to the next.” Jan and Seymour lived under the parachute for two years.

They were light on food. And they were so green, says Seymour, they didn’t even know that the Yukon was full of salmon that could be easily caught with nets and put up for use throughout the long winter. “I didn’t know nothing about fishing. Well, I didn’t know nothing about trapping. I’d done a little bit of it but I didn’t have a clue. So the first winter was really just, well, actually it was a lot of hardship, too. We didn’t have a lot of food, and didn’t even get an early moose. A couple of people just lost, not really knowing what to do, but we had a good time figuring it out.” Eventually they got things figured out: hunting, fishing, trapping, and ordering bulk organic food through a co-op—like two hundred pounds of wheat, fifty pounds of rye, and fifty pounds of buckwheat. All this they freighted downriver from Eagle in their canoe.

They managed. Thrived, even, if propagation is a measure: by the spring of 1977, Jan was expecting a baby. The couple decided they did not want to go to a hospital. “But I did go to a doctor and get a little instruction,” says Seymour, “about pressure and torque and that kind of stuff, and read a bunch of books and decided we’d have it here at Shade Creek.” Charlie Edwards and his wife Cheryl had a cabin at Shade Creek then (today, it molders as a ruin below Seymour’s spot), and Cheryl had acted as a midwife once before. But the river’s breakup was a drawn-out affair that spring, and it took a long time for the ice to begin clearing out. Finally, when Seymour was ready to load his pregnant wife into the Grumman canoe and point it into the Yukon’s current for an iceberg-dodging upriver run to Shade Creek, Jan said she thought she might be going into labor.

All things considered, it still seemed best to go anyway, so they did. Seymour cut the nine dogs loose to run along the beach, and as much as he could, he hugged the bank where he didn’t have to buck too much current. The little ten-horse kicker didn’t fail him, and the whole menagerie arrived safely at Shade Creek. Charlie and Cheryl arrived in camp a little later with a Dall sheep they had lucked into right on the beach below Limestone Hogback Ridge near Pickerel Slough. Jan’s labor was evident now, and Seymour was trying to get things set for the birthing. “There was only one piece of plywood, and Charlie didn’t want to give it up for us to make a makeshift bed for Leif to be born on. He wanted to tack the sheep [hide] on it. So he tacked the sheep on it, and we still needed it, so we just used it anyway with the sheep on the other side—we just turned it over and Leif was born, and it was something.”

Before Leif entered the world, hale and whole and ultimately handsome, there had been some “what if” discussion. “You know, being out in the bush, you’re alone a lot, we even talked about, you know, like we do puppies, you know, we cull puppies if they’re not right when they’re born. And we even talked about what if he’s born weird or, are we going to cull him or—you know we could a never done nothing like that, couldn’t of even considered it, but we talked about it, you know. And it’s a good thing because far as I’m concerned he looked awful when he was born.”

Leif’s arrival in 1977 prompted the abandonment of the tent and the construction of a cabin. “We figured we needed a cabin for a kid,” says Seymour. Leif may have been the more powerful force, but the decision to leave the tent was also nudged along by agents of the federal government. The tent sat on federal land, administered by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), and in the summer of 1977 the BLM paid Seymour and Jan a visit. They served the couple with a trespass notice laced with to wits and hereby notifieds and impenetrable citations to the statutes. Seymour pointed out that they were living in a tent. Technically, they were camping, which was legal. It was a cute argument, but the agents were not amused. “They threatened me with jail, so I went to town and signed a piece of paper saying I would move, and I moved off that section that they wrote in their paperwork.”

 

THIS LEVEL OF INTEREST on the part of the federal government in trespass cabins out in the wilderness of Alaska was a new development. From prehistory forward, anyone who took a notion to move here just did it. And the government seemed to give tacit approval to the occupation. Basically, it ignored the land during the first century of American ownership. And that seemed reasonable. The few people who were tough enough and savvy enough to handle the cold, the darkness, and the mosquitoes, and to wrestle a slim living from such a place had certainly lived up to the spirit of the government’s homesteading programs. But in the early 1970s, things began to change. A new logic took hold that said no old-fashioned, dues-paying residency amounted to a “right” to live on public land.

And BLM officials started patrolling the country in search of cabins to post with trespass notices or, they threatened, to burn. Because the cabins were usually tiny and made from the natural materials at hand—unpeeled logs with sod roofs—they weren’t easy to spot. And though they blended into their surroundings, though they were sometimes fifty miles from the nearest town and often more canoe-dragging miles up a side creek, the BLM had its orders. And it had helicopters. When the river people cut a tree for firewood or for some construction purpose, they took to placing a chunk of moss on the fresh-cut stump to make it less visible from the air. With townspeople, they were cagey about where, exactly, they lived.

A big part of the reason for this turn of events had to do with the discovery of the nation’s largest oil field at Prudhoe Bay on Alaska’s Arctic Ocean coast in the late 1960s. Alaska Natives and environmentalists halted the rush to oil development until aboriginal land claims were resolved and provisions made for establishing parks. In short order, land issues dominated Alaska politics. Out of this controversy emerged the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) in 1971, an unprecedented legislative victory for Alaska’s Native people. Along with a tidy cash settlement (about a billion dollars), the Native people were permitted to select forty million acres of federal land in Alaska (roughly a Wisconsin plus a New Jersey). Also tucked away in the legislation was something for the advocates of the environment: a promise that Alaska lands for refuges, preserves, and parks would be identified and set aside by 1978.

Federal land managers from the National Park Service, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the Bureau of Outdoor Recreation, the BLM, and the Forest Service sat down together with their maps to see “which lands should go into what System,” as the new law stipulated. Literally in smoke-filled rooms, with big maps on the wall, the agency people strategized like players in a board game, trading for what they wanted. At the same time, the Alaska state government also staked its claim to vacant lands. According to the statehood act passed by Congress in 1958, Alaska had the right to select one hundred four million acres of public land as its statehood entitlement, though much of this land had neither been selected nor transferred by the 1970s. So, all at the same time, the various federal agencies, the state government, the oil companies, and the Native groups all moved to acquire title to Alaska lands. It amounted to an institutional land rush. And that is how, by the mid- 1970s, briefcase-toting BLM bureaucrats came to be jumping out of helicopters in the middle of the wilderness to assert the government’s ownership of lands and cabins it had long ignored.

 

SEYMOUR ABLE COMPLIED with the BLM’s order. The agency had said they wanted him off Section 14, Township 6 North, Range 27 East, Fairbanks Meridian. So he moved off Section 14. But he built a cabin on another section about a mile away, near a lake that people now call Seymour Lake. For his fish camp, he used another site on the Yukon directly across from Glenn Creek, and it too was outside the section he’d agreed to vacate. But BLM was still on his case; they visited him via snow machine in March 1978 with two of their agents and four state troopers, and again via riverboat in July. Jan decided to write Alaska’s congressman, Don Young, and Senator Ted Stevens. She explained that she and Seymour trapped and fished seventy miles from the nearest village, that their life was simple, canning fish for their food, drying fish for the dogs, trapping for the cash that bought the other basics. “This land,” she wrote, “has historically been available for public use and subsistence living, without patented land or any deed of ownership. It is not our desire to own the land, but to be able to continue using it as it has been used traditionally. We believe there’s enough area out here that BLM should have some kind of program so that we can continue our present land use.”

After Senator Stevens asked the BLM for an explanation, the BLM offered several of the river people, including Jan and Seymour, the opportunity to apply for permits to occupy existing cabins during the trapping season. But the locals were leery. It seemed best to see how the land management shuffle played out. If it turned out the Park Service was to take over the upper Yukon, maybe that agency would take the mandate to protect subsistence living more to heart and set up reasonable regulations governing the resident people. For the time being, the river people bided their time.

Eventually Seymour and Jan’s fish camp across from Glenn Creek took on a form more emblematic of the 1970s than of the classic sourdough period, and it harked back to older old-timers than the prospectors. The camp’s main dwelling consisted of a tepee not so different from the sort of skin tents once used by the Athabascan Indians native to this region. The occupants, too, took on an aboriginal aspect. “We used to go around every summer whenever it was possible naked all the time. I mean we’d do canoes naked, we’d line naked, we was always around fish camp naked.” Later in the summer, when evening brought gradually darker nights, the muslin of the tepee glowed a cheery yellow from electric lights within. Seymour had rigged up a twelve-volt system charged by a wind generator mounted atop a fifty-foot log tower.

Meanwhile, back in the halls of government, a new law emerged from the horse-trading. The Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA) of 1980 was said by its framers to be the most significant land conservation act in the history of the United States. In one stroke ANILCA added Alaska land sufficient to more than double the size of the nation’s national parks, more than double the national wildlife refuge lands, and triple the size of the country’s wilderness preserves. It designated twenty-four new wild and scenic rivers, named ten more rivers for possible inclusion in the system, established four new national conservation areas and two national recreation areas, and created one new national forest and added to several existing ones. If the ANILCA real estate in Alaska were declared the fifty-first state, it would rank third in land area. Only the remainder of Alaska and Texas would be larger.

Obviously, this had big consequences for the river people. With the passage of ANILCA, most of the land adjacent to the Yukon River between Eagle and Circle was given to the National Park Service. And many of the cabin dwellers, including Seymour, found themselves not just squatting on some long-ignored BLM acreage but smack in the middle of a new unit of the National Park System: Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve.

There seemed to be a ray of hope, however. Wisely, Congress recognized the difference between backcountry in the lower states and wilderness in Alaska. For one thing, there were people—both Native and white—who lived in or near these wild places. Their livelihood depended on their freedom to hunt, fish, gather berries, cut trees, and so on. And this way of life in rural Alaska, the Congress noted, “may be the last major remnant of the subsistence culture alive today in North America.” Accordingly, the “subsistence lifestyle” was declared a “cultural value,” and its practice was to be allowed in the newly established parklands.

Furthermore, in the specific case of Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve, it was precisely the human use of the country that made the area especially deserving of protection. “The history of the upper Yukon River area is rich and still visible,” said Congress. “Along the banks of the Yukon, the remains of many old buildings attest to the river’s historic use as an artery of trade, travel, and communication.” And these old cabins, roadhouses, mining works, trails, and equipment—these “historic resources,” in Park Service parlance—were said to be among the primary “values” present in the preserve.

In consideration of all of this, Congress mandated that the Park Service establish regulations that would protect the subsistence lifestyle within parklands. The regulations adopted by the Park Service, however, were designed to eliminate the resident people altogether. It went like this: the most recent residents, those who built cabins on federal land after 1978, were to lose their cabins to the Park Service straight away. Those who built before 1978, but after 1973, could apply for a permit to stay in their cabin for one year. And those who built cabins prior to 1973 could apply for a five-year permit. This latter permit could be renewed every five years for the life of the occupant, but it could not be transferred except to an immediate family member residing in the cabin “at the time of the issuance of the original permit.” Applicants were required to sign away any interest in the land on which the cabin stood and to agree to turn the structure over to the Park Service upon the expiration of the permit. The regulations, therefore, phased out—over the course of one lifetime—the residency of all people living on preserve land. And with them would go the culturally and historically significant activities, which, in large part, justified the preserve to begin with.

 

SO IT WAS that one day in the early 1980s, Seymour received another visit, this time from the National Park Service. “[It] was early summer and I think about six or seven of them showed up at my camp.” Seymour met them at his boat landing and sat down for a chat. “They were all really nice and told me that this was a park now but that it was made to accommodate subsistence people and that I could stay there the rest of my life, my family could stay there the rest of their lives, my kids and so forth and so on.” All this was sounding pretty good, says Seymour. “I really liked being there and I had no plans of leaving. I thought that it was my spot forever, at that point.”

The bureaucratic details of occupancy were still to be written, the park rangers said. “They seemed disoriented theirselves, it was a new thing, they flat admitted it, and said things needed to be worked out, but that Congress said not only that it was all right for us to be there but that they were supposed to accommodate us, that they were supposed to help us stay there, that the preserve was to preserve the subsistence people, as well as the park. And at that point I thought that I had it made.”

Like the other people living in the new park, Seymour was asked to sign a document that allowed him to stay at his homesite but which turned over any interest he may have in the property and his buildings to the Park Service. That was all right by Seymour because he wasn’t living in the country to acquire property. “I didn’t own the land. I didn’t care to own it. I didn’t want no ownership and I didn’t move there hoping to claim anything. So I got a permit. I agreed to get a permit. I was the first one to sign it, if I remember right.”

He didn’t go to town much in those days, but when he did, he’d stop in at the Park Service headquarters and ask questions to double-check on his status. “And at least for that first year, and maybe the next one after that, I was led to believe nothing but great stuff.”

Then things changed. “Within a few years I asked them for a permit to build a new cabin, and I got a permit written that I could build a cabin. I cut the logs and everything.” Seymour let the logs dry a year, as cabin builders often do, but before he could start building the next summer, he was told he had to leave. “Somewhere along the line I made them mad at me. I just didn’t fit into their idea of what they wanted. I came back from being gone all winter and was told that I was no longer considered subsistence, and they were going to pull my permit.”

The Park Service had begun, as bureaucracies are prone to do, to attempt to codify things. Defining exactly what is and what isn’t a subsistence life can be an oxymoronic exercise because living a subsistence life always involved a shifting, resilient, opportunistic approach to making ends meet. What subsistence was one year, it might not be the next. If game animals were in a certain area for a few years, that is where people exploited them. If the animals moved to another place later, the people moved their operations there. If fur prices were up, they trapped more. If they were down, they might cut steamboat wood instead. If a little wage work offered itself at a roadhouse, or a mine, or some geologists needed supplies freighted, people seized those opportunities as they came along. A fellow might even forego fishing altogether in favor of a summer’s wages in town. One common tactic beginning in the 1950s was for bush residents to fight fires for the BLM in the summer, to return to hunt for meat in the fall, and to go out on the trapline for the winter. With their wages, they could pay cash to feed their dog teams dried fish that they hadn’t caught themselves. There were innumerable combinations. They varied with the practitioner, and they were always in flux. What the federal agency was missing was that attempting to define narrowly what was and what wasn’t a true and sanctioned subsistence lifestyle simply missed the point: it degraded in a Heisenbergian way the very thing they sought to measure. As Seymour sees it, park employees (with titles like Cultural Resource Specialist) were trying to objectify the subsistence life with so much quasi-legalistic verbiage that pretty soon the bush people no longer fit the definition of themselves.

“They started making all these laws, like you could only make so much money. You could only make a certain percentage of that money outside of your subsistence life. And it was a small percentage, like twenty-five percent. Seventy-five percent of it had to be made in the bush or something like that. You know, they come up with all these things. They was trying to make all these laws from that intent and they kept changing them. And one year I’d be told one thing, and the next year I’d be told another, and it started to get to where it was hard to keep up with.” The Park Service says no such income limits were ever established. But these ideas were talked about, and the regulations were written and rewritten for many years. At the same time, the agency was getting an earful from the other side. Environmental groups pressured—even sued—to get the squatters out and the cabins torn down. They saw only the countryside as worth protecting, not the inhabitants, not the lifestyle.

Like most other frontiersmen before him, Seymour hadn’t given a whole lot of thought to quantifying his life in the woods. “I didn’t even claim to be a subsistence person. I didn’t even know what a subsistence person was. And I still don’t claim to be subsistence. I don’t claim to be anything. But them guys came down and wanted to put labels on everything. And they were pulling my permit, and I was going to have to move out.”

It was a little like a situation that developed in the village of Barrow on Alaska’s North Slope in the 1950s when an overeager fish and game warden flew up and busted a few of the local hunters for shooting ducks out of season. He told the Eskimos that they had to wait until September because that’s when hunting season for ducks opened. The locals thought he was crazy. Their people had hunted ducks for ten thousand years. Now comes a white guy telling them they can only hunt ducks after the ducks had flown south and the ponds had frozen over. The game warden did not consider it within his purview to factor in latitude, or history, or common sense, or even a general notion of fair play. He pointed to the regulations and wrote out the citations.

Unlike the Eskimos, who fought the government and won the right to continue taking ducks, Seymour folded his tepee. He bundled up his tribe, pulled the snow hook, whistled up the dogs, and moved out of the preserve. Now, sitting in the yard beside his spacious cabin on a birch- and spruce-covered slope above Shade Creek just outside the park boundary, he is for the most part sanguine. “I can honestly say that I am glad that it happened because my life is so good now that I can thank them for putting me in such a position.”

But sometimes Seymour remembers a lot of wasted energy. “We’re talking about quite a few years of dealing with these guys. And I mean if they’d have come down from the very beginning and said, ‘Look, we’re turning this into a park, we don’t want you here,’ I’d have left. There’d have been no problem at all. I would not have stayed because I would have seen the writing on the wall. I wouldn’t want to be hassled all my life by them guys if they didn’t want me to be there.”

The park has definitely changed things, and not all for the better, says Seymour. Having the Park Service come in is about the worst thing that can happen to a pretty piece of country, he thinks. Well, not the worst thing. The worst thing would be having it be industrialized or commercialized. But being loved to death by the Park Service is the next worst thing.

“You know, if the congressional intent was really to have subsistence people here and accommodated, they flubbed. They didn’t do it. Not only did it not work, they went out of their way to orchestrate getting rid of the subsistence people so they wouldn’t have to mess with them.” From where Seymour Able sits, the result is clear enough. As far as Congress’s intention to recognize and protect subsistence activities in Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve, “it’s not happening. Everybody’s gone.”

Calico Bluff

I get myself gone, too, as it’s close to dark and time to make some ripples on the surface of this wide, placid river. In a minute, I am pointing toward Calico Bluff, where the river takes a bend to the north and crosses the boundary into Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve. The exposure reveals a multicolored, multilayered face that suggests a bite taken out of a giant torte. The Yukon River took that bite and digested the light and dark layers of limestone and shale. I visited Bob Satler here once. He was leading a crew of historical archaeologists excavating the site of a one hundred-year-old cabin just upstream from the bluff. They had found two butter cans from Coldbrook Creamery in San Francisco dating 1898 and 1899 as well as various cans, bottles, bits of fabric, hundreds of rifle and shotgun casings of various calibers, and assorted buttons—some military.

The 1900 census lists Homer Ford, a woodcutter, as the resident here. But Bob thinks market meat hunters may have used the cabin at some point and that, after market hunting was outlawed in 1907, a military contingent might have been posted here to enforce the law. The area is rich, situated on a strip of land between the Yukon and a large lake that attracts many hundreds of ducks. There are flats—moose habitat—east and west and north of Calico Bluff, and the easily climbed bluff provides a great lookout. Bob thinks the site has been occupied for thousands of years. He almost always finds flakes of worked stone on the beach, and he has excavated and dated shards to more than five thousand years before present. Once, he unearthed a football-shaped wad of chipped black argillite. Black argillite is a soft, crypto-crystalline rock that fractures predictably and so can be fashioned into tools. It shows up as a dark streak on Calico Bluff. He speculates that the heap of chipped stone he found resulted from a man sitting cross-legged, chipping stone as the flakes piled up between his legs.

Seventymile River

Around a big horseshoe bend, past Limestone Hogback Ridge, is an island that hides the mouth of Seventymile River. It looks like camp to me. And soon it is.

It is an absolutely silent evening. The setting sun lights up little puffs of clouds until they glow a shade of purple that, I want to say, does not occur in nature. From my pipe, I send up little puffs of rejoinder. Smoke signals. I don’t smoke as a rule. I suppose I do it to break a rule. Out here, a bowl of Stoney’s Blend is as companionable as the fire. It is a communion, too, with my Uncle Jim, whose teeth have left indentations on the stem.

Now it is dark, and the calls of the great horned owls are floating across the still air. A plea for company broadcast hopefully into the night. Over and over. Four notes, one a double. Short, long, short-short. The dit-dah of loneliness.

In the middle of the night, the sound of pounding feet very near my tent startles me awake. A big animal in full charge. I grab my pistol and sit bolt upright until I can tell from the clattering cobbles that it is running inland, away from me. Almost certainly it is a moose, walking the shore and surprised by the tent. Tomorrow we’ll see.

 

IN THE MORNING, a black cloud moves through, washing down the bar like a Mexican shopkeeper up early to clean the sidewalk. The squall prompts me to lie in my bag and jot some notes. The air is lovely when I emerge to make a fire for coffee and to paw through the grub box. A raven flying over the island alters his course to check me out, his wing strokes making a whoo, whoo, whoo, directly overhead. We exchange casual squawks.

I’m packing up the tent when a green johnboat with a Go-Devil passes, heading upriver. A Go-Devil is a kind of outboard motor where the propeller is located at the end of a long driveline that projects well astern of the transom and allows operation in shallow water. I wave. No response. Wave again. No response. The raven was friendlier. Twenty-two minutes later, the throb of the motor still comes to me in faint waves from around the bend, five miles up river. He is probably up near the mouth of Pickerel Slough. He is probably looking at the morning sun lighting up the variegated strata of Calico Bluff ahead of him. I am in his past. But he remains in my present because I can hear him still. Perhaps, we are both in the raven’s present, as he may perceive us both from his vantage. In another moment I cannot distinguish the pulse of the Go-Devil from the general thrum of the living world. The whine disintegrates into the air, though for a while I can reassemble it more or less accurately in my memory. It is a shadow of perception, and it begins at once to fade like a photograph left in the sun.

Unless one makes a record.

Stories are the original record of human memory in this place. My friend Bill Schneider is the curator of oral history at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. He makes the point that human experience on the landscape invests the country not just with derelict steamboats and old cabins and tin can middens but also with stories.

 

That bend is where Biederman’s dog team went through the ice.

The current swirls there and eats away the ice from below. You have to watch out here.

There used to be a cabin at this bend. John the Baptist starved to death in it. Have I ever told you about him?

 

Schneider says that as people are eliminated from Alaska’s parks, new stories cease to be created, and the tradition dies. “There’s still some retelling of the old stories from before the park took over,” he said. “And there are the adventure stories of visitors—people from elsewhere who come to the park to recreate.” Of course, these folks rarely get off the main stem of the Yukon, and their knowledge and store of experience connected to this place is limited. Meanwhile, the lore of trappers and dog mushers and miners, who knew intimately the Yukon, Kandik, and Nation, is not being replenished. “What’s being promulgated now in Yukon-Charley,” he said, “is an oral tradition of the park employees’ activities.” That strikes me as an astonishing fact.

I don’t know if Schneider would go this far, but it does seem that the changes along the Yukon in the last twenty years can be seen as a process of cultural succession. Like what happened when the white people supplanted the Athabascan here. Or when the Athabascan supplanted the Amerind, who came before them. With its roots in the nether regions of law and management policy, this new culture of administration, and the bureaucratic language that accompanies it, flourishes like fungi on a dung heap. The talk used to be about whose dogs could break trail when other teams bogged down; or where you can still see some old deadfall traps, and who likely built them; or the best sled runner width, and whether to use a skeg. Now the stories are, sadly, the shoptalk of a bureaucracy. More than once, around a woodstove, in a cabin along the Yukon, I have heard the talk slide into the brain-numbing argot of the civil service. It would have been incomprehensible to Jack London. It was largely incomprehensible to me, as the Park Service people spoke of E-perbs, FLET-C, SHPO, APLIC, ANHA, RAPS, O-A-S, D-I-1, I-B-P, and S-C-A (emergency personnel beacons, Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, State Historic Preservation Office, Alaska Public Lands Information Center, Alaska Natural History Association, Resource Apprenticeship Program for Students, Office of Aircraft Services, Department of Interior form number one, Incidental Business Permit, and Student Conservation Association).

Whenever I hear talk like this, I always think of a line from my friend, the Alaska poet John Haines, in his testy review of Coming into the Country. Where John McPhee sends up some speaker’s bureaucratic gibberish, Haines swings his shotgun to it and blasts: “Anyone who can pretend to think in this jargon must be beyond ordinary human communication and should not be trusted with public policies.” “Pretend to think.” There’s truth in that. So much of the chatter we listen to amounts to the coupling of preformulated phrases, labels for predigested ideas. There’s no more actual thinking involved than there is in linking the cars of a toy train.

McPhee was only repeating the jargon, of course, but Haines’s ear was cocked toward McPhee’s language, too. “I found myself annoyed with his continual dropping of the brand names of our culture, as if we would not know where we are without these abundant references. . . .” And, even more trenchantly, “His grip on the words for things is not hand-worn and familiar. He never loses himself sufficiently in what he sees, but remains in a semidetached way something of the sightseer in a strange land.” But I think we need, from time to time, people from New Jersey to come up to Alaska and report on this very different place, to compare us against the standards they bring with them. These things rub both ways, though, and I wouldn’t be too sure as to who was taking whose measure.

 

A GLANCE AT the ground breaks my hermeneutic reverie. Besides the Go-Devil and the raven, the other diffident visitor, last night’s charging beast, was indeed a moose. I see from the tracks that it ran into the trees on the island. Now, just as I get the canoe packed, I see a riverboat come downriver and take the left channel above my island, disappearing behind it. In a minute the motor shuts off. It must have stopped at the Seventymile, and it is probably Terry McMullin. Ten minutes later, I pull in below his boat and see last night’s moose standing out in the channel five hundred yards below.

McMullin meets me at the beach and invites me up to the cabin for tea. He is square-jawed, tan and silver-haired, and might be in his early sixties. His new log cabin is a beautiful piece of work, far and away the most upscale habitation I’ve seen on the Yukon. The log work, done by three fellows from Eagle, is as good as it gets. The sun streams in through picture windows. The kitchen area is modern. There is even a well and a septic system.

McMullin tells me that he moved to Eagle in 1967 to teach school. There were only eighteen to twenty white residents in Eagle at that time, and none of them had kids. The school was in the Native village, and he was the sole teacher of all eight grades. Originally from Minnesota, he had taught in Kodiak and Copper Center before coming to Eagle. At Copper Center he started running dogs, and when he moved to Eagle, he brought his team of big malamutes. He was keen to get out hunting and fishing and trapping with his dog team, but the old ways of living on the land had been dying out in Eagle for some time. Only two men, Willie Juneby and Tony Paul, ran fishwheels in the Native village, says McMullin, “and absolutely nobody was trapping in Eagle at that time.” Eventually he partnered up with Tony Paul, and they trapped marten out along the cat trail from Eagle that hits the Seventymile River sixteen miles up from the Yukon.

McMullin loved his time traveling and trapping in the country, and the nights spent in a little trapline cabin he built himself on the Seventymile, a mile above the mouth. A few years later he dropped out of teaching with the idea of packing up his family and going out and living in the woods for a year. He expanded the trapline cabin, and in 1970 he and his wife Mary Ann and their four kids left Eagle and moved to the Seventymile River. Instead of one year, the family lived there for five. The kids—three girls and a boy—became more and more competent in hunting, fishing, running dogs, cutting firewood, gathering berries, and looking out for themselves in the woods, summer and winter. In 1975, high wages on the Trans-Alaska Pipeline lured McMullin away to construction camps. For two years he worked as a teamster, piling up his savings. It wasn’t until 1979 that the family completely settled back into Eagle, and McMullin went back to the school district, this time as principal of the high school.

The family still used the cabin, but the land around it became entangled in Native claims with the passage of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act. First Paul filed a claim to the land, though he said he did it to protect McMullin’s right to the place. But then Tony died and his wife Hanna inherited the property. She wanted to transfer it to McMullin, but the Bureau of Land Management wouldn’t go along. Finally, in an instance of fair-mindedness rare in Alaska land squabbles, the Han-Gwech’in regional Native corporation stepped in to make things right where the U.S. government would not. They deeded McMullin twenty acres of their land at the mouth of the Seventymile, and there he had this new cabin built. “It was amazing,” says McMullin. “But, you know, I taught school out there. I had a lot of friends. I knew everybody on the board. And they are still my friends.”

Clear title is a comfort to McMullin. Like Seymour Able’s site a few miles upriver, his is just outside the Yukon-Charley Preserve boundary. For just a few miles around the mouth of the Seventymile River, the right bank of the Yukon is within the preserve, while its left bank is outside of it. McMullin’s tenure seems safe, but as he reaches an age where his activities on the land are reduced from what they once were, he regrets the gradual elimination of subsistence people living on the river. “I think it’s a loss to see that happen. But it’s going to happen. Why would the Park Service want to keep allowing subsistence? It really goes against the grain of everything that they want to see happen. I don’t think there’s any compatibility with what they think a park ought to be.”

These days, Terry McMullin visits his cabin whenever he gets the urge. His kids, who all grew up to become self-reliant and competent people, are gone now. But he says they remember and appreciate and draw strength from their upbringing out here. And they retain their connection to the place. His son comes every fall to hunt moose with his father. And every July, one or two of his daughters comes down to join Terry and Mary Ann in fishing and putting up smoked, kippered, or canned king salmon for their extended family, just as they have done for nearly forty years. For the McMullins, the salmon they catch and put up can’t be matched by anything found in a supermarket, shrink-wrapped on a Styrofoam tray.

Seventymile City and Star City

Where McMullin’s cabin stands, or near it, there was once a sizable town. In 1887, prospectors found gold up the Seventymile River, so named because of its distance below the town of Forty Mile. A man with a rocker could take out fifty dollars a day on the Seventymile. In 1897-1898, overflow stampeders from Dawson and Eagle, both of which were booming, laid out a townsite called Seventymile City on the Yukon in a spot likely slightly above the mouth of the Seventymile River. Over the years, the river took a new channel, and McMullin thinks this town was probably right where the present-day mouth is. But it was flooded its first spring, and the miners moved two miles upriver, on the same side of the Yukon, and rebuilt. They called the new town Star City. By June 1898, two hundred fifty people lived here in forty or fifty cabins. The town boasted a post office and a small store. But within a year Star City drained away, too, when almost everyone stampeded on the big rush to Nome in 1899. McMullin says the only remains are a few roughly rectangular depressions in the ground, back in the brush and hard to find.

Tatonduk River, Heinie Miller

When I come out of the big bend below the Seventymile River, I come upon one of the grandest vistas in a place prodigal with vistas. It is the view to the east looking up the valley of the Tatonduk River. If I were the expedition artist on some nineteenth-century exploration, I’d stop here and set up my easel. The way the near hills part to reveal the distant Ogilvies creates a space that would pull you into the canvas, the way the actual scene beckons you into this valley, a back room in the house of wilderness. Bands of Han people were drawn into it, less for aesthetic than for economic reasons. They traveled here to the mouth of the Tatonduk after they quit fishing in the fall and waited for freeze-up. With the rivers and creeks frozen, they would trek up the Tatonduk River valley into the Ogilvies hunting sheep and caribou, spending the winter in the higher country. Throughout the winter, they would trend southeasterly. Then in the spring, with the rivers flowing again, they would build moose-skin boats to float back down to the Yukon to fish again. Perhaps many circuits of migration like this spun like water-wheels, driven by the great river’s current, one revolution per year.

In the 1920s and 1930s, Frank Charles “Heinie” Miller had a woodcutting camp here just below the mouth of the Tatonduk. He’d bought out an old-timer called Lucky Laughton. I don’t know if it was to celebrate the sale, or some other occasion, but Adolph Biederman once saw Lucky and Heinie shortly after they’d left Eagle in a rowboat with a gallon of whiskey. They were caught in the eddy below Eagle Bluff, contentedly drifting in big circles, pleasurably prolonging their journey, at once in motion and not really going anywhere. When Biederman asked an Eagle man if he thought they should get a boat and go help the men out, he was told that God looks out for fools and drunks, meaning, I suppose, that Heinie and Lucky were doubly protected.

Even though Heinie has been dead for better than half a century, some maps still mark the spot as Miller’s Camp. He hired six or seven woodcutters, including a number of Han men, to cut wood at various places, buck it up into four-foot lengths, haul it to the river bank with horses, and stack it there for the steamboats. Maud, a trained horse, hauled timber from the hills to the wood yard unattended. In 1930, Miller shipped in a Caterpillar tractor. The woodcutters came down in the springtime, driving their dog teams on the Yukon River ice to the Tatonduk, or to Wood Islands a few miles below. They would have gotten a grubstake on credit from the Northern Commercial Company in Eagle and piled those staples into the sled, along with a tent and camping gear. They would shoot their meat downriver. “They all take their dog team, tents, and they set up tent camp,” said a Han man from Eagle named Silas Stevens in an oral history interview. “A regular tent city. Down there on Wood Island. For $4.00 a cord. Good money them days too.”

When Heinie Miller needed woodcutters in the middle of the winter, the men may have been able to drive a harder bargain. A 1936 letter in the Eagle Historical Society archives, from the Northern Commercial Company agent in Eagle to Miller, lays down one Native man’s terms: “Charlie Yukon has agreed to go down and chop wood for you soon after the first of the Year, but he says he would want a Cabin with a stove in it, and a good place to chop that is good timber, he will furnish his own Cooking utensils and grub, and he will chop more wood than any three men you have.”

Ernie Pyle, the famous journalist, met Heinie in 1937. He took a sternwheeler down the Yukon that summer, and the boat stopped to “wood-up” at Miller’s Camp. According to Pyle, Heinie was a Chicago native who had come into the country around 1900 and hadn’t been Outside since. “Hell, no, and I ain’t going out,” said Heinie. “I didn’t lose nothin’ down in the States I have to go back after.” Heinie was getting old. “His clothes were old and not too clean,” Pyle writes. He was whiskery, with tobacco juice stains on either side of his chin, and his sky-blue eyes were weakened by cataracts. But Heinie still sounded fierce in that summer of 1937, pealing off strings of profanity as he talked about tough times. He and his men had worked all last winter and stacked up about 700 cords of wood by spring. But at breakup (when the river ice finally breaks into pieces and begins to move) the ice jammed and the river rose. It flooded so quickly Heinie had to wade to a tree and climb it. When the tree started to keel over, he made his way to the big woodpile through ice water up to his shoulders. “By the jumping ______ ______ it was cold,” he told Pyle. After sixteen hours on top of the woodpile—during which time it poured rain—the ice dam broke, and the water fell. Heinie hoofed it, soaked and shivering, to a trapper’s cabin. “Damned if I even got a cough out of it,” he said. The Yukon had left Heinie with his life, but it made off with a hundred cords of his wood, representing 800 hard-earned but not yet realized dollars. The river also knocked Heinie’s new cabin off its foundation and generally trashed his entire operation. The breakup of 1937 didn’t give him a cold, but it did give him enough of the country. Not long after Pyle met him, Heinie Miller packed up and left.

Dick Cook

I cut the motor to add silence to the scene and drift languidly by the mouth of the Tatonduk. Funny how the gentle sun sinks me into a kind of torpor, until it seems I cannot move, can barely daydream. It should be ice, not paper, I’m thinking, that covers the rock that breaks the scissors. Except that the scissors could never win. But then it wouldn’t lose either, not when the ice gets through with the rock. In the mountains far upstream from where I am, millions of tons of moving glacier ice reduce bedrock to specks of grit as fine as flour. The gray, powdery stuff roils the glacial outwash, clouding to a pearly translucence every creek and river downstream all the way to the sea. The suspended silt hisses now against my canoe, the aluminum hull magnifying the sound tympanically, like brush strokes on a snare drum, a quiet drum roll. Enter Dick Cook, McPhee’s most notable river character.

I am seeing a July day ten years ago, when my wife and then six-year-old son and I sat right over there on that stony beach, eating lunch. We hadn’t realized we were quite so close to Cook’s place when we saw a canoe pull out from shore a quarter mile below and glide across the wide, sparkling river. There were two people aboard, and we watched them check a salmon net on the opposite bank, gathering lunch, perhaps. In a few minutes they began to motor back, but the outboard quit. With half a mile or more of silence between us, we could clearly hear their voices over the water, as the river swept them away and the man pulled repeatedly on the starter cord. Finally, the motor fired, and they swung around and pointed into the current. But a minute later, the air was silent again. As they drifted downstream, the man pulled and fiddled, pulled until the motor caught and ran long enough for them to make it back to camp.

After a bit, we packed up and drifted down to where Cook’s canoe was tied. I gave my son a bag of grapefruit to carry up the trail. If we were to disturb this famously crusty denizen of the wilds at meal time, I figured to do so a couple of paces behind a cute kid bearing gifts. But Cook was already at the head of the trail before we started up. In seconds his flashing eyes had taken in the three of us, scanned the canoe, registered that I was running an older fifteen-horsepower Evinrude on a nineteen-foot, square-stern Grumman with a lift, sized us up by our gear, calculated its volume and weight, and followed the bag of grapefruit until it was in his hands. He received it with thanks and invited us up to his camp, where he introduced us to his friend, a woman named Pat from Texas.

Cook was as McPhee had found him in the 1970s: thin and balding, with longish, gray-streaked black hair and beard, alert as a mink. He wore a T-shirt emblazoned with some irrelevance and old pants with a busted zipper. But he was shod in new sandals. He looked like a marooned pirate in Birkenstocks: a castaway scavenger of random goods swept overboard from freighters somewhere out in the distant lanes of commerce.

It was the time of gardens, and once up the bank we inspected Cook’s well-managed plot, discussed fish guts as fertilizer, cauliflower that would not head, and subsistence living generally. I mentioned seeing some fish heads on the beach where we had stopped for lunch and asked if he fished with rod and reel. No, it was the work of some floaters. For him to fish with a rod would make about as much sense, he said, as for him to take his rifle and shoot into the woods, then to take off walking after the bullet to see if it hit anything. I laughed, but remarked that old-timers in this country sometimes fed their dog teams by jigging for pike. I’d read accounts of holes so productive that a person with a spoon and a length of twine could stack up fifteen-pounders like cord wood. Cook wasn’t buying it. He delivered a short lecture on the need in a subsistence economy for maximum return on invested effort. It put me in mind of a bit of McPhee’s scathing tact. He described Cook’s voice as soft and gentle, except “when he is being pedagogical. ... He is not infrequently pedagogical.”

But neither is he ungenerous with the fruits of his wisdom. As we moved to leave, Cook plucked from the garden a perfect, deep green cucumber and handed it to my boy.

 

THAT WAS THEN. Now his fish camp could hardly feel lonelier. Dick Cook was one of the very few bush people left in all of Northern Alaska who still lived year-round out beyond a village. It seemed like he was here forever, part of the place, a central figure in anybody’s book. And now he’s gone. Just a few weeks before I pulled up to his fish camp, Cook drowned somewhat mysteriously in the Tatonduk, the river he navigated for thirty-six years.

At times, Cook used this place, half a mile below Miller’s Camp at the mouth of the Tatonduk, as his main residence. More often, it served as his fish camp and trap cabin, especially when the lynx population was high, and he ran his lines through the flats and islands along the Yukon (lynx numbers oscillate harmonically with the hares, which overpopulate, then crash). The old cabin that Cook had taken over once belonged to Max Drews, a native of Berlin, Germany, who in the teens and twenties bounced around all over the country—Dawson, Fortymile, Woodchopper, finally settling in Eagle. He had a cabin at Trout Creek too but lived here near Heinie Miller. In 1933 or 1934, Drews had a contract to carry mail as far as Nation River, until he stepped in overflow and froze his foot, losing three toes. “He had extra foot gear and socks in his sled,” according to one old-timer, “but he did not know his foot was frozen.”

Drews’s cabin, built in the 1920s and haphazardly maintained by Cook, looks to be about fourteen by sixteen feet. Its roof is not quite one thing or another. It’s like a composite illustration depicting the full range of bush construction techniques. The front is lopsidedly covered with a thick layer of sod sprouting tall green grass. The section behind that is mostly clad in rusted white gas cans, cut and flattened and lapped to shed the rain. The hind quarters feature a few sheets of corrugated tin, brown with rust, and some plywood, weathered and gray. Withal, these are all honest materials, earth-toned and dignified. But wrapped across the whole rear end of the cabin, like a bright blue diaper, is a large plastic tarp. That this jury-rigged arrangement leaks is suggested by the rotting logs, which are falling apart, and the fact that Cook tacked up plastic sheeting inside over the ceiling and walls.

It takes a minute for my eyes to adjust to the low light level inside, especially because the plastic sheeting is black, and it soaks up most of what light comes in through the small windows. The interior has the look and feel of an animal den, a sensation intensified by the mixed aromas of rancid salmon grease, damp hides and the stink of recently resident chickens. Cook had cut a low opening through the south wall and rigged up a room there under the tarp for his chickens, which he regarded as very companionable animals. Letters to his friend and lawyer, Bill Caldwell, often concluded with the sort of news that a more conventional seventy-year-old might pass along about the grandchildren. “The chickens, as usual, say hello,” he wrote in the spring of 2001. “They really love being in the house. Chickens seem to be God’s definition of ‘spectator.’ No matter what I’m doing, they line up to watch.” The year before, he had grieved over the loss of a hen. “A marten caught her on the nest while she was laying. I knew the marten was stealing eggs—saw him a few days earlier coming out of the henhouse with an egg in his mouth—so I’d been closing the coop at night after the birds went in and not letting them out until late morning. He got her about noon. I took the rest of them in the house; they’ve not been out since.” Cook set traps, and got nine marten in about a month: “five shot, four trapped.” The marten were worth hundreds of dollars, but Cook lamented that the hen was “the highest flyer and most skilled at getting away from the dogs. Wish she could have raised chicks and taught them her method.” In his next letter, he was still pining, “No amount of marten will replace the little red hen.” Eventually, he got over the loss and started planning. He decided he wanted to get a hold of a fighting cock and breed a tougher strain of chicken.

Dick experimented in the vegetative realm as well. Friends say he had some theory about the value of importing weeds. Once, while visiting his second ex-wife, Ann, and her family in Washington state, he collected the seeds of stinging nettles. He planted them, and they grew near his cabin. Perhaps he intended them for some medicinal purpose. Or, being transplanted himself, and prickly, maybe he just liked the idea of a few obnoxious exotics on his spread.

Most years, Cook’s home cabin wasn’t this dank little log cabin beside the Yukon but a place about six miles up the Tatonduk near the mouth of Pass Creek. He had gone to that spot first in the winter of 1964-1965, while he was living in Eagle. Maybe he built some kind of shelter there at that time. Maybe not. In a sworn deposition he says, “I built a little cabin up there [Pass Creek] at that time, ’64, ’65.” Ann Cook, his wife in those days, now a lawyer in the Seattle area, says he didn’t have any kind of shelter at Pass Creek then. But then, Ann didn’t travel with him. He probably had something up there, though probably it was more lean-to than “cabin,” a few logs piled up in a ramp against the wind. Around 1971, he built a ten-by-ten-foot cabin at Pass Creek but decided to move it a year later. He took the cabin apart, floated the logs about half a mile downstream, and put it back together at a new site with a better garden spot, more firewood, and no permafrost. He added a small room on to that cabin, and when McPhee saw it, he wrote that it was trim and tidy and lined with books and tools. But that was probably because Donna Kneeland was living with Cook then. Some years later, when Donna was long gone, a friend of mine saw Cook’s cabin at Pass Creek. When I related McPhee’s description, my friend, who is possibly as far from fastidious as anyone I know, wrinkled his nose and shook his head. “No. It was very funky.” Another former river resident who knew Cook for better than twenty-five years said he seemed to practice a kind of studied degeneracy. “You know, if his porch overhang was sagging, he wouldn’t even prop a pole under it, he’d just let it fall down. It was almost like he was trying to out-sloven everybody. Like, he’d leave a piece of moose liver on the floor and then get pissed at you when you stepped on it.”

Cook said he moved on to the Tatonduk at a time when the Native people had given up trapping, and there were almost no whites out in the country. His area hadn’t been trapped for six or eight years, he said, and the country downstream toward the Nation River hadn’t had a trapper on it for eighteen or twenty years. Willie Juneby had been the last to trap the Tatonduk. And Art and Charlie Stevens had trapped portions of what became Cook’s trapline downstream from the Tatonduk and over into Hard Luck Creek in the Nation River drainage. Cook talked at length with these Native men, gathering information and stories. Juneby told him where he could find a trapline trail that had been brushed out not too many years earlier, and Cook incorporated it into his line. He gave Juneby the first marten he caught on that trail.

Eventually, Cook claimed a trapping area of perhaps two hundred fifty to three hundred square miles. His habit was to rotate each year into one of three sectors, leaving the other two to rest. One sector included the Tatonduk, the flats around its mouth and its tributary, Thicket Creek. Another sector was the area downstream from the Drews cabin on both sides of the Yukon. And the third sector was over the hills on into Hard Luck Creek, a tributary of the Nation River. He trapped a couple of the smaller creeks off Hard Luck, including Cathedral Creek and Harrington Creek. The Hard Luck trapline was perhaps forty miles long but might have required a hundred miles of travel, out and back. He would run the line every week to ten days. Earlier on, Cook maintained a team of strong dogs. When he was trapping seriously, he had as many as nine dogs and as few as three. The Hard Luck line required a tough dog team. “You’re dealing with long, long, long days and long trails,” he said in a court deposition.

 

COOK WAS GIVING a deposition in 1987 because he was suing the National Park Service, which came along a few years after McPhee left. He said an airplane trapper who had recently moved to Eagle was slipping into his area and poaching his fur. He pointedly complained to the Park Service superintendent in person, and he fired off letters. He must have been pounding the hell out of his old manual typewriter because the centers of all of the o’s are punched clean out of the paper. Held up to the light, Cook’s letters look like they were punctuated by a blast from a shotgun. “I want that pirate off my trapline and I believe it is your legal obligation to put him off.” Presenting his line of legal reasoning, he declared that in the Alaska lands act, “Congress dictated that NPS would protect the subsistence lifestyle in Alaska. It is impossible to protect my lifestyle without also protecting the furbearer population in the area I trap. . . . If the courts decide I have no subsistence priority, then subsistence priority doesn’t exist. Congress says I have rights; you say I don’t; it is time to find out.”

Cook was fond of the declarative statement, the punchy absolute. In his deposition, he lamented the introduction of not just the airplane into rural Alaska but also the internal combustion engine, calling it the worst thing that ever happened to the country. It would strike most people as unusual, then, to find that despite his ardor, Cook owned a chain saw (“vintage 1967”) and an outboard motor (“given me 6 years ago because ‘it’s not worth fixing’”). When pressed by the pirate’s attorney about snowmobiles, Cook acknowledged, “I’m going to buy one. I mean, I don’t like them for personal reasons. I’d much rather have dogs. Circumstances are changing.”

Most people would acknowledge that Cook certainly knew a lot about the country he lived in. But most people who knew him probably would also say he was, in common parlance, a bit of a bullshitter. Listening to his assertions about managing the marten population on his trapline, you start to think that maybe you should set a few traps of your own in the hope of catching an actual fact. In a sworn statement he gave in the spring of 1988, Cook said, “The minute I start catching females, I pull traps.” A little later, he talks of a recent catch as consisting of “one-third females, which was somewhat high for the females.” Well, it would be “somewhat high” if a fellow pulled his traps “the minute” he caught the first one. It was Cook’s view that “catching females is a good sign that the trapline’s in bad shape.”

 

THE AMERICAN MARTEN is a member of the Mustelidae, or weasel family, and includes sea otter, river otter, wolverine, badger, fisher, mink, ermine, and the tiny least weasel, the world’s smallest mammalian carnivore. After salmon, the marten is probably the most important wild animal in the economy of subsistence people along the Yukon, as it is widely distributed and easy to trap and sell. The marten is closely related to Siberia’s sable, having crossed the Bering Land Bridge into North America during the last Ice Age. It is secretive and rarely seen, aside from when one shows up in a trap. Its presence in an area is mainly revealed by tracks in the snow. Even allowing for an expert trapper’s talent for reading tracks, it would be hard to distinguish, for example, the tracks of one juvenile female from those of another juvenile female. Nevertheless, Cook claimed to have “delineated the families” in many cases and to have “made sets in such a way so that there were two sets in each family.” He would “only take two out of a family which is a family of, say, six. . . .” In a letter to the park superintendent, he said, “For 13 years I managed that fur at near maximum population density with a 13 year sustained yield of 17 to 20%.”

Either Cook was in possession of data-gathering techniques that would be the envy of fish and game agencies the world over, or he was in possession of rhetorical gifts that fit pretty well into a long tradition of frontier gasbaggery. In a 1987 affidavit, Cook called himself “a trained scientist” because he had taken courses, but not graduated, from the Colorado School of Mines. In another place he referred to himself as an “engineer,” even though he had never completed any degree or passed any licensing examination. Cook certainly was a close observer of the nature that surrounded him. And he did make notes in his journal and on big rolls of butcher paper about his catch and the tracks he’d seen in fur prospecting trips. He was the sort to sit and cipher, to work up numbers from this angle and that. But he was an amateur. And when he latched on to an opinion, he hung on to it like a barnacle. He was prone to overstatement, and that’s an understatement.

An actual trained scientist, Dave Payer of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Fairbanks, who earned his PhD studying marten, thought Cook’s notions of marten families “interesting.” “A male and a female do not cooperatively raise a family,” he said. The adults are solitary. They are territorial within their sex, meaning they generally cannot abide another of the same sex on their range, but they will tolerate the presence of another of the opposite sex. A male’s territory may be twice that of a female’s, and these territories will overlap. You can think of it like a senate district represented by a male, which consists of two house districts represented by females. The male may breed with both females, and the females are not necessarily monogamous either. Breeding occurs between late June and early August, but implantation of the egg is delayed for more than half a year until spring, a more advantageous time to birth and rear young.