And the dogs did fine, though Moore and Kelly did have to pare down to five or six. (Eventually, most river people saw the disadvantages of their big, hundred-pound Malamutes: you had to shovel the food into the big galumphing beasts, they ran at a walk, and they loved nothing so much as a murderous fight. Eventually, all but the big-dog die-hards converted to the smaller, Iditarod-type dogs—like those George and Carolyn ran—which were around sixty or seventy pounds, had better dispositions, and could trot all day.)

In August, Carolyn and George started a cabin near the mouth of Andrew Creek. They used only hand tools, having a strong aversion to gasoline engines of all sorts, their noise especially. The fall came cold. By October, the cabin was late and the winter early. They were still camped out, and Carolyn was pregnant. Seeing the circumstances, Charlie Kidd offered to let them use the Sam Creek cabin, so long as he could continue to stop over there. They moved in straightaway.

The baby was due on March 29, and as the date approached, George was sticking close to home, not running his trapline, to be sure to be on hand when Carolyn went into labor. The cabin’s square footage is approximately that of a medium-sized Persian rug, and George was developing a case of “cabin fever.” “George was hanging around and hanging around. By the twenty-ninth he was going nuts,” remembers Carolyn. “So we went over from Sam Creek to Andrew Creek to our tent. And I snowshoed. I probably snowshoed about ten miles that day. And about ten o’clock that night I went into labor in the tent. And at dawn, George put me in the sled and ran me back over across the river to Sam Creek, because I didn’t want to have the baby in this little five-by-eight tent with nothing in it.”

Carolyn had seen Jan Waldron in September but had not seen another woman in the intervening six months. She and George had debated about going into Fairbanks to have the baby. Or maybe, they thought, they should go down to the Coal Creek mining camp, where Arlene Bell and her husband Ray were caretakers. If things went badly, there was both a radio and an airstrip at Coal Creek. All they had at this little log cabin on Sam Creek was a book: Spiritual Midwifery—“the greatest book ever written,” according to Carolyn. Back at the Sam Creek cabin, George just had time to get the cabin warmed up and some water thawed and the book opened to the pertinent page. “It was pretty quick,” Carolyn says. “Pretty easy.”

When the baby was two weeks old, George made a dog-hide carrier, lashed it to a showshoe, and attached pack straps. Sort of a Pleistocene Snuggly. They wanted to get the baby checked out by a doctor, and Carolyn was nervous about rocketing down the steep hills to Coal Creek with a newborn in the dogsled. The sled could easily flip, become separated from the driver, and crash into a tree. So she walked while George took the dog team. Over the hills, down along Coal Creek to the mining camp, then on down to the roadhouse at the Yukon. On the map, it looks to me like nearly fifteen miles, with about a two-thousand-foot climb. But her story gets better. She and the baby, Zach, check out fine in Fairbanks, and they get a lift home from a friend with a Taylorcraft on wheels. He buzzes George at the Sam Creek cabin and then tries to land on a slough at the mouth. It is now mid-April. What looks from the air to be ice turns out to be slush two feet deep. “The wheels hit, the nose hit, and we just flipped over and landed on the top of the plane. Everything went through the windshield, and we ended up hanging upside-down.” But Zach was in a carrier in front of her. And, because Carolyn had been a little wary of the landing, she had covered him with her parka before touchdown. Everyone got a jolt, but everyone was fine. George mushed to Coal Creek and radioed for a helicopter in Circle to come and flip the plane right-side-up. The pilot took off the prop, bent it more or less straight, and flew back to Fairbanks. Just in time, as it turned out. Within a couple of hours, Sam Creek went out, and the landing area became moving water and ice.

The family spent the summer at Slaven’s Roadhouse at the mouth of Coal Creek and another winter at the Sam Creek cabin. They finished the Andrew Creek cabin in the fall of 1980 and lived there for four years. At eleven by fourteen feet, it was the biggest cabin they’d lived in to that point, but now there were three people in the space. George was away much of the time, either building a trapline cabin or checking his line, which took five or six days. Meanwhile, Carolyn watched the baby, and when he was asleep, she’d wash the diapers out by hand. Cooking took a lot more time out there too, she says. To cook, she had first to cut and split wood and build a fire. For water, she had to chip and haul ice from the creek and melt it on the stove. And she had to grind the grain to make the flour to make and bake the bread.

“A friend of ours said once that the men were the lucky ones because they got to go out and do all the fun things, and the women had to do all the work. And, you know, that’s partly true because when you had a family it seemed it broke out that way. Because the men were more likely to be the ones to go do the hunting and trapping and fishing, and you stayed home with the child or children,” says Carolyn. If the women were cabin-bound, the whole family was river-bound. “You just can’t pick up and go. It always seemed we were tied to the seasons and the river. You didn’t ever want to leave during king fishing or chum fishing. And you never wanted to leave—you couldn’t afford to leave—during trapping. And you certainly weren’t going to leave during moose hunting season. And you couldn’t leave at breakup or freeze-up. When you figure the windows there, there weren’t that many.” And then they had to find someone to feed the dogs. The upshot was a once-a-year, five-day shopping trip into Fairbanks in early June—a short span of time after breakup, but before one can quite get out on the river, and a time when the bugs are especially bad. In the fall they would get away for a short boat trip up the Yukon twenty miles to visit Jean Trainor and Larry Ricketts at the mouth of the Kandik.

Eventually, Carolyn went a bit stir-crazy. She wanted to spend more time around people. “I started missing seeing other women. Because I’d go for months, I mean for the whole winter, without seeing another woman or having another woman to talk to. I think that probably was the thing that got to me most.” At the same time, Zach wanted to be around kids. In fact, a number of things were stacking up on the same side of the scale. Carolyn’s mother died, and it is hard to be out of contact when something like that happens. Andrew Flats flooded during the breakup of 1982. Fourteen feet of water floated the cabin off its foundation, and it settled back down a little cockeyed. As Zach grew, the cabin shrank. Once, Zach got sick and had to be flown out. The illness cleared up, but doubts about risks and parental responsibilities remained. At this time too, the Park Service arrived. “The final straw for me, personally, was that summer the Park Service showed up,” she says. “Up until the time the Park Service came down there, we saw very little river traffic. It was real quiet. And once Park Service came down, they had boats up and down the river constantly, and there was a lot of traffic and a lot of noise because they had boats and they had helicopters.”

Now there were people streaking through their country, right past their doorstep, who may have left Eagle that morning after a ham-and-eggs breakfast at the cafe. Or they may be zipping back up to Eagle, contemplating a shower and TV before bed. “It suddenly seemed like a joke to me,” says Carolyn, “that we were going to all this work to be down here and do things the way we were doing them, when there was all this stuff happening right there.”

Carolyn had always considered herself a conservationist, had been a member of the Sierra Club, had even testified in favor of the Alaska land withdrawals leading up to the creation of such park lands as Yukon-Charley under ANILCA. But she had in mind that Alaska parks should not degrade the thing being preserved. “It always was available for public use. And the people who would come and use it were the people who had the gumption to get there and could take care of themselves,” she says. She didn’t want to see it “turning into a Yosemite or something,” and felt that there should be some places where “somebody’s got to work to get to, and want to go there, and not want to have somebody in a uniform greeting them.”

If it was bad when the rangers sped by, it was worse when they stopped. “They would stop, and they wanted plans of all our cabins. And they wanted this, and they wanted that, and they wanted to issue permits for everything. And it just seemed like that wasn’t why I was out there.” The big question, given all of this, was should the couple invest the effort in a new cabin if they might be kicked out, or should they just move on? They moved on. To Eagle in 1984, then later to Fairbanks.

Carolyn acknowledges that she and George always knew that “at some point we would have to leave or we would want to leave.” They knew they “weren’t going to be in that spot forever.” Still, the way their departure was hastened by the presence of the Park Service bothered her. “At the time, I was angry,” Carolyn says. “And I guess I still am angry in some respects.” But she treasures the experience that allowed her to grow in significant ways. “I was never a very self-confident person,” she says. “My dad died when I was young, and I’d never even been camping or anything. I never had to take care of myself in the true sense of the word.” It took moving back to town for Carolyn to realize how much the bush life had changed her. “I developed self-confidence. Because things happened. I got in situations where I had to take care of myself, had to take care of Zach. . . . It was so good for me,” she says. “I think other people should be able to do that if they want to.” She, herself, doesn’t want to live out there any more. “I mean, now my life has changed.” But, says Carolyn Kelly, it is important that some other young woman or man “right now, today, have the same opportunity that I had.”

AT PRESENT, THE SAM CREEK CABIN tentatively has been determined to be eligible for inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places. The rough attention of whoever put on the tin roofing and an old brace on the far gable wall are probably the only reason the cabin still stands. The log ends are beginning to rot. The biggest contributor to a cabin’s demise is water, and water is getting in at the ridge and where the tin doesn’t lap properly. Sooner, rather than later, the cabin will go. I ask the Park Service managers what’s wrong with simply putting a tarp over the roof against the day that somebody might want to save it. For twenty bucks, I tell them, you can retain for years the option to fix up the oldest structure in your park. The reply is so prolix and discursive, I honestly am at a loss to paraphrase it.

Slaven’s Roadhouse, Coal Creek

You can’t miss Slaven’s Roadhouse at the mouth of Coal Creek. In a country nearly empty of visible buildings, a two-story structure in a clearing on a high bank looks enormous from a mile away. Only when you climb the bank to have a look do you see it is about the size of a smallish house (thirty-seven by twenty-one feet). Still, that’s big by local standards. As big as Frank Slaven was little. From the old photos, he looks a rugged little Irishman, with big mitts on him and a nose that probably had been flattened a time or two by fists. Slaven had stampeded to Dawson, then moved on to Coal Creek, where he’d staked ground by 1905. Thirty years later, he sold his claims to Gold Placers, Inc., which had brought in a dredge. It is known that Slaven had a crew building the roadhouse in 1932, though that work might have been an expansion to an existing structure. Helping Slaven in 1932 were four miners from the area, including Sandy Johnson, who built the mail trail way station and Sam Creek cabin. The roadhouse is a fine example of log work. The crew cut big spruce logs on the Kandik River and floated them down to Coal Creek. They are expertly hewn to give flat wall surfaces on the interior. The milled lumber came from abandoned buildings at Fort Egbert in Eagle. The Park Service did a nice job restoring the building in the early 1990s, including a new foundation and new bottom logs to replace those that had rotted. It’s now listed on the National Register of Historic Places. To my mind, it’s a shining example of the good work the Park Service can do. Volunteers from the States stay here in the summer and keep track of such things as the number of floaters on the river and the number of dog-fighting Air Force jets overhead (fifty-four in a busy week the month before I arrived). And in winter, Park Service people come in and prepare the roadhouse as an unofficial checkpoint of the Yukon Quest International Sled Dog Race that runs between Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, and Fairbanks, Alaska. They stomp around the yard on snowshoes, packing the snow so the mushers have a firm parking lot where they can stake out their teams. With snowmachines, they pack down an airstrip on the frozen Yukon River so that Quest officials and the veterinarians can fly in. They chop a hole in the Yukon River ice to use as a water hole, split firewood, fill the lamps, and keep big pots of moose stew or moose chili simmering on the woodstove. I came in with them one year, and it is wonderful to see the old roadhouse lit up in lantern light and people talking about dogs around the stove, just as it ever was. When the mushers arrive, they are treated like celebrities, just as the mail carriers were. They are directed to a seat near the stove. A bowl of stew and a stack of pilot bread crackers are pressed on them. Room is made on the few nails above the stove for the musher to dry mitts and hat and parka.

Before the first dog driver arrived, I had noticed an odd lack of advantageously located nails above the woodstove, the most logical place to hang a hat or mits. Intending to be helpful, I instead set off a minor alarm by saying I was going to go look for a hammer so I could pull and reposition some of the nails. The nails, I was told, are regarded as historic and may not be moved. Nor could new ones be added. The staff laughed about the rule but said we had to observe it. They told about the time when the gravel road that runs up Coal Creek to the mining camp washed out. The obvious solution was to repair the road with some of the dredge tailings, the cobbley waste rock that covers the entire valley floor for about seven miles. But a Park Service historian said it was “historic gravel” and not to be moved. Of course, if any of the miners were still operating here, that is exactly how they would have fixed the road. I figured the nails weren’t just as Frank Slaven had left them in 1939 when he moved down to the States; they were as Carolyn Kelly and Ole the Swede and any number of other people who stayed here in the 1970s had left them. But it’s good to see that the Park Service cares about the old place.

Coal Creek Dredge and Camp

A mile up a little road along Coal Creek sits the dredge that operated here from 1936 to 1957. It was built in San Francisco for Gold Placers, Inc., the firm that had bought up all the claims on Coal Creek. Once built, the dredge was taken apart and shipped in pieces by steamer to Skagway in the summer of 1935. From there, the four hundred tons of steel parts were carried aboard the White Pass and Yukon Railroad to Whitehorse. Ernest Patty, who ran the mining operation at Coal Creek, said the railroad tunnels were measured and the dredge parts sized to fit through them. A sternwheeler and barge carried the materials six hundred miles downriver from Whitehorse to the mouth of Coal Creek, where they were offloaded. In October, when the ground was frozen hard, bulldozers skidded the dredge parts up the creek on sleds. (Today’s prospectors have an easier time transporting in their excavation equipment within the preserve because by regulation the only digging tool allowed these days is a tablespoon.)

The assembly site for the dredge was six and a half miles up Coal Creek. During the summer, crews had been stripping off the overburden there to get down to the gold-bearing gravels. First a dozer pushed off the trees and brush and sod, then hydraulic “giants” washed away the “muck,” or silty material. The muck ran to a depth of between six and twenty-six feet, and all of this material the giants washed down Coal Creek and out into the Yukon, blackening them both. The next spring, in April of 1936, a crew began putting the dredge together on the frozen surface of a pond created for that purpose. In mid-June, the two diesel engines chugged to life for trial runs, and on July 1, the bucket line began to turn and bite into pay dirt. “It was a great moment,” wrote Ernest Patty, who ran the mine, “to hear the thump of the first gravel falling into the hopper.”

A dredge looks something like an angular mollusk with corrugated tin siding and windows for eyes. A great radula extends out from the head of the floating building, and an excretory appendage projects from the other end. A chain of sixty-two buckets scoops gravel and tosses the stuff into a great maw. Thence it slides into a digestive organ called the trommel. It’s a huge rotating steel drum, perforated with holes of graduated size. Rocks larger than these holes bounce straight through the trommel and out a conveyor belt that juts rearward (the stacker) and dumps the rock astern of the dredge. Smaller rocks and sand pass through the screen, aided by jets of water, and are sorted by size. This material drops onto sluices and is moved along by moving water, except for the gold, which is caught in riffles. The miners added mercury to the sluices where the finest material was processed because mercury binds with gold fines and makes recovery easier. The waste rock, or tailings, end up in fan-shaped windrows (linear heaps) behind the dredge—fan-shaped because the whole dredge pivoted on a massive spike at the stern called the “spud.” As the bucket chain swung right, the stacker swung left. Two big diesel engines provided power. An Atlas drove a big twelve-inch main belt that moved the digging ladder and turned the trommel, and a Cat engine ran the water pumps and the belt for the stacker. Roaring and clanking, the dredge proceeded up the valley. It could process with a single revolution of the bucket chain the volume of material that nine pick-and-shovel miners could move in a day. It moved in a day the material a single miner could move in about ten years. In its first season of operation (which was only eighty days) the Coal Creek dredge produced about three thousand five hundred ounces of gold, with a 1936 value of around one hundred twenty thousand dollars (an August 2005, value of $1,529,500). By the time Gold Placers, Inc., shut down its operations here, they had taken more than three million dollars out of the creek.

Today the Park Service embraces the mine as an important record of capital-intensive mining, to date directing at least a million dollars (local people say “millions”) to restoration and interpretation of the dredge and camp. The agency flew in a restoration carpenter for four months to redo all the windows and doors on the dredge, including fabricating mullions to match the old style. They spent another eight hundred thousand dollars cleaning up the miners’ mess (though it is not clear which of several mining companies left it). Before the cleanup work began, I remember seeing a display at the dredge offering colorful anecdotes about the heyday of its operations. But nothing at the site, except the still-remaining junk piles of twisted scrap metal and the rusting drums leaching God-knows-what fluids into the shallow water table, suggested the extreme irony of a parks agency celebrating a machine that ate its way through this pretty little creek valley excreting uniform rows of barren rock. Meanwhile, the same managers pointedly overlooked the historical worth of folks like Dave Evans, whose developments were, as McPhee noted, essentially biodegradable. During the environmental remediation, crews here removed mercury, blasting caps, dynamite, pesticides, acids, spilled petroleum products, and of course a scattering of fifty-five-gallon drums. Recent interpretive work includes a book by a Park Service historian that gives a lot of wonderful details about the old prospectors who lived in the area. It’s called The World Turned Upside Down: A History of Mining on Coal Creek and Woodchopper Creek, Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve, Alaska. It is so detailed that it contains tables listing the employment dates of every employee. There’s room even for a page on the camp cat (Bozo, who, we are told, used to leap onto the backs of wolves and ride them around the camp). But the book does not budget so much as a paragraph to mention pollution so extensive that it cost eight hundred thousand dollars to remediate.

The book stops where the Patty family’s involvement with the two creeks ends. The final passage in the body of the text features a quote from Ernest Patty’s son, Dale, who was the last superintendent at the mine. He says that when his company shut down the dredges on Coal Creek in 1957 and at Woodchopper Creek next door in 1960, that that was “the last time the dredges have ever run to the best of my knowledge.” As the Park Service knows, however, after Gold Placers, Inc., closed up shop, others took over and ran the dredge. Ted Matthews ran the operation in the early 1960s, followed by Ernest Wolfe and Dan Colben from Fairbanks. It’s too bad the Park Service excludes from history the events of the 1960s, because interesting things were happening. For example, to get the dredge running again, Wolfe and Colben brought in a few aging miners who had worked on dredges decades earlier, including Joe Bayless from Circle. With wrenches and torches, the resourceful old-timers performed CPR on the dormant behemoth until it sputtered to life. Some local new-timers, like Charlie Kidd and Ole Beckloff, worked on the dredge too, as did Richard Smith from down near Eureka Creek. Kidd says that Bayless knew just how much coaxing the old dredge could take. He’d nurse her along, running at one-third power, unless he got an order to speed up from one of the bosses. “[A boss] would get on the dredge [and say], ‘Bayless, you can run more dirt than that.’ Every time he did, everything just slowed down and stopped.” Wolfe and Colben sold out to AU Placer, a Texas outfit that had the dredge running in 1977. It’s hard to tell if these enterprises produced much gold, or just how long the dredge ran, because this part of the history is not included in Park Service interpretive work.

The camp itself is about four miles up from the mouth of Coal Creek. There are twenty-six buildings there, including a mess hall, bunkhouses, a bathhouse, and a machine shop. Of the million or so dollars spent by the Park Service on the Coal Creek mining operations, much of it has gone to rehabilitate the buildings and to map, describe, and photograph the industrial leavings. The camp and the dredge area is now a designated National Historic Mining District. Today the Park Service maintains the air strip and camp as an “administrative site,” a place where agency personnel and VIPs can gather for overnight retreats and various functions. In large part because of this use, the camp is one of the few sites in the whole preserve that is assigned the highest level of fire protection: “critical.”

Woodchopper Roadhouse

Six miles below Coal Creek, on the same side of the Yukon, a companion creek called Woodchopper slices through the same gold-bearing formation. The pair of creeks parallel each other, hooking from the northwest to the southwest, as if God had used two fingers to scratch quotation marks in the sand. By 1917, a fellow known as Woodchopper Smith had built a large, two-story roadhouse here with the help of Fred Brentlinger. After World War I, Smith sold out to Brentlinger and bought an orange grove in California. When Brentlinger died, his widow, Flora, sold it to Jack Welch and his wife Kate. According to Ernest Patty, the Welches were old and rheumatic by the early 1940s when the ice jammed one spring right here in Woodchopper Canyon. The Yukon backed up and rose over the banks, and the Welches awoke in their second-story bedroom to the sound of massive ice cakes banging dangerously against the walls. Jack stood at the window with a pike pole deflecting some of the oncoming icebergs that were swirling around the cabin in the dark. The terrifying night left Jack mentally unbalanced thereafter, and his wife became bedridden. Perhaps it was the next winter that Jack became seriously delusional and one night told his wife that he knew what was wrong: he was losing his mind. He got out of bed, went outside, and shot himself. Kate Welch managed to get her wounded husband into bed, then, supported by two canes, she staggered a couple miles up the winter trail to George McGregor’s cabin. McGregor loaded both the old people into his dogsled and hauled them up to Coal Creek, where the watchman radioed for an airplane from Fairbanks. The ordeal proved to be Kate’s undoing. As Jack recovered, she passed away. Patty tells of Jack wandering up to the mining camp and asking, “Have you seen my wife? I can’t find her. She’s hiding from me.” The men tried, gently, to explain, but Jack could not accept that his old companion was gone forever. The next day Jack and his boat disappeared. According to Patty, reports filtered back to the camp from villages far downriver of a man alone in a boat, drifting all the way down the Yukon and into Bering Sea.

The Woodchopper Roadhouse was salvageable when Melody Webb surveyed it for the Park Service in 1976. As the largest structure in the preserve to still have its roof on, she recommended it be “restored if a lodge is ever needed for the park. A National Register would give added protection.” But by 2003, the roadhouse lay “in ruins, the roof caved and the upper story fallen in,” according to a Park Service pamphlet.

Woodchopper Creek/Joe Vogler

After their initial success on Coal Creek, Ernest Patty’s company bought out the small-scale miners on Woodchopper Creek and set up another dredge here. In his book, North Country Challenge, Patty recalls an old-timer named Frank Bennett who had come into the country around 1890 and had mined on the Fortymile before the Klondike discovery. He had already been on Woodchopper Creek for twenty years before Patty optioned his ground in the 1930s. Bennett was youthful looking, with bright blue eyes, white hair, and cheeks “pink as a baby’s.” The cabin was spick-and-span, with gingham curtains on the cupboards, a polished cook stove and a scrubbed floor. He was a kindly man, dignified and cultivated, according to Patty. He spoke well and had a shelf of quality books, including poetry. Eventually, Patty’s crew finished their test holes on Bennett’s claims, exercised their option, and bought the ground. Workers began stripping off the overburden with hydraulic giants, but Bennett kept finding reasons to forestall moving out of his cabin and into another one the dredge crew had set up for him. Pretty soon the giants had washed away all the ground except Bennett’s cabin site, which now stood alone on a little “mesa-like island” above the gravels. When Patty finally got him to climb aboard a truck with his belongings, a bulldozer standing by, Bennett said, “Please don’t knock it down until I get out of sight.” In a little while, even the spot where it used to be ceased to exist. Frank Bennett lived out his life on Woodchopper Creek, and when he died, no one knew if he had any family to contact. He hadn’t spoken about his past, left no papers, no letters, “not so much as a faded snapshot,” writes Patty.

 

BY THE 1970s, the most visible claim holder at Woodchopper Creek was a Fairbanks character named Joe Vogler, who had bought the Woodchopper dredge and some acreage from Patty’s company. Maybe “most audible” would be the better phrase. Vogler’s mouth produced fiery salvoes at about the rate of a Roman candle. He could work himself into a great froth over the environmentalists, or “posy sniffers,” as he called them. And when he finally tangled head-on with the Park Service in the 1980s, it was a battle royal. Frank Bennett and Joe Vogler were both Woodchopper miners—in the same way that Mother Theresa and Jessie Ventura were both cultural figures.

Joseph E. Vogler was born April 24, 1913, in Barnes, Kansas. He must have been a precocious child, as he entered the University of Kansas at sixteen, and emerged five years later with a law degree. He passed the Kansas bar, but the Depression came along and limited Joe’s chances of practicing law. It seems like he became a bitter old man while still in his twenties. He famously told McPhee he was fired from one job for calling President Roosevelt “a dirty rotten son of a bitch Communist traitor.” Vogler moved to Alaska in 1942 to work construction on military bases, but his wife did not like the country even a little and left with the two kids. Joe diddled at mining here on Woodchopper Creek, but it seems to have been more a hobby interest. One local person told me, “Oh, he really didn’t do a whole lot. He couldn’t really get it together himself. Messed around a little bit.” Maybe he valued more the job title “gold miner” than he did the actual job of producing gold. Joe made his money subdividing his land in Fairbanks. He was well known for the covenant he insisted every buyer accept: a legally binding promise to cut down every aspen tree on the property. Joe considered them “arboreal weeds” and had no problem suing eight of his new neighbors to see that they obeyed the covenant.

 

JOE LOVED TO MINE, he just didn’t do all that much of it. On the other hand, he “detested” politics, he said, but did a lot of it. “A couple of us got a belly full one Sunday afternoon in the spring of 1973 up in my shop,” Joe said in a videotaped talk at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. “We started the Alaska Independence movement.” He drafted a petition asking for a vote of the people on whether or not Alaskans wanted to remain in the union. His own view was clear enough: “I’m an Alaskan, not an American. I’ve got no use for America and her damned institutions.” Anger became something of a trademark for Joe and he built upon it in his first run for governor, as an independent, in 1974. That year’s election was decided by two-hundred-odd votes, while the renegade Vogler pulled in four thousand seven hundred and seventy. His five percent of the vote determined the outcome. Four years later, from the nucleus of a lunch group that called itself the “Cuss and Discuss Club,” Joe founded Alaskans for Independence, a nonpartisan organization devoted to pressing the issue of an “Independent Nation of Alaska.” The same year, 1978, Vogler and pals launched the Alaska Independence Party (AIP), and he ran for lieutenant governor under its banner. Next election cycle, 1982, Vogler was back at the top of the AIP ticket. I remember hearing him in debate with the major party candidates at the fairgrounds in Fairbanks. Although his voice was loud, it squeezed through a constricted throat until it came out high-pitched and thin. But Joe was a gifted orator. He was a flinty-eyed hellion with a hard mouth, and he didn’t use weasel words. The Fairbanks crowd loved him. Vogler did well enough—after a court challenge of the state’s rules—to earn the AIP official recognition as Alaska’s third political party. The Alaska Independence Party would be printed on future ballots alongside the Democratic and Republican Parties. As the AIP gubernatorial candidate in 1986, Joe pulled in more than ten thousand votes statewide, or 5.6 percent of the vote, including nearly twenty percent in feisty Fairbanks. The Republican candidate lost to the Democrat by about seven thousand votes, so it looked like Joe was the kingmaker again. All this set the stage for the election of 1990, when the Alaska Independence Party candidate didn’t just influence the governor’s race but stole it.

It was a brilliant switcharoo. With Joe declining to be nominated again, the AIP put up a dubious but eminently available character named John Lindauer. Seven weeks before the election, Lindauer and his running mate dropped out of the race, implausibly citing Lindauer’s wife’s illness. Joe Vogler, as chairman of the AIP, promptly announced that two long-time (not to say old) Republicans were the new candidates: Walter Hickel in the top spot, and Jack Coghill riding shotgun. Hickel had served half a term as governor of Alaska in the 1960s, before leaving to become President Nixon’s secretary of the interior. After that early prominence, Wally had spent millions of his own money (made as a shopping mall developer) in repeated and failed attempts to recapture the governor’s mansion (1974, 1978, and 1986). Coghill, to make matters really interesting, accepted the AIP lieutenant governor nomination even though he had just won the Republican primary for the same job and was on the Republican ticket. Hickel and Coghill switched parties and filed their candidacy papers minutes before the deadline, leaving the Republican gubernatorial nominee that long to find a replacement for Backstabbing Jack.

So, two lifelong Republicans had just trashed their Republican allies and split the vote in order to join the one percent of registered voters who thought Alaska should be an independent nation. For the Democrat, it looked like a cakewalk. But Hickel put his fortune behind the campaign, and his ads had a polished look. There wasn’t much time for him to produce detailed position papers, let alone for anyone to analyze them. On election day, it wasn’t the Republican vote that got split, it was the sanity vote. With 38.9 percent, Hickel-Coghill won. Joe Vogler had just pulled off an astonishing coup. Only six times in U.S. history had a third-party candidate won a governor’s race. And this third party was advocating secession from the United States.

During his single term, Wally Hickel was not particularly interested in secession, and some AIP members were miffed at the way he had rented the party. They and others launched a recall initiative, charging Hickel was mentally unfit. Vogler thought the interference showed every sign of being the work of the “damned, dirty, filthy hands” of the CIA. With Joe Vogler’s help, Hickel served out his term and, in fact, proved to be a moderating force in Alaska politics. Hickel managed to hold in check a Republican-controlled legislature that was, believe it or not, more radical still.

 

IF JOE VOGLER WAS CRANKY with mainstream Republicans and renegade secessionists, he was notably crankier with people he didn’t like, for instance representatives of the National Park Service. One day in the summer of 1984, Joe was driving some equipment over an old trail from the Steese Highway to his claims on Woodchopper Creek. He had a Caterpillar tractor and a monstrous wheeled vehicle with six-foot-tall rubber tires. Just as he was crossing some boggy ground around Webber Creek a black helicopter swooped down on him, and six armed federal agents leapt out to cut him off. It was either Joe’s worst nightmare or a supreme validation of all that he suspected was true. He was on Park Service land, the agents told him. He didn’t have a permit to walk a Cat across boggy ground in summertime, they said, and his equipment wasn’t going any farther. Walter Roman, who carried the mail by dogsled from 1934 to 1940, has said the government cut that trail for the mail carriers in 1900. Vogler knew that even backcountry trails could fall within the definition of “highway” under an 1866 law called RS 2477. “That’s a public highway,” he said. “I don’t have to get a permit to get out here on the public highway.” The law was repealed in 1976, but “highway rights of way already established may still be valid,” said Vogler, the nonpracticing lawyer.

The Park Service pointed out that when people drive bulldozers across tundra trails in the summer, they destroy the plant cover that insulates the permafrost below. That causes the permafrost to melt and turns the trail into something like a canal of chocolate pudding. The next driver through avoids the muck and drives his Cat alongside the earlier track, making a new mud rut. The Park Service was finding trails sixteen, seventeen, even eighteen tracks wide. The scars can take generations to heal. Or erosion can accelerate thawing and carve canyons or turn the whole area into a quagmire. That’s why the Park Service asks people to use winter trails in the wintertime. Then the ground is frozen hard and the snow protects the plants. A permit ensures that it happens. Reasonable people can see that. “Well, I’ll tell you one thing,” said Joe to all that. “That Cat will either move out of here without any permits, without any red tape, or it’ll set here and rust into the ground.”

By the time Joe was being interviewed on the subject for an Alaska public television documentary called Battle at Webber Creek, it was winter. The ground was now frozen, snow-covered. Dave Mahalic, then superintendent of Yukon-Charley preserve, said, “You know, if Mr. Vogler came in here this morning and asked me for a permit, he could be driving that Cat to his mine this afternoon.” To which Joe replied, “They can go straight to hell! And hell will be frozen over before I’ll do that! There’s no compromise!” Amplifying, he said, “I don’t know the word ‘compromise,’ because I’m right, they’re wrong.” It was a fight Joe was ready to carry on to his last breath. And beyond. “If I’m wrong in my belief that the federal government cannot retain sovereignty here, my bones won’t rot under the American flag! I’ll tell you, I’m going to Whitehorse. I’m going to buy a burial plot. And if I do not win this lawsuit lock, stock, and barrel, if I’m wrong in my concept of what America meant when it started out, I don’t want to lie under their flag.”

With a phalanx of government and environmental lawyers arrayed against him, Joe fought the case all the way to the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, losing all the way. He appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, but that body refused to review it. He said he was “going to take it to the bitter end.” As things turned out, Joe’s bitter end came not from the federal government but from a firebrand like himself.

 

IN MID-APRIL 1993, Joe Vogler turned eighty, and friends gathered for a big birthday party. That was the last time most of his friends saw him. Two weeks later, sometime over the Memorial Day weekend, he disappeared. A friend found his four dogs locked in Joe’s large log home. His wallet and heart medicine were on the table, but his trademark fedora was gone, as was his “belly gun,” a .32 caliber handgun he liked to carry. Things didn’t look right, especially to Joe’s inner circle. They thought that the government had reason enough, and was sinister enough, to murder Joe. The authorities declined to investigate the disappearance as a crime, which only added to the growing outrage and suspicion. The troopers suggested Joe had gone for a walk and gotten lost. After all, they pointed out, he was eighty. Or maybe he was despondent over his wife Doris’s death from cancer a year earlier, they said. Or maybe he’d gone over to Dawson City to visit her grave. But he might have his vehicles were in the driveway, and Air North had no record of him boarding a flight to Dawson. Besides, he would have arranged for the care of his dogs. And, eighty or no, Joe Vogler had all his marbles. (Well, he had all the marbles he’d ever had.) The Alaska state troopers said they could find no evidence of foul play. Only after “five days of mass call-ins to the governor’s office,” as an AIP account says, was a specialist finally assigned to examine the house.

The house was clean as a whistle. No leads. The search for Joe Vogler continued through that summer and into the winter. Alaska Independence Party members raised money to fund their own search and hired a private investigator. The group had posters printed asking “Where’s Joe?” It featured a mug shot of Himself, hard eyes staring from under the brim of his fedora, looking far more like a crime perpetrator than a crime victim. The signs were everywhere in Fairbanks, even stapled to stakes and jammed in the snow. But no trace of Joe turned up.

 

IN THE SPRING OF 1993, thirty-eight-year-old Manfried “Fred” West was living (at the insistence of the courts) in a residential alcohol treatment center in Fairbanks. He had violated probation on an earlier burglary conviction and presently faced sentencing for passing seventeen bad checks drawn on the bank account of his son’s grand-mother. For the moment, said the court, Fred’s options were two: treatment or jail. Eventually, he was kicked out of the treatment center for a breach of the rules. It wasn’t a lockdown facility, and he was simply told to pack up his stuff and go. Out of treatment, West had to go back to jail. He says he called the jail to arrange serving his time but was told to call back the next day. Eight days later, troopers learned that he was hiding out in his stepbrother’s cabin on the outskirts of town. By now the troopers wanted to talk to him for more than serving his time for parole violations. They had reason to believe Fred knew something about the Vogler disappearance. On May 27, 1993, shortly after 7:00 P.M., they surrounded the hideout cabin and called in a helicopter. Using a cell phone, trooper Jim McCann phoned West in the house and tried to get him to surrender. West told McCann that he was armed and had dynamite in the cabin. He threatened to blow the place up. But he alternated between threatening violence and discussing favorable terms of surrender. One of the things he dangled in front of McCann was a story of how he had shot and killed Joe Vogler. The call lasted more than three hours, and an on-the-ball news photographer named Genezaret Barron caught the exchange on a radio scanner:

 

West: Let’s talk about what me and Joe talked about the first time we met. I was supposed to get some plastic C-4 ... but I didn’t know where it was. I had no idea where it was. I told him I’d bring it up to him the next night. I didn’t have it when I went up there, and that’s what started the whole thing. Hell, I was “a no-good son of a bitch.” I was not a man of my word.

McCann: What’s this got to do with it?

West: Well, I’m getting to the story. There’s more to the story than just a robbery. You want to hear what happened, or not?

McCann: Yeah, yeah.

West: So, I go back and try to do the best I can . . . to get the whole fucking situation straightened out. He gets mad. I’ve got the fucking C-4. I get out and go to open the back of the truck. He gets all pissed off, fires a shot, apparently up in the air, and says, “I told you to get the fuck out of here, and the next one, I’m blowing your head off.” I remember the words almost exactly the way he said them. You can believe me or not.

McCann: I believe it.

West: So, I get in the truck, and he says something about, “For further reference,” and then he shot the truck. I thought I was shot. I really did. But I wasn’t. But I thought I was. And it pissed me off. I grabbed my little brat .22 that I stole from a house. . . .

And anyways, I shot it [sic] with a .22. He apparently only had two shots in his gun. I don’t really recall what was going on. All I know is that he turned once. He looked like he was getting ready to reload, and I pulled out the .22, aimed at him, fired, missed, fired again, and he turned around and ran for the house. And I hit him again. . . .

McCann: Where’d you bury him? Or do you even know?

West: Well, I know.

McCann: We’re all going there?

West: I put him in a tarp and I dug a hole about three feet deep ... I laid enough stuff on him, wrapped him up in a tarp, duct-taped it together numerous times so it could stop the swelling. ...

McCann: Where is he? Where is he, Fred?

West: It’s all over, bud . . . this place is gonna blow . . . the best you could do . . . is get the hell out of here . . . the dynamite is in the living room, [garbled] and dynamite toward the back of the garage is going to blow when it hits the fuses.

McCann: You gonna take this with you, huh? You gonna take this with you? That’s not the way to do it, Freddie. That’s the coward . . . [Explosion].

 

The troopers heard a blast and saw smoke billowing, then flames burst out of the windows. In a few minutes, the whole cabin was engulfed in smoke and flames. A propane tank exploded. Ammunition began to go off like popcorn. Firefighters responded but had to stand by, only moving in after the roof collapsed. The cabin burned almost to the ground, with all of West’s stepbrother’s possessions in it. After firefighters put out the flames, the troopers moved in to search for the body. When they found it under a toppled concrete block wall, they thought he was dead. But his hands were shaking. The firefighters had been pumping frigid water on the building. In the midst of an inferno, the hapless arsonist was nearly hypothermic.

 

THE CONFESSED KILLER was in jail, but for Joe’s friends in the Alaska Independence Party that explanation was too simple. “Joe wouldn’t have done business with [West],” Lynette Clark, the AIP secretary, told the Fairbanks newspaper. “If Joe wanted dynamite, he knows reputable members in the blasting community.” It was a good point. Joe would have only been inclined to deal with reputable government-hating, secessionist dynamiters. (Still, the reference to a Fairbanks “blasting community” leaves me uneasy.) For Clark, it was more likely that Joe was the target of an assassination by a government hit man. “I don’t think it’s far fetched at all to think that the government would want to eliminate Joe Vogler,” she said.

 

ONCE A WEEK for seventeen months, volunteers with sniffer dogs had looked for Joe in ten different locations (the same dogs had looked for Dick Cook). On October 12, 1994, a couple of inches of snow were on the ground, mixed in with recently fallen leaves, and searchers were looking at yet another site. But, there was a strong sense of anticipation this day at a gravel pit off twenty-five mile Chena Hot Springs Road, about thirty miles from Fairbanks. The spot had been suggested by a jailhouse snitch. Five hundred yards north of the road, down a little track into a lightly wooded area, in a depression that had been scraped with a dozer some years earlier, a Bouvier named Maya stopped and pointed. Tanna, a golden retriever, joined Maya and began to dig frantically. Two troopers began the excavation with shovels. As they did so, Trooper Jim McCann was saying to himself, “Give me some tarp—blue tarp and duct tape—and I’ll know he’s there.”

Three and a half feet down, the tarp began to show. The body was wrapped up and sealed with duct tape. The seventeen-month-long search was over, as dental records and fingerprints later confirmed. In the matter of his burial, Joe had been wrong about one thing and right about another. Wrong in that he was buried under the American flag. Right in that his bones would not rest peacefully there. For Trooper McCann, the tarp meant the case was solved and that he already had the murderer in jail. “I don’t see any other plot than the simple one,” McCann said. “People don’t want to hear that.”

A blue tarp and duct tape. Archetypal implements of Alaskan culture. Joe, the Alaskan patriot, was wrapped in a kind of unofficial Alaska flag, buried in a gravel mine. Maybe this quintessentially Alaskan paraphernalia inoculated Joe from the objectionable influences of American dominion, like a necklace of garlic warding off vampires. But soon, according to his wish, he was buried next to his wife Doris in Dawson City, Yukon Territory, Canada. The grave is regularly visited and tended by Joe’s admirers. Several Alaskan flags flutter inside the white picket fence, like a little stockade of Alaskan nationalism amid all the Canadians. Inside it is a block of granite, looking hard, immovable.

DRIFTING BELOW WOODCHOPPER, I think about the small-scale miners like Frank Bennett, the industrial-scale miners like Ernest Patty, and the intensely dedicated but somehow not quite real miners like Joe Vogler. I have no unified theory. The idea of taking wealth out of the ground, from the earth directly to your pocket, without a lot of intermediary fuss, is appealing. There is freedom in that. I can understand it. But there is a real environmental cost too. Ken Ross gets at it in Environmental Conflict in Alaska: “A placer operation typically disrupted a valley by changing the landforms, altering surface and groundwater flows, removing streamside vegetation and topsoil, silting fish habitat, reducing natural food supplies, and rendering the floodplain nonfunctional. Impacts could be lasting, and ‘many, if not most, miners and regulators believed that once a stream was disturbed, it could not be reclaimed to a stable state.’” Maybe we should pay that cost, if the result is important enough.

To me it’s reminiscent of the plot line of the film The Misfits, based on a screenplay by Arthur Miller. Nevada cowboys had been rounding up wild mustangs for generations, productively breeding the wild stock into the quarterhorse. And the tradition of the roundup was important social glue. It kept people connected with the land and preserved certain skills. But now (the 1950s) the techniques had changed. Instead of horses, the cowboys started mounting aircraft and pickup trucks to herd the mustangs. More than that, the purpose of the enterprise had changed. Quarterhorses weren’t in great demand on ranches any more. The mustangs were still chased, corralled, and transported. But they were not taken to ranches for breeding, they were trucked to factories to be ground into dog food. Maybe it was time, Miller seemed to say, for Nevada outdoorsmen to connect with the land in some other way.

Gold is put to important uses, for example in electronics. But this use accounts for only about seven percent of gold production. Use in dentistry is three percent. Add up all industrial applications, and you have a use for twelve to fifteen percent of the gold we mine. Eighty-five percent of gold mined in the United States is used for jewelry and ornamentation, and the number-one retailer of jewelry is Wal-Mart. The Worldwatch Institute calculates a single ring (.33 ounce, eighteen karat) leaves behind eighteen tons of mine waste. As student activists across the country have suggested, maybe we don’t need to turn creek valleys upside down in Alaska for school rings. Maybe, they say, we should make class rings out of something else, like recycled metals. And maybe, like the Nevada cowboys, Alaska gold miners should throw the dozer into neutral for a minute and think about just exactly what this endeavor has morphed into in the modern era.

 

WHEREFORE TRAPPING, in light of all this? Brad Snow told John McPhee he wouldn’t kill wild animals just “to clothe fat whores in New York.” Others have reached the same conclusion. Of course, fur can be made into more than fashion apparel. Marten hats, beaver mitts, and wolverine ruffs are still unsurpassed as winter wear in this part of North America. But there aren’t too many people walking around Fairbanks in lynx clothing, for example. And I know trappers who have sold lynx pelts for as little as thirty-five dollars. It ought to give a person pause to take such an animal out of the wild for thirty-five bucks. But here’s the flip side, the part that makes this screenplay complex. Trapping is one of the few sources of cash for rural subsistence people. In other words, it is very important. And in the villages of bush Alaska, trapping’s demise cancels one of the reasons to maintain a dog team. In turn, eliminating a dog team takes away one reason to run a fishwheel. If you aren’t fishing, there isn’t much of a need to own a boat. And as village life ceases to revolve around these vigorous outdoor activities, it will more and more settle on the four prongs of a cultural pitchfork: welfare, TV, junk food, and alcohol.

 

I HAVE FRIENDS who can retain for years precise recollections of the taste of a particular bottle of wine. My brother-in-law can whistle a melody he heard once six months before. I cannot hold these things in my mind. But I do store away, like a tray of special slides, scenes from trips along this river. I can put myself back in those scenes and sit again by the fire and feel the breeze. I can watch as the most amazing colors light up the world, including, somehow, the inside of me. I am a lone person among billions. On a world among billions. And, for a brief moment, I am aware of it.

The sun is sliding into the north now, and the sky glows with gold. A little breeze makes the river sparkle with white light, flashing like a handful of diamonds scattered across the water. I am a miner too, I’m thinking. This is what I mine.

Eureka Creek/The Other Fortymile

On the right bank, forty miles above Circle, beneath a handsome bluff, is Richard Smith’s cabin. I remember the time I stopped in to meet him, and he told me his bear story. After hearing it, I was glad that I was within striking distance of Circle. For the previous ten days I had been camping on gravel bars along the Yukon, but as Richard says, “After you hear a story like that, you don’t want to camp on the river for a couple of nights.”

Richard came into the country as a ten-year-old in 1968 when his mother and stepfather, Ray and Arlene Bell, converted a school bus to a motor home and drove with their five boys from Grand Rapids, Michigan, to Alaska. Five miles out of Central, on the way to Circle, they pulled the bus off the road to spend the night. In the morning they found that the bus was stuck, so Ray set out for Fairbanks, where he filed for a homestead on the land surrounding the vehicle. The bus stayed put, while the family cut logs right on the property and built a twenty-two-by-twenty-four-foot cabin. About half the five hundred twenty-eight square feet was devoted to kitchen-dining-living room. Of the remaining space, about half was partitioned off as master bedroom, and half accommodated the five boys.

The family had been living on the homestead for three years when Richard’s stepfather took a notion to spend a year in the woods. He was friendly with Gordon Bertoson, a bachelor sourdough, who had trapped and fished at this place, known locally as Fortymile (not to be confused with the town of Forty Mile, one hundred sixty-five miles upriver in Canada). Bertoson had occupied the site since 1960, but he was getting pretty old for the heavy work of living in the woods. Once, he hurt his back while working on his fishwheel and lay in his bed for two weeks before a friend from Fairbanks visited. Then in 1971, around breakup, the time when the river ice begins to move, Bertoson’s cabin mysteriously burned down while he was away in Circle. “I’m all done with it now,” said Bertoson, according to Ray Bell. The old trapper allowed Bell to take over the site, together with the trapline trails and the fishwheel spot, which was just upstream of the cabin. Richard, then thirteen, and his brothers helped their stepfather build an eighteen-by-twenty-foot, one-room cabin at the site. It was ready by fall, and the family moved upriver.

Richard’s family fixed up the cabin and filled their days with chores. They hauled water from a nearby creek in summer and from the Yukon in the winter, when it runs clear. They cut firewood from driftwood piles on the islands in the Yukon. Ray and the boys learned to trap and skin fur. They cut, hung, or canned salmon in the summer and tended a huge vegetable garden. In the fall, they hunted and put up meat. Arlene taught her kids from correspondence materials. When Richard was seventeen, his parents moved upriver to work for wages at mining claims, first at Woodchopper, then at Coal Creek. Richard kept the place at Fortymile, though sometimes he’d work a summer “running Cat” at the mines.

One day in the summer of 1979, Faye Chamberlain, a pretty, dark-haired young woman from Canada, floated down the river and into Richard’s life. Faye was twenty-two and had been in the Dawson area for a few years, living out of town in a cabin. In the summers, she worked for wages bartending and at mining camps. She had dabbled a bit at trapping and was keen to get her own trapline. The local conservation officer, however, seemed hostile to the young people moving into the country wanting to trap, especially to the idea of a woman trapping. She heard that things were less regulated in Alaska, and one summer day she packed up her canoe to see what opportunity might await downriver, across the border. At the last minute, a girlfriend decided to join her. It was a great vacation as they visited with people along the river. When they stopped in for a while at Glenn Creek, Faye remembers, all the river people were totally naked. “My girlfriend and I took off our tops, but that’s all we felt comfortable with.” Downriver at Fortymile Bluff, they saw smoke coming out of a smokehouse and pulled the canoe over to see who lived there. When they crested the bank, they saw, standing on the porch on either side of the door, two long-haired, rugged young men, Richard Smith and Charlie Kidd. Kidd was wearing a bear hide vest and a marten-fur headband. Both were holding jars of homebrew, and marijuana plants were all around (it was legal to grow pot in Alaska in those days). If a cartoonist had drawn the encounter, he would have all four bug-eyed and sharing the same thought balloon: “Oh, my God! I must be in heaven.” “We ended up spending three days,” says Faye, “playing crib—nothing serious.” But she and Richard spent hours talking beside the campfire about life in the bush and how much they both liked it. She told him about how much more regulated Yukon Territory was becoming, that she wanted a trapline and to mush dogs. He understood. “And towards the end of our visit, that’s when he invited me down to trap for the winter. As I left, I told him there was a fifty-fifty chance that I’d show up in the fall.”

Faye and her girlfriend continued on down to Circle and back to Dawson. In September, Faye made up her mind. Into her leaky canoe she packed her wall tent, rifles, miscellaneous gear, garden gleanings, and a sack of salmon strips. Alone, she paddled two hundred sixteen miles downriver to Richard Smith’s cabin at Eureka Creek. They hit it off well, trapping in the winter and fishing in the summer. They would run the traplines together, with Richard letting Faye take his three-dog team, while he walked. Later, she had her own team of three big dogs. In places, they had branch lines, and each would take a branch, covering those separately. They stayed together for five years, and when they split up, Faye moved on to her own trapline. One day, she remembers, she joined a few of the boys who were gathered out in back of the Carrolls’ place in Circle, drinking beer and talking trapping in a little shack among the derelict vehicles. “How many marten you catch?” said one guy to another. It was November, still early in the season.

“Oh, five, I guess. How about you?”

“I got fifteen.” And so on around the group, fifteen being tops. Finally, someone asked Faye, jokingly, how she was doing.

“Twenty-five,” she said, quietly.

“Five?” someone asked.

“Twenty-five,” she said again. And the whole group burst out laughing at being shown up. Guys were rolling on the floor, she says, but they were also probably calculating their chances of connecting, or reconnecting, with the hottest trapper in the country.

 

IN AUGUST 1981, when Richard and Faye had been together for a couple of years, they took a boat trip upriver to Dawson to visit friends. On the way back, twenty or so miles below Dawson, they saw at the water’s edge a sow grizzly bear and three good-sized cubs. Grizzlies are larger than the more common black bears, and they can be aggressive. A traveler might not even mention having seen a black bear, but spotting four grizzlies is always a notable occurrence. Richard, who had seen a lot of bears over the years, decided the cubs were bigger than any black bear he had ever seen, and that the sow was the biggest grizzly he had ever seen. The cubs ran up the bank, but the towering sow stood up. “She stood there,” says Richard, “and gave me a look in the eye that I’ve never seen from anything. Like, ‘I’ll remember you. I’m going to get you.’ It was that kind of look, you know.”

A mile downriver, Richard and Faye stopped to spend the night with some friends at their fish camp at the mouth of Fifteenmile River. There were two couples there, each with two kids, and a big dog. Richard mentioned seeing the bears. Their friends said, yes, they had seen some bears in the area. No one said much more about it, and after a bit of visiting, everyone got ready for bed. There were two canvas wall tents housing the families, with a picnic table in between. Richard and Faye, traveling light, had no tent and only one sleeping bag, which they threw out near the picnic table. Everyone fell asleep.

About 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning, the dog began to bark, says Richard, piecing the story together from everyone’s account. Faye sat up, “And right there’s that grizzly bear. The sow. And it only took”—he snapped his fingers—“like that. I mean Faye tried to turn over on her stomach, you know, hide her face, but before she could do that, that bear jumped around that picnic table and got her by the head. Drug her out of her sleeping bag.”

Perhaps because he grew up with six other people in a one-room cabin, Richard has developed the ability to sleep through a fair bit of commotion. While the bear continued to attack Faye, Richard continued to sleep. One of the women, however, heard the ruckus and woke up her man, who opened the tent flap. The bear at once dropped Faye and charged the tent, says Richard. “He’s standing there and sees this thing come charging at him and the only thing he can do is close the tent flaps and pray to God that thing didn’t get him.” With one swipe, the rampaging bear brought down the wall tent, then clamped her jaws on the man’s leg and “shook him like a rag doll.” There was only one gun in the camp; it was in the other tent, in the custody of the third man, who happened to be another deep sleeper.

Richard finally awoke, but he was disoriented. “When I woke up I was standing up. And I had this really weird feeling, like doomsday, you know. I didn’t know what was happening yet, and I look down and I see Faye laying there, just all chewed up and blood everywhere. And my back was to Zeke and the bear. Zeke was the guy getting mauled at the moment. Well, when I stood up the bear saw me and dropped Zeke and came over and stood up behind me.” As Richard turned, he became fully awake. He knew he couldn’t run. Playing dead was no option. “So I start slugging it . . . I was yelling at it, you know. I was freaked out, you know . . . it let me hit it a few times.” Then the bear gave a swat that Richard reenacts as an effortless forehand, as if shooing a fly. “I was airborne. Just flying.” As soon as he hit the ground, the bear was on top of him. “Its teeth kind of raked across my skull, split it, tore it wide open, tore my scalp off. Started chewing me up and down the back.”

Zeke got up, hoping to crawl under the fallen tent, but now the bear saw him and dropped Richard. Zeke ran once around the picnic table with the bear on his heels, then dove under it. The bear kept running. Straight back to Richard. Meanwhile people were beginning to shout and scream, and the dog was going berserk. The grizzly stopped for Richard, clamping her enormous jaws around his midriff, stopped again for Faye, gathering her up under one arm, and ran off into the woods with both of them.

All of this took just a minute or two, Richard thinks.

About thirty feet down the trail out of camp, the bear dropped or lost her grip on Faye. She fell into the bushes, but the bear continued on with Richard in its mouth. The trail led to a deadfall tree, and as the bear sailed over it, Richard remembers having a clear vision of his fate. “Well, when she jumped, I’m hanging there and I’m seeing what’s all going on, you know. I’m going, ‘God, this thing’s taking me out to its cubs!’”

But the deadfall saved his life, he thinks. “She probably figured she couldn’t make it over with me in her mouth. As we’re sailing through the air, she dropped me right on top of it and kept sailing over it.”

It took a couple hours for the badly injured friends to reach Dawson by riverboat. There was no hospital there, no doctor. The little nursing station was unable to do much of anything for them, other than to call for a chartered plane from Whitehorse, the territorial capital, two hundred seventy miles away. It was ten hours from the mauling to the time they were on the operating table in Whitehorse. “I don’t know how you guys are alive,” Richard remembers the doctor saying, “you ain’t got no blood left.”

At about the same time that Richard and Faye and Zeke were being stitched back together, some well-armed Dawson people motored down to the camp at Fifteenmile River. By then the bear had returned and gone. The camp was destroyed. She had knocked over the picnic table, staved in the shelves in the cooking area, and sliced to ribbons the tent that had been left standing.

 

DURING BREAKUP ONE YEAR, when Richard was away at Circle, Yukon River ice jammed below Fortymile, and the river rose until Richard’s cabin began to float. It floated right out into the river. A pilot friend had flown over the area after the water dropped and reported that the cabin was sitting on ice floes out on the edge of the Yukon’s channel. But then the water—and the cabin—rose again. Somehow the river floated the cabin back into Richard’s yard and set it down near its original spot. The building was plenty worse for wear, and by the time I visited Fortymile late that same summer, Richard was about seven rounds up on a new cabin. “It really ain’t mine,” though, he said. Park Service people had visited Smith after the preserve was created and noted that he had not filed for a homestead during the many years when it was possible to do so. According to the law, they said, he had “no possessory interest” in the place. He was a trespasser on public land.

It was true that Richard Smith hadn’t done the paperwork necessary to get legal title to the site. Neither had his mother and stepfather. Nor had Gordon Bertoson, who lived there before them. Nor had Phil Berail, who was there before him; nor Walter Roman before him; nor John Nathaniel, nor Hank Connette, nor Charlie Moon, and so on going back a very long time. In those days, title to the land might have been easily obtained. The federal government even ran advertisements in stateside newspapers promoting the colonization of Alaska through homesteading and other programs. But the old-timers didn’t always bother with the legalities. Many say they always thought they’d be let alone, that they didn’t need to own the land anyway, just wanted to use it. Besides, respect for each other’s rights to cabin, trapline, and fishing site was an unwritten law here. By any moral standard, they felt, they owned the modest bit of material culture they’d wrestled from a tough country: a log cabin, a cache, an outhouse.

The park managers explained the new law and told Richard that he could apply for a five-year, renewable permit to stay in his family’s cabin. “But when the permit finally came in the mail, they put in there that I had to sign over all rights to the buildings and the land and everything. And that kind of stumped me there for a while. So, I don’t own the cabins. I don’t own any of the buildings I built around here or nothing. It’s all Park Service. And I don’t know what to make of it. It wasn’t the way I understood it at first.”

A lot of people on the river “get up in arms about it,” says Richard. But he, himself, takes a live-and-let-live view: “Well, I just figure, you know, I’ll just live here and do what I’ve been doing. If they decide to kick me out, well, that’s my tough luck. I can’t worry about it. . . . I’m building this new house here. I’m not worrying about all the time and effort and money I’m spending on it. I’ve got to have a house to live in. So, I just do like I would have done back in the old days. Just go ahead and do it and hope that nothing will ever happen where they’ll phase me out.”

Richard said that the Park Service people he had met, the ones who signed his permit, were nice guys. But considering that the permit had to be renewed every five years, and that the average length of a superintendent’s stay at Yukon-Charley was running about three years at the time, Richard’s domestic security was nil. “Maybe the next guy who gets the job there, he might not like me. It’s up to them, you know. And that’s kind of scary. To me it is. But I been getting along with them. But there’s always that to think about.” Richard Smith is wary. Not afraid, not bitter. It’s a bit like his view of the other large omnivore that claims these woods: the bear. “I still get the jitters every time I think about it. But, as far as bears go, it don’t bother me to have bears around. I don’t go shooting every one I see.”

Since I saw him that time, Richard has married and moved away. He was the last person to hold a permit to live in a cabin within the Yukon-Charley preserve.

Falcons and Jaguars

From my chair, from my camp, on an island a couple of miles below Eureka Creek, I look back upriver at the bluff above Richard Smith’s cabin. I’ve taken my seat for the evening’s entertainment. Tonight it is the deepening peach in a horizontal band behind the hill. The clouds are as dense and dark as the bluing on a rifle barrel. But beneath these an orange wash, pale and delicate, claims a good bit of the horizon to the northeast. It’s as if somebody’s fingers are on a board of rheostats, muting this hue, boosting that, dialing up the intensities. And all the while, imperceptibly fading to black. The old-timers, I’m thinking, they didn’t see in sepia. They saw these colors too. The streak of peach and patches of baby blue. Skookum Jim and Chief Charley. McQuestin and Harper. Phonograph Nelson and the Fish boys. DeWolfe, Adney, and Stuck. They too sprawled under these quilty covers, this comforting blanket I would pull all around me, in the bosom of the same mother.

And now the hills go from green to green-black. The rugged, tan face of the bluff experiments with a softening rose. And the river carries all of these colors, and shines silver too.

 

IN THE MORNING I am back in my chair, almost unable to move, with the flowing water charming me into a stupor. The start of the last week in August. The start of my last day on the river. I am sitting by a pleasant fire, drinking coffee and listening intently to the absence of sound. I think I could hear the footfall of a moose a mile away. But there is no moose. The tree did not fall in the forest, and I was there to notice. The stillness suggests emptiness on a continental scale, as if I were the first man to cross the land bridge, the first to discover an entire hemisphere of the world. The interior of Alaska and some of Yukon Territory remained unglaciated during the last Ice Age, except for alpine glaciers in the high country. Hence, it served as a refugium for animal and plant species that the ice cap displaced or destroyed elsewhere. Some south-facing slopes along the Yukon River contain rare plants associated with an Arctic steppe community, a holdover from the Ice Age. During this period, with the land bridge emergent, but with the ice sheet cutting off access to the south, some of the first Americans may have settled here. When it began to warm again, and the glaciers retreated up into the mountains, the people may have followed along the Yukon River valley, using it as a migratory corridor in their expansion southward.

But this country between the Kandik River and Circle City is not always so quiet and empty as it seems today. In fact, it is home to noises that boom louder than thunder and shriek wilder than any animal.

My friend Skip Ambrose is the man to tell the story. I was sitting on a sandbar not far from here earlier this summer with Skip and his colleague and wife Chris Florian. Skip is a little older than I, but he looks much younger. He has a sort of modified punk haircut. It’s not exactly spiky, but every hair on his head seems to stand perpendicular to a point at the center of his head. He is tall and lean and tan. He looks cool and relaxed in a powder blue polo shirt, gray nylon pants, and wraparound shades. He is an outdoorsman, but he looks like he just stepped out of an air-conditioned clubhouse on a golf course in Charleston. His face shows a perpetual half-smile, as if he is constantly taking in folly and converting it to mild entertainment. When he shrugs and smirks and his eyebrows invert and suggest a helpless resignation to the fates, look out, because he’s about to launch a zinger. Half the time I do not hear what Skip is telling me because I am too caught up in his South Carolina accent, saying over in my mind words like “bucawz.” The accent has not been much attenuated by thirty years in Alaska. Chris, who can identify the calls of two hundred birds, is much younger than we are and constitutionally quiet. Her blond-streaked ponytail pokes through the crescent in the back of her baseball cap. Her wide eyes absorb everything, miss nothing.

We have finished breakfast and are all three glassing a bluff across the river, keeping an eye on the peregrine falcons. Presently, Skip says, “Well, I guess it’s about time for the morning war.” We fold up our chairs, jump in the riverboat, and skim over the placid river for a few miles to a spot he thinks will offer good viewing. We set up our chairs again, and Skip scans the sky. It isn’t long before he zeroes in on an area just above the hills to the north. “See them?” he asks. I see nothing. “C-130s,” he says. Finally, I focus on three specks just above the horizon. They are no more than specks. His binoculars are no more powerful than mine. In minutes, they grow into transport planes with one hundred thirty-two-foot wingspans that can haul Caterpillar tractors. They roar over us, disappearing over the horizon to the south. “Toranado,” says Skip, now looking back to the north. “It’s British.” I look where he is looking. I see a speck and a smudge. “A-10 Warthogs.” Slightly blobbier specks. I happen to know what an A-10 looks like, but I certainly can’t see these dots—about the size of a period on this page—well enough to identify them as A-10s. “Jaguar,” he says. “Also British.” I’ve known him for thirty years, but I didn’t know he possessed these talents.

Skip came to Alaska in 1973 after service in the army, but he had grown up on air force bases. He came up here because his father was the base commander at Eielson Air Force Base, just south of Fairbanks. As a kid, he learned about airplanes the way I learned the stats on baseball cards. The blue sky is now streaked with white contrails. They diffuse into fat lines, as if they were made with the flat side of the chalk. Soon, they waver like the tentacles of a jelly fish. An invading jelly fish from Jupiter. The planes will make a turn, Skip says, and re-cross the Yukon. He has an idea where, so we climb in the boat again and shove off. “I don’t know when they’ll figure out that they should just put a transmitter on my boat,” he laughs.

Skip is spying on NATO war games because he is a peregrine falcon biologist, formerly of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. He has returned here to the bluffs along the Yukon River between Eagle and Circle to look for peregrine aeries every year since 1973. In that year, the Fish and Wildlife Service added the American peregrine (Falco peregrinus anatum) to the endangered species list. Thanks to industrial pollution, especially the widespread use of DDT, the American peregrine falcon experienced reproductive failure. When use of the insecticide was restricted in the United States, the birds gradually rebounded. Skip thinks that after the 1947 introduction of DDT, peregrine populations along the Upper Yukon declined to perhaps twenty to twenty-five percent of their earlier levels. By 1973, only eleven pairs could be found between Eagle and Circle. With the ban of DDT in 1972, the birds have steadily recovered until this stretch of river seems to be nearing saturation, and territorial disputes are increasing. Now at about fifty pairs, this is one of the densest populations of nesting peregrines in North America.

But as DDT’s presence in the environment declined, military training activity increased. In the early 1990s, Alaskan politicians and captains of commerce saw dollar signs in the war games and suggested that their state should become “the military training capital of the free world.” And that is exactly what happened. Foreign nations, delighted not to be dropping bombs on their own landscapes, now come to interior Alaska, where they are welcomed by civic boosters and a fawning Fairbanks press. Besides NATO forces, countries that have come to rain bombs on Alaska, or to participate as observers, include Canada, Great Britain, France, Germany, Japan, South Korea, New Zealand, Australia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, Brunei, Indonesia, China, India, and Bangladesh.

Big chunks of Alaska’s land and air space have been given over to this training. One military officer enthused, as if he couldn’t believe his luck, “They can fly their missions over something like the size of Kansas!” And vast stretches of Alaska land have been appropriated for bombardment, such as the “live-fire exercises” that take place in the Tanana Flats just south of Fairbanks. Much of this new training involves very low-level, high-speed flights. Screaming jets may come upon a dog musher or canoeist without prelude and at treetop level. Multiple, sudden sonic booms are now daily events on hunting, fishing, or canoe trips in many parts of Alaska—even along streams officially designated Wild and Scenic Rivers and in national preserves. Here in Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve, the air force is authorized to fly jets one hundred feet above the ground at nearly the speed of sound. A hundred feet is about the height of a mature spruce tree. The jets may break out over a hill and streak across the sky at low levels above calving caribou or lambing Dall sheep. The pregnant or postparturient females are said to be somewhat less startled than if a wolf were charging them, according to studies, but the long-term effects of this sort of disturbance are not known. Skip worries that sonic booms, or just the sudden, unexpected roar of a low-flying jet, may disturb the falcons during the critical nesting time. Largely because of his efforts, the military has been constrained to fly no lower than two thousand feet above ground level in a corridor that follows the Yukon River and extends for two miles on each side. A similar corridor restricts low-level flights over the Kandik and Charley Rivers. So, where “ground level” behind a bluff is at two thousand feet, the planes are supposed to be no lower than four thousand feet.

WE SET UP OUR CHAIRS across the river from a bluff near Woodchopper Creek and scope the face of it, looking for the nesting pair. A C-130 transport plane flies over. He is clearly not two thousand feet above the height of the bluff. Four more follow in formation. It is less certain, but they appear to be flying too low as well. Skip says he doesn’t want to bust the pilots, he just wants them to stay out of the restricted area. He doesn’t like reporting the violations to the colonel, but he likes it less if he is treated patronizingly, as he was at first. A colonel told him once, “Well, you know, Skip, it’s pretty darned hard to estimate heights from the ground. Unless you’re pretty experienced, it’s easy to be off by hundreds of feet.” Skip replied, “Yup. But when I’m standing on a bluff that the USGS shows to be 1,500 feet high, and I am looking down on an airplane flying along the Yukon River, I’m pretty confident that he’s less than 2,000 feet above ground level.”

Once the Air Force got a better idea who they were dealing with, they moved to work with rather than against Skip, to the point where they funded his peregrine monitoring. Most of Skip and Chris’s time is now spent climbing the cliffs into the aeries and adding to their incredible data set, now more than thirty years old.

 

AS IT HAPPENS, I am not overly fond of heights, but Skip prevails in arguing that I’ll have no problem climbing up to an aerie. Then, too, I must “get the story.” When our riverboat is still most of a mile away from the bluff where a pair of peregrines are nesting, the birds start squawking. We can’t hear this from a mile off, of course, but Skip has observed the birds’ reaction a couple of times when he has been on the ground below and his boat was being operated by someone else. Skip’s boat will occasion a ruckus every time, while the appearance of other boats elicits no reaction. The falcons can distinguish his boat from others, and they can do it from such a great distance that the boat would appear to us as little more than a speck. The falcons are detecting Skip the way he is detecting Jaguars and Warthogs.

The pair of falcons is circling and kak-kaking as we start up a steep three-hundred-foot scree slope. I am wondering if one of them might rake my T-shirted back, laying it open with a talon. But Skip isn’t watching or ducking, so I figure, “no problem.” Later, when I ask him about it, he tells me about a time when a friend got his scalp sliced open. “There was blood all over,” he says. And once a diving bird nailed Skip with his balled-up foot. “It felt like getting hit by a small ball peen hammer.” For the moment, I do not worry about being attacked by razor-footed missiles that can dive at over two hundred miles per hour. I am busy worrying about falling to my death.

Accepting the age-old wisdom, I do not look down until we are at the aerie. It makes me dizzy to notice, but I notice: what a spectacular site. A sweeping view of a very big river in a very big country. It would be consciousness-transforming for a human to be reared with this million-dollar vista. The sun streams in. The breezes sift through the sage plants, scenting the air in a salubrious way. Consciousness would expand another notch if one could live here without walls, as these birds do. Amazingly, peregrines do not build nests. Falcons are one of the only birds not to. They simply lay their eggs on a little shelf, totally unprotected from above and from the sides. There are no nesting materials whatever where these four little birds huddle. Their white, fuzzy plumage is just beginning to yield to dark gray and orange feathers. They have sunken chests, scrawny necks, and pot bellies. Their Barney Google eyes bug, and their mouths stand agape, ready to snap at us, I figure. But Skip says they are not programmed to fight with their beaks. You can grab one from behind, keeping the talons away from you, but it’s good to wear leather gloves for backup.

Massive, black thunderclouds are rolling in fast, and we leave the foursome to their tiny ledge. That’s the downside to the no-walls plan. The little birds are totally exposed to driving wind and icy rain. And that appears to be the biggest cause of mortality. If it is a cold, wet May, Skip says, many of the young do not survive. The summer of 2000 was unusually rainy and cold, and only thirty-eight percent of the breeding pairs raised a fledgling. This year, with a pretty rainy June and local hail storms, forty-nine percent have raised young. Another downside—for me—is getting down off this cliff. Skip tells me not to be tempted to lean into the hill, as intuition would suggest, but to lean away from it so as to stand more vertically. That way you are less likely to lose traction and go into a slide that might not end until you are in the Yukon River. So, I lean into space and follow Skip, half loping, half surfing on the loose scree.

 

AT ANOTHER SPOT on the right bank of the Yukon, we climb a wooded slope upstream of a cliff face and make our way to a point above a nest. I’m watching Skip tie a climbing rope to the base of a spruce tree when suddenly he flings it into space. Oh, no, I’m thinking. It’s only about eight feet down to a little scrap of ledge, but below that it is maybe a thousand feet almost straight down to the river. I look, in order, at the stoutness of the rope, the knot, the tree. It all looks strong enough, though I could wish for a thicker rope to make gripping it easier. Over we go, first he, then I. Ignoring all the hard-wired warning lights flashing “PERIL, PERIL,” I follow another bit of Skip’s counterintuitive advice and lean outward into the void, walking backward down the face of the cliff. There is one egg here, and it is too late for it to hatch now, says Skip. No young for this pair this year. The adults are likely nearby, but Skip says they will not defend a nest where there is no young. They will defend the ledge from other falcons, however, to protect their property rights for next year.

It’s especially disappointing to have no young falcons at this nest because it is one where Skip has installed a camera. It’s about the size of one of those little flashlights sized for two AA batteries. A cord trails up the cliff to a transmitter wired onto a tree and pointing out over the river. A deep-cycle twelve-volt battery at the base of the tree powers the transmitter, and a solar collector keeps the battery charged. The signal beams out toward an island in the river. In a few minutes we are at that island and bushwhack through the willows to a little clearing Skip and Chris had found earlier. Taped to a willow is a receiver positioned to pick up the signal from the transmitter on the hill across the channel. A cord from this receiver sends the signal on to a laptop computer inside a weather-tight hard case. Five twelve-volt deep-cycle batteries power the computer, and they in turn are charged by a large solar panel. On a stand is a microphone with a wind screen. The microphone is wired to a sound-level meter, which is plugged into the computer.

All this gadgetry is, in a sense, aimed at air force jets. The video signal from the nest is constantly streaming into the computer, and the microphone is continuously picking up all sorts of sounds, from bird calls to wind and rain. But the computer can exclude the extraneous events. The sound meter takes a reading every second, and it sends that information, expressed in decibels, to the computer. The computer saves, but soon deletes, all sounds and all video images unless a sound threshold is reached, namely fifty decibels. As soon as the noise reaches that level, the computer saves the audio and video files beginning ten seconds before the onset of the noise event to ten seconds after its cessation. When a jet roars overhead, the computer saves both the audio of the jet and the video of the birds’ reactions. Back at home, Skip mixes the two together, and he and Chris can watch the falcons on their TV.

He was still in the early stages of this study when I was with him, but what Skip was noticing at the several sites where he has installed this array of instruments is that the birds often jump at the onset of a loud, sudden noise, like a sonic boom. But they show less of a response when the sound of an approaching jet increased gradually. Skip hasn’t documented it yet, but he worries that, apart from whatever stress-induced effects there may be, sudden, unexpected sounds may startle the peregrines enough that they dart out into flight and some eggs or nestlings could be knocked off the ledges.

 

AFTER MANY YEARS with the Fish and Wildlife Service, Skip was lured away by the Park Service. The agency was interested in his studies of jet noise, and now they have him leading noise studies in many park lands throughout the western United States. But he has made it part of the deal that he be allowed to return in the summer to the Yukon to monitor these birds. He still pesters the air force, as necessary, as well as the Park Service’s Yukon-Charley administrators. When the preserve was established, there were two MOAs, or military operating areas, already in existence, covering the western half of the preserve. In the mid-1980s, the air force successfully applied for additional temporary MOAs that would overlap every bit of the preserve. In the 1990s they proposed to make those MOAs permanent. These changes would permit warplanes to streak over the landscape, as low as one hundred feet above the ground, over the entire preserve. In each case, in the 1980s and the 1990s, the Yukon-Charley superintendents (a different superintendent in each case) chose not to object to the plan to make the entire preserve a training area. Once, Skip says, he confronted an air force officer, saying the air force did not need, for example, to fly at one hundred feet over the Kandik River. He says the officer replied, “We don’t need it, but as long as the Park Service wasn’t going to object, we took it.” Skip shakes his head. “I think there should be some place in a national preserve such as this one where the military cannot fly, where they cannot fly at near-supersonic speeds a hundred feet off the ground.” Warming to the topic, he says, “Everybody thinks it’s great that the Park Service got the entire Charley River drainage to ‘preserve in its wilderness state,’ as the enabling legislation directs NPS to do. But then for NPS not to object to military jets roaring through on war game sorties, at a hundred feet above the ground anywhere in the preserve, just does not make sense.”

The jets sometimes drop chaff and flares. The chaff is a kind of jettisoned litter that is picked up by radar and is intended to confuse radar-guided antiaircraft missiles. The flares are used to foil heat-seeking air-to-air missiles. In real combat, the chaff and flares confuse real missiles; in these war games, the chaff and flares confuse electronic missiles. Flares dropped by dog-fighting jets in June 1991 started a forest fire in the heart of the Charley River drainage that torched about forty thousand acres in one week, including Charlie Kidd’s trapline. Skip was working for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service at the time of the MOA expansion, but his main area of professional interest was in Yukon-Charley, studying the peregrines along the rivers. He couldn’t believe how easily the Park Service caved to the military. “It’s like the NPS just didn’t care about Yukon-Charley, as they did for the other parks in Alaska—like Denali, Lake Clark, and others—where they got the air force to exclude areas of the parks from the new MOAs. But they never even objected to the air force’s plans in Yukon-Charley.”

Shahnyaati’

About twenty-five miles below Richard Smith’s cabin, and fourteen miles above Circle City, I pass over the invisible boundary of the preserve and see immediately a white rail fence and a large white cross among birch and spruce trees on a grassy hillside on the right bank. This is said to be the grave of Shahnyaati’, a famous Gwech’in Indian chief. The last of the trading chiefs, Shahnyaati’ lived during the later stages of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s presence on the Yukon and the early part of the American period. The Hudson’s Bay people preferred to do their trading with the top man, and a chief’s stature with both the whites and his own people grew in consequence. Shahnyaati’ presented his people’s furs and meat at the post, and he divided up the acquired ammunition, matches, flour, tea, blankets, and knives.

His band moved around within the Yukon Flats, up the Porcupine River, and into the Brooks Range. People in Circle and Fort Yukon, many of whom are related to Shahnyaati’, say the chief was such a great provider that he had seventeen wives and twenty-four children, though some of the wives were widows he took in, and some of the children orphans. Maybe this was over the course of many years, but if the entire household customarily gathered for the evening meal, that would mean dinner for forty-two every night.

Several early adventurers met Shahnyaati’. Alexander Murray, a Canadian explorer who came through this region in 1847, was impressed with the chief: “This Indian never saw Whites before we arrived. He has given us more fur and more meat than any other, was our Fort Hunter this spring, has great influence with his band, and is the person for whom the Red Coat is intended.” Robert Kennicott called him “Old Thunder” and says he had five wives. Frederick Schwatka magisterially describes him as “a savage of more than ordinary authority and determination.” Francois Mercier says he knew Shahnyaati’ well. “He was a man of extraordinary stature and strength, of braveness or more than that, ferocity, and duplicity which one rarely encounters even among the savages. He was not only the terror of the people of his tribe, but above all the other neighboring tribes, whom he rarely left in peace, and whom he massacred each in their turn for the least reason, or for only the love of carnage.”

Mercier relates an Indian story that he says he heard many times. Shahnyaati’ was camped with some of his men at the head of the Rapids, about forty-five miles above Tanana, while several men from another regional tribe were fishing at the foot. “Senate [Mercier’s spelling] made each of his men take two knives, of which one was in sight in a sheath hung from a shoulder belt, as is the custom among all the savages of the Youkon, and the other knife hidden in their clothing. This done, he sent two of his men in advance to announce to these poor fishermen that they should not be alarmed to soon see him arrive with his men, that he came in friendship, desiring for a long time to make peace with them. Believing that they were on a mission of peace, the poor Gen du Large received Senate and his men with open arms, and, as is the custom on such occasions, they sang, feasted, danced, and exchanged presents, etc., etc. And as it is also the custom among all the savages of the Youkon to wrestle when they meet with each other, Senate proposed then to the Gen du Large that they wrestle together, but he said, ‘Is it not possible that on wrestling with our knives someone would become angry?’ All disarmed themselves of their knives, and when they were all held around the waste, at a signal from Senate, each of his men pulled out his knife which had been hidden, and each killed his man.”

Oral tradition among the people of Circle and Fort Yukon say that Shahnyaati’ died an old man at Circle in 1894. It is said that all throughout the area, other men with strong medicine knew at once that someone of importance had died. Shahnyaati’ was placed on a scaffold until a sign should appear indicating where he should be buried. When a rainbow shone on this hillside, the chief was brought here. For many years, travelers on the river would shoot their guns as they passed this place, and the sternwheeler captains would blow the boat’s whistle, in salute to Shahnyaati’.

Into Circle City

The Yukon begins to braid out into vast flats just before Circle, and the distances are immense. I keep to the left channels until I see a blue oil drum on the bank and know it as a sign: Welcome to Circle. It is almost impossible to conceive that all this vast land was intended to be flooded, especially by a dam so far away. But in 1959, the Army Corps of Engineers hoped to build the largest dam in the world at Rampart Canyon, three hundred miles downriver. The impoundment would have been larger than Lake Erie, and more than ten thousand square miles of wild land would have been lost. Alaska’s Senator Ernest Gruening, the dam’s chief proponent, didn’t think the loss amounted to much. He said, “Scenically it is zero. In fact it is one of the few ugly areas in a land prodigal with sensational beauty.” The Yukon Flats, he said, was “nothing but a vast wasteland.”

Gruening’s chief of staff, George Sundborg, who had been the editor of the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, said, “Those who know it best say the kindest and best thing one could do for the place . . . is put it under four hundred feet of water.” “Those who know it best” were not the residents of the seven Athabascan villages that would have been inundated, but apparently the Corps of Engineers. Sundborg also helpfully pointed out that the whole area contained “not more than ten flush toilets.” I always thought that an interesting way to objectify the value of a culture. (It’s probably just as well Sundborg doesn’t control the fate of Mayan temples.)

You don’t see it much these days, but the biologists working for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in the 1960s bravely confronted the politicians and the boosters with the blunt facts: “Nowhere in the history of water development in North America have the fish and wildlife losses anticipated to result from a single project been so overwhelming.” The Yukon Flats is an Arctic solar basin, gathering in twenty to twenty-four hours of sunlight each summer day. The elevation is low (less than six hundred feet), and the area is both far from the cool coast and protected from Arctic weather by hills. Temperatures here can reach one hundred degrees, higher than any place in Alaska. Minnesota may be the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes, but the Yukon Flats encompasses thirty-six thousand lakes and ponds. And all this adds up to abundant food and superb nesting habitat for ducks.

In response to the Rampart Dam proposal, Fish and Wildlife Service personnel launched a crash program to band ducks in the Yukon Flats in the summers of 1960 and 1961. “They knew that damming the Yukon was a serious threat to the wildlife to whose protection they had dedicated much of their lives,” says Jim King, a retired Fish and Wildlife Service biologist. “The banding project was their chance to do something about it. Getting the job done in two seasons was a major challenge. We hit the road running.” Actually, they hit the lakes in float planes. During the molting period, when the ducks shed their flight feathers and grow new ones, there is a three- or four-week period when they cannot fly. King and his colleagues landed on lakes where molting ducks gathered in large numbers. They constructed corrals and herded the flightless birds into them. In two seasons, they fitted eighteen thousand ducks of fifteen species with metal leg bands. And shortly after that, but continuing for twenty years, hunters from forty-five of the forty-nine lower states turned in the bands. Eventually, with improved counting techniques, the biologists determined that 2.4 million ducks fly out of the Yukon Flats each fall. Today, the nine-million-acre Yukon Flats National Wildlife Refuge is considered “the premier duck nesting refuge in the world,” says King.

Rampart Dam died because, as a financial proposition, it was a gigantic white elephant, and the federal government had no inclination to underwrite it. Still, the Bureau of Land Management continued to classify the area as a power site until 1990. Woodchopper Canyon was also investigated as a dam site. And those who liked big water projects loved one called NAWAPA. Conceived in the 1960s, the North American Water and Power Alliance proposed reversing the flow of the Yukon and Tanana Rivers, sending them south to the desert states of the American southwest via a system of dams and canals, some excavated with nuclear explosions. Occasional presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche periodically resuscitates the idea, sometimes from a jail cell. Yet there are serious thinkers who maintain that, with NAWAPA, it’s not “if,” but “when.” The Yukon Flats National Wildlife Refuge, as well as Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve, stand as the best deterrents to the revival of these visionary propositions.

Another once and future project that the existence of the Yukon-Charley preserve so far has impeded is the construction of a road along the Yukon River between Circle and Eagle. Boosters and business people who cater to tourism like the idea of a loop where today there are two dead-end roads. Then, to the experience of floating the stretch of river I’ve just descended, a traveler might add traffic noise, dust clouds, motor homes, Jet Skis, boom boxes, generators, satellite TV dishes, awnings, Astroturf, and barbecues.

 

ON NEARLY THE LAST PAGE of his book, and in a rare first-person appearance, McPhee writes just exactly what he thinks. He says, “If I were writing the ticket, I would say that anyone at all is free to build a cabin on any federal land in the United States that is at least a hundred miles from the nearest town of ten thousand or more—the sole restriction being that you cannot carry in materials for walls or roof or floors.” A typically nifty formulation. We could do worse than have McPhee write our laws. In 1980, he enlarged on this view in a letter to Secretary of the Interior Cecil Andrus, whom McPhee had earlier visited in his office in Washington, D.C. On the river people’s requirements for subsistence living in that part of the world, McPhee had this to say: “It seems to me that these needs are modest. The cabins are small—five or six would fit in your private office—and they are scattered through the forest and they are biodegradable. The people are small and they are scattered through the forest and they are biodegradable. I feel that the subsistence living they practice is important to us all, that it is not an isolated pocket of nostalgia in a technological world, and that it is as worthy of preservation as any aspect of Alaska.”

Echoing the early Park Service planners who were determined to make parks in Alaska different, McPhee told Andrus: “I would like to add that I believe Alaska should be dealt with uniquely, that it would be a mistake to apply many rules there that are universal in the nation as a whole. Customs and practices can be allowed there that would overwhelm a place like New Jersey’s pine barrens. In the past four years, people have come and gone in the upper Yukon, but, despite the considerable attention that has been given the region, the population has not increased. The latitude is in charge, and Alaska screens its own.”

It didn’t work out as McPhee had hoped, though it is said that his book, which came out three years before the passage of ANILCA, had appreciable influence on Congress (portions of it were read into the congressional record). The law did speak to the value of residents living the old-time subsistence lifestyle, and it did provide for the continuance of subsistence activities within park lands in Alaska. But because of the way the law was implemented, the way the regulations were drafted, subsistence is regarded less as a value than as a nuisance.

The empirical result is clear enough. Asking around, I have come up with a list of people who lived between the Canadian border and Circle City in the 1970s and 1980s, before the park was established and cabin regulations promulgated. The list is almost certainly incomplete. But I tally more than eighty people, counting the kids, in about thirty-five households. They were spread out along some one hundred seventy miles of Yukon River. In many cases, they were far up a side creek, as far as sixty miles off the Yukon. Today there is not a single person holding a permit to live in a cabin within the entire Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve. Resident subsistence activities are now, finally, eliminated from the preserve. That is, they are eliminated from two and a half million acres—an area larger than Delaware and Rhode Island combined. That includes one hundred twenty-five miles of Yukon River, one hundred miles of Charley River, and all of the lower Nation and Kandik Rivers. There are only two permits issued in all of this area that allow the periodic use of a cabin for subsistence purposes—but not for use as a primary residence.

One of the Park Service’s chief planners in Alaska, Zorro Bradley, says the agency constitutionally cannot abide subsistence activities. “The Park Service as a whole has a ‘no subsistence’ attitude. I think that’s pretty well recognized. They’d like to get rid of it.” Bradley, now retired, was a key man in Alaska overseeing subsistence research. “I suspect that what we’ll do is eventually kill it off entirely,” says Bradley. “And, as we did in the Southwest, remove the Natives from park land. Today you go to a place like Navajo National Monument, where they excluded all Native peoples, now they hire them as people to come in and demonstrate their cultural activities at the visitor center. They are paid actors.”

Bradley was a career Park Service man, but growing up in and around Indian reservations in the Southwest, he saw the Park Service from both sides. “At Wupatki National Monument we had resident Navajo families the Park Service tried for years to move them out of there, even though they had lifetime tenancy status from when the area was established. And I found the Navajo families in there to be darned good neighbors and friends. But they thought of these Indians being in there—to many of the superintendents I served under, it was just anathema to them. And they’d pull all kinds of stuff trying to get them out of there. Same thing at Chaco Canyon. At Grand Canyon. The harassment of the Havasupai Indians by the Park Service just really bothered me.”

In the 1960s, Bradley spent time in rural Alaskan villages and saw firsthand the dependency of the rural people on fish and game, including marine mammals. He even stayed in a whale camp on the Arctic coast and watched the Eskimo people hunting whales. “It made me realize very early on that if we ever develop any kind of parks up here, these people would be excluded by—not by written policy or anything like that—but by Park Service attitudes. So I started talking early on about the need for these people to use these resources.”

But Bradley has little faith that that will happen. The attitudes and tactics that he saw growing up have a long history, dating back to the world’s first national park, established at Yellowstone, Wyoming, in 1872. As Mark David Spence has documented in his book Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks, Park administrators at Yellowstone thought the presence of Indians scared away tourists, so they drove the Indians off the parklands. Later, park managers hatched a plan to build an Indian exhibit on Dot Island in Yellowstone Lake peopled with living Indians. Fortunately, this human zoo proposal failed.

At Yosemite National Park, after the Indians were forced out of the valley, they managed to return as hotel workers or to sing and dance and sell baskets. The Park Service used the Indians as tourist bait by staging “Indian Field Days,” where the local Ahwahneechee dressed up as the more popularized Plains Indians and competed for prizes in equestrian and basket-making contests. One by one—with relocations and raised rents and new rules and evictions for one cause or another—the Park Service forced the Ahwahneechee out of the valley. In 1969, they burned the last Indian residences in training exercises for firefighters.

In 1895, at Glacier National Park in Montana, Blackfoot Indians confronting incipient starvation agreed to sell to the U.S. government the mountainous territory they regarded as the “backbone of the world.” But they did so only with the stipulation that they be allowed to hunt, fish, and collect timber there for their cabins and corrals. Once the land was set aside within the “fixed and carefully policed boundaries of the modern bureaucratic state,” writes historian William Cronin, the “original inhabitants were kept out by dint of force, their earlier uses of the land redefined as inappropriate or even illegal. To this day, the Blackfeet continue to be accused of ‘poaching’ on the lands of Glacier National Park that originally belonged to them and that were ceded by treaty only with the proviso that they be permitted to hunt there.” Meanwhile, the Great Northern Railroad lured tourists to the park by hiring Blackfeet to “play Indian” at its depot and at the Glacier Park Hotel.

At Great Smokey Mountains National Park, the Park Service bought out six thousand six hundred private parties—many by using condemnation proceedings. Park managers moved assorted barns and buildings to the Mountain Farm Museum, where costumed interpreters now demonstrate hill-country life at the imitation farmstead. At Buffalo National River in Arkansas, the Park Service condemned and leveled many hundreds of homes; at Ozark Scenic Riverways in Missouri, the Park Service bulldozed the cabins along the river; at Big Bend National Park in Texas, they knocked down the ranchers’ cabins. And now they regret it.

At least some of the Park Service employees at Yukon-Charley are prepared for the same thing to happen in their park. The day is not so distant, they say, when all the river people will be gone from the river and the Park Service will put GS-5 summer hires in their cabins. They’ll be drama majors from colleges in the States. They’ll wear red flannel shirts and spit snoose. They’ll hang a few fish so the floaters can see people living the old-time way. And come the first frost, they’ll head back to school.