Shadows on the Koyukuk

by Sidney Huntington

  Many modern Alaskans consider sleeping out under the open skies, even in a $300 down-filled sleeping bag, as “siwashing out,” but that’s the easy way. In my younger years, Koyukon elders told me to avoid siwashing out unless I had no choice. “Only when you are all played out, or lost,” Edwin Simon warned. I made up my mind that I would never siwash out, but of course I couldn’t avoid getting caught a few times.

  Edwin told me what to do if I had to siwash out during winter when all I had with me was the clothing I wore and an axe. His words probably saved my life.

  One night in early February 1935, when I was a tough nineteen-year-old, I learned about siwashing firsthand in the Hog River country behind Sun Mountain. I frequently ran marten down, but I often got into trouble in doing so.

  Interested in establishing a new marten trapline, I decided to scout new country. I left my Clear Creek camp on Hog River about 4:30 in the morning, and drove my dog team to the foothills, where I tied them.

  It was breaking daylight when I put on snowshoes and set out to search the hills. Snow was deep, but none had fallen for several days. If marten were around, I knew I would see their tracks, made since the previous snowfall. I soon found good sign, with marten tracks here and there. I toured among the big hills and covered many miles. Late in the day, I ran into a fresh marten track. To test its freshness, I slid the head of my axe into the snow under the track and tried to lift it. Disturbed snow sets after a time, and an old track remains intact when lifted with an axe in that manner. This track crumpled, which indicated that it was fresh. The marten was traveling in the opposite direction I wanted to go, but I didn’t worry about that.

  Part of the satisfaction of the trapline was the excitement I felt when on a fresh trail. But sometimes I would forget to be smart. I forgot the dog team I had left tied. I forgot that I had traveled hard all day. I forgot that darkness was near. I forgot that I hadn’t eaten since breakfast. I took off on a run, snowshoes flying, following the fresh track over a ridge and down into a steep valley, thinking I would catch him quickly. His tracks, instead of meandering, with short leaps, changed to a straight line with large leaps, so he knew he was being trailed. Finding no big trees to climb, he ran faster.

  Floundering in the deep snow in that steep-sided valley, I slowed my pace but continued to follow him along the creek. The chase lasted about an hour. Finally, after several miles, I caught up with him. He treed and I shot him with my .22. His fine pelt was worth about $20, big money in 1935, when a good day’s wage was about $5.

  Within a few hours that $20 seemed like small potatoes.

  When one makes his first mistake in the woods, other mistakes usually follow. When I had left my cabin on Clear Creek more than twelve hours earlier, the temperature had been –34 degrees, with no wind, a fine temperature for traveling. Until the marten chase, I’d remained comfortable because I was properly dressed and kept moving. The marten chase had made my clothing damp with sweat, and damp clothing combined with cold is a lethal mixture.

  Rather than climb the steep slope, I decided to head down the valley, which seemed to turn in the direction of my dog team. I walked for about an hour, left the creek where the bank wasn’t so steep, and climbed out of the valley. Both darkness and cold deepened.

  Reaching the top of the ridge, I decided to follow it out, expecting to intersect my snowshoe track at any time. I was growing very tired, and darkness under the heavy spruce timber made it difficult for me to see any distance. I came to an open place, but I didn’t see anything that looked familiar. I crossed the ridge into a new valley, scanning the snow as I went, searching for my own tracks. The snow seemed deeper and the cold more intense. I was dog tired.

  I decided to build a fire, rest, and dry my damp wool underwear, for I could feel the penetrating cold sapping my strength. With my axe, the most important survival tool in wooded country, I cut dry wood and started a fire atop the snow. The heat felt good and I could feel the moisture leaving my underwear. The flames quickly thawed a hole in the snow that eventually became more than four feet deep. Using a snowshoe for a shovel, I dug in around the edge, away from the fire, following it down. I wasn’t thinking of siwashing out, only drying off.

  I dozed in front of the fire. Then I remembered Edwin’s warning: “Look out if you get sleepy. Go to sleep and you can fall into the fire. You can be burned so badly you can’t do anything, and then you will die. Take care of yourself before you let yourself fall asleep.”

  I roused myself, suddenly realizing that I was going to have to siwash it for the night. I cut a few larger trees, some green boughs, and three-and-four-inch-diameter dry poles. Soon I had a large pile of wood.

  I built up my original fire. By this time it had melted its way to bare ground. I placed the green spruce boughs near the fire, where they thawed, dried, and warmed, ready for later use. Then, using my snowshoes, I dug a second hole in the snow for another fire, near my original fire, which by now was burning down. I scooped all the hot coals and partly burned wood from the first fire and placed them on my new fire, and then I piled wood high on the new fire.

  I laid my supply of now-dry green spruce branches over the spot where the first fire had burned. Steam arose from under the branches, for the ground was still hot. I remembered Edwin’s instructions: “Lie down with your parka over you for a blanket, and you’ll get two, maybe three, hours sleep. When the cold wakens you, the other fire should just be going out.”

  Edwin also said I would be stiff all over, but rested. Everything proved to be true to the last detail. When I lay down on my pile of green spruce boughs with my parka on top of me, the warmth from the heated ground felt heavenly. I was asleep in moments. When I awoke I was rested, but no more heat was rising from the ground beneath me, and the cold was beginning to penetrate. My muscles were so stiff that I could hardly get the kinks out. The damp steam seemed to have settled in my joints.

  My second fire was nearly out, but by piling dry wood on the coals I soon had the flames leaping high. I huddled near the life-giving heat and thoroughly dried my clothing, damp from the steaming ground.

  I waited for daylight before moving on, for I knew I was lost. With the first faint light, I worked my way high on a ridge in search of a landmark. As I peered across country, I discovered that after killing the marten I had walked toward the Koyukuk River, away from Hog River where I had left my dog team.

  I spent almost that entire day hiking back to my dog team and driving the dogs back to my cabin. After thirty-six hours without food, the dogs and I were ravenous. Based on that experience, I did my best to avoid having to siwash out during winter again.

  Do I get upset nowadays if someone calls me a half-breed Siwash? I haven’t let anything like that bother me for years. Besides, I can always look anyone who does straight in the eye and say, “You’re absolutely right, friend. Now, what’s your background?”

  17

  KOYUKUK GOLD

  Because of the Depression, during the early 1930s a silver dollar looked as big as a full moon in October. Fur prices were low, and we saw little cash, but we continued to live as trappers and from the land. Despite the tough times, we were happy and lived well.

  Dad’s health continued to grow poorer. In 1934 he left his job at Nulato and entered the Alaska Pioneer’s Home at Sitka. After a year there his health had slightly improved, and he was restless.

  When I was eighteen I spent much time at Koyukuk Station, where a girl named Jenny Luke lived. We were married in 1934, when I was nineteen, and we lived at Hog River. Jimmy lived with us for a year after we were married.

  In 1936 Jimmy married Celia Olin at Cutoff, about eighty river miles from Hog River, and he lived most of the time in that Koyukuk River village, close to her family. During some winters he returned to trap with me at Hog River.

  After he had been in the Pioneer’s Home for a little over a year, Dad wrote to Jimmy and me, “Whether I die lazing around the Pioneer’s Home or digging for gold in the Koyu
kuk makes little difference. I might as well be doing something, so I’ve decided to try digging for gold at Bear Creek.”

  Trapping, freighting, and trading were only sidelines as far as Dad was concerned. Gold was what he came north for, and the search for it continued to be his passion. He had faith in the Koyukuk gold fields, and with good reason: from 1900 to 1930 about five million dollars worth of gold came out of the Koyukuk, mostly from the headwaters area, seventy-five miles upstream from Bettles.

  Bear Creek, about forty miles northwest of Hughes, a headwater tributary to Hog River, is one of Alaska’s sixty Bear Creeks. Gold was found there in the 1920s and earlier by Dominic Vernetti and others, but not in large amounts.

  Most of the area surrounding Bear Creek is permafrost—permanently frozen ground—but Bear Creek ground is wet, not frozen, with only a few spots of permafrost. Permafrost forms when the average annual temperature is below freezing, and in some of the colder regions of the arctic, permafrost is hundreds of feet deep.

  Because of the wet ground at Bear Creek, early miners couldn’t sink a hole to bedrock where the gold lies without being what they called “drowned out.” Dominic Vernetti and Ernie McCloud and a couple of others managed to take $2,000 worth of gold out of a frozen pit at Bear Creek before being drowned out. After that, Ernie McCloud worked at Bear Creek for years, trying unsuccessfully to develop a way of mining the area before he was starved out.

  But Dad was convinced Bear Creek was worth another try. “No one has mined Bear Creek right,” he said. “If we can get down to bedrock and prove gold is there, we can either sell out, or mine it ourselves.”

  So in January 1935 Jimmy and I headed across country to Bear Creek with our dog teams and built Dad a fine twelve-by-sixteen cabin out of dry spruce logs. We put up a good roof, digging under the snow for sod to insulate it, and we mudded the walls to eliminate drafts and installed a good window and a door.

  At the time I had a wife and was starting a family. Jimmy was busy trapping and had no money. Financing a mining venture was out of the question for us, but we could help some. We took Dad to the cabin and left him there more or less on his own, and hauled food and other supplies to him periodically. Bear Creek wasn’t far from the end of one of my traplines, so I checked on him every few days.

  Dad staked claims for himself and for friends and small investors who had provided him with power of attorney, then he gradually froze a prospect hole down into the wet ground.

  First he dug down three or four feet, chipping away the frozen ground, making a hole about three feet wide and five feet long. When he got down about five feet, he chipped out the frozen earth, filled a bucket, climbed the ladder out of the hole, winched the bucket up, and dumped the spoil. That he did again and again. The process was slow and strenuous for a sixty-eight-year-old in poor health.

  When he reached wet ground, he sometimes waited days for it to freeze. Then he dug a test hole to see how far down it was frozen. When he was sure six or eight inches had frozen, he chipped out the frozen ground, leaving a frozen crust thick enough to prevent groundwater from entering.

  Each week he dug down another six inches or so, and eventually his hole was almost eleven feet deep. One day when he dug out some frozen dirt he noticed dampness. He figured it would freeze, since the temperature was around –30 degrees. But the next morning he found the hole almost full of water—the wet spot had given way. Dad had been drowned out, like all the others. Two months or more of hard, patient work had been destroyed overnight. He didn’t say much about it, but I knew he was bitterly disappointed.

  He didn’t live long enough to know that he had dug to within a foot and a half of bedrock—and millions of dollars worth of gold! That summer he sold partnership shares in the ground he had staked. His various partners were all mining people, and they arranged for the United Smelting and Refining Company to drill prospect holes, with an option to lease or buy.

  Shortly after that Dad died at Fairbanks.

  I went to work for the mining company in 1937. We flew the first drill to Bear Creek in a small plane, and then a little D4 Caterpillar was driven in. While I worked at seventy-nine cents an hour to help set up the drill and to move it around, my wife, Jenny, lived with our kids in a log cabin at the mouth of nearby Clear Creek.

  That winter I saw good fur sign, so I quit the mining company and went trapping. I went back one day to visit the drill crew. They fed me and were cordial, then one of the men told me, “Sidney, your dad would turn over in his grave if he knew what we have found.” They had drilled a prospect hole next to Dad’s eleven-foot-deep hole. In the bottom of their six-inch-diameter hole, they had panned $16 worth of gold. Later, when a dredge was brought in, more than $3 million in gold came from that one claim alone.

  After drilling, the exploration company acted on their option and bought all the claims. For our inherited shares, Jimmy and I each received $15,000—a fortune to us.

  Almost twenty years later, in 1955, a gold-mining dredge was brought, piecemeal, up the Koyukuk River. I worked as a foreman, clearing the road that ran twenty-eight miles from the river back to the mining camp. In the fall and winter when the ground was firmly frozen, we hauled in the dredge parts and reassembled this machine-filled floating behemoth—a floating building that could be dragged along, scooping up the gold-laden earth. The buckets it swung could pull gravel to the surface from as much as sixty feet below ground level. At the site, we had big Caterpillars and graders, pile-driving equipment, and other heavy machinery.

  I was paid well—$600 a month, plus room and board, so I worked there a year. But I missed my wife and kids.

  One of my jobs was to use a surveyor’s transit to lay out a seven-mile ditch for bringing water to the dredge. I had to follow contour lines through the hills so the water fell at a maximum rate of about one-half inch per 100 feet. At the end, the water dropped straight down for 142 feet, providing pressure for a hydraulic nozzle. Since I was self-taught as a surveyor, I enjoyed this challenging job. Later, the company engineer resurveyed my ditch and found that I was off only one-half-inch in the seven miles.

  I also helped to run the dredge. One day the man who was panning on the dredge quit. “Sidney, would you mind panning for a while?” a supervisor asked. “We’ll leave your salary at $600 a month.”

  I agreed, but reluctantly. The panner, who pans a sample of the dredged-up material every twenty minutes or so, guides the dredge all day. He judges which direction the dredge should travel and the dredgemaster follows his instructions. Until then, with the work I was doing, I had been able to get out of the noisy contraption from time to time.

  The gold came in steadily as I panned during that first day. On hand were nine buckets of pure gold, each weighing between 90 and 100 pounds. When I removed the mercury amalgam with a retort outside of the dredge, the gold looked just like butter.

  Until then, working the dredge on Dad’s claims hadn’t bothered me, not even the one where he had been drowned out. But as I panned the gleaming yellow stuff, I suddenly realized that all that gold I was seeing had been my dad’s—I was making others rich with Huntington gold.

  I put the pan down, found the foreman, and said, “Call Sam White for me. I’m leaving.” Sam White had left his job as game warden, and was the Wien Airlines bush pilot at Hughes.

  “What’s wrong, Sidney?” he asked.

  “I’ll tell you some other time. I have to leave. I have no gold on me.” They were careful to make sure that people leaving the dredge carried no gold.

  To my knowledge, $20 million worth of gold came from the Bear Creek claims on which Dad filed. I never returned to the dredge.

  18

  SLED DOGS

  One May day in 1937, Jenny and I drove our dog team up Clear Creek. The dogs pulled a twelve-foot basket sled equipped with a gee-pole. Wearing skis, I straddled the towline and guided the sled through the deep snow with the gee-pole, a spruce pole that projected from the front of the sled.

&n
bsp; Jenny was pregnant and rode on the rear of the sled. We started to cross a deep gully, and as we pitched down the steep cutbank, Jenny stepped on the brake, a simple hinged claw on the rear of the sled. But the brake didn’t catch and the heavy sled picked up speed and got out of control. The rear end whipped around and threw Jenny clear across the gully onto the opposite bank and she sustained serious internal injuries.

  I put Jenny on the sled and drove her back to our Hog River cabin. Leaving her there, I drove several miles to my uncle Hog River Johnny’s place, found his wife Molly at home, and brought her back to nurse Jenny.

  I waited for a day, but Jenny didn’t improve. She was in considerable pain and Molly advised that I get her to the hospital. “I’ve never taken care of anyone hurt like this,” Molly said.

  Jenny was in no condition to ride a dogsled to the hospital. I had to get an airplane. The nearest plane was at Koyukuk Station, so early the next morning I took off from Hog River with my eight dogs. My leader was Dakli, a lovely animal with upstanding pointed ears and a beautiful gray coat. She resembled a wolf. I’ve never had a better leader.

  That day that grand dog team averaged more than ten miles an hour for the 120 miles from Hog River to Koyukuk. Those dogs loved to run. Happily carrying their tails high, their feet pattered on the hard trail, steam puffing from their mouths, with the sled runners singing their song—a song that changed pitch with speed and with changes in the trail.

  That evening, I found bush pilot Herman Lerdahl at John Evans’ store. “How much will you charge to fly Jenny from Hog River to the hospital at Tanana?” I asked. “I don’t have much money, but I have some marten skins, and I think I can get some cash.”