Walking Home: A Traveler in the Alaskan Wilderness, a Journey Into the Human Heart

by Lynn Schooler

  Chapter 17

  It Started with a paragraph at the end of a story on the front page of the May 12, 1900, issue of the Alaskan newspaper, headlined sloop lost. According to the article, a month earlier, on April 15, at the tail end of the terrible winter of 1899–1900, the schooner Dora B. had been in tow behind the steamship Excelsior outside Lituya Bay when the towline parted. The seas were heavy, and after determining the Dora B. to be a “staunch and completely seaworthy vessel,” the Excelsior’s captain decided not to attempt to recover the tow, because doing so in such boisterous weather would be dangerous. Instead the crew of the Excelsior stood by and watched as the four men aboard the Dora B. hauled in the broken towline, raised a sail, and shaped a course for Lituya Bay. It was late in the evening, and the Dora B. was never seen again.

  “The supposition is,” continued the article, “that she was driven ashore and broke up. The body of a man supposed to be one of the four men on board was found on the beach at Yakutat but no clue was obtained as to his identity.”

  Lituya Bay had claimed another four lives, and that was that. But the final paragraph of the four-inch article reported in an almost offhand manner that the Excelsior, after entering Lituya Bay during its search for the missing vessel, had returned to Juneau to report that there had been a “lynching” there.

  “Two men were murdered last fall,” read the yellowed clipping from the files of the Alaska State Historical Library. “And it being impossible to communicate with the authorities, and fearing to set the murderer at large . . . the Lituyans thought it proper to take the law into their own hands.” The result, concluded the article, was the “elevation” of the criminal.

  It was not a great piece of journalism, even by the standards of the time, and it suffered at the hands of a writer who apparently did not know the difference between a sloop and a schooner, each being a very different rig, and both descriptions being applied to the lost vessel in the space of three lines. He also got the number of murder victims wrong; only one was killed and another wounded. Nonetheless, a bit more digging quickly uncovered a strange and horrific story that had leaked out to the rest of the world to be distilled through various filters of yellow journalism, until it appeared in William Randolph Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner a year later as a lurid account of northern justice under a headline that screamed, WOMAN HANGS A MAN . . . AND THE LAW UPHOLDS HER! Whether the Examiner found it more disquieting that murder had been done or that a female had done the hanging is debatable, but the Examiner’s standard of journalism is not; Hearst’s reporter got the hanged man’s name wrong. Tagged as Michael Dennin, the killer was actually named Martin Severts. When Jack London wrote up the story for McClure’s Magazine six years later, he apparently cribbed from the breathless Examiner piece, because he, too, called the killer Dennin. London then went a step farther and, for reasons I could never discover, called the woman involved Edith Whittlesay, although her name was Hannah Butler.

  It took three hours of easy walking to get to where Justice Creek ran as clear as air over gray and green stones. The sun was hanging low in the west, and there is little that feels better at the end of a day than shedding a heavy pack. I had seen two more bears, looking up once just in time to spot a line of brown fur hobbyhorsing away behind a stand of tall dead grass a hundred yards away, as a young brown bear loped off at what looked like an easy pace but carried the animal quickly into the trees; the second was a darker animal grazing on a distant point that apparently picked up my scent, fleeing well before I got close enough to make out any details. Every time I left the beach to poke into the trees, there was a well-worn trail just inside the brush line, packed as wide as a grocery cart by years of heavy feet.

  As I had expected, the late spring had pushed a large percentage of the bears coming out of hibernation along the Fairweather Range down onto the narrow strip of snow-free coast in search of food. Four was not an unusual number of bears to see in a day of walking in Alaska—the most I have seen is twenty-four, and there are places in the state where fifty or sixty are possible. But it was comforting to catalog the four I had encountered—five including the one I had spotted while kayaking to Huscroft’s island—and to note that all had run at my approach. Along the way, small knots of shorebirds passed at regular intervals. A great blue heron unfolded at my approach to the creek and threw itself into the air with an ungainly flap and a squawk.

  After rummaging through the pack, I carried the stove, the utensils, the bag of freeze-dried food, and the water bottle a hundred yards away to avoid having the smell of food permeate the ground where I planned to sleep. While I set up the stove and sorted out a package of spaghetti for dinner, I thought about Hannah Butler and the other people involved in the story. Hannah Butler was an Englishwoman who first came to North America in 1898 to work as a handmaiden to a Victorian Lady on a grand tour of the continent. While they were passing through Chicago, she met and eloped with Hans Nelson, a miner bound for the goldfields of Alaska. After arriving in Skagway, the newlyweds fell into a partnership with three men: Fragnalia Stefano (known as Harkey), a popular teamster from Juneau named Sam Christianson (or Dutchy), and Martin Severts, with whom they traveled to Lituya Bay after hearing rumors of a vein of fine placer gold there. Stormy weather often cuts into the low bluffs along the beach, exposing a layer of dense sands that contain minute flakes of the precious metal, which can then be laboriously extracted by flushing lighter material away with water pumped over the ribbed surface of a sluice box. North of Lituya Bay the auriferous layer is also heavy with garnets, which give it a reddish tint the miners referred to as “ruby.” It was the ruby sands that brought Hannah Butler-Nelson and her cohorts to Justice Creek, where they built a rude cabin.

  It was hardscrabble mining in an exceedingly remote and rugged place, with little chance of a big strike that would make them rich. After months of hard labor the five had only around eight hundred dollars’ worth of fine gold dust to show for their efforts. By autumn, with winter approaching, they were discussing leaving and had started watching for a passing ship to flag down. Then on October 6, as the five were sitting down to dinner, Severts got up, walked outside, came back inside carrying a gun, and started shooting, killing Harkey immediately and firing a round into Christianson’s neck, wounding him. Hans sat frozen until Hannah leaped up and threw herself at Severts, at which point he, too, hurled himself into the fray. One newspaper account said that Hannah managed to throw a towel or cloth around Severts’s neck and choke him into unconsciousness while her husband pummeled him.

  Reports of what happened next are mixed, but all agree that the Nelsons tied Severts in a bunk and began guarding him around the clock to prevent him from escaping, hoping all the while that a passing ship could be flagged down. But the days grew shorter, winter rolled in, and rescue never arrived. As winter deepened, it became increasingly difficult for the Nelsons to take turns keeping watch over their prisoner, nurse the injured Dutchy, and gather enough food and firewood to warm and feed themselves. They all began to slowly freeze and starve. Severts, suffering from his prolonged confinement and bondage, began to beg to be killed, but Hannah could not reconcile her Victorian belief in a civilized system of law and order with the urgent need to dispatch him. Although Severts wished to die, she apparently preferred to die herself rather than give in to the tempting practicality of a summary execution and “mob justice.”

  The solution was elegant, though bizarre. At Severts’s request, the surviving miners—including the prisoner—held an election incorporating Lituya Bay as a community. Then they elected Hannah as the community’s judge and Hans as a prosecutor. Hannah made careful handwritten notes of all the proceedings, as well as a transcript of the trial that followed. Two Indians were summoned from a nearby encampment to act as witnesses as Severts signed a confession stating that he had intended to kill them all for the gold, then return to Juneau and blame the murders on the Indians. At the conclusion of the trial Judge Nelson pronounced him gu
ilty, and, as newspaper accounts later related it, the convicted prisoner was then taken to a nearby tree and “elevated.”

  It is not clear whether the Excelsior, after discovering the marooned prospectors, brought them back to Juneau or continued with its search for the missing Dora B. and arranged for another vessel to evacuate them, but in any case the records indicate that immediately after being rescued, Hannah contacted the authorities and turned over the transcript of the trial. After reviewing her notes, a federal judge presiding over the territory ruled Severts’s death a judicial execution and declared Hannah Nelson a “plucky little woman.”

  The stove roared, the water boiled, and I tore open the package of freeze-dried spaghetti and poured in the water as the directions stated. Perhaps the savings in weight was worth it, but I missed the comfort of preparing food, the chopping, slicing, mixing, and spicing that is as much a part of the pleasure of cooking as the actual consumption. All I had to do was wait ten minutes for the crunchy stuff to absorb the boiling water, and I was assured enough carbohydrates to keep my body fueled, but the efficiency, rather than being a virtue, seemed a deficiency, in that it sped up the process and eliminated the slowing down and concentration that can distance one from a day’s events and be as nourishing as the food.

  While I waited, I watched gulls drift back and forth over the white line of the surf, glancing over my shoulder now and then to make sure the smell of cooking had not drawn any bears, and thought about the hanging. As late as 1971 there was a handwritten note in the Alaska State Historical Library in Juneau verifying Hannah’s account of the event. The note has since disappeared.

  That did not bother me; history muddles things, dropping facts and stirring the truth in all directions, as the various versions and twists I had come across during my research of the incident show. The question that lingered was what effect such a traumatic experience had had on Hannah and Hans.

  Hannah Butler had come of age in the staid, emotionally straitjacketed environment of Victorian England, and for her to have met and eloped with a common workingman like Hans indicated an explosion of love so strong that she was willing to abandon, perhaps forever, whatever connections she had to her class, culture, and family. For a British woman of the late 1800s, this was tantamount to a permanent self-exile.

  I opened the package and stirred the spaghetti with a fork. The smell of tomato sauce rose out of the bag on a wisp of steam. Behind the hanging there seemed to be a larger story, one of a romance so overpowering that a young woman was willing to throw herself headlong into a world rife with unknowns in the company of a virtual stranger. Could there really be such an instant and impregnable connection between two people that it could withstand the stress and terror of seeing murder done, of freezing and starving, and the fear of being murdered should the killer escape? Leaving aside the utter horror of having to put a noose around Severts’s neck and dig graves for the dead, the strain of sharing a small, cramped cabin through the deprived months of a terrible winter might have been enough to make even the smallest tics of one’s companion gnaw and chew until they became unforgivable irritations. Hannah and Hans had been rescued, but I had wondered for years after learning of the tragedy if their marriage had survived.

  I twirled a forkful of spaghetti and blew on it until it was cool enough to put in my mouth. It was not bad, but I was probably hungry enough to eat one of my socks if it was drenched in tomato sauce, and sitting there alone on a rock in the middle of that vast solitude eating a one-dish meal out of a foil bag sent a bubble of yearning through me for the days when my wife and I had shopped for, planned, and prepared meals together, shuttling back and forth between my cabin and her apartment as we had tried to out-please each other during our courtship.

  Like Hans’s and Hannah’s, our convergence had seemed wildly romantic, a magnetic drawing-together over decades of time and distance that in the space of a few days had boiled over into something that seemed to have the capacity to become permanent. I was at the harbor, heading out to put out some crab pots. She had a small halibut that needed filleting. I had a sharp knife, and she thought a boat ride sounded fun. There was dinner together that night and the next, and on the third night she reminded me that we had met twenty years earlier, on a late-summer day in a soaking rain. The coffee shop I frequented was packed with tourists trying to get out of the storm. I offered to share my table with an attractive woman accompanied by a little girl who kept her nose in a book while I tried to make conversation with her mother. Both seemed nervous about making small talk with a bearded stranger, so I knocked back my coffee and said goodbye.

  “I always remembered you,” she told me the next morning, leaning back against a bolster of pillows as she reached out to take the coffee I had brought back to bed to share with her. “You were so nice. I always wondered who you were.” That we had come together two decades later seemed to hint at some great order in the universe, a map of such scale that our entanglement was inevitable.

  I walked to the edge of the ocean and waited for a wave to push a surge of foam up the beach, stepping back in time to avoid wetting my boots and bending to rinse the empty meal bag in the slurry of water. Then I stood and watched the waves roll ashore as I wondered what had gone wrong. What once had seemed part of a larger design now seemed a shadow play, full of disorder, or a Kabuki where little was revealed. The lump of freeze-dried food in my belly grew heavy as I thought of how coffee in bed every morning had quickly become a custom until suddenly one day it was not; we were always too busy to linger. She was contracting with two offices and running her own business. I was always in a hurry to be at work on the house by seven A.M.

  A flicker of disquiet as ephemeral yet disturbing as a strand of spiderweb floating across one’s eye moved through me when I remembered the number of times I had dropped by an office where she had said she would be working on a given day, only to be told that she was not on the schedule, or I had called and been told she was somewhere else or with a client. Things had become so hectic I could not keep track.

  I swung the washed bag at arm’s length to dry it as I walked back to the grassy bench beside the creek where I had left the pack, then put it back in the small bag holding the rest of the food and picked up the coil of line to go find a tree from which to hang the bag. It took a few minutes to locate a tall spruce with a suitably high but accessible branch and three tries to toss the line over it. With the bag pulled aloft and the end of the line tied to a second tree, my food supply was secure from bears. It was late, and long shadows were reaching out from the trees. By the time I got the tent unpacked, rolled out, staked down, and sprung into shape with the flexible poles, the sun was going down and everything inside the edge of the forest was slipping into darkness.

  I was pulling the sleeping bag out of its stuff sack when I heard something that sounded like someone running a stick back and forth across the keys of a badly tuned xylophone. Someone else was keeping time with an asthmatic bicycle horn.

  The eerie, discordant music floated down the creek. It was that strange moment when the sun has fallen far enough below the horizon for its rays to strike the upper atmosphere at the proper angle to be reflected back to earth and briefly beat back the oncoming darkness. The light flared, painting the forest a deep green and the water of the creek a color somewhere between rose and gold, then faded as I stared toward the sound. The odd song fell silent, then started up again. I began easing upstream, pausing every few yards to listen.

  All the color was gone from the world by the time I spotted the cranes a hundred yards from camp. Everything but the sky was in shadow, and the gray birds were nearly indistinguishable against the forest background. Bobbing and weaving, the tall, gangly pair danced, stepping this way and that with wings extended, then pausing to throw back their heads and cry out with their long, pointed beaks thrust toward the sky. The air was cold, and in the near dark, with the creek chuckling to itself as it turned from silver to black under a sky dotted with a s
ingle pale star, the rusty yodeling sounded like the musical instruments of an ancient civilization being played to celebrate a migration that has continued without interruption for millions of years.

  I stood and watched until a last call echoed back and forth. The cranes fell silent and became still. I eased away, feeling my way back to the tent across the uneven ground with my feet. There was still enough light for me to cover my pack and gear with a light tarp and worm into the sleeping bag without using my headlamp. I remembered reading somewhere that cranes mate for life and that ornithologists, with a scientific aversion to any phrasing that might imply emotion or affection, theorize that the complex, synchronized duet of the “unison call” strengthens “pair bonding.”

  I curled into the sleeping bag and stuffed a coat under my head for a pillow, thinking that I would go up the creek in the morning and look around for any remnants of the cabin used by Hans and Hannah Nelson. Their marriage, it turned out, had endured their ordeal; ten years after first learning of the tragedy, I had come across a thin pamphlet of the sort history enthusiasts put together in small towns, this one describing Atlin, a mining community of around four hundred souls located just across the border in northern British Columbia. The section detailing Atlin’s gold rush history mentioned a Mr. and Mrs. Hans Nelson moving to town several years after the hanging to operate a dry goods store.

  I was drifting off to sleep when a faint warbling floated in over the sound of the surf, followed by a low-pitched moan. I rose up on one elbow to listen, but for a long minute there was nothing else. Then again came the higher tone, followed by the lower note, and silence. A third exchange was more extended, drawing out into a series of alto and baritone yodels I recognized as the howling of a wolf pack, calling back and forth as they roamed.