Chasing Alaska: A Portrait of the Last Frontier Then and Now

by C. B. Bernard

  Ever adept at capitalizing on opportunity, Stefansson wrote, “We found Captain Bernard most kind and ready to do us any service possible. It took Dr. Anderson and me but an hour or two to change all our plans, for now there presented itself the new resource of a ship willing to cooperate with us.”

  After a brief visit, Stefansson pushed west to return to expedition headquarters, but Anderson remained with the Teddy Bear. He’d found a friend in Joe and, recognizing his interest in science, patiently taught him the proper techniques for collecting and preserving specimens and artifacts. But the relationship went both ways. “The sun was hot and with the rapid season during which vegetation thrived, mosquitoes came—so thick that I believe our lifetime friendship was sealed the day I gave Dr. Anderson half of my mosquito net,” Joe wrote.

  In August 1911, Joe sailed the Teddy Bear west to Baillie Island, a Native village on Cape Bathurst that served as the easternmost winter harbor for the remaining schooners in the whaling fleet. Anderson was to meet Stefansson there, and Joe hoped to send mail home with a departing schooner before another winter locked them in. It had been two years since he’d left Nome, and he had yet to get word back about his well-being. He learned that the last whaler had left for San Francisco the day before and wrote, “So, once more, the knowledge of my welfare—or even existence—was sealed from my family and friends.”

  Baillie Island served as a gathering place for Arctic vessels, including an “old scow” owned by Arctic veteran Christian “Charlie” Klengenberg. A colorful sailor, Klengenberg had a history of legal problems and crazy ideas. Most recently, he’d come down “from the mouth of the Mackenzie in this old tub. . . . Now he is insanely proposing to continue on to Banks Island in it. He does not have a crew to help him, either, only his family. The oldest member is a girl of 17 years.”

  That daughter, Elvina, later married Storker Storkerson and became the wife he left behind when he returned to Norway. Five years earlier, at Herschel Island, Klengenberg had told Stefansson about a race of fair-haired Eskimo, a tall tale that bent the arc of the explorer’s career.

  Joe planned to return before winter to Coronation Gulf, where few ships had ever gone, but fate intervened in the form of a woman: Tulugak’s wife decided she’d had enough of the itinerant life aboard the Teddy Bear. The rest of the family wouldn’t leave without her. Joe paid them in fox skins and trade goods, discharged them from their duties, and braced for the cold months ahead at Baillie Island, alone.

  That third winter proved particularly trying. Poor trapping meant the Inuit had nothing to barter, and food was scarce. Joe also wrote that the “Eskimos were sickly” that winter. His friend Billy Natkusiak’s wife died in December, and Joe helped organize a Christian funeral for her. On several occasions he also performed impromptu medical duty. He held great faith in the healing and medicinal powers of Epsom salts, and had stocked the ship’s stores with barrels of them before leaving Nome. On Baillie Island he found himself dispensing as much as 4 pounds a day to treat Inuit for illnesses he believed resulted from the unfamiliar food white explorers introduced into their diet. “More than half of the village is sick, constipation being the chief complaint,” he wrote. “This is because these people are using white man’s provisions—especially flour. They have not the slightest idea how to use it. They don’t combine anything else with it and so become very sick.”

  Even the Tulugaks were affected. In February the eldest son, Putoga, arrived at the Teddy Bear begging Joe to help his younger sister, Anaetsea. Joe followed him to their camp at the village and found her too weak to speak, her face swollen almost shut.

  She had been given up to die by her people. But where there is life, there is hope, so I gave her a dose of the salts. I had no trouble making her take the medicine. . . . I could see by the condition of the camp that I would not be able to do much for her there, so I asked Saijak if I could take her home with me where I could watch her and treat her. I stayed up with her all night.

  In entries over the next month, he wrote in clinical, frank detail about his efforts and methods to treat her constipation. For days he remained by her side on the Teddy Bear. With his patient entrusted to him for the long haul, he fixed her a room. “She is still very weak and I have little hope of saving her,” he wrote on February 12. A week later he reported an improvement. “I am still at home, for I cannot leave the house until this child is well. She is improving all of the time, but I keep her in bed and will not let her have anything but the milk [of Magnesia] to drink.”

  By February 21 she’d improved enough to begin eating “a very thin broth from boiled ptarmigan,” he wrote, and by the following week she was well enough to rejoin her family. “Since I helped Anaetsea, all of the Eskimos are beginning to call me ‘spirit man’ because they think I can bring the dead back to life.”

  Just a month later, that reputation proved a mixed blessing when an Inuit woman known as “Mrs. Cooper” asked Joe to operate on her son, Oveyo. The boy had been sick for years but had taken a turn for the worse. Joe found him on the schooner Rose H in the care of a crewman named James Hill, suffering from “a swelling in his throat which appeared to be a dangerous thing for me to touch,” unable to swallow anything. He could scarcely breathe. A tumor in his throat had grown beneath his jugular vein; as removing it would be a world apart from treating constipation, Joe told Mrs. Cooper there was nothing he could do for her son and returned to the Teddy Bear. Undaunted, she followed him home, accompanied by an Inuit “wise man” named Majorik, who gave Joe an ultimatum and a veiled threat. “‘Oveyo is going to die within 24 hours if you do not operate on him,’ he said. ‘So you have to take a chance. You might save him. If you do not take a chance and do nothing, he will die. Then, you look out for yourself!’”

  Joe spent the night studying a book on surgery. The next day, he returned to the Rose H. “I’m a marked man,” he told Hill.

  With an Inuit girl as nurse, Hill strapped Oveyo to a chair, tilted his head back, and held him down while Joe went to work. He made several incisions, and with a pair of forceps and the knowledge of anatomy he’d learned the night before, he removed as much of the tumor as he dared. The surgery didn’t proceed without incident—a geyser of black blood drove their nurse from the room—but the patient responded immediately and improved quickly. Within ten days Oveyo returned to the ice, hunting seals, and Joe’s reputation as a healer grew.

  In Joe’s journal entries from that spring, a nugget of adventure lies buried between pages of climate and temperature data. It’s a good story, and it gives a better idea of the realities of life in the Arctic, where nearly every day became a battle for survival.

  I went to my bear trap at the [whale] carcass. I had not gone far when the dogs got excited and started across the ice—a she bear and her two cubs were not over 100 yards away. The female was in a bear trap and the cubs were beside her. I stopped my dogs when we got up to within 50 yards then I shot her and managed to catch one of the cubs, tying it to the sled.

  In the meantime the other cub started to run away. There were a lot of large icebergs, from 10 feet to 20 feet high, scattered from 40 to 75 yards apart and young ice in between. The young ice was level and with the bergs, the place looked just like a town, the bergs being houses, ice the streets. I took off my parka, put my gun on the sled, and started to catch up to the other cub for I decided to get him alive. . . . I started out on the run. After going about 200 yards, as I got up to a big iceberg, I heard a loud roar! The loudest I have ever heard. I looked up. There on top of the berg, right above my head, there was a big polar bear looking down at me.

  I suddenly realized that I was without my gun so I quickly turned and ran for the sled. When I came in sight of the sled my dogs got up to watch me come. I jumped over the sled, grabbed my gun at the same time, then turned to shoot. To my surprise, there was no bear in sight. . . .

  I stopped for a few minutes
to get my breath then went back to where I had seen the bear. As I came in sight of the iceberg I saw him still there, watching me. I was only about 50 yards away when I shot him in the head. He fell, dead, with his head hanging over the edge. Then I saw the other little cub running across the ice. I fired at him as I was now too exhausted to run any further.

  The iceberg which the bear was on was about 15 feet high so I went around, found a place to get up on it, and when I got up on top I found the bear had been caught in a trap. Apparently one of the natives had set a bear trap there the day before, so someone else has a claim on him. But I have plenty of meat now and the thought of bringing back 2 large polar bears and 2 cubs was comforting—especially when food has been so scarce.

  It was getting dark when I journeyed back with my heavy loads on my little sled, one live cub tied to its mother’s body with the others. The whole village turned out when I returned. The women helped skin the bears and begin preparations for a big feed. . . . I gave each household some of the meat, and also invited them all to a big feast.

  The story reveals Joe’s ability to be unsentimental about killing when necessary. To him, wildlife meant meat or specimens or articles for trade. During a particularly brutal winter a few years later, he resorted to eating a sled dog, which meant the difference between life and death. But that’s not to say he didn’t have a soft side. Subsequent journal entries show that he kept the polar bear cub he’d caught as a pet, making a cage for it to sleep in. Is it cruel to raise a wild animal that you’d orphaned as a pet? I could throw a rock and hit a dozen people who think so, but taken in the context of the time, I see it differently.

  He writes in great detail about his dogs too, providing another view of his feelings toward certain animals. Throughout the Arctic, dog teams served and still serve as means of travel, intruder alarms, and hunting partners. Joe trained his dogs well, which apparently confounded his Eskimo companions, but if he fell off his sled, he wanted his dogs to know enough to circle back and stop for him rather than abandoning him miles from camp in the Arctic. He taught them to remember the location of his traps and to lead him along his trapline, stopping within 20 feet of a trap and lying down so as to not spook the animals he’d caught. He treated them comparatively well, too, and thought fondly of them.

  Since we were confident that we could make it out of the Arctic, I had no use for my dogs. I put them ashore, tying them up at the sand spit abreast of where we had the Teddy Bear anchored. They were quiet all of the time I was talking to the police, giving the dogs to them and to a trader who was stationed there this winter. But when the dogs saw me hoisting the sails they howled and howled. They knew I was leaving them. When we sailed out of the harbor, they followed the schooner, wailing loudly, following until they were stopped by the water at the end of the spit. It was hard for me to leave them too.

  For the most part, his dogs fell somewhere between tools and coworkers, but he treated several as pets, distinguishing them from the rest of the team. He writes lovingly about Toothpick, Lady, Sport, and King. Lamed by a bear, King had the misfortune to end up as a last-resort dinner, but Joe didn’t make that decision—nor did he take to the meal—without difficulty.

  In a 1913 documentary, The Cruise of the Whaler Herman, which chronicles the experience of a whaling crew on a voyage from San Francisco to the Arctic, a scene shows a man on Banks Island feeding two polar bear cubs collared and leashed by long chains to poles in the ground. Though still juveniles, they’re bigger than dogs, well more than 100 pounds—adult males will grow to 1,500 pounds—and eager for the scraps he feeds them. They stand on their hind legs and lean their front legs against their keeper, begging for more. On two legs they reach shoulder-high to the man. He wears “Native” clothing, a skin parka and pants, fur boots, and in the camp around him you can see dogsleds, tents, and cabins. His treatment not abjectly cruel, he does taunt them a bit, feeding one while the other begs, kicking the bowl out of reach, letting them fight over scraps. The scene has something of the feel of a prisoner-of-war camp—he’s providing care and feeding, but grudgingly, and not without a little spite.

  The man is Peter Bernard.

  Watching that two-and-a-half-minute motion-picture footage of “Uncle Pete” launched him out of the pages of books and journals, out of history, and into real life. I wasn’t going to judge his actions from one silent film clip.

  From the forests of Southeast to the sea ice of the Arctic, Alaska hums with bear stories. Any Alaskan worth his salt has several, even I. But learning that the Bernards made pets of polar bears—the world’s largest land carnivore—how could I ever tell any of my own bear stories again? If Joe named his bear cub, he doesn’t give the name in his journals. In fact, he barely writes about the pet at all, except to note that a month after its capture it already had outgrown the cage he built. Four months pass before he mentions it again. “The northern lights are beautiful. My pet bear died during the morning. The rocking of last night’s storm was just too much for the little fellow.” Scientists consider polar bears marine mammals. They live for long stretches on sea ice, catch much of their food from the water, and have adapted webbed feet and a layer of blubber to allow them to swim long distances in the cold ocean. Joe’s polar bear may have been the first ever to die of seasickness.

  But the unfortunate cub wasn’t the only creature that Joe opted to domesticate rather than kill. There were wolf cubs and foxes, and the day after his bear died, a ptarmigan landed on the deck of the Teddy Bear, too weak from the storm to fly farther. Joe brought it into the cabin, out of the weather, and nursed it back to health.

  Poor trade conditions around the Baillie Island village continued well into the spring, but the arrival of the whaler Belvedere brought word from home—or at least from Nome. Ira Rank had forwarded his mail with the schooner, and Joe packaged 400 fox furs on the Belvedere to ship back to Rank to settle his debt. Rank didn’t receive the furs for almost two years, since the whaler went east first, but when he did he was able to sell them for $60 apiece—over half a million for the lot when adjusted for inflation. (Joe notes bitterly that by the time he returned to Nome two years later with more than 1,400 furs, fox farming, fur dying, and the outbreak of World War I had tanked the market. He unloaded them one at a time for just $4 apiece.)

  Joe had yet to hire any crew to help man the Teddy Bear, but Billy Natkusiak, still mourning the death of his wife, asked to join when the ship left Baillie Island. Joe struck a deal, and Billy “Banksland,” as he was called, moved into his quarters to help him ready the schooner for the trip east. The situation was looking up . . . until Stefansson arrived at Baillie Island and offered Billy a higher sum to break his contract with Joe and accompany him to Barrow.

  Billy Natkusiak, also known as Billy Banks­land, waiting for a seal to surface from a breathing hole.

  “Last night Billy came to me and asked if I would mind if he hired out with Stefansson for this trip and whether he could get back here in time to go east with me,” Joe wrote in late March. “I did not say anything but let him go.”

  Joe’s friend Dr. Anderson visited him at the Teddy Bear to express his regret and assured him he had not known of Stefansson’s plans. “I am left in a difficult situation,” Joe wrote, without a crew for the Teddy Bear for the third time in as many years.

  12

  Signs

  The Hudson’s Bay Company now has a station here and there is a mission of the Church of England. The weather is also very different. Why, in 1912, at this same time of year, the snow was on the ground and all of the fresh water ponds were frozen over. Now there is no sign of frost. Among the Eskimos, however, it is the same as it was: mostly all sick.

  Fourteen years ago, when I visited Juneau for the first time, I drove to where the road turned to dirt some 40 miles north of town and took a picture of the sign posted there:

  TRAVEL BEYOND THIS POINT NOT RE
COMMENDED.

  IF YOU MUST USE THIS ROAD

  EXPECT EXTREME COLD/HEAVY SNOW

  CARRY COLD WEATHER SURVIVAL GEAR

  TELL SOMEONE WHERE YOU ARE GOING

  To me it was a 141-character metaphor for all the ways that Alaska differed from the New England of my childhood, the modern equivalent of the mapmakers’ old Here Be Dragons. This is the state capital, after all, not some backwoods afterthought, and it’s a safe bet you won’t find anything like this in Boston. As my father would say, when something in Massachusetts might be dangerous, the lawyers make you put up fences, not signs.

  Driving past the sign as far as Echo Cove, I waded into Lynn Canal and fished for Dolly Varden. Beautiful, quiet, and accessible within a short drive from the downtown—in practical terms, the end of the road a beginning too. Along its unpaved length sat several launching points for recreational adventures into the woods and water north of Juneau, trailheads from small parking areas that disappeared into the wilderness, boat ramps angled into Lynn Canal. Porcupines, marmots, deer, or bears might cross the road in front of you, or whales and seals along the shore against a Chilkat Mountains backdrop. The road went from urban to strip mall, from semi-industrial to residential to wooded. Past a certain point, you could find the smoldering remnants of bonfires, shattered beer bottles, cigarette butts littering the ground like shell casings at a crime scene, condom wrappers and empty french fry cartons left by the teenagers practicing the same, primary activities of teenagers everywhere.