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

by C. B. Bernard

  After watching the Mary Sachs sail away to the east in 1914, Joe and Old John pushed the limits of the Teddy Bear and of themselves in their efforts to escape the Arctic before another winter descended, sailing round the clock when conditions allowed.

  We ran all night and were off McKinley Bay by 4 a.m. Here we went inside of the ice, off shore, in 4 fathoms of water. Trying to get out, we ran aground on a sand bar.—August 23, 1914

  All night we made only four or five miles against a heavy E current. . . . We are exhausted. We have been going night and day, no sleep since leaving Cape Parry except during a dead calm or when we have to stop like this. We have been eating mostly dried salmon on the run.—September 3, 1914

  All day we kept meeting heavy fields of ice, mostly dirty and full of sand. At 9 p.m. we had to tie up to an ice field as the ice was too heavy and it was raining and dark. I figure we are off Beechey Point tonight. I cannot see land; we have been going on dead reckoning.—September 4, 1914

  We beat all day. . . . It is very cold tonight, salt water freezing on deck. We kept beating all night.—September 9, 1914

  After five years in the Arctic, Joe finally reached Nome in late September, unloaded his cargo of furs and specimens, and settled his debts. Then he raced to winterize the schooner and catch a steamer to Seattle, unwilling to risk getting stuck in Nome until spring.

  That same month, the Mary Sachs reached her destination, though not without difficulties. A storm ravaged the ship, damaging a propeller shaft, and she began leaking heavily. Her engineer, a drunk, turned increasingly hostile. In his diary, crewmember George Wilkins wrote:

  A heavy breeze increasing to a gale had sprung up, accompanied by sleet and fog. Our compass was very erratic, and the steering of the boat even more so. Thompson is the only one on deck that can manage the wheel. Billy keeps the boat swinging from side to side, making almost 45 degree turns, and I have seen Captain Bernard make a complete circle in one watch.

  When at last she reached Banks Island, the crew winched her ashore. She would serve as the expedition’s northern party’s winter base, known as Camp Kellett and manned by Peter Bernard, William Baur, J. R. Crawford, Charlie Thomsen, and Thomsen’s Inupiat wife and child.

  At Camp Kellet the crew documenting The Cruise of the Whaler Herman delivered some of the expedition’s food and supplies and filmed Pete feeding his bear cubs. Footage shows the Mary Sachs on the beach, other expedition ships in various anchorages, brief clips of the camp at Herschel Island where the Teddy Bear had spent time, and an Inupiat ceremony at Barrow, providing a glimpse of life in the Arctic. At the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Quebec, film clips and photos taken by the official CAE photographer show Sachs’s crew unloading at Banks Island and Pete detailing a sledge he built.

  Peter Bernard remained at Camp Kellett until December 1916, when, on Stefansson’s orders, he and Charlie Thomsen set out to deliver 400 or 500 pounds of mail and supplies northeast across Melville Sound to the expedition leader’s camp on Melville Island. Not long after they departed, an unexpected winter storm ambushed them with blinding headwinds and deadly temperatures. They never made it to Melville Island, or back to Camp Kellett.

  The next summer expedition members Aarnout Castel and Karsten Anderson found two sleds, some remaining supplies, and a note signed by both Pete and Thomsen and lashed to the handlebar of one of the sleds: “December 22th. We leave a cache on the is wer we started back as we can not goe anny farder we hav no mor grub and or dogs ar dying we hav lost 8 dogs we hav 10 mor and we hav the mail whits we tac back.”

  Farther west they recovered the middle portion of a sled Pete had axed to lighten his load. “At first there were some dog tracks but these became fewer, for the dogs were dying one by one,” Stefansson wrote in The Friendly Arctic, recounting the search secondhand. Castel and Anderson discovered Thomsen’s body nearby. In his own diary, Castel wrote, “I hope Capt. Bernard came out of this alright although I have my doubts.” They followed traces of his trail west until it disappeared.

  “It seems most likely that Captain Bernard died on the sea ice,” Stefansson wrote, “and that his body with the mail and whatever else he had with him will never be recovered.”

  In 1920 Stefansson recommended the Canadian government bestow its Arctic Medal upon Peter Bernard, one of only five CAE members for whom he made such a recommendation. One hand giving, the other taking away, he also arranged for the government to withhold Pete’s share of the profits from the sale of fox skins gathered during the expedition from his widow, Etta, citing his “unsatisfactory service.” But even then he couched this alleged lack of discipline in words of praise:

  Thus died two of the expedition’s best men. With Storkerson and Wilkins, Bernard made the third of those who contributed most to our northern section. Any one is wrong who thinks that I have criticized Bernard by pointing out his peculiar attitude towards orders. I have merely made clear how this tragedy could happen in spite of precautionary instructions which are matters of record. After all, there is often good reason in the Arctic for disobeying orders, for conditions may change so fundamentally that the commander who issued them might desire to alter or even reverse them were he present. Loyalty and good intentions are the main things, and I never knew a man who had more of either of these than Captain Bernard.

  In 1917, following a series of miscommunications that Stefansson later judged as willful rather than accidental, the captain of another vessel ordered the run-down Mary Sachs dismembered for supplies and firewood. Over the coming decades, Inuit traveling the area scavenged wood from the ship for their fires and to build cabins and bits of metal from her engine and fittings to make knives. By the 1940s, just her long timber keel remained, the curved bow still pointing to the sky.

  When Joe left the Arctic, he’d collected 2-plus tons of artifacts and ornithological and natural history specimens assessed at about $50,000 1914 dollars, which by some calculations would have the same buying power as more than $1 million today. He donated it piecemeal to Loyola College in Montreal and the Victoria Memorial Museum in Ottawa and funded his travel around the States and Canada by selling pieces to the Smithsonian Institute, Chicago’s Field Museum, the Museum of the American Indian in New York, and the University of Pennsylvania, many of which still display them.

  For two years he traveled the United States and Canada with his exhibits, visiting family and friends. But by 1915 a familiar feeling had begun to return. “I found I was getting restless, for I was not satisfied being in civilization. I had spent five long winters and five short summers east of Barrow and north of everything. I had been worn out and ready to quit the Arctic for good when I had reached Nome in 1914. And now, a year later, I wanted to return.”

  In 1916, he did. The Teddy Bear left Nome that August.

  The following summer, Joe and his three-man crew pushed east, all the way to Coronation Gulf, until ice again held them fast off the southeast corner of Victoria Island for twenty-five straight months.

  In 1919 he freed the schooner and sailed as far as his old Coppermine River anchorage, where he came upon a few tents along the shoreline of a little bay. When the Teddy Bear approached, two men launched a dory from the beach to help guide the schooner. He’d had no word of his uncle since he’d last seen him and didn’t know about the tragedy at Banks Island, but Joe recognized the dory from the Mary Sachs.

  “I was quite excited,” he wrote, expecting another long overdue reunion with Uncle Pete, the man who “was like a father” to him, but instead he found Otto Binder, the Sachs’s engineer and his uncle’s close friend.

  “Why, I thought you were my uncle Peter Bernard,” I told him, for I am sure I looked disappointed when I saw him.

  “No,” he said sadly. I was stunned at his reply: “Peter Bernard is dead, frozen to death in Banks Land.”

  For five straight years, from 1909 to 1914, J
oe had lived off the land in the Arctic without reprieve. With the exception of half a day’s visit with his uncle—literally two ships passing—he saw no family or friends outside those he made along the way, away from home, away from everything, sleeping beneath the churning Northern Lights or in a cabin torn from the snowbound Teddy Bear. He hunted what he ate, ate what he hunted, and traveled hundreds of miles on foot, by sledge, or by ski for every single stick of firewood and piece of meat. Then he returned in 1916 and did it again for five more years without rest. First Gus Sandstrom had died, then Stefansson had taken Billy Banksland from Joe, and now Joe learned that Stefansson’s expedition on Banks Island had taken his uncle too. Such was the promise of Alaska that had lured him so far from home.

  Heavy-hearted, he decided to push farther east and sail the Northwest Passage all the way to Prince Edward Island. “What a pleasant surprise my family would have had were I to sail my little schooner right up to the dock at Tignish,” he wrote. “I knew the Teddy Bear could easily do it.” The following summer he reached Taylor Island, and on a whim decided to explore further north rather than continuing toward Tignish. “My curiosity led me to explore Victoria Strait, which was entirely off of my course,” he wrote. “This desire to satisfy my curiosity was nothing new in my life.”

  The Teddy Bear crew use poles to break the ice in Victoria Strait in 1919 after being frozen in for 25 months.

  While he missed that chance to make history, he and the Teddy Bear nevertheless had reached a more easterly point along the Northwest Passage than any ship before her.

  There was no time to celebrate, though. The Arctic winter again came early, catching his small crew ill-prepared. A series of journal entries provides a window into that Arctic summer:

  It has been snowing for the past 3 days.—June 20

  Fresh snow has piled up around the Teddy Bear and she is leaking.—June 21

  Still storming. Snow.—June 22

  Dark, cloudy, some snow squalls.—July 8

  Well, it looks like winter is here.—August 20

  Resigned to their fate, they hunted for food, surviving on owls and the occasional fox, or the unlucky bearded seals that surfaced through the ice. For his crew it was the fifth long Arctic winter and the fifth short Arctic summer. For Joe it was the tenth year of the last eleven spent east of Barrow and north of everything.

  25

  A Fleeting Condition

  I played the Gramophone first and their expressions of awe and wonder was a sight to remember. Putoga told them that I had a ‘canned’ man inside of the box which played the funny music. They wanted to take the box apart but I explained the mystery.

  Cordova’s movie theater burned down in the 1960s. The bowling alley shut down some time after that. As Bill ferries me around town, I can’t help notice what’s missing from town more than what’s there. Drive half a mile down 99E in Portland and you’ll pass more in the way of business and entertainment than in all of Cordova. “We don’t have any of that stuff,” he says. I didn’t come here to bowl, though, and who am I to judge what’s benefit and what’s shortcoming? You choose your priorities. Under the category “Additional Information,” the USCG information packet for new and prospective recruits advises that Cordova is “an isolated town” and promises that Coasties “are not going to find better hunting or fishing at any other unit.”

  A generous host, Bill’s even more generous as a tour guide. We spend the day driving the same handful of roads he’s been driving for half a century. A pair of coyotes run along Whitshed Road near Hartney Bay. Timid, one hides in the bushes while the other trots out to the center line and stares us down. It takes him half an hour to coax his mate onto the road. As soon as I raise my camera, she dives back into the brush, skittish around paparazzi. We park on the shoulder and walk down to the water and look for salmon. A few seals patrol the bay, and one swims under the bridge into the estuary, his gray back smooth and slick and exactly the color of the sky.

  A coyote waits for his mate to cross the road outside Cordova.

  “I appreciate you showing me around,” I say.

  “I have plenty of time,” Bill says, though he keeps busier than he likes to admit. He clears brush at the cemetery, volunteers a bit, and helps out a few elderly women around town. The more time I spend with him, the clearer it becomes that he’s as kind and genuine a guy as you could meet.

  We drive around shallow Eyak Lake until the road ends. Fishermen could run their boats up the Eyak River and into the lake before the earthquake, and a few deep channels remain, giving the lake two distinct colors—a rich blue and vibrant green—that never merge. Joe kept a cabin out here when it wasn’t so easy to get to, Bill says. A few salmon float in the water, spawned-out and rotten. We walk through the woods a bit, along the banks of a stream, and he gets excited when he sees a number of bright silvers beginning to arrive. He hasn’t fished in a while but still gets enthusiastic. Force of habit.

  Small planes buzz overhead, and Bill calls out the type of each plane as it wings past. “Cessna 206,” he says. “That’s George,” or Brian, or whoever. Having lived for so long in such a small town, Bill knows not just each plane but its pilot.

  Close to town, we pull over at a trailer selling hot dogs and watch a floatplane land on the lake. The pilot taxis ashore and cuts the engine, nosing onto the gravel. Bill grabs a line and holds it steady in the strong wind. The pilot dashes over to an old, heavily modified International Harvester Scout, ass-end sawed off so just the two front wheels and the exposed cab remain. Someone has welded the prow of a forklift to the front of it, and he starts it up and drives it over to the plane, slips the prongs beneath the floats of his Piper Cub, and lifts it out of the water like a game bird on a serving fork.

  Bill yells over the wind and the buzz of the Scout’s engine. “Pretty cool, huh?”

  Damn right it is.

  Cordova and nearby Valdez stand out among Alaska place names as distinctly Spanish among names of Native (Aleknagik, Nightmiut, Nuiqsut, Shaktoolik), Russian (Baranof, Kasilof, Nikolaevsk, Razdolna), and questionable (Chicken, Deadhorse, Thom’s Place, Wiseman) origin. The Spanish influence here may not be enduring, but neither was it fleeting. It extends as far back as 1493, when, in the wake of Columbus’s voyage, the Treaty of Tordesillas and Pope Alexander VI—a Borgia, and Lucretia’s father—divided the New World among the Spanish and Portuguese kingdoms. The Spanish explorer Vasco Núñez de Balboa claimed the Pacific Ocean and all the lands it touched for the Spanish Crown in 1513, but the empire didn’t explore the Pacific Northwest until the late 1700s, when Salvador Fidalgo landed in the fjord now known as Orca Inlet. He claimed the bay and named it Puerto Córdova, along with nearby Puerto Valdez, for Spain.

  Long before Fidalgo, two major Native groups occupied this part of Alaska—the Chugach around Prince William Sound, and the Eyak in four major villages in the Copper River Delta area around Cordova. The town occupies the site of one of those villages. The same resources that provided the Eyak with good subsistence opportunities also drew industry, and by the 1800s two canneries were operating near Cordova. A population boom reached a whopping 200 people.

  The town grew further when prospectors discovered copper nearby. An entrepreneur backed by J. P. Morgan and Daniel Guggenheim bought the mineral claims and hired contractor Michael Heney to build Alaska’s second railroad to transport copper to shipping docks at Prince William Sound. Heney had already built Alaska’s first railroad, the White Pass and Yukon Route near Skagway, but his new undertaking presented numerous challenges, running as it did through such absolute wilderness and between two glaciers. He began construction on the 196 miles of track in 1905, and six years later, while Joe was sailing Coronation Gulf with the Tulugaks, the first rail shipment from the Kennecott Mine hauled out $250,000 worth of copper ore. By the time the mine closed in the late 1930s, it had processed
nearly $200 million worth of copper and more than $4 million in silver. Eventually abandoned, the Kennecott mining camp now belongs to the National Park Service.

  It was Heney, known as “Big Mike,” who chose the village of Eyak for the railroad’s destination and renamed it Cordova to honor Fidalgo’s name for the bay. Over the next two decades a handful of canneries appeared in the new town, and by the time Joe arrived here fishing had supplanted mining as the main industry, with nine processing plants supporting the area’s herring, crab, and salmon fisheries.

  Bill drives us out to one of them, the Orca cannery, a sprawling site of more than two dozen buildings originally constructed by the New England Fish Company, which company archives say expanded its East Coast operations to the Pacific in the late 1800s when the Canadian Pacific Railway permitted refrigerated fish cars to be attached to passenger trains. Parts of the campus were purchased a few years ago and renovated into the Orca Adventure Lodge, offering forty guest rooms with ocean views, private baths, and daily fishing charters, a good example of how the state has evolved even as the resource, salmon, remains the same.

  In his journals, Joe wrote at length about passing long hours in the Arctic reading, mending nets and sails, sharpening tools and knives, cleaning guns, building toy schooners. He brought a lot of reading material with him and traded with passing ships at every rare opportunity. He also brought a gramophone, an early-model phonograph with a tin horn for a speaker, and played it each Sunday and on holidays. In 1911, wintered at the Kugaruak River with the Tulugaks, Joe entertained a group of eastern Inuit with an impromptu performance before they packed camp for summer travel.

  They stood in a big circle around the machine and we had a real open air concert! The new people listened with awe. A fine, big fellow named Oulookshuk insisted that I open the box to show him the spirit hidden inside. Of course, Tulugak and his family looked on with a proud smile at them as I took the machine apart to show them that no spirit was there. Then I played some more; a bagpipe piece, Virginia reel, and all of the Ruben talking records.12