The Final Frontiersman

by James Campbell

  John Peterson, who at one time or another flew in most of the trappers who used Fort Yukon as their base, adds some perspective to the plight of the male trappers. “They were all hot to hang out in Fort Yukon and find a woman,” he laughs. “Most of them had come to the conclusion that they couldn’t be out there alone. But finding a woman to live with any one of them guys, especially out there, was a real chore.”

  Lynette Roberts, who lived with her husband, Steve Ulvi, and two children on the Yukon, above Eagle, was one of those unusually tough women who thrived in the bush despite its hardships. “The most lonely thing for me was the lack of female companionship,” she explains. “It’s hard to find female energy in the bush. It’s a real yang experience. And after I had Lena [her first child], I really felt the isolation. Although she was my sidekick, my companion, what I missed most was not being able to share that experience of motherhood with anyone else. The bush though is no place for shrinking violets. It demands an emotional sturdiness. Structure is also very important; you need that. I settled into a rhythm—teaching the kids, tending the garden, canning, checking the fishnets, raising rabbits, hauling wood. All of that gave great purpose to my life.”

  “The key to living out there,” says Karen Kallen-Brown, who lived on the Kandik River with her husband, Randy Brown, and their two sons, “is keeping busy. I don’t think I ever felt lonely,” she says. “I don’t know that I ever had the time, between homeschooling and the trapline. Of course, we homeschooled the boys, and I organized the program. It was a very creative program—individualized education can be so good—and we worked hard at it. But I was never willing to just stay at home. We ran the trapline together. Randy put in the trails and laid the traps early in the season, but after that we checked them as a family. We also traveled as a family. Trips into Eagle took us anywhere from a week to twelve days.”

  Nancy Tarnai, who spent time in the bush with her husband, Alex Tarnai, says, “It’s a beautiful world out there. I always had it in the back of my mind that I wanted to live like that, and I tried it for a while, but it turned out that I couldn’t do it. It’s really, really isolated, and there’s no one else. When we were first married, I got mad at Alex one night. I left the cabin and started walking down the river. It was nighttime, in the dead of winter, and I was scared. I came back to the cabin an hour later. Alex asked what I had planned to do, and I told him that my intention was to walk to town. Then I asked him how far town was. ‘A hundred fifty miles,’ he said, nearly laughing. Not long after, we moved to the village, to Tanana. I really took to village life. I felt a part of something. In the village we lived without running water and, of course, heated with wood. But it wasn’t the bush. There are not many women who can live out there.”

  Heimo remembers that some of the Fort Yukon trappers, unable to convince their girlfriends to join them but eager for female companionship anyway, even resorted to taking out personal ads in national magazines. “Never go to the woods without a skirt,” Tommy Carroll, Joe’s brother, told them, and they took his advice to heart. One of them put an ad in Mother Earth News. “He knew hippie chicks would be interested in coming out to the Alaskan wilderness,” Heimo says—and received a sackful of letters, literally. Many of the women even included photographs. Heimo helped his trapper friend sort through the letters and remembers that they usually fell into four categories: nuts writing ten-page confessionals, starting with “Some people think I’m weird … ”; wives trying to escape their husbands (those letters were destroyed immediately); divorced women with kids (those letters were also thrown out); and single women looking for adventure. The trapper read the letters for days, narrowing his list down to a dozen letters and photographs, until he chose a young woman who seemed to have what it took to make it in the woods. It helped that she had included a picture of herself. “She was very good-looking,” Heimo recalls. The trapper burned the rest of the letters, and only after they’d been reduced to ash did he realize that the woman he’d chosen had forgotten to include her return address.

  Though men like Ron Bennett, David Schlesinger, and Heimo learned how to deal with the loneliness, others didn’t fair as well. Those who didn’t were usually the ones who’d gone to the woods on a whim or come only for the romance of it, guys who loved the idea of being in the bush but weren’t willing to put in the hard work of learning the country, hunting, trapping, cutting and splitting wood, hauling water. Those were the guys who froze to death or were eaten by bears or, as Heimo says, the ones who “put the boots to themselves”—who took their own lives. There was one—nobody seems to remember his name—on some lakes near Rapid River, who came out in March, the story goes, to photograph ducks and to have some kind of religious experience. He intended to stay for only the spring and summer. Rather than hunt or trap, he was going to live off of canned vegetables. Six months later, when he didn’t show up in town, the state troopers went out to investigate. They flew overhead and he crawled out of his tent and waved. Assuming he was okay, they flew off. Only he wasn’t. He was low on food and waved out of joy at being discovered. A few months later a friend got worried about him and sent the troopers back out. They discovered him dead. He’d shot himself because he was too weak to move. The troopers found him frozen to his cot. The mice had burrowed holes into his body. They also came across a diary, which paints a predictable picture. After two months, he was lonely and getting stir-crazy. Since he hadn’t planned to hunt, there was little reason for him to explore the country other than to satisfy his curiosity and sense of adventure and get his photographs. At first he hiked a lot, but he was covering the same terrain, and that got old fast. When he finally realized that he wanted to hunt to keep his mind off of his isolation and that he needed to—his food was running out—it was too late; he’d already pitched most of his shotgun shells into the lake. By mid-November, starving and desperate, he had only one choice, and that’s when he decided to “put the boots to himself.”

  “Wilderness,” Roderick Nash says in Wilderness and the American Mind, “appealed to those bored or disgusted with man and his works… . The solitude and total freedom of the wilderness created a perfect setting for either melancholy or exultation.” Nash gets part of it right. The appeal of the woods for guys like Heimo Korth and the others is undeniable. It allowed them to shake society’s dust from their feet. But in his second sentence, Nash makes a misstep. He should have written that “wilderness created a perfect setting for both melancholy and exultation,” for even the most mentally stable of the wilderness men were subject to vagaries of mood, vacillating between moments of joy and despair. If they were lucky, very lucky, and they worked hard at it, they could achieve a kind of emotional equanimity that allowed them to enjoy highs—celebrating the return of the sun, a clean kill, spring warm-up, a snared wolverine—and ride out the inevitable lows.

  And the lows were inevitable, particularly in early December, when many of the trappers could hardly wait to come to town to sell furs, and just after breakup, when they would be getting ready to leave the bush for the summer. They could barely contain themselves, and when they’d get to town, they’d pop, trying to cram in as much craziness as they could. They were like cowboys coming in after a cattle drive, like sailors on leave, like fishermen who’d been out on the water too long. They lived hard out on the trapline, and they lived just as hard when they came to town, particularly the Fort Yukon bunch. However, contrary to what one might think, the first order of business was neither booze nor women. “A shower,” Heimo says, as if he can’t quite believe it himself. “A shower was worth more than gold.” Sometimes a trapper would head for Fairbanks, bypassing the shower. One, in particular, had a reputation for heading straight for the roughest bar—in the days of the pipeline a guy could take his pick—where he would provoke fights just to blow off steam. He was a small man and would invairably be on the losing end of the beating, but that didn’t stop him. But the others would remain in Fort Yukon, rushing to the base’s locker room (eve
ryone called Fort Yukon’s Air Force radar site “the base”) as if a shower were necessary to sustain both body and soul. Only after their showers would they think about getting drunk. Then they would stampede the liquor store, where they’d buy cases of Olympia beer—“Oly pop,” “Athabaskan champagne”—which they’d sometimes haul back to a friend’s cabin in wheelbarrows.

  Richard Carroll, Jr., another member of the Fort Yukon Carroll clan, says that the trappers like Heimo were just following a tried-and-true tradition. “The trappers would come to town,” he says, “and they’d have one hell of a vicious party. They’d try to outsmart the fur buyers by getting them drunk, but it always backfired.”

  The trappers wouldn’t stop drinking until the beer was gone. Then all of them—trappers, their Native buddies, Native women, non Native women, and sometimes fur buyers, too, who at that time still made buying trips to the remote villages—loaded into the “meat wagon,” a big flatbed truck with wooden slats that the small airport used to transport luggage. They’d drive the mile of dirt roads to the base’s bar, where they would drink more. When the temperatures plunged to 50 and 60 below, this could be dangerous fun. The trappers and their friends often drank until they passed out. If a guy passed out in the meat wagon, someone would have to remember to haul him indoors. And someone would always have to have the presence of mind to light the woodstove. The following day, nursing crippling hangovers, the trappers would walk up to the AC and buy a set of new “town clothes,” after which they’d begin the business of haggling with the fur buyers.

  * * *

  The summer gatherings unfolded much the same as the Christmas get-togethers—a week’s revelry and then they’d settle down to serious business. Some would go commercial fishing, others would work construction, those who had dog teams to feed would prepare for fish camp, where they’d need to catch 1,500 salmon to sustain their teams through the year. In his early years, after returning in June from St. Lawrence Island, where he spent the spring months walrus and seal hunting and whaling with the Eskimos, Heimo stuck around Fort Yukon. There he’d do odd jobs for cash, tending the register at the AC Store, doing the bookings for Yukon Air Service, and working small construction jobs. But mostly he spent his time on the river.

  Working the river with the likes of Fred Thomas and his brother Harry and Paul Herbert, natives who knew the river as well as most people know their backyards, learning how to set gillnets, build fish wheels, read the river’s currents, and cut up salmon, was a dream come true for Heimo. When he first came to Alaska, Heimo envisioned that he’d be a river rat, living in the woods but in close proximity to the Yukon or the Porcupine. He surrendered that dream as soon as he laid his eyes on the Coleen River. A month and a half on the Yukon wasn’t long, but it was enough to satisfy his desire to take part in the lifestyle of those who lived on a big, historic river. That month and a half also bound him to the community and people of Fort Yukon. Acceptance in Fort Yukon didn’t come easily. It was an insular place in which outsiders were viewed with considerable suspicion, particularly young men who looked like Heimo—full beard, dark hair down to the middle of his back, a sealskin headband with an eagle feather stuck in it. Who was he pretending to be anyway—an Indian?

  The image, of course, was part of the wilderness myth that Heimo was both participating in and perpetuating. The trappers of the Rocky Mountain West more closely resembled the Indians than they did the Missouri farmers or the city folk of St. Louis. A woodsman was supposed to look wild, rugged, and often altogether uncivilized. It underscored his triumphal escape, his emancipation from the galling restrictions and pretext that ruled the lives of the people he’d left behind. Roger Kaye, who as an U.S. Fish and Wildlife planner-pilot, had occasion to meet many of the men who took to the woods in the 1970s. “Almost all the young men who came to Alaska arrived with this idea about the woods firmly embedded in their minds,” he says. “The big knife, the clothes, the log cabin—they were all symbols of the wilderness, symbols of their new lives as trappers and woodsmen.”

  If some of the people of Fort Yukon intitially greeted Heimo with mistrust, many of them soon had a change of heart. His openness, his curiosity, his eagerness to learn about their culture were disarming, and he had the same effect on the Natives of Fort Yukon as he had on the people of Savoonga. By the time he brought Edna, his fiancée, to town in the summer of 1981, many were eager to see the woman that Heimo Korth would marry.

  CHAPTER 8

  Hunting the Ice Whale

  In the Korths’ relatively spacious one-room cabin in Fort Yukon, there is a framed photograph on the wall above the kitchen table of Heimo at the helm of an Eskimo walrus hide skinboat, an angyaq. The sail is up, stretched tight by a stiff wind. Though the photograph doesn’t show that detail, it clearly captures Heimo gripping the tiller, with a full beard that gives him the look of Ahab and his long, dark hair flowing wildly behind him. Heimo is staring straight ahead, as if searching the distant ice for a navigable lead or a great whale. The sky is ominously gray, heavy with fog and mist.

  The photo occupies a prominent space on the wall next to a photographic homage to the Korths’ first daughter, Coleen. It is one of Heimo’s favorite photos, if only because his time on St. Lawrence Island, to this day, strikes him as nothing short of serendipity. What was a kid from Wisconsin doing hunting with the Eskimos of the Bering Sea? Surely when Heimo was a boy, dreaming of Canada’s Northwest Territories and Alaska, he never imagined a place like St. Lawrence Island—an island encircled, as far as the eye could see, by, depending upon the season, either ocean or ice. His imagination, after all, had been conditioned by Wisconsin’s North Woods, by small, hidden lakes surrounded by remnant white pine, and by 300-year-old hemlock, paper birch, red and sugar maples disregarded by rapacious turn-of-the-century loggers.

  St. Lawrence Island is a place devoid of trees—entirely. When Heimo arrived just after Thanksgiving in November 1975, having barely survived his first three months on Beaver Creek, there were elders still living in Savoonga who had never in their lives been off the island. Consequently, they had never seen a tree. Asian currents deposited prodigious heaps of driftwood on the island’s shores, but this was as close to a tree as many of the village’s older residents had ever come.

  Herman Toolie, Heimo’s Eskimo teacher, taught Heimo to respect the wilderness of ice that stretched to the North Pole for its stark and simple beauty and its impersonal cruelty, and Heimo was an attentive student who adapted quickly to the demands of his temporary home. He loved the elemental challenge of hunting on the ice even though the failure to notice a faint change in the direction of wind could result in death. Above everything else, Herman told him, a hunter has to be acutely aware. He has to become a predator. Nothing should escape his notice—not a track, a sound, or flash of color in the distance. The final component to the hunt, Herman said, is the shot. When the animal is near, the most important rule, the only one, is bullet placement. Place the bullet where the head meets the neck.

  Like Herman, Heimo had the heart of a hunter, but he was also drawn to the Siberian Yupik people. After months of isolation on the trapline, Heimo relished the easy intimacy of Savoonga’s 350 residents. Though the village was in the midst of cataclysmic changes—television and telephone would come to the island by the late 1970s—Heimo discovered a people continuing the traditions and living by the rhythms that had defined the lives of their people for thousands of years.

  St. Lawrence Islanders form one clan of the nine-clan Siberian Yupik people that populate Siberia, called Ungazik, and the two modern-day villages of Savoonga and Gambell. Centuries ago, the Eskimos of St. Lawrence Island, who called themselves the “Real People,” lived according to clan in semisubterranean homes called “nenglus,” along the shore, and subsisted on whales, walrus, seal, polar bear, fish, water birds, and eggs, and trapped arctic fox and polar bear for fur. The roofs of these nenglus were built of sod stabilized inside by the jawbones and rib bones of whales. The w
alls were made from what was available— driftwood and whale bones. Contrary to popular myth, Alaskan Eskimos never lived in snow houses. In the Canadian Arctic and Archipelago, however, people lived in snow houses on the shore ice for nine months a year and in animal skin shelters during the summer. Elsewhere— Labrador and west and northwest Greenland, for instance— the snow house was used only as a temporary shelter.

  The first European to come upon St. Lawrence Island was the Dane Vitus Bering, who sailed in the service of the Russian crown. Bering christened the island St. Lawrence when he sighted it on August 21, 1728, the Feast of St. Lawrence. Bering was searching for the geographical link between America and Siberia and would have discovered a cultural, linguistic, and ancestral link, too, had the St. Lawrence Islanders come out to greet him and his crew. The Eskimos of “Sivuqaq” had traded with the Siberians of the Chukchi Peninsula for centuries before Bering arrived, sailing their skinboats, or angyaqs, which were capable of carrying thirty people back and forth over the forty miles that separated the island from the mountainous Russian mainland. Instead the Eskimos fled into the Kukulgit Mountains when they spotted his unfamiliar vessel. Bering writes: “We located this island, which we named St. Lawrence, in honor of the day, and found on it a few huts but no people, although I twice sent the midshipman to look for them.” Unimpressed by what he saw, Bering moved on.