The Final Frontiersman

by James Campbell

  Rhonda explains. “I’m glad I remembered it. It means the Bureau of Indian Affairs will pick up my medical expenses. Uncle Tom will have to drive me to a reservation, though. I guess there’s one about an hour from Appleton. Sometimes I wish Daddy would move us to Fairbanks. I could go to school there. It would make things easier. If he had the money, we could live in Fairbanks, and he could buy a plane and fly out during the week and trap. But that would kill him, I think. He can’t stand town for very long.”

  I give the card back to her, and she studies it. “Only,” she says, “I’m Eskimo, not Indian.” She sticks it in her purse and then sniffs the air. “Smell that?” she asks, scrunching up her nose. “Plastic. I really don’t like the smell of plastic.”

  She gets up to go to the bathroom and returns with a Coke, flopping down in the seat next to me. “You should have been there when I left the cabin.”

  “Maybe it’s better I wasn’t,” I say. I had left the river a day earlier than she, hitching a ride back to Fort Yukon with John Peterson. “I’m sure it was very emotional.”

  “Yeah,” Rhonda says noncommittally, as if that is the end of it. I return my attention to my book, and she says, “The night before I left, I listened to Enya and cried. She’s Daddy’s favorite, you know. I was upset, but I think it was hardest on Mom and Krin. Krin climbed in bed with me in the morning and just hugged me. She seemed okay, but when I left, she really lost it. Daddy carried me in his arms down to the canoe. He wouldn’t talk. I think he was trying not to cry. Mom just cried and cried.”

  “How do you feel now?” I ask her, shortly after they announce our flight to Minneapolis.

  “Okay,” she says sadly. “I have to just keep imagining Daddy getting on his snowmachine first thing in the morning. You know how we always come out to kiss him good-bye for the day? Him all bundled up against the cold, heading for the trapline? It makes me happy to think about that.”

  CHAPTER 11

  Closing of the Frontier

  “Keeping it simple is extremely hard work,” says Steve Ulvi. He and I and Stu Pechek, who trapped for a decade out of a cabin on Grayling Lake, fifty-five miles west of the Korths, are sitting by a campfire on a sandbar along Salchaket Slough, a side creek that feeds the Tanana River about an hour by boat outside of Fairbanks. We have just finished our dinner and a six-pack, and Ulvi is leaning back against a large dead-fall, eyes closed, puffing on his pipe. The smell of tobacco is sweet and pleasant and seems to work as a deterrent to the mosquitoes. “Simplicity was the unwritten code on the river,” Ulvi elaborates, a wisp of smoke rising.

  It has been twenty-seven years since John McPhee wrote about him and the Yukon River experience that was such an important part of his life. At fifty, the good looks are still there, the shattered blue eyes, the dramatic droopy mustache, his hair no longer blond but dark and streaked with gray, his body still strong but no longer coiled tightly from toiling in the woods. Ulvi is genial and laughs easily, but there’s no mistaking the intensity.

  “It was our religion. When we left the river, we had three power tools: a chain saw, a thirty-five-horse Evinrude on a homemade, welded thirty-foot riverboat, and a gas-powered ringer washer. To live in the bush for six or eight years, let alone ten or fifteen, let alone nearly thirty, as Heimo has, is damn difficult. On the Yukon, we had a sense of community. It came with its responsibilities and pressures, sure—the pressures to keep it simple were enormous—but, all in all, it was such a positive experience. There were people up and down the river who were willing to help out in a pinch. Heimo and his family are out there, way up there, by themselves. That adds another dimension to the experience. Their isolation is compounded by the fact that so few people are doing it anymore.” Ulvi stops talking and pokes at the fire with a long stick.

  “More wood?” Pechek asks in his bass voice still tinged with the long vowel sounds of Minnesota’s Iron Range. “Why not,” Ulvi answers, smoke wafting from his nose and mouth. “Let’s settle in.” Pechek rambles off into the brush to collect more wood. Though I’ve just met him, I like Stu already. He looks as if he’s just come off the trapline with his split-rail-fence physique, all knotted muscle and bone, not a pound to spare.

  “You literally can count them on one hand, maybe two” Steve continues, “the people that are still out there. And the numbers are shrinking. When we left there wasn’t a fragment of a doubt that we were doing the right thing. We got bored; we needed more intellectual and social stimulation; the kids needed a better education; they needed friends; we got tired of the isolation and the never-ending work. I admire Heimo, but there is no way I could have stayed engaged in that lifestyle for as long as he has.”

  If anybody knows what it takes to make it in the bush, it’s Steve Ulvi. He and his wife, Lynette Roberts, and their two children lived on the Yukon from 1974 until 1984, honing their version of the simple life, and then they began a slow transition into Fairbanks, where they moved in 1991. After living on the river for a decade, it took Steve years to acclimate to the idea of being in Fairbanks. Had it not been for Lynette and the kids, he probably would have dragged it out another few years. But he knew it was the right thing to do, and he had a job, which made things easier.

  In 1981, Steve took a position as a seasonal employee with the National Park Service to make ends meet. Then in 1984, he joined the Park Service full-time, and that’s when they made their move into Eagle. They lived in Eagle for two years and then bought seven and a half acres of a Native allotment outside of town and built a three-sided cabin with tarps for doors and plastic windows. They still lived off-the-grid, ran dogs, and raised rabbits.

  Steve admits that it was a big deal when he went to work for the Park Service. Some regarded it as a kind of heresy. “Eagle,” he says, “was one of the hotbeds of opposition, and the Park Service presence wasn’t always greeted kindly. But I figured that I was a local hire. I felt like I could make a difference. Another guy from the river and I had a big impact on how the Park Service’s policies were implemented locally. We tried to fit in. Our first staff boats were nineteen-foot Grumman canoes with six- to fifteen-horse kickers [outboard motors]. In the long term, for Alaska and America, ANILCA was a good thing. But there was a price to pay. The old Alaska was transformed, but the land was saved. I’d love to be able to turn the clock back to 1952, but that just isn’t possible. I believe we’ve done the right thing. I thank my lucky stars, though, that I was able to experience life on the river. I can’t imagine what I’d be dreaming about or what I’d be like today had I not done it. But the truth is, this land that we’ve protected will be here for generations. The state and BLM lands will be crisscrossed with roads.”

  His pipe wedged between his teeth, Ulvi pokes at the fire with a stick. “Our lives along the river in the 1970s and 1980s will one day be interpreted as history by the National Park Service, as it now interprets the gold rush and the era of the stern-wheeler. We’ll never see anything like it again. Our society in general suffers in small ways from that. The Alaskan and American sense of self suffers, too. We’re losing a sense of who we are as a people, and it’s not only because the land has been partitioned. The greatest threat to the bush experience is not the National Park Service, but the intense regulation of trapping, cultural homogeneity, and changing societal values. Does a wilderness impetus even exist? There are thousands of young men living on the outskirts of Bozeman, Montana. Montana’s beautiful; we’d all be there if it hadn’t been overrun. How is the rebellion manifesting itself these days? Where are the dreamers who want to turn the clock back?”

  “There’s damn little land left,” says Dean Wilson, a longtime fur buyer. Wilson and I are sitting in his office at the Klondike Hotel on Airport Way in Fairbanks, out of which he and his wife operate their fur-buying business. The room smells like a butcher shop and is cluttered with lynx, otter, red fox, and marten furs, dark and light brown wolverine furs, wolf furs stretched nine feet long, ranging in color from gray to tan to pure white
to a deep, inky black. Danny Grangaard of Tok, one of Alaska’s old-time trappers, a former hippie who came up in 1965 with hair down to his waist, has just brought in a pile of luxuriant wolf skins. Grangaard is regarded as perhaps Alaska’s most skillful wolf trapper. “I’ll catch more wolves than marten this year,” he laughs, sipping black coffee, making light of the cyclical, but still disappointing, shortage of marten, whose population has hit a low not seen in many years.

  Wilson is inspecting Grangaard’s wolf skins and talking at the same time. “The pipeline changed everything. But it’s not just the land deal. For fifty-six years, I’ve made my living by trapping, fur buying, hunting, mining,” he says, scribbling notes, as best he can, in a pocket-sized notebook. Wilson was diagnosed with Parkinson’s not long ago, and those trappers who have known him for his honesty and fairness say he’s gone downhill fast. “It’s a way of life that’s disappearing,” he continues. “It’s being phased out, choked out, by a culture that doesn’t understand it or like it.”

  Federal export fees and regulations, including in-person inspections of furs, notwithstanding, trappers have a bigger battle to fight. The poor image of trapping is something that neither Wilson nor Alaska’s trappers can ignore. Sixty percent of the land in Alaska is held in federal trust. In other words, outsiders have the power to mold Alaska into their idealized image of what a frontier should look like, and public opinion in the Lower Forty-eight does not favor trapping. A trapper on federal land, though he may live in extreme isolation, like Heimo, cannot escape the heartfelt stirrings of animal lovers in Illinois.

  Danny Grangaard leaves, and ten minutes later, Alex Tarnai, a trapper, who was born in Hungary and came to Alaska in 1976, walks in with his six-year-old son, Little Alex. Alex’s hair has gone almost entirely gray, but even at fifty-nine, he is heavily muscled. He has the build of a gymnast and the gentle voice of someone accustomed to reading bedtime stories to a child.

  I am hardly surpised to see Alex here today. Dean Wilson’s office is like a local bait-and-tackle shop or a small-town diner, where folks wander in and out for much of the day just to shoot the breeze and catch up on the gossip. We visit for a while and Little Alex falls asleep in his father’s lap.

  “What’s the state of trapping today?” Wilson asks Alex.

  “What a large question,” Alex laughs. Then, like a man who is used to taking his time to get things right, Alex pauses before answering. “Well, you can’t do it like I did, but there are still opportunities,” he says, pointing to a sign hanging behind him that reads “Trapline for Sale.” “A young guy could come up and make it known that he wants to trap. He could come here and talk with some of the guys. There are any number of trappers willing to give up their lines. I’d give him one of mine, forty miles or so to start with. But nobody’s coming and nobody’s asking.

  “It isn’t just the lands issue,” he continues, “but that certainly plays a part.” When Alex Tarnai speaks of the effects of ANILCA, he isn’t just relating stories he’s heard. He experienced ANILCA firsthand. The problem with the 186-page document is that portions of it are necessarily vague, subject to the interpretation of various agencies and agency managers with distinctly personal visions of how the act should be implemented. In Alex’s case, he hadn’t even heard of ANILCA until the assistant manager of the 1,560,000-acre Nowitna National Wildlife Refuge, in the central Yukon River Valley, showed up at his cabin door in brand-new Abercrombie & Fitch outdoor gear with a briefcase a full two years after the Lands Act was passed. There would be “changes, new regulations,” he told Alex, and proceeded to read some of those new rules to him. As the refuge’s only full-time resident, Alex was made to feel “like an outlaw whose presence in the woods was dependent on staying in the agency’s good graces.” He was told that it was a “privilege” to be there, one that could be revoked at any time. Despite feeling bitter about the experience, Alex maintained a good relationship with refuge officials until 1987. That year, a federal wildlife refuge planner, whom Alex had come to know, made plans to pay a friendly visit. The Nowitna’s refuge manager got wind of the visit and informed Alex that he was not entitled to have visitors because his cabin was a “work cabin” and not a “recreational” one. That’s ridiculous, Alex thought, and his friend visited anyway. The manager, however, feeling that his authority was threatened, harassed them, flying overhead with a camera and a ticket book to document their violations. Worse yet, while Alex was out on his trapline, the refuge manager entered his cabin, ostensibly to check on his stove. That was it; Alex had finally had enough. He sued the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service— many Fish & Wildlife officials later told him that they were sympathetic to his cause—claiming he was denied his constitutional right to associate with anyone he pleased and accusing the agency of illegal trespass. In a landmark case, U.S. District Court Judge Andrew Kleinfeld ruled in his favor.

  Wilson gets up when another trapper comes in with a bundle of marten fur. Alex remains seated, holding little Alex. “The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service treated me shamefully,” he says. “But I don’t hold a grudge. That refuge manager is gone, and my relationship with the agency is now very friendly.”

  It is late morning when I meet Bill Schneider in his office at the University of Alaska Fairbanks’s Elmer E. Rasmuson Library. Schneider has served as curator of oral history at the UAF since 1981. In that capacity, he has interviewed many Native trappers who are still living in the bush villages, as well as white trappers who once made the bush their home. I have just left Dean Wilson’s, and Schneider and I pick up on the subject of the last of the white trappers still living off the land. Schneider elaborates. “White guys trapping in the bush,” he says, speaking slowly and thoughtfully, “are an ‘endangered species.’ The Natives get a lot of support, but there is no organization besides the Alaska Trappers Association advocating for the rural white trapper.” He pauses and studies a large pair of headphones he’s holding in his hands. “Wilderness is both the source of, and a respository of, our national myths about who we really are as a people. Yet the people who are left out there, living the myth, are more out of touch with American life and values than ever before. Ironically, we have always held in higher esteem those who make forays into the wilderness than those who live in it. We’re creating an environment for ecotourism, but we’re eliminating a culture dedicated to living on, and working with, the land.”

  “The lands issue dramatically changed Alaska,” Randy Brown says emphatically. He and I are having lunch at Soapy Smith’s Pioneer Restaurant, a Fairbanks institution situated a few doors down from the intersection of Cushman Street and 2nd Avenue. Two Street, as 2nd Avenue is often called, has been cleaned up in recent years, but it still has something of a reputation for drunkenness and decadence.

  Brown is friendly, intelligent, and intense. Though he would surely resist the comparison, he looks a bit like Robert Redford in Jeremiah Johnson. He is still taut and fit and wears his copper-colored beard and hair slightly long, as he once did on the trapline.

  What Brown says is true. The reapportionment of Alaska’s 375 million acres changed Alaska’s physical and psychic landscape. John McPhee was there while it was happening, while the lines were being drawn, but he never reported on the fallout. In 1976 and 1977, ANILCA was still an idea, legislation in the making; today it’s not. Every square foot of Alaska has been surveyed and conveyed to one group or another—the Park Service, the BLM, the state, Fish & Wildlife, regional corporations, Native villages, Native allotments, private holdings. The map of Alaska is now a color-coded mosaic, a patchwork of neatly delineated boundaries. On the ground, these boundaries are anything but neat; state land abuts National Park Service land, which adjoins Native land, and the division is often indistinguishable. Hunters and trappers can get confused trying to figure out what’s what.

  For centuries, anyone who could use the land was welcome to it. Through the Homestead and Homesite Acts the government even enabled people to acquire land, free of char
ge, provided they “prove up,” making nominal improvements to it. In a place like Alaska, however, this stipulation was rarely enforced. The Homestead Act, which was enacted in 1862 and was terminated nationwide in 1976, provided that any person over the age of twenty-one could obtain free title to 160 acres of government land. Although the program had been marginally effective west of the Missouri River in the Lower Forty-eight, it was a bust in much of Alaska. The Homesite Act of 1927, which was established only for Alaska and provided free title to five acres of land under terms similar to the Homestead Act, wasn’t repealed until October 1986. Though it was more successful than the Homestead Act, the large-scale settlement of Alaska never occurred.

  Randy Brown and his family experienced the partitioning of Alaska firsthand. In 1985, the land on which they were living was conveyed to Doyon, the largest of the regional corporations, covering the whole Athabaskan Interior and thirty-four villages. Doyon issued a trespass notice in 1990. Brown says, “We could have sued for grandfather rights, but how big of a place could we have sued for? Five acres, ten, one hundred— no amount of land would have suited our needs.

  “After ANILCA, and before Doyon issued the trespass notice, we were working through a permitting process with a variety of different agencies. Dealing with the BLM was relatively straightforward. It offered ten-year renewable permits. Same with the state. However, on Park Service land, where we had our fish camp, the regulations were more complex; we needed a fish camp permit, a permit to cut wood. The frustrating thing was that the rules changed from administrator to administrator. Some of the people living on Park Service land just refused to abide by the process. Of course, the agencies were under no obligation to accommodate guys like me, but they did. Nevertheless, the land regulations precipitated an exodus, and now they prevent recolonization. If they were to allow people back in, the question is where to draw the line? Do you just allow limited colonization? At first, I think they’d be flooded, but a lot of people wouldn’t stay. It’s always been that way though. Lots came and few stayed. There are a lot of half-built cabins out there. People came to live forever and they left after a year or two.”