00:00:08 Speaker 1: This is the meat-eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwear-less. We hunt the meat-eater podcast. You can't predict anything. Brought to you by First Light. When I'm hunting, I need gear that won't quit. First Light builds no compromise gear that keeps me in the field longer. No shortcuts, just gear that works. Check it out at firstlight.com. That's F-I-R-S-T.com. L-I-T-E dot com. Alright, everybody. It's that time of year when you get... It happens every year. It's an annual event or so. When you listen to a podcast and learn something that you actually need to know. Not all the normal BS on podcasts, which is like nice to know. Yeah, it's fun. Fun to know. Nice to know. Entertaining. This is where you learn what you need to know. Which is the history of The United States of America, but not just the history of the United States of America, but the history of the United States of America, like frontier history. Mm-hmm. The good stuff. The good stuff. Yeah. The good stuff. The stuff that makes your brain, that makes your head tingle. 00:01:21 Speaker 2: And the big headline is, Meteor's American History, the Alaskans, 1896 to 1941, is on sale now. It's out now, unless you're listening to this, the day it drops. 00:01:34 Speaker 1: Mm-hmm. 00:01:36 Speaker 2: The Alaskans comes out on October 20th, so this podcast is October 19th. You can buy it, pre-order, and then it'll show up tomorrow morning if you're listening on Monday, or on Tuesday you can just dig in. 00:01:48 Speaker 1: Yeah. And this is a service we provide where we give you, this is the freebie version. Mm-hmm. Every time we come out with the Meat Eaters American History series, we do like the freebie version. Mm-hmm. Where you can listen and we're going to tell you the basic gist of the... We're going to kind of tell you the history of Alaska between two special dates. And then if you're titillated, if it grabs you by the shorts, good enough. We're going to tease you. Then you go listen to the whole full balls deal. I've talked about... I'm going to explain the setup. I'm going to explain the premise. And apologies to people that have heard the premise of Meat Eaters American History a bunch of times, but I'm going to explain the premise. The premise is, in this series, and again, we're going to dive into Alaska and the Alaskans today, but the premise of the series is we look at these windows of time in American history, and we look at wildlife commodities in a window of time and we kind of pick these like start dates and end dates for these often storied periods of american history history that were defined by certain well-known frontier personalities as an example um and this is one we've talked about many times because it's the first one we did the first meat eaters american history did was the long hunters And the Longhunters covered the colonial deerskin trade and often through the story of Daniel Boone. Okay, where here's this, he was a professional deer hunter. He supplied the deerskin market. And that Longhunters series ran from 1763, so imagine sort of the end of the French and Indian War, and that volume ended in 1775. the American revolution. Right. And that was that story. And it was a time when it was a time when deer skins, this kind of blows your mind, but it was a time when deer skins were the number two export out of South Carolina. Yeah. Rice being number one. Yep. So this is like pre cotton boom. It was the number two thing getting shipped to Hundreds of thousands. Getting shipped out of that colony was whitetail deerskins, right? Then we bumped ahead, what, 31 years? And we told the story of the Mountain Men era, which our argument was that the Mountain Men era began... This is a common argument, that the Mountain Men era began with the Louisiana Purchase, when all of a sudden this... Huge opportunity opened up in the western U.S. Lewis and Clark were dispatched out to explore the area. In their wake, on their heels, were all these entrepreneurial trappers moving out into this new area, and they exploited these enormous populations of beavers. And that created the Jim Bridger, Hugh Glass, Jed Smith, john coulter that era of american history um and we wrapped that one up in 1841 when the market the beaver market started to crash and not only that these guys had killed the beavers off which the killing off of is a big part of these stories um we argue that the long hunter era ended with the american revolutions for geopolitical reasons, but at the same time was humming along this idea that these guys were literally not extirpating, but putting a herd on. Putting a herd on. Yeah. Putting a herd on whitetail deer numbers as they marched westward to the point where commercially hunting those areas became not viable. 00:06:17 Speaker 2: Yeah, and also at the same time, you're starting to see new settlements in their areas of operation that are then having these very significant impacts in the areas around those settlements. 00:06:32 Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a good point. Where these first wilderness frontiersmen that moved into the Appalachians, moved into Kentucky, they would start these little stations, they called them, hunting camps. And the hunting camps would grow and grow and grow. And then people pretty soon are planting corn And then they're like hunting for a living and wiping everything out. And they did wipe out Buffalo. They did wipe out elk in those eras. The mountain men, the market collapsed for beaver. The system changed. And also they were making it that it was no longer profitable in a lot of these areas to pursue beavers because they simply caught them all. From there, we jumped ahead to 1865. So the end of the American Civil War. and we told the story of the Buffalo hide hunters, which we argued ran up to 1883. When I say we argued, I don't mean that there's multiple ways of looking at it. In the case of the hide hunters, it was just that they ran out of stuff to shoot. In some of these other stories, there's like big political things brewing. Yeah, it's more open to interpretation. Yeah, they're like, well, things were kind of changing, and you know, with the American revolution, we weren't exporting to Britain and there was all these, there was these embargoes and trade got really complicated. And also the deer were kind of gone. Um, with the hide hunters, it's one thing and one thing only. And the market didn't crash. Yeah. Um, we didn't like sell or buy the West. There are still guys loading up to go out and shoot Buffalo. It was just one day. They're like, Oh my God, we killed them all. Yeah. And that ended that era. So as, as we work on these, when we're finishing one of these things, we're often talking about what we should do next. So at the end of hide hunters, we were kind of kicking around these different options of like, what should we work on next? And, and Randall, I'd like you to like, Try to reminisce a little bit for a while. We were going to jump into the bird hunters. 00:08:49 Speaker 2: Yeah. We were going to do the bird hunters, um, like commercial waterfowl hunting, both for, for meat, like sold in restaurants and butcher shops, but also, uh, the, the, the plume trade where they're shooting exotic shore birds for feathers that are being used in hats, supplying, uh, believe the i think it's the millinery industry is hat makers yeah so they're supplying and and this like if you're writing a story of american conservation or a story of american wildlife exploitation like that would be the natural next chapter yeah if you're just focused on wildlife exploitation and how it led to the system of conservation that we have today because that chapter especially the plume trade Like it raised a lot of popular awareness of the impacts on wildlife that these. 00:09:44 Speaker 1: Consumptive industries have. 00:09:46 Speaker 2: It led to the creation of the first national wildlife refuge down in Florida, Pelican. 00:09:53 Speaker 1: Island, I believe. 00:09:54 Speaker 2: And it led to new laws to protect wildlife. shorebirds and other wildlife. So if you're telling one story and saying, we want to capture just wildlife exploitation as it shaped the broader story of American conservation, the bird hunters was kind of a natural choice. 00:10:19 Speaker 1: Yeah. The, the, the downside to doing the bird. I want to hear your down. I have two, I have two personal downsides, but I want to hear why didn't, why couldn't you get excited about it? 00:10:32 Speaker 2: Well, I could get excited about it, but we could always go back and do it. We could go back and do it at some point. I mean, the difference is it's not frontier market hunting. So it's not like, I think, I think one of the fun threads that we've, pulled through long hunters mountain men and hide hunters is this it's an industry that's built around people going out into areas that at that time were pretty much only inhabited by native people i don't want to say they're uninhabited but they were going out into what was then regarded as wilderness and they're living off the land and they're they're hunting their own food and they're building shelters. And so having shootouts, like it's risky business. 00:11:20 Speaker 1: Um, I mean, one of the things that I thought. 00:11:22 Speaker 2: About each other, there were shootouts in the bird hunter story, but it's like wardens shooting at poachers. 00:11:28 Speaker 1: Right. 00:11:28 Speaker 2: Um, cause you kind of, after conservation laws get in place and you have these early enforcement, uh, efforts, then it becomes a riskier business. But one of the things that we've focused on, throughout the first three, uh, volumes is that these, this is like life and death on the landscape, wild animals, wild landscapes, raging rivers, brutal cold, all that stuff, which is kind of core to our interest in these people as historical actors. And so to go to the bird hunters, all of a sudden you're, you're looking at people that are waking up in their bed, you know, probably before they send the kids off to school heading out you know killing whatever they're killing and then they're they're sitting around a dinner table at night with their families or whatever else or maybe they're just drinking in the bars you know but they're they're in places that at that point in time are not sort of blank spaces in the average american's mental map yeah and so by going to the bird hunters you could have told a story that was historically consequential from the perspective of the development of the North American model, but you lose a lot of the fun, personally appealing aspects of these stories, which is the wilderness survival and just people enduring terrible, terrible shit. 00:12:58 Speaker 1: I don't want to sound glib. We might come back to the bird hunters. a big thing that weighed on my mind is we, I couldn't think of a cool name for it. Yeah. Now the bird hunters is a great turn. Great. Great turn. Pike Troubadour song. And they got, they got like the bird hunters. Sure. There was, I couldn't think of a cool name for it. That really like set you at a place. Yeah. Um, and the, the big thing was like, you're saying it wasn't, it's not a frontier story. You know, it's not a frontier story. Now we're going to talk about the Alaskans, which is very much a frontier story. Yes. Um, And then now we're kicking around an idea that I don't want to get into yet, but we're kicking around an idea that in terms of like, it's got a lot of frontier, but what the next one we're going to do is very heavy on shootouts. It'll probably be the most shootout rich, maybe the most shootout rich era of American history. But, you know, I don't know. I don't think that like, cause you look at the rate at which the long hunters died violently. Yeah. I don't know that you're going to, that the one we want to do next, we'll, we'll match that. Yeah. Shoot out rich. The long hunters. Yeah. The long hunters. 00:14:10 Speaker 2: There's a lot of death, a lot of dying, a lot of violence. Um, same for hide hunters too, at least like on the Southern Plains, especially in Texas. Um, not so much in Alaska. I mean, I think the Alaskans and maybe we should, before we go further, maybe we should just define what we're talking about when we say the Alaskans are. 00:14:30 Speaker 1: No, that was the next thing I was going to ask you. Walk everyone through... Walk everyone through... What is the period of history in Alaska? And it's a big window. But walk everyone through... When we think about Alaska and this formative period of Alaska and what was going on in Alaska, walk people through where we landed. Yeah, so we. 00:15:01 Speaker 2: So it's called the Alaskans, but obviously it's referring to a specific group of Alaskans. And we really, when we started this process, you were aware of a number of individuals whose memoirs you'd read and who you read about just sort of in your extracurricular reading who lived as full-time fur trappers. in the first few decades of the 20th century in Alaska, supplying fine furs to furriers in places like Chicago and New York. And one of the things that's really interesting about this period of time is that the experiences they're describing are sort of frontier experiences that could have come right out of like the age of Jim Bridger or Daniel Boone. But at the same time, they're living in an era that we associate like the 1920s. You think about the roaring 20s. This is an era of unparalleled economic growth and rising standards of living and the age of mass consumption. And when you picture the 1920s, you picture flappers and you picture you know, sort of the aristocrat, like, Gatsby types at, like, a cocktail party. And they're all wearing these very over-the-top fur, uh, accessories. I mean, fur coats, but also, like, mink stoles. You know, you can picture the imagery from the 20s of a woman with, like, a fox with the head and feet on it wrapped over her shoulders. 00:16:48 Speaker 1: And so there's this... And I'm sort of skirting around. 00:16:54 Speaker 2: who we're talking about here, and like the nitty-gritty of it, but one of the things that drew us into this story is this connection between what's going on along the Yukon River in the 1920s, and then what we think about when we think about American history more broadly in the 1920s. And so there's like this really interesting sort of duality that is. 00:17:18 Speaker 1: At the core of, of what we got into here. Yeah. All the, all these stories about these like wildlife commodities that we've explored have that there is a, there, there's something that, that, um, oftentimes seems out of sync, meaning these wildlife things combine these different worlds. So, so for instance, with the colonial deerskin trade, you think of a buckskin clad guy like Daniel Boone. But he's shooting deer and those deer could wind up being white leather pants worn by the aristocracy, worn by the King of England. 00:18:00 Speaker 2: Captured in a portrait painted of some dandy posing with. 00:18:05 Speaker 1: His He's got the powdered wig on. He's got the shirt with all the brass and gold and whatever. But he's got these white pants on. Once you know what you're looking at, you're like, those are buckskin pants. And so there's this difference. Like this guy living in a little half, in a little dugout shelter. Maybe he's got elm bark over his head and he's hunting deer. And those deer are being worn by people far away. Mm-hmm. The same thing occurs with the mountain men. So you got these guys that are literally out on the plains, getting tomahawked and scalped by plains tribes, catching an animal that is being worn by people in Boston, people in New York, like fine hats. People in London, people in Paris, far away. The Buffalo trade, it's like they're shooting an animal, and it's being used to drive the Industrial Revolution, leather belting. But with the Alaskans, it was something kind of like, I don't know, it just struck me more when I read about these frontier trappers from the early decades of the 1900s, that the imagery of who they're supplying is so fresh in your mind. Yeah. Because we don't watch a lot of movies about industrial belting. We don't sit and watch a lot of movies about English kings in 1773. But your whole life you've been watching mobster movies. Al Capone stuff. Prohibition stuff. Your whole life you've been looking at photographs. That's another thing is like all these other stories are kind of mostly pre-photography. Right? But all of a sudden, like your whole life, you've been looking at photos of flappers. Yeah. You've been watching mobster movies from the 1920s. And you've been seeing these arrows when all women, virtually all American women are adorned in fur. Yeah. The other day I was at university of Nebraska and we were touring this, the meat lab at university of Nebraska. And they had this like wall of photos of these trustees or board members or something going back in time. And I'm not kidding you. I walk back. Okay. I walk back, back, back. And I get to the part where every woman in every photo. is wearing a coat or a hat trimmed with fine fur. Yeah. Every woman. And I commented on it right there. I'm like, look, notice the year, you'll not find a woman who's not wearing fur. Yeah. And that these, that these, that the flappers, the roaring twenties, this sort of emergence of American wealth and opulence is being fueled by these guys that are like living out in the Alaska frontier of dried salmon. And, and just, the distance between these two people. Yeah. And the sort of cultural difference between them, but the spatial difference is so small. This is happening in Seattle, Washington. Yeah. Right. And it really became like, um, it just became remarkable. But then, and, and, I'd like you to explain the process of then we got to look and be like, okay, there's something there. There's something crazy there. But when did it begin and when did it end? Because it's very hard to identify when it began and when it ended. And how significant was it? 00:21:52 Speaker 2: In all these books or in all these research projects, we obviously have a handful of characters who are emblematic of a broader experience. industry yeah like you could you know we could tell the story of jim bridger and you wouldn't doubt that there was a whole thing behind him meaning that he was one of a type yeah right and so part of this story then when we think about the alaskans is is wondering like are these just anecdotes like are these couple of people here and there and and they happen to write some great memoirs and and maybe we're making more of something than it is because one of the interesting things about this project was that there aren't really any historical monographs, meaning like a study of a single subject that focus on this economy at this particular moment in time in this place. 00:22:54 Speaker 1: And so. 00:22:57 Speaker 2: Beginning with some of the, individuals that you came across in your reading and this was all like a blank spot in my mind like i didn't have any specialized knowledge of this i started reading more broadly about the fur trade and more broadly about alaskan history and started digging in on a couple little wrinkles here and there you begin to see mentions of the seattle and you'll see this in some of the memoirs they'll say i sold that year I sent my first to the Seattle Fur Exchange. And so then I started digging in on the Seattle Fur Exchange. And then you start digging in on sort of local histories of interior Alaska, which is really where we focused for this story. And you sort of start chasing leads and following them out from this kernel that had really caught our interest. And by chasing enough of those leads, you kind of fill in the world around these people and truly there was, um, this was like a, a golden era of American trapping. Um, there's ups and downs because we were looking at such a long window and I'll talk about that. Um, there's ups and downs in the market over the course of this story. It's not the case that we're following one big boom and then it collapses like we are with say the mountain men or the hide hunters. Um, the market fluctuates a little bit, but you could go out, uh, you know, if you're someone in the lower 48 and you don't have, uh, you, maybe you have a taste for adventure. Maybe you just don't have anything keeping you at home. Like you don't have a trade, you don't have a profession, you don't have property. You could go up to Alaska and, you know, borrow a grub stake and go out and make a living as a wilderness fur trapper. 00:24:49 Speaker 1: Um, In the 1920s. Yep. And beyond, and beyond. 00:24:53 Speaker 2: Because this world also didn't necessarily collapse. And maybe I'll talk about the dates now. 00:24:58 Speaker 1: But you could go out and make a good, you had the potential to make a good living. We talk about the buffalo hide hunters, that at a time when you could sell a buffalo hide for three or four dollars, if you worked at a tannery in Pennsylvania and you were a foreman, you'd make maybe a dollar a day. If you were a Buffalo hide hunter on the great plains, you might shoot 20 of them and get three or $ 4 a piece. Yeah. Now there's a theme here that happens is that the types of people that are always the frontier types that are always drawn to this are always very poor. They're very bad at getting rich. Yes. And every one of these stories, it's like, you look at the basic layout. If you work in a factory, you make a dollar a day. If you're a buffalo hide hunter, you sell buffalo hides for three bucks a piece. You can kill 20 a day. That guy must be rich. And it's always like, but he's not rich. Yeah. But it doesn't work. No. It doesn't work out. 00:26:07 Speaker 2: And I mean, we talk in this book, we talk about Frank Glazer, who's maybe perhaps the most recognizable of all the individuals that we discuss. 00:26:18 Speaker 1: And he... He really made his rep, he sort of lived. 00:26:22 Speaker 2: 10 different lives in Alaska, but he came up to Alaska at the age of 26, I believe. 00:26:30 Speaker 1: In 1915. 00:26:31 Speaker 2: And there was a period of time when he was focused primarily on fur trapping. He was a market hunter supplying meat for construction crews. Later, he became a government wolf hunter and trapper, and that was sort of really how he made his name. Um, but for a while he was, he was focused on fur trapping and he says at some point when prices were good, I could buy anything I wanted. He's like, I could have, I could have lived off a couple hundred bucks a year and I was making $ 5, 000 a year. Yeah. 00:27:06 Speaker 1: Um, so yeah, like there was real opportunity there. Um, and this is a time we get into, this is a time when fur exports, um, out of Alaska are competitive against timber exports, competitive against mineral exports, competitive against fisheries exports. It was a major business. It was a major business. 00:27:31 Speaker 2: And so I guess at this point, we've kind of been dancing around the dates. So with a story like this one, you always need to figure out a beginning and an end, right? And one of the commonalities that we saw in a lot of the individual stories during this research project is that their origin story as a trapper was in some way tied to the klondike gold rush so in 1896 a man named george carmack and his a couple indigenous guides or companions discovered gold uh that was all ended up in, in San Francisco, sent back on ships and it triggered this massive stampede to the Klondike goldfields. Now the Klondike is in Canada. Um, and the way they're accessing this area at that time is you'd take a steamer up like Skagway, Southeast Alaska, and you'd climb over the coast mountains and get to the headwaters of the Yukon, um, which are in Canada. And then they're floating down to the gold fields and You have this huge explosion of settlement and all of this intense economic activity around Dawson, which is the main hub there. But we're talking more than 100,000 people in a couple years are attempting this journey. Not all of them make it. When they get there, not all of them actually get into mining. Some end up working odd jobs. 00:29:10 Speaker 1: Some end up opening a saloon, things like that. 00:29:13 Speaker 2: And then of those that actually made it into mining, very, very few struck it rich. And what ends up happening is as this flood of people continues to roll into the headwaters of the Yukon, a lot of folks are getting there and seeing that the good claims are already taken. And so they're continuing. 00:29:40 Speaker 1: On downstream. 00:29:41 Speaker 2: And there's sort of this ripple effect that rolls back across. So these guys are starting in Alaska, going over into Canada, and then going back into Alaska via the Yukon into the interior. And the Yukon itself is this huge river that goes from you know, if you're going to draw sort of a line dividing the main chunk of Alaska in half, the Yukon just sort of bisects it. 00:30:08 Speaker 1: Yeah. Between. Yeah. We may just geographically, we make the point in here that you can imagine Alaska, a good way to start understanding Alaska topography, geography, whatever, is to imagine it occurring in like five bands, East to West running bands, the North slope of the Brooks range, right? The Brooks range. everything south between the Brooks Range and the Alaska Range, then the Alaska Range being another layer of the cake, and then south of the Alaska Range being, that's like a five-layer cake, or you could imagine as a three-layer cake, and. 00:30:42 Speaker 2: It's... Stuff that, by watershed, stuff that flows north, roughly, I mean, this is all very crude, but basically, if rain falls in Alaska or snow melts in Alaska, if it's north of the Brooks Range, Brooks range. 00:30:59 Speaker 1: It's rolling out to the Arctic sea. Yeah. Yeah. Arctic ocean, whatever. 00:31:04 Speaker 2: Um, in between the Alaskan range and the Brooks range, it's in the Yukon watershed and it's flowing east to west across Alaska out into the Bering sea. And then south of the Alaska range, they gets messier, but this is sitting as a big one out going out to cook in lid. And then, um, But basically what we're looking at in this story is that center of the cake. 00:31:33 Speaker 1: Yeah, I kind of screwed us up, Randall. I should have never done the five-layer cake. Yeah. It's a three-layer cake. Sure. It's a three-layer cake. And I want to get back to the dates, but this is about the layer everybody wants, man. Yeah, yeah. The middle layer of the cake. The middle layer. And it's the Yukon, it's called Interior Alaska. Yeah. 00:31:54 Speaker 2: And it's the Yukon drainage. And so that's where we focus in our story. So from this big rush to the Klondike goldfields in Canada, there's sort of subsequent, it's like a runoff of people down the Yukon. And there's also- Subsequent strikes of gold up and down the Yukon, um, all the way from Nome, which is near the mouth of the Yukon Fairbanks. Um, there's smaller strikes up the Koyakuk. There's there's strikes and all these feeder drain feeder rivers that some of them are hundreds of miles long. Like the Yukon has tributaries that hold their own against what we would think is like major. 00:32:39 Speaker 1: River systems in the lower 48. Yeah. 00:32:42 Speaker 2: Um, and, and what happens with the gold rush like this is that not everybody strikes it rich and, and heads out some people. And these are the people that we look at in this story. They, they end up in a new place and they figure out how to make a living there. And in interior Alaska at that time, you could make a real decent living trapping for. And it also was sort of a lifestyle, I think, that appealed to some of these characters. But if you think about one of the guys we talk about a lot in this is James Carroll. And he was born in 1893. He came up north to Alaska in 1910. So he's 17 years old. His brother had gone up chasing gold and had written to James Carroll saying, hey, there's gold nuggets the size of your fist. Get up here, it's easy pickings. So James Carroll follows in his brother's footsteps. And within a year, more or less, he's just a full-time fur trapper. There's a family that we look at, the Berglund family. And there's two brothers who come up in 1898, Oscar and George Berglund. They go up chasing gold. They kind of wash out, end up back in the lower 48. But according to his daughter, Evelyn, who wrote this memoir later of her childhood, she said that the North country got its hooks in them. And they went basically back to Oregon. George got married to. 00:34:26 Speaker 1: A woman named Maude. And then they all went back up to the interior. 00:34:31 Speaker 2: And George and Maude then raised a family in the interior of as trappers and the daughters are like this really remarkable story. They're all born in the interior and they grow up, you know, as soon as they can walk, they're sort of learning how to trap first with sort of like messing around with squirrels and stuff around the home cabin. But they end up just being as badass as any trapper that we've covered in this series. So there's another one is Sidney Huntington and Sidney Huntington is an interesting one. Um, he and his brother, Jimmy, they're the sons of a gold rusher from Buffalo, New York, who came up to the interior, sort of found out that he wasn't going to strike it rich as a gold miner. And then he ended up marrying a native woman. And so Sidney and Jimmy are both, um, the products of this collision of, I don't know if collision of cultures is the right term because it's, there's not a ton of conflict between the native Athabascan people and. 00:35:44 Speaker 1: Yeah, hold that thought for me because I want to talk about that. 00:35:46 Speaker 2: Yeah, but again, in each of those stories, like the James Carroll, the Berglunds, the Huntingtons, like all of those origin points stem from this discovery of gold that drew people together to interior alaska at a time when most of them couldn't have found it on a map yeah and that's really why we begin our story with that 1896 date which is the discovery of gold in the klondike. 00:36:10 Speaker 1: You know it's an interesting parallel that didn't even occur to me until right now how many people lewis and clark was like what about 40 people yeah the expedition it's kind of it's kind of funny about the ratios so you imagine the lewis and clark expedition sends 40 people into the american west and into the rockies They come back, and one of them, one of them, at least immediately, one of them, John Coulter, is like, I'm going back. And there's a similar thing when you think about Alaska and the gold rush. I think we have some better concrete numbers in here, but perhaps for every 100 people that rushed up into the gold fields along the Yukon, For every 100 that rushed up there, one stuck around. Yeah. 00:37:01 Speaker 2: I mean, if that, you know, it's like this, it's almost like a funnel, right? Or I guess that I'm not coming up with the right, there's this huge number of people that come up. Some of them don't even make it because the journey is too difficult. Of those that get there, some of them can't even get into the business of mining. Of those that get into the business of mining, some of them get a claim originally where they intended to mine. Most of them end up rolling downstream and mining somewhere else. Of those guys, few of them find gold, even fewer of them find enough gold to make a difference. And not all of them give, I mean, this is another point too where we sort of need to draw a distinction between the Alaskans and some of the other volumes. A lot of these guys still are, you know, in their summers looking for gold. You know, they sort of keep a toe in that world. They keep a foot in that world. But fur trapping and hunting for subsistence is how they actually make their living. It's how they pay their bills. It's how they feed themselves. It's how they stay alive in this place. 00:38:14 Speaker 1: I think another way to describe that beginning date of the gold rush would be that It initiated a huge change in interior Alaska where there had always been Europeans or there had always been whites kind of poking around the edges of Alaska for a couple hundred years. I mean, Captain Cook came and explored the coastline of Alaska. The Russians had been fur trading around sea otters and other pelts along the coast. But there was this big hole in the middle that just hadn't really been filled up by frontier-type people. There was a constant, of course, like everywhere in North America, there was a constant Native American, or in this case, Native Alaskan, Alaska Native presence in the landscape. But it's what brought in, it initiated a push of frontier people. Yeah. As... Many of them came and fell in love with the landscape and decided to make a life there. The, the gold rush, it was, a fleeting enterprise and it forced these individuals to the ones that wanted to stay and wanted to make a life they had to sort of find a more consistent way to make a living on the landscape And they turn to a form of like a subsistence lifestyle. They turn to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle in order to stay. And then that life way, this hunter-gatherer life way, this frontier life way, then went on to exist for decades. Yeah. And in some cases, as we'll get into, in some cases still exists today in interior Alaska. Yeah. And so that's the start because prior to that, they weren't there, you know? Yeah. Yeah. 00:40:23 Speaker 2: And it's, it's kind of like the first, not this maybe isn't the right analogy, but it's kind of like the beachhead. 00:40:30 Speaker 1: It's like that. 00:40:31 Speaker 2: The Klondike gold rush is the moment that people from the outside start pouring into the interior in unprecedented numbers. 00:40:38 Speaker 1: And, and it begins this whole. 00:40:41 Speaker 2: Sort of this evolutionary process by which people from the outside adapt themselves to that environment and figure out how to make a living. 00:40:49 Speaker 1: In a way, it's a little bit of a weird twist on some of these other stories we've told in that the first people, if you go to the first far west, so everything beyond the Appalachian range, the first people, the first whites to go in there are going in there to hunt deer. Yeah. Like a hundred percent. Yeah. Like the first whites to go into those areas are going into hunt deer out of that activity becomes farmers, people engaged in other industries, but it was like, they were there first, the Rocky mountains, the first whites to really push into all these remote areas of the Rockies are going there to trap out of their activities comes immigrants and settlers and People establishing agriculture. Ski resorts and breweries. Yeah. Craft breweries. Yep. And here's an interesting one where it's the initial push, at least in this case, the initial push into these areas isn't the hunters and trappers. Yeah. A lot of the guys going into these areas are gold miners. Mm-hmm. And out of that, instead of the hunters and trappers being sort of the forebears. Yeah. They're kind of the afterwards. 00:42:15 Speaker 2: We've sort of covered this throughout the discussion, but there's a lot of way, there are a lot of parallels between the Alaskans and these earlier volumes. And then there's also these real key distinctions that separate it. But real quickly, as you mentioned, we could have, they're we might not necessarily have had to put an end date on our story if it weren't for, uh, the fact that we need to keep it to 12 chapters or 10 chapters or something. So at some point we had to pick a date to end our story. And for that, we picked 1941. Um, 41 is obviously, uh, when Japan attacks the United States at Pearl Harbor and the United States enters the second world war. Um, There's several reasons why that upends the world that these trappers are living in. One is all of a sudden the federal government starts pouring tons of money and people into Alaska as part of the war effort. Alaska is actually invaded by Japan and then retaken by America. and its allies in the Aleutian campaign. 00:43:31 Speaker 1: This is a thing not widely understood. There were combat operations in the Aleutians during World War II. 00:43:38 Speaker 2: Yeah, there's an amphibious assault where American forces retook part of Alaska from the Japanese. 00:43:48 Speaker 1: Allow me on this subject because if you're a big World War II guy and you go and look at how did we What was our long-term play on Japan in the Pacific Theater during World War II? And you know all these battles we fought on all these islands, okay? Guadalcanal, Okinawa, Iwo Jima. Like, our play was, we can't just go invade Japan. Right. You need to get islands. And you need to get islands closer and closer and closer and closer. And you need to take these islands. establish rebuild or establish air bases on these islands. And so you can get your aircraft there and your aircraft can have greater accessibility to bomb the mainland. Yeah. And, and that was the strategy is like the island hopping. But, but think about that, that we weren't the only ones doing this Japan as well as like, what is some remote ass islands? Yeah. Where's some remote ass islands that we could go nab. Right. And like take their air base and potentially set up to bring the fight to those sons of bitches. Atu, Kiska, these islands in the Aleutian. 00:45:08 Speaker 2: And we're going to go bomb them bastards in San Francisco. And so there's this huge, there's, as the war gets underway, the U.S. realizes the strategic importance of Alaska and the federal government starts spending unimaginable sums of money developing infrastructure in Alaska. Um, building airfields, communications, like all of the stuff that sort of built Alaska into what it is today, that really starts with this huge influx of money in World War II, and it continues during the Cold War. But part of this story is that those big construction projects draw a lot, and also military service pulls a lot of these trappers out of the bush. to go either work in Anchorage or Fairbanks, these very high paying construction jobs. Sidney Huntington is one of these individuals who, he goes to Anchorage to enlist in the military. And because he's so handy, they actually end up, he gets sort of recruited away to work on construction projects. 00:46:20 Speaker 1: Yeah, because these are dudes that can make anything by themselves. 00:46:25 Speaker 2: He's been building boats by himself or just with his brother. They've been building boats on the banks of the Yukon for years. 00:46:32 Speaker 1: Yeah, tearing outboards apart, putting them back together, fabricating components. And they come down to enlist and they're like, buddy, you're going into the trades, man. 00:46:40 Speaker 2: Yeah and so you see i mean you see in some of these studies of the area they talk about a lot of a lot of people just sort of getting drawn away from what they've been doing before the war to go have a stable high paying income during the war and what ends up happening too is is the the fur economy when those guys try to go back to fur trapping after the war the fur economy takes a slump that carries on through the 50s and 60s. And, you know, there's a huge renaissance in the 70s, and there's a ton of great memoirs and books of people who have gone to the Yukon in the 70s to take part in this big fur renaissance, the late 70s, early 80s. But we ended up at 1941 because also the technology is changing at the time, and that's another aspect of this. 00:47:33 Speaker 1: Like, World War II. 00:47:36 Speaker 1: Um, catalyzes this. 00:47:37 Speaker 2: Huge advancement in aviation, manufacturing, aerospace technology, um, and trains a huge number of pilots. And so general aviation, meaning, you know, like private aviation and people flying small planes around that existed in Alaska before 1941, like the, the real pioneer aviators definitely predate world war two, like the, the, The real groundbreaking Bush pilots definitely predate World War II into the 20s, right? But after World War II, the scale of aviation, both in the United States in general and in Alaska, is on a totally different level. And you have some of the most iconic airplanes of Alaska Bush aviation trace their origins to the 1940s, like the Beaver. canadian but the the the super cub um the cub is the plane that almost every world war ii aviator is learning to fly in and so after the war um aviation which in alaska transforms sort of the nature of remoteness and what it means to get in and out of town get out to your camp get back into your camp and so there's a lot of um it's not like in 1941 after that point there are no more interior fur trappers but it's just an era had ended for a number of different reasons. 00:49:08 Speaker 1: Yeah, there's a crazy thing that I didn't know until we started on this, but when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the first... few casualties of that attack were guys out flight seeing in a cub. Yeah. Yeah. 00:49:26 Speaker 2: It was two, two soldiers, um, who had learned that the U S in the lead up to the war, the U S had started a, a civilian pilot training program, just, just in order to turn out people who could, they could put behind the controls of an airplane. And so a lot of people just learned to fly, even if they weren't necessarily going to be flying a, flying a. 00:49:50 Speaker 1: Mustang, exponential growth in pilots. 00:49:52 Speaker 2: And so, um, yeah, there's, there's a couple of folks, I believe in a California national guard regiment, and they're about to be transferred back to the mainland. And before they do that, they have pilot credentials. 00:50:04 Speaker 1: So they rent. 00:50:06 Speaker 2: A pair of Super Cubs, I'm sorry, a pair of Cubs, and go for a flight scene tour. And then they're actually shot down by Mitsubishi Zeros, by Japanese fighter pilots. And so it's the first, I believe it's the first American military personnel killed in the attack on Pearl Harbor were flying Cubs. 00:50:25 Speaker 1: Flight scene tour in a Cub. 00:50:27 Speaker 2: It doesn't have this great historical significance, but there's something there that it's like, here's this aircraft that will transform Alaska into in the second half of the 20th century and it plays this, it's in the moment that we identify as this turning point in Alaska's history. 00:50:46 Speaker 1: So there's sort of like a poetic symmetry there. Yeah, we talk about in the piece on Alaska, we talk about, we begin one of the chapters and talking about that there is a, every generation will tell you what ruined Alaska. Mm-hmm. Okay. The Bush plane ruined Alaska. It's always from some perspective. The Bush plane ruined Alaska. The snowmobile ruined Alaska. Satellite communications ruined Alaska. Whatever. There's always something ruined Alaska. I don't want to use the word ruined, but undeniably it was World War II and the events around World War II and the events surrounding World War II that didn't ruin it, but stripped away, we still call it the last frontier, but mostly stripped away. It's frontier persona. It's frontier reality. And you just talked about like the, the world war two of it all, but an, a offshoot, like an outcome of world war two was the cold war. Right. Right. And so not only were we using Alaska to supply the Russians, in fighting the Nazis. But even after we beat the Nazis, Alaska transitioned immediately to a... The front lines. Yeah, to an area of enormous strategic importance in holding off the Red Menace. Yeah. If Russia's going to invade, where are they going to invade from? Right? And so all of a sudden it became like airfields. Bomber squads, early warning devices, running a highway. 00:52:32 Speaker 2: Weather forecasting. 00:52:34 Speaker 1: Just very basic stuff like that. Strategic petroleum reserves. Running a highway to connect Alaska through a highway system. And putting a highway in. Putting in these military bases everywhere. It just, like, again, it didn't ruin it, but it just brought it into the global... consciousness yeah as a place of enormous geopolitical significance and it just changed the place it. 00:53:05 Speaker 2: It really like prior to world war ii alaska was an american territory and it was sort of floating out there you know like you see on on a map that doesn't include all of north america alaska is just sort of floating out there right but world war ii really cemented a brand new type of link between the American mainland in Alaska, and even the Alcan Highway, the physical linkage between the U.S. 00:53:34 Speaker 1: And Alaska, that is an outgrowth of World War II. At that Klondike time, we argue this, at that Klondike time, there were men, young men, rushing up to Alaska to join the gold strike that that it sounds funny that would have been unable to pinpoint it, that, that a year prior would have been unable to show you where it was on a map. Yeah. It was not, it was, it was on the periphery of American consciousness, but it was not the center of American consciousness. Yeah. 00:54:13 Speaker 2: And so I think like that you can make a very, and that's what we're doing ultimately in, in, telling history is you're making an argument about the past, right. 00:54:23 Speaker 1: And you're interpreting the evidence. 00:54:25 Speaker 2: And so I think our argument is that world war two marked the end of an era for trapping in the interior of Alaska. Um, even though trapping in the interior didn't obviously end with world war two. 00:54:40 Speaker 1: And I feel like it didn't begin with the Klondike. Right. 00:54:42 Speaker 2: And I, so I feel like, I feel like we've covered a lot of this except for that trapping part. And so maybe, maybe at this point, like we want to flesh out what this lifestyle looked like on the ground. 00:54:55 Speaker 1: Yeah. Um, yeah, let's talk about those, those decades of frontier culture and a frontier subsistence hunter gatherer lifestyle that was happening in this vast area of Alaska during this time. And again, just a thing I like to do is always put it in the context of these, these other areas. Like if you go into, uh, during Boone's deer hunting phase, during his deer skin part of his life, how did those guys work? What did they do? You hunted with a group of people, your brothers, your brothers-in-law, your cousins, your dads. You formed these little parties of hunters. You would outfit yourself with pack trains, saddle horses, and pack horses. You would work up enough supplies, primarily salt, lead, gunpowder, and you would go on these big expeditions. And these expeditions could be six months. They could be sometimes a year. And you would push into these wilderness areas until all those pack horses were loaded with dried deer skins, bundles of dried deer skins. You'd pack them back and sell it, and that was your cash. The mountain man era was... generally brigades of guys that did not know each other, that did not grow up together. But they were organized and financed by investors who would put together a group of guys, some of them on salary, and send them out on these extended trips to trap Beaver. And then they would settle up with these guys in a salary sense or a basis of a per-fur basis. And that drove the economy. Buffalo hide hunters were these small organizations where you had like kind of a principal figure. He owned, uh, wagons. He owned livestock to pull wagons. He was able to go and buy all the lead and powder and everything. He would hire guys to work in his camp and he would be the financier and they would go out and shoot Buffalo. He would pay them their day rates. He would, he would pay them percentages on the take. And it was his business. And he wasn't backed by corporate interests the way early mountain men brigades were backed by corporate interests. With the Alaskans in this era, it became a really small little thing. These are, by and large, individuals. They're small families. They're a couple of partners together operating in a very small scale sense in the Alaskan frontier. And the way their lifestyle would work, is they would operate on an annual cycle. The annual cycle would involve, in the summer, you would go to a, we use the term roadhouse, there's roadhouses in Trading Post, which we explain in great detail where they are, but you would go to these population centers, usually located at the confluences of major rivers in Alaska. And a guy that wanted to get into the biz, okay, would go to one of these trading posts, go to one of these roadhouses, whatever, and he would try to work up financial backing and work up a thing called a grub stake or a stake. And he would need to go and get, to join in the biz, to become a frontiersman, he would need to go and get almost a year's worth of supplies, a winter's worth of supplies, meaning he would need to be able to afford a rifle, a shotgun perhaps as well, a bunch of traps. a bunch of food, clothing, and other equipment. The way his season began is he would then either go up and down rivers. And it's funny when I say up and down rivers, but it would often be you leave a little frontier depot and maybe you descend the Yukon. And then you come to a Yukon tributary and you maybe then ascend by dragging Holy. whatever, your watercraft, oftentimes homemade watercraft. 00:59:13 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:59:14 Speaker 1: Boats built out of whipsawed planks these guys would make themselves. Maybe very primitive outboards. Yeah. This is the early outboard era. And this was also when winter travel was done by sled dog. And that's an important thing. Yeah. In the summer, late summer, you're striking out to your area. And you might go up the Yukon and then up another river. You might go down the Yukon and up a river. But you would go potentially hundreds of miles by yourself or you and a partner. And you've got your boat loaded with all your gear, your trapping equipment, your hunting equipment, canvas, some tents, whatever, nails, basic wood tools. and a ton of dogs running along on the bank, and you would find your way up to an area where you thought you could establish a trap line and have an exploitable number of fur-bearing animals and also an exploitable number of animals to hunt and eat. Once you found this place, you would build a small cabin. You would then establish a bunch of line cabins on your trap line. You'd lay out trap lines, and it could be a couple different Loops through the forest, loops of maybe 40 miles, loops of up to 60 miles where you knew you're going to go out and run traps. And then you need to start building in on supplying your food. And so September, October would be hunting and fishing months. Maybe August as well. Catching, at times these guys would catch hundreds of salmon. Yeah. Because that's how they're going to feed their dogs. And so they'd have a fishing season where they're catching and drying literally hundreds of salmon. They're shooting black bears. They're shooting moose. They're shooting caribou. They would try to do their hunting right around the time when you started to get freeze up at night. So if you're hunting around mid-September, by that point, by late September, early October, it was possible that you could kill a moose or kill five or six caribou, whatever. And put it up in a cache where bears couldn't get at it. And the stuff would start to freeze up and you build up enough food to last you through the whole winter. At that point, once November comes, then you were into your money-making phase and you would start running these trap lines. You would build a sled. You would use your dog team and you'd start running trap lines. And what were they trapped before they were trapping for Martin? They were trapping for lynx. They were trapping for wolf. They were trapping for red fox, different color phases of red fox. They trapped a lot of mink. They trapped small numbers of beaver. They trapped small numbers of otter. In the spring, they would trap enormous numbers of muskrats. You did that all through the winter, oftentimes with no interactions with the outside world. So when you left a trading post or left a roadhouse, in July or early August or whenever you took off, you'd go into the bush, and you might have from that point next to zero interaction. Because the way this system worked, you really couldn't have neighbors closer than 40 miles. The land was so, I hate to say it, people have this idea of Alaska as being so rich in wildlife, which we explain, it is at times. But these are windows of seasonal abundance. Salmon runs, like there's nothing more staggering than looking at a river where it's just like you could walk across on salmon, but you could also go there 11 months out of the year and there ain't shit in that river. It's full of salmon today. It ain't tomorrow. Yeah. And it wasn't yesterday, right? There's a bunch of caribou passing through. Like I've sat there in Alaska and watched hundreds of caribou pass by every day for three days, but there's 11 months out of the year when you might sit there and never see a single caribou. Yeah, and that shapes how these guys. 01:03:27 Speaker 2: And women lived their lives because when they needed to stock up on food, they got after it and they put it away for when the caribou moved off or when the fish went away, right? And so it's like this life cycle of stocking up on food when it's there and then sort of slowly and very deliberately working your way through that stockpile until the next window of abundance. 01:03:58 Speaker 1: Deer in Appalachia, like in Kentucky, whitetail deer resources were so good that 10 or 20 long hunters could go into an area and kind of hunt off different directions out of a, out of a station and all have good hunting. Mountain men brigades could be 20 or 30 trappers that just would rove along and they'd come into a new valley. They'd break off in groups of two and they'd trap the piss out of that area. But there's a gang of them. Yeah. And they're like a roving war unit. Like there's so many of them that they can hold off native nations coming after them. Hide hunters would talk about that in your camp, you're listening to the distant booms. of other hide hunter camps. And you'd kind of space yourself just by the sound of how far the booms were, but you'd wake up in the morning. It's boom, boom, the next camp over. This is a solitary existence, man. Like in Alaska, it is not a rich resource area. So these guys would go that long. And then they, when they had, when they went up to these areas to trap, to get there, they're reliant on open water because they need to get their boats up to these areas. shortly after they get there everything would freeze up yeah and then they had to wait and stay there because they couldn't then take their furs down to market until breakup so once you got there and things locked up you could do these extraordinary dog sled trips and people did in emergencies travel enormous distances in the winter to go get help or whatever but generally once it froze you stayed put yeah it froze up in october whatever in november You stayed put. You weren't going anywhere until breakup in the spring. And in that spring breakup, you would come down your tributary, whatever. You'd go up the Yukon, down the Yukon to get to a place to settle your debts. You'd go in. You'd pay back the guy that fronted you. Not cash. You'd come in with your furs, and you'd settle up. And you'd wind up generally, and this is like, this is what happens to these market hunters. This is what happens to these frontier guys. You come down and you get like, if you're lucky, you got a balance, you're positive some money. What did they do with the money? Did they, did they invest it in Roth IRAs? Did they like, did they, did they go and buy a stock? No, they generally drank. they gambled they hired prostitutes they partied generally whatever they would just again and again and again there are exceptions but again and again and again they would they would later more as we're gonna do they would later marvel about i don't understand what happened to my yeah what happened to my money there's a yeah there's um. 01:06:59 Speaker 2: And then in the summer they're working odd jobs basically until they can go out and trap again and make real money. 01:07:06 Speaker 1: Yeah. 01:07:06 Speaker 2: You know, they're cutting firewood or, or tending a garden and selling vegetables in town. 01:07:12 Speaker 1: Yeah. They're maybe they're going out and looking for gold. Or a lot of them got into the freight business. Yeah, like hauling freight up and down to different mining camps. 01:07:20 Speaker 2: Because they already had a boat, so they had suppliers. And there's still like, there's other people out on the landscape. I mean, not that they're running into them, but there's a mining camp here, a mining camp there. So these guys have boats, they have knowledge of the rivers, they know how to run them. And so they'll take a contract in the summer running goods up to a mining camp or something. But one of my favorite images from the, I think it's James Carroll describes Like in the springtime, you'd come down after break up and you'd pull up into Fort Yukon or one of these places and all the old timers would be standing on the bank waiting to see who the next one. 01:07:56 Speaker 1: In would be. 01:07:57 Speaker 2: And they're all greeting one another and saying, how's your season? You know, how'd you do out there? But it's like this annual tradition that they all spend months out on their own and then they all sort of return to town around the same time. And it's this like welcome party of you made it another year. And some of these guys, I mean, necessarily don't need to list them all, but there's also cases where those guys are standing on the riverbank waiting for someone to come in and he never comes in. 01:08:27 Speaker 1: And then they go out and try to figure out what happened to him. Yeah, we get into that a lot of the ones that don't come. And in this era... in all these we like to do ways they died and there's a way there's the there's a ways they died in here but in this because of the solitary nature yeah of this occupation so many of the names um there's just a question mark next to the name yeah because if you're out with a brigade of mountain men and you get arrowed and die, it's captured. Someone later tells somebody you died here or there. 01:09:06 Speaker 2: Or like you can read in a journal, you know, we're all crossing the river and so-and-so came in on his horse and the horse lost its footing and we all watched him drown. 01:09:16 Speaker 1: That's not what you get. 01:09:18 Speaker 2: In the interior of Alaska when somebody is out trapping by themselves for months on end. 01:09:22 Speaker 1: Yep. It's they, they go through the ice, their boat capsizes, whatever. Yeah. And it just winds up being that they're just missing. 01:09:31 Speaker 2: Someone found their canoe in a place that wasn't supposed to be. They never saw him again. 01:09:36 Speaker 1: And that, and in that way, the air about how the Alaska, the chapter about how the Alaskans died is a little bit less fun. unless you have a good imagination because there's a lot of like, no one knows. Yeah. No one knows where this person is. No one knows what happens to this person. 01:09:52 Speaker 2: There's still, there's a couple of them where the, the, the, the scene or the evidence is, leads you to a fairly compelling explanation of what happened. And, and in those cases, the stories are just so wrenching, you know, like they find a guy, who laid down in bed and shot himself and he had a broken leg and they realized he broke his leg while trapping, ate through all of his food, couldn't go hunting and eventually gave, you know, things of that nature. There's some stories where we're able to piece together what happened. And that just makes you wonder about all the other ones that we'll never know. 01:10:33 Speaker 1: Yeah. There's a thing too, that in this, in this time, a thing you see less of earlier is I think the darkness is, the loneliness yeah um you see the emergence of i should say the emergence i don't think it was always lacking but we encounter references to suicides within this story yeah a guy that puts a snare around his neck hooks the other end of the snare to a to a dog team and has his dog team take off um some strange things like that. Do you wonder about that loneliness and that cold, but I wanted to touch on the thing about this, this, this, this annual life cycle is when these guys are coming down during, after the river ice breaks up and they're coming down to trade, there's also this, this funny thing where it's your chance now to go get actual food, but The towns and the trading posts and the roadhouses are supplied by river as well. And there's this interesting thing that would happen is you bust your ass to get down to a roadhouse or trading post. And you go in there expecting you're going to be eating this and eating that and eating this, but the place hasn't been supplied yet. 01:11:54 Speaker 2: Yeah, the boats coming up river with all the store goods haven't made it there yet. 01:11:59 Speaker 1: Yeah, there was a guy we talk about here. There was a guy that when he would come in from muskrat trapping in the spring, he would bring a big bag of dried muskrats to live off if he got to town quick enough and there was nothing there. Yeah. But then you would wait there for these supply things to come and then you'd get your supplies and you'd have a couple months to kill. And like you said, they would engage in different activities during that couple months, always in anticipation of come late summer, you just do the whole thing over again. And the thing you see within this era, um, earlier Randall started talking about it and I kind of paused him because I wanted to touch on it is all of these other eras we've spoken about are marked by extraordinary conflict between white Americans Euro-American figures and native peoples um the long hunters were uh killed off and killed off by native Americans who resented them coming into their homeland and shooting all their food resources cause tons of friction, right? The, the mountain men are fighting like, like the number one cause of death for mountain men is absolutely the black feet, hide hunters, Comanche, right? But here you have, and you should talk about it a bit because you spent a lot of time researching this as we worked on this project. Here you have a really different engagement between whites and Native Alaskans. 01:13:52 Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think one thing that we haven't pointed out yet is that the Native people along the Yukon border had actually gotten into the fur trade before all these guys arrived. So the Hudson's Bay Company actually established an outpost that would become Fort Yukon, the town that's sort of the heart of this trading. 01:14:20 Speaker 1: Network. 01:14:22 Speaker 2: And they began buying furs from the native people of the area who were Athabascan. 01:14:30 Speaker 1: And so... when. 01:14:34 Speaker 2: Would-be gold prospectors or would-be gold miners arrived with the Klondike gold rush, they were sort of entering an area that had already been remade by the fur trade. And trapping was a way of life. In many cases, these guys, when they're deciding to trap, they're looking at how the native people they're encountering are making their livings. And a lot of them are trappers. And so in some ways, they're sort of adopting... this lifestyle that had already been, um, that had already evolved before their arrival. And like I mentioned, Sydney Huntington and Jimmy Huntington, they're the, the sons of a gold rusher and an Athabascan woman. Um, they, their, their, their father, James Huntington was not the only, um, sort of cross-cultural, um, marriage or relationship during this time. James Carroll also married a Native woman. And in a lot of cases, the towns where these guys are going to trade their furs and spend their time, they have significant Native populations that are living in these areas. Fort Yukon essentially is a mostly Native town at this point. And there's a lot of instances too where because one of the sources that we looked at, um, that you have Robert Marshall, the, the wilderness advocate as we best know him, but he traveled to, uh, interior Alaska in the late twenties, early thirties, and sort of wrote about it from an anthropological sense. There are other anthropologists who go up in the twenties and thirties to study this place. Um, and, What was striking to me is oftentimes they'd be describing, oh, you know, we met this trapper named. 01:16:35 Speaker 1: Jimmy, say. 01:16:37 Speaker 2: And he told us this story and he stayed for dinner and whatever. And oftentimes you don't know if that person is Native or non-Native, if they're of Euro-American ancestry or if they're Athabascan, until it's actually specified by. 01:16:55 Speaker 1: by the observer. 01:16:56 Speaker 2: And that's, I guess I bring up Marshall and these other anthropologists because from an outsider's perspective, um, they're just sort of describing the world as they see it. And you just don't, as the reader, you're not aware of if they're talking about a native person or because they're living, which is. 01:17:14 Speaker 1: Not a problem when you're reading about the mountain man era. Yeah, you know, exactly. Any story from the mountain man area. It's abundantly clear. Yeah. Who's white. And who's Indian. 01:17:23 Speaker 2: And they're, and they're living, they're living very, um, similar lives in terms of their, their annual calendar. I mean, a lot of what the, um, a lot of what the sourdoughs, a lot of what the Alaskans are doing, um, as trappers they've learned from, uh, at the Baskin culture, like the cash hiding all of your food on an elevated platform, um, so that bears and Wolverines and other critters don't get your food stuffs. That's something they learned from Athabascan people. Um, the way that they're splitting their fish and drying their fish and storing the salmon for winter and feeding their dogs, like that's all stuff that they're picking up from Athabascan people. So there's this really interesting exchange of, of knowledge and culture that's going on. And it's, you still see evidence of, you know, like maybe interpersonal conflict. Like certainly there's, we're not saying it's this harmonious world where there aren't biases, you know, but it's not nearly as, there's no like Indian wars as we see on the Great Plains. It's just a very different, yeah, it's a very different just context when it comes to Native and non-Native relations. 01:18:47 Speaker 1: I don't want to brush over or pass up that Alaska has its fair share of atrocities. Oh, yeah. The atrocities, when I say that with the Russians or others, the atrocities, like the massacres, wound up being a coastal thing. And it was a lot of conflict around the coastal fur trade, which was driven in large measure by sea otter hunting. You have, I mean, there are stories of native villages on the coast of Alaska getting artillery barrages. Terrible things. And then you have as well, like the coast was a rich enough resource where it could support Large groups of people. And so then you have the epidemics. Yeah. European diseases, which is a, it's an, it's an atrocity on its own, but it's not an intentional trial atrocity where we're like European diseases. We're killing enormous numbers, influenza, killing enormous numbers of native Alaskans. So I'm not trying to act like this. This is a place where, white culture and native culture came together and it was all like daisies and parades. It wasn't, but the interior was kind of its own thing. Yeah. And it was, um, it was relative to other frontier collisions. It was remarkably harmonious relative to other relative to the American West. Yeah. Relative to Appalachia relative to these other, the great Plains. all these other places we've done, it was like a low densities of people coming together in a pretty peaceful fashion, seemingly much less aware of, of that your race identified you. Yeah. You know? Yeah. 01:20:59 Speaker 2: And, and again, it's just, you, you, you run into it again and again, as you're reading individual stories on the ground, that this is a world of, of intermixture between, you know, it's not like a segregated world. Um, it's not, it's people living sort of the same lives. Obviously there's very different contexts for each given the history of their, their ancestry, whatever. But, um, it, that's one of the things that's stuck out to me in this and Sydney Huntington like is, is, you can't say that he's, you know, he's a fur trapper. Like he trapped for a period of time. It was very influential as he tells it in his memoir of, of how he became a man and how he learned, uh, who he was. But then he goes on to this, this long, long life where he's a very respected elder. Um, he's a very accomplished individual. Uh, he, he served on the Alaska game commission like you can't reduce him to a fur trapper, but during this period, when we're talking about this, this world along the interior, he's participating in it in much the same way that a guy like James Carroll was participating in it. 01:22:14 Speaker 1: Yeah. Hit me with one of your favorite, um, from this era, hit me with one or two of your favorite anecdotes before we go into the, uh, before we, before we go into a sample chapter. Hmm. 01:22:29 Speaker 2: Um, You know, this isn't, this isn't necessarily an anecdote, but I think one of the things that I enjoyed researching the most was the market in furs. 01:22:47 Speaker 1: And one of the. 01:22:50 Speaker 2: Unexpected things that we highlight in here is the 1920s are really the era of one modern advertising, meaning you're you're not just listing an item by its, its qualities or, or what someone might look for when they're going to purchase something, but they're saying like, you know, you're an idiot if you don't wear, Hey dudes shoes, you know, like they're, it's trying to like the, the, the advertising for the first time is trying to elicit an emotional reaction in people. And so that's, what's used to drive the sale of fur and, you know, things like, uh, a woman is only as beautiful as the fur on her shoulders is an ad that you see in the twenties. Right. And then at the same time too, um, this is the dawn of the age of consumer lending where, um, you know, previously, like you had, you know, you could go to a store and you'd sort of having, have a revolving credit account, something like that. Um, but this is an age where you could go out and, and get it because this is the age of mass consumption and appliances and things like that automobiles there's a huge shift in the 20s from the number of automobiles that are purchased with cash versus purchased on credit and so all of a sudden in american life these goods that might have been unattainable previously people are people are signing for them on credit and making payments And so that all of a sudden renders a luxurious fur coat that once was just like a marker of very high status. 01:24:29 Speaker 1: It makes it accessible to workaday folks. 01:24:34 Speaker 2: And so there's all these references in the material to like shop girls in New York wearing furs or clerks wearing furs. And there's this great sort of moral anguish about people buying a fur coat with a mortgage. But all of a sudden, it's like this fur becomes achievable. It becomes attainable to a much wider swath of the American population. And connecting those two, like the advertising and the credit, to someone like James Carroll being able to make this primitive frontier life work out was really, I think for me, that was one of the things that kind of made me giddy. And it's not as exciting as someone getting charged by a bear, but. 01:25:23 Speaker 1: No, but it's good. I like, I'll do a bear one. Okay. Uh, I was digging. 01:25:29 Speaker 2: Evelyn, Evelyn Berglund and her sisters come back to the cabin one night and, the door is a jar and they can hear something in there. And they say, it sounds sort of like ice skates on the floor. And they realize it's bear claws on the walking around on the wood floor of their cabin. And they go in and it's all trashed. And, She, uh, she gets the gun and she pokes her head in and, um, there's a bear just sitting on their bunk bed and she shoots the bear and kills it. And then she describes, we took all the sheets and bedding and stuff and brought it outside. So it would freeze solid until we could actually go through all the work of cleaning it. So there's a lot of like really interesting. Here's another Evelyn Berglund line. Evelyn Berglund Shore is her, her married name later that her memoirs published under, but She describes, talking about how her family would keep their meat in the cache and they'd bring it in and cut steaks. They'd let it thaw, then cut steaks, then bring those outside, let them refreeze, and that's sort of what they'd eat for the week. And that's sort of how they, and she has a line because she's writing in the 1950s, in the era of people having freezers and refrigerators. She said, our family learned how to eat from a deep freeze well before most other Americans did. And we didn't have to thank GE for it. 01:26:51 Speaker 1: Yeah. So that was, she's, she's a really clever writer. So that was a fun one. Uh, one of the ones that most like doing the research, one of the things that, that I hit on that I knew would be in here and would have to be in here is the guy, the James Carroll, who, who like an early job of his was as a camp cook in lumber camp. Mm-hmm. So he had kind of an eye for food. One of these guys he describes, one of these Alaskans he describes, would be standing there cooking for other people. Oh, God, yeah. And he would use a fork to flip everything. And he would flip something. He had a nervous whatever where he would flip something and then stand there and comb his mustache with the fork. Yeah. Between flips. 01:27:33 Speaker 2: We have a whole section of these descriptions of these cooks at the different roadhouses. And one guy, his biscuits always had cat footprints on them because to make help his dough rise he would cover his bread with a towel and then his cat would get up on there and keep it warm walk paw around and then lay down and sleep on the bread. 01:27:53 Speaker 1: He he describes another guy he would go into he would actually cross the international border um to go trap muskrats in the crow flats Which is this whole thing, but it was like after the regular trapping season, he would do the muskrat season. And he would travel enormous distances by dog sled and boat and go trap across the border. And you'd have to find a Mountie, a Canadian Mountie, to like check in and tell him you were going into Canada. Yeah. But he would trap near this old, like real rugged old guy that he regarded as being an old rugged guy. And the guy would, he preferred to live off muskrats. And he didn't really like to cook. And so he had a he would cook a head so to speak and he would take an old oil can and he would take whole skinned out muskrats head tail and everything and he'd stick them head down in the oil can because the oil can wouldn't hold them the whole way he'd put 10 of them in there head down and boil them for a while and then he'd flip them Head up. So the heads are sticking out of the can. So now the heads are out of the can and boil them for a while. And that would give him his three days of food. Yeah. Whenever he went to do it, he would take a muskrat out. He would mix a little flour in the water. And that is what the guy would live off. And he, as he ate these muskrats, he would put the bones behind his wood stove in his tent. And this guy observed that he had accumulated by the end of the muskrat trapping season, he had accumulated A pile of muskrat bones the size of a muskrat hut. And this is the guy that was so reliant on muskrats. This is the guy that would bring bags of dried muskrats back to town with him. Yeah. For his food. And he observes that one time James Carroll was running low on supplies. He goes to visit this guy, this old guy that ate muskrats. And the guy... gave him his supplies yeah like he just felt more comfortable not having them he said take my extras yeah which is just like his his coffee and sugar yeah he just he just just wanted to eat his muskrats simple man he just liked it simple and it was and again to to juxtapose that with the roaring 20s gangster mall dressed in fur yeah you know and the Like, where was the fur coming from? It was coming from that guy. Yeah. No, it's really interesting. Just creates like the rich story that it is. 01:30:36 Speaker 2: It's a really, really interesting chapter in this American frontier history that. 01:30:44 Speaker 1: I knew nothing about going into it. 01:30:46 Speaker 2: And the more and more I read, the more it just like brought me joy and fascinated me. 01:30:52 Speaker 1: Tee up the chapter. We're going to jam in here. 01:30:55 Speaker 2: So we're going to share a preview of a chapter. from the alaskans which is available anywhere you get your audiobooks um apple books audible you can listen on spotify premium um this is this is chapter it's called feast and famine and it is about uh sort of the annual cycle of food acquisition and storage and preparation. 01:31:23 Speaker 1: And And also the lack thereof. And also the lack thereof. When things go bad, they go real bad. Yeah. So enjoying, again, Meat Eaters American History, the Alaskans, 1896 to 1941. Thank you. Chapter 5, Feast or Famine? Everyone pictures Alaska as a place overflowing with wildlife, a place where moose and salmon abound. What that picture leaves out is timing, because in the last frontier, abundance arrives in a fleeting rush and vanishes just as fast. The men and women who learned to recognize that rhythm and abide by it were the ones who lived to see spring. I want to tell you one of the most harrowing stories of wilderness adventure that I've ever heard, with the acknowledgement that it takes place outside of the political boundaries of this story's focus, though well within its timeline. During the first few decades of the 20th century, at the same time the Alaskan sourdoughs were building their lives, hunting and trapping up and down the Yukon, the same process was playing out in western and northern Canada. Fine furs were a global commodity, and the same habitat, vast tracts of wild country, and ecological conditions that made Alaska a trapper's dream existed across the boreal forests extending eastward from there across the international border. There are a number of outstanding memoirs and books produced by these Canadian trappers, but one in particular stands apart from all the rest. In May of 1926, a three-man party set out from Edmonton to trap in northern Canada. The members were 17-year-old Edgar Christian, his 49-year-old cousin John Hornby, and 28-year-old Harold Adlard, an acquaintance of Hornby. The party's destination was a patch of spruce trees along the Filon River, that Hornby had discovered on a previous trip to the far north. The site was north of the tree line, which meant that it was something of an oasis of timber, where a group of trappers could build a cabin and stock up on firewood in what was otherwise barren tundra. Hornby had observed that the area was rich in fur-bearing animals, and the plan was to hunt a herd of migrating caribou that passed through there in the fall in order to stock up on food before settling in for a winter of trapping. When they did not return by the summer of 1928, as they told family members they would, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police instructed a party of geologists headed out in the same vicinity to keep an eye out for signs of the men. Six weeks later, those individuals found a small cabin and reported that they'd found the missing trappers all dead. It would be another year before Canadian law enforcement made it out to the site to conduct an investigation. Upon arrival, they found a note that instructed them to look inside the wood stove where they discovered, among a few letters and notebooks, Edgar Christian's diary. That document shed light on the fate of the men and the harsh realities of living off the land in the far north. For reasons unknown, the trappers had been delayed in reaching the site on the Thelon River where they intended to build their cabins. The only explanatory clue was a note found in a can by a portage along the route, in which John Hornby wrote simply, quote, Owing to bad weather and laziness, traveling slowly, one big migration of caribou passed. By the time they built their cabin, it was early October, and winter was setting in. They established their trap lines and began to put away fur on the constant lookout for the caribou migration they believed would be inevitable. But before long, it becomes clear that they'd missed the big herds, which had already passed through. By mid-November, the entries in Christian's diary remain focused on their somewhat normal day-to-day activities, but they do begin to mention By December, Christian notes they are hunting less and less to avoid burning calories unnecessarily. He describes them as denning up to, quote, They did what they could to get some ptarmigan, small game, and fish, but Christian and his companions were already looking ahead to the spring when they anticipated the caribou would migrate back through their area. In January, the men began to boil bones from their previous kills to get, quote, a nice cup full of grease. In February, Hornby brought back to the cabin some frozen blood he'd found, which they mixed into a paste with their remaining flour. March's entries become increasingly desperate. The three men manage to get a wolverine in their traps from time to time and the occasional snowshoe hare, but their mental and physical decline is unrelenting. they begin eating the hides from the furs they'd cached and digging down into the snow to retrieve fish scraps and bones from the bait piles they put up in the fall. By April, the men are, quote, bound up by the accumulated bone fragments and animal hair in their digestive tracts. Simply lying in bed causes them to cramp up and they grow weaker and weaker. Hornby's condition deteriorates until he finally passes away in his sleep. Adlard and Christian rig up a makeshift enema in hopes of clearing their rectums of plugged animal hair so that they'll be able to hunt when the weather improves and the caribou return. On the 21st, Christian is heartened when he manages to clear a big blockage of wolverine hair and his appetite returns. He notes that, quote, the procedure, meaning the enema, takes every atom of energy and willpower to carry out. He and Adelard continue to dig through the snow for whatever frozen blood and rancid fish guts they can find. Sometime between April 28th and May 4th, Adelard passed away. Christian, now alone, wrote simply, quote, I cannot hunt as walking around in soft snow is beyond my powers now, not a sign of animal life around. Christian noted that his joints no longer moved smoothly, but instead were clicking and jerking in and out of position. He began suffering nosebleeds and sleeping more and more. The makeshift enema continued to clear lump of bone after lump of bone from his digestive system, but his fate was sealed. Sometime around Wednesday, June 1st, 1927, Edgar Christian crawled into his bunk and pulled a wool blanket over his head. There he died a few days shy of his 19th birthday. He had been alone, trapped with only his thoughts and his failing body for nearly a month. It's worth holding that story up against a very different kind of excess. The hide hunters and long hunters of an earlier era. working the buffalo herds farther south, were drowning in meat. Theirs is a story of waste, not want. Mountains of rotting flesh left behind on the American Great Plains. A mountain man might shoot a buffalo at night, eat a few pieces, and shoot another the next evening for supper. Five or ten pounds taken out of an animal that weighed a thousand pounds. Alaska and the sub-Arctic were the opposite. There are no stories here of dozens of moose shot just for their tongues. I want to tell you something about my own relationship with Alaska because I think it helps illuminate the underlying truth that explains this contrast. I've been going to Alaska for many years. I've hunted there, fished there, spent time in the interior and along the coast. The Alaska I know is a place of staggering biological richness. Salmon stacking up in river mouths by the thousands. Caribou moving across the tundra in herds that pass for days at a time, sometimes hundreds in a single group. Patches of berries so thick you can pick them by the gallon. This is the Alaska that gets written about and filmed and talked about. And it is real. However, like most people who visit Alaska, I time my trips carefully. It's all about timing. I go when the salmon are running or when the caribou are migrating or when the bears are feeding heavily on berries or fish from dawn till dusk. I go, in other words, during the windows of abundance. I show up for the feast. I leave before the famine. I go up to Alaska hoping that I might see 300 caribou pass through my campsite in one day. A concentration of wildlife so intense you can hear their collective breathing and feel their hooves beat across the tundra. Here's the thing. I know that you could sit at that same campsite for 200 days in a row and watch nothing pass by. But I had a bush plane drop me off ahead of the action. And I know I have it waiting to pick me up when I'm ready after seven days or 10 days or whenever the action dies down. And because of that, my experience of Alaska is fundamentally different from the experience of the men we're talking about in this volume. The trappers who lived in interior Alaska year-round, who couldn't leave when the windows of abundance closed, knew a different version of the same landscape. They knew what it looked like in February, months after the last caribou had moved through and months before the first salmon would push upriver. They knew what it felt like when the grub stake was running short and there weren't any fresh moose tracks and the dogs were looking at you with hungry eyes. What they lived in was not a wilderness pantry. It was a feast and famine system with long stretches of famine between the feasts. And the men who survived it long term were the ones who understood that distinction completely. they adopted the seasonal rhythm of preparation and preservation. Arctic and subarctic Alaska stand in stark contrast to ecosystems near the equator. In places where seasonal changes are minimal or effectively non-existent, animals become arrhythmic. Rutting seasons are very long or occur all year. Fawns can drop during any month of the year. Axis deer, for instance, which are native to India but found now in Hawaii, don't have a strict or synchronized rut and fawning season like whitetail and mule deer do. Likewise, some equatorial trees, such as certain fig trees, will bear fruit without any noticeable seasonality. At any given time, you've got a good chance of finding a harvestable crop. In the far north, however, biological rhythms are extremely tightly regulated and occur within very narrow temporal windows. Wild berries like blueberries and salmon berries ripen all at once and not for long. Salmon show up and then go away. Candlefish spawning runs are matters of days, not weeks. Geese eggs are laid at virtually the same time across the whole nesting ground. Nothing trickles in gradually or subtly ebbs and flows. It arrives in a rush and then it's gone, and the landscape sits empty and waiting until the next rush a year later. For that reason, the sourdough trappers had to become equally disciplined and seasonal in their food acquisition and storage. Long before white trappers figured it out, usually the hard way, the Athabascan people had already solved the central problem of the interior, how to turn a few weeks of abundance into a winter's worth of survivals. The Athabaskan seasonal round was, at its core, a system for converting the brief windows of abundance into stored calories that could sustain a family group through the long windows of scarcity. The big event of the year arrived in the summer, when the salmon came. Salmon are anadromous fish, meaning they live their lives in the saltwater of the ocean and run up into freshwater river systems to lay their eggs. When those eggs hatch, the juvenile fish head downstream and now into the ocean where they remain until, as adults, their own biological clock tells them to head back to their spawning grounds and repeat the cycle. In the case of the five species of Pacific salmon, which are all native to Alaska, each generation of adults dies after completing their reproductive act. Each of those five species of Pacific salmon have at least two different common names. You've got king salmon, also known as Chinooks, silver salmon, also known as Coho, sockeye salmon, also known as reds, pink salmon, also known as humpies, and chum salmon, also known as dogs. Each of these species has its own migratory calendar, meaning that they begin their upstream journey at different times and move up the river system at different speeds toward their different spawning grounds. Each major run of fish packed the rivers with an unimaginable abundance of protein. In turn, entire communities mobilized to catch and process fish in quantities that went far beyond any immediate day-to-day need. Salmon were eaten fresh for sure, but were mainly preserved, dried, or fermented, or cured in a bath of alderwood smoke. The work during salmon season was relentless and deliberate, but every fish caught and stored away was a buffer against the shortage that February would inevitably bring. In the fall, before freeze-up, came the berry harvest. Crowberries, blueberries, cranberries, salmon berries, picked and stored away, sometimes mixed with fish oil or rendered fat to help preserve them through the winter. Then came the caribou hunt, timed to the migration and sometimes involving communal hunting techniques. Fences of brush and stakes built to channel animals toward wading hunters. That could produce a large number of animals in a short window of time. Then freeze up in the long winter when travel was possible but food was scarce and communities dispersed into smaller family groups spread across their territories. Winter was a time for conserving resources and disciplined calorie consumption. In short, winter meant conservation. The arrival of the fur trade in the 1800s led to an upending of this age-old system. Furs are only valuable as a commodity during the winter months, which meant that trapping demanded peak physical activity and thus calorie consumption at exactly the time of year when the old pattern called for rest. This was truly a genuine departure from how people had lived in this country for generations. So while the sourdoughs would adopt and emulate many of the food acquisition strategies, and storage techniques of their Athabascan neighbors, they would use the resources with an entirely different set of goals in mind. Nonetheless, they were bound by those same biological cycles and narrow windows of animal activity. For months at a time, they and their dogs had to rely on stored foods, and so they stored away as much as humanly possible. They fished when the fish were available. They hunted when the game was. They picked berries when they were ripe. They took credit at the roadhouse to buy a grub steak when the rivers were open for boat traffic. Every calorie they managed to get into a cache or a cabin before freeze-up was a calorie they wouldn't have to worry about later. Then, come winter, They ran their trap lines and supplemented from the land as best as they could, but the whole time they were gradually depleting their stores with little hope of rebuilding them until the following summer. Even with a careful system of food preservation and management, and even with a supplement of some store-bought goods, acquiring a full winter's worth of food and dog food would from the Alaskan wilderness was not an easy task. Let's start with an obvious assumption. You're in Alaska. Anyone who's seen a postcard rack in a Fairbanks tourist shop knows that the place is packed full of moose, right? They're tangling their antlers and laundry lines. They're harassing students on college campuses in Fairbanks and Anchorage. They can't keep them off the airport runways. So why not just go shoot a moose when you're hungry? It's a reasonable question, and the answer is more complicated than it sounds. First, moose are not and never were uniformly distributed across the interior. The popular image of Alaska as a place crawling with moose is, again, a product of our modern-day ability to visit the exact right places at the exact right times and to coincide with peak moose abundance. And the moose aren't just distributed sporadically in a spatial sense, meaning from one valley to the next. They're distributed sporadically in a temporal sense. Places where moose are abundant and thriving today, such as the remote upper drainages of the upper Koyukuk River, are periodically devoid of moose. There are accounts from old sourdoughs, including Sydney Huntington, where seeing a moose track around the Koyukuk was, quote, an event to celebrate. People got excited about it and gossiped about it. Nowadays, you could go to those same areas and have a hard time finding a gravel bar that doesn't have a moose track on it. The reason has to do with habitat. Moose are browsers. They need the willow, birch, and alder that grows up in river bottoms, burns, and other disturbed ground. Deep, old-growth spruce forests simply does not support them in large numbers. A man running a line through mature timber country might go weeks without seeing a moose, not because Alaska doesn't have moose, but because the specific piece of Alaska he was working had the wrong habitat for them at that particular time of year. To add to that challenge, big game animals like caribou and moose roam over much greater distances than fur bearers like martin. So if big game hunting is your priority, you have a much more sprawling area of the map to choose from. For the sourdoughs, though, the priority was fur bears. You wanted to be where the marten were, regardless of whether there was better big game hunting on the other side of the mountain. On top of the uneven distribution of moose, there was the simple fact that moose were not as abundant in the first few decades of the 20th century as as they are today. Their populations are highly affected by predation. The combined effect of wolves, grizzly bears, and black bears can result in what's called a low-density dynamic equilibrium for an extended period, meaning that the number of moose on the landscape is far below whatever the nutritionally determined carrying capacity of that landscape might be. government programs to reduce wolf and bear populations in Alaska in the 1940s and 1950s produced the abundance of moose that comes to mind when you hear stories about the golden age of big game hunting in Alaska. One landmark study showed that substantial reductions in predator populations could result in a quadrupling of moose densities. Frank Glazer, after his days trapping full-time, got heavily into the work of predator control during the middle of the 20th century. In fact, he is better known for this part of his career than any other, which goes to show you how prominent, intensive, and impactful that work was. So, in short, areas along the Yukon that today are considered world-class moose hunting locations were, at the time of the sourdoughs, the kinds of places where you'd race home to tell your trapping partner if you found a single moose track. I'll mention, too, that this historical comparison of resource availability works both ways. Back then, salmon were found in far greater numbers all along the Yukon, salmon of every variety, that is, than they are today. Even when you did find a moose, the timing and logistics of getting one from the landscape into the cache were never trivial. A moose is a thousand-pound animal. Ideally, you would hope to kill it on a riverbank where it could easily be loaded into a boat. If you killed one five miles from your cabin in October before the snow was ripe for sledding, getting that meat home was a seriously challenging task. Sidney Huntington mentioned that when moose were scarce and he couldn't manage to kill one next to the river, he wouldn't even attempt to pack the meat back to his cache until the snow fell. Instead, he would wrap the meat in canvas to protect it from scavenging birds, hang it all in a tree, and then return to the kill site once he could drive his dog sled right up to that tree. The effort of retrieval wasn't really about raw distance. It was about terrain and season, and the sheer mechanical difficulty of moving heavy dead weight through a landscape that was, more often than not, actively working against you. Given all of that, moose hunting rewarded patience rather than raw effort. Much of the fall hunting, when trappers would put away serious amounts of protein for the winter ahead, was undertaken opportunistically. Before freeze-up, they were always on the lookout for a moose or caribou that wandered out onto an exposed riverbank or gravel bar. James Carroll practiced a float hunting technique, where he would pull up river aways and then float back to his cabin. He said, quote, floating down a stream, one has a chance to spot game easily. Going upstream is all work, or you don't go forward. He'd stop to hunt small islands where he knew moose like to feed and he carefully approached stretches where he knew bears like to fish. When the river level dropped in the late fall, drying out some side sloughs and back channels, the Bergland sisters used their dogs to drive moose out of thick willows and brush into those openings, where they could get a shot at them. Carroll also used to call for bull moose in the rut with a scapula or shoulder blade from another moose he'd killed previously. Scraping and rattling the scapula against the willows mimics the sound of a bull raking his antlers, encouraging any bull within miles to come check out his competition for mates. They'll come in all pissed off, issuing a guttural grunt every few steps that sounds pretty much like this. Grunt. Grunt. Grunt. A shrewd hunter will make that sound right back at him. If a sourdough heard a bull grunting close by at night, he might release his dogs to give chase, hoping that they'd bait up and hold the animal nearby until shooting light. In areas where moose were scarce, any sign of their presence was an opportunity too good to pass up. Sidney Huntington wrote that, quote, whenever a moose showed up in the Koyukuk, someone would find its trail and stay with it until he killed the animal. He described his family cutting a single cow moose track in 10 degree weather. His great uncle and aunt tracked that animal for a couple of days. Soon after, when Huntington visited the kill site, there was nothing left. Every scrap of hide, hair, and meat had been packed off and cached. But one big game animal, even one as big as a moose, wasn't enough to keep a trapping operation in meat over the long winter. You needed to deal in numbers. The writer Seth Kantner, who was raised in a dugout in the 1970s near the Kotzebue River in western Alaska, living a lifestyle very closely resembling that of 50 years prior, recalled how his family would go through 15 or more caribou in a single winter in order to feed themselves and their dogs. With caribou, you weren't looking for a single track like you were with moose. You were looking for a huge mass of animals moving across the landscape. When they were in a trapper's vicinity, he knew it and he made the most of it. James Carroll described caribou herds so massive it looked like the mountains were moving and steamboats having to tie up on shore because their captains were too afraid of damaging their stern wheels because the river channel was choked with migrating animals. Evelyn Berglund described, quote, the timber moving with caribou, and, quote, flats that looked like thickets because of the horns. When hunting caribou, you want to get in front of a group of animals as they move across the landscape. This can be a little bit of a game of cat and mouse, as the herds will drift one way and swing back another. Once they were within shooting range of some sourdough hunters, it was typically an all-out volley of fire to see how many they could get down before the herd got away. With big game animals like moose and caribou, you weren't going to drag them out whole, and you weren't going to get far dragging quarters either. My buddies and I regularly weigh the back legs off bull moose, and they average around 110 pounds. to 130 pounds for one leg. Now imagine toting that for 10 miles across Muskeg and Tussock and then having eight more trips to get the rest of the usable parts. You really needed to get your meat to a boat or a sled as quickly and efficiently as you could, especially when you consider that grizzly bears wanted that meat even more than you did and would fight or kill you for it when they found it. And getting meat to a sled or boat, the sourdoughs packed quarters with the hide on, making cuts through the skin to pass a rope through for carrying straps. There are also photos from this time of Elsie and Hazel Berglund packing a bear out on a pole over their shoulders. You have to imagine that they might have done the same to move a pair of moose or caribou quarters. After you got your meat to the river, as with all things in interior Alaska, the job was a lot easier. You could simply put it in your boat and move it to your cabin the same way you'd done with all of your other worldly possessions just a few weeks earlier. In order to prevent the meat from getting too wet along the journey, sourdoughs would stack their quarters on top of bundles of willows placed in the bottom of the boat, another trick we still use today. Temperatures were cold enough by late September or early October that meat stored in a cache would freeze overnight. Trappers would put away their animals in large chunks like that, not all cut up into steaks and roasts, and then they'd bring a chunk at a time into the cabin to thaw out as they needed it. Evelyn Berglund joked that her family, quote, discovered the deep freeze a long time before it became popular in the States. And we didn't have to depend on General Electric for it either. She described bringing a big hunk of moose and caribou inside, letting it thaw out enough to cut stakes, and then laying those stakes out on some canvas and putting them outdoors to let them refreeze for more immediate use. Of course, a trapper couldn't depend on moose and caribou alone. That was especially true because, in addition to feeding themselves, they also had to keep their dogs fed all winter, and they needed a robust supply of bait for their traps. For that, they turned to small game and fish, which they themselves did enjoy on occasion, but these foods played a more significant role in terms of these secondary uses. Rabbits were one source of food that was never overlooked by the trappers, And when they wrote rabbits in their journals, they meant snowshoe hares. They could be easily trapped with wire snares attached to willows or other vegetation. Marshall noted that when snowshoe hare populations were high, it was common to snare 50 in a single day and thousands in a season. He observed that a good harvest of hares made it possible to feed one's dogs almost entirely on them alone. Snowshoe hares also made an ideal bait for just about any type of carnivore in the North Country. Something we'll touch on more in the next chapter. As you might guess, fishing provided another important source of protein for human and dog diets alike. It was a constant chore, though it took on different forms depending on the target species and technique. Salmon fishing was typically done with gill nets, but there were other techniques that proved effective. James Carroll preferred to use a gaff hook to catch chum salmon as they sat on their spawning beds. After laying her eggs, a female salmon will hover over her nest and defend it with reckless abandon, making for easy pickings by anyone trying to snag as much protein as they can. Carroll's gaff hook was obviously effective. He figured about 500 fish was a decent amount for four dogs, and in 1915, he stocked up on 800 chums for his six dogs. Sidney Huntington similarly hoped to catch around 100 salmon for each of his dogs. Most trappers split and dried their salmon the way they observed native Athabascans doing in places like Fort Yukon. This technique involved running your knife down the backbone from just in front of the tail towards the head, and then splitting the head in two. The result is two halves of a salmon held together at one end by the tail. Next, you score the fillets with your knife so that you essentially have a row of strips on each side attached to the skin. The fish can then be hung on a drying rack by its tail, each side balancing the others. Whitefish and suckers were commonly netted. Carroll described setting out a six-foot gill net on floats, and as he said, quote, in no time at all, the floats would be bobbing up and down. The suckers were too bony for Carroll and his partner to eat, so they fed those to the dogs. Northern pike were netted as well, or caught with primitive spinners and spoons. Evelyn Berglund recalled that she and her sisters would take a small poling boat and head upriver, pike fishing their way back down towards the cabin. One of the girls ran a net from the boat as it drifted in the current, while the rest of them worked the riverbanks with fishing poles, targeting weedy patches and swampy sloughs that connected to the main river. She said, quote, Some days we caught 60 or 70 pike with hook and line, and a third that many more with the net. At that time, they needed 20 or so pike to feed their dog teams each day, so a good afternoon fishing like that would only cover them for a few days. Grayling could be caught on dry flies in prodigious numbers. Evelyn Berglund remembered a spot half a mile from their cabin where she and her sisters could catch as many grayling as they could carry in just a couple hours. Later in the season, instead of smoking fish, they would simply let them freeze overnight for preservation. Up the Koyukuk, grayling were so thick that Robert Marshall witnessed the sourdough just killing them with a shovel. That same guy later caught 24 grayling in 25 minutes using a fly and a willow stick as a pole. Frank Glazer simply left a couple fly rods near the creek by his cabin. Anytime he needed a fish, he just had to wander down and pick up as many grayling as he wanted. August fishing expeditions often doubled as scouting trips for berry picking before the first hard frost of the year. Alaska is known as a popular hunting and fishing destination, obviously, but it also has some trophy berry picking all over the state, and the interior is no exception. Lowbush cranberries, blueberries, bearberries, crowberries, and currants were all favorites. Put away for winter, They added variety and flavor to a diet of fish and moose. The Berglunds would cook them down and can them in quart-sized mason jars, more than 100 gallons every year. James Carroll preferred to make as much cranberry jam as he could with whatever sugar he had in his grub steak. In addition to salmon and berries, there were other seasonal opportunities to add variety to one's diet throughout the year. In the spring, When trappers were targeting muskrat, waves of waterfowl heading north for the summer arrived on the Yukon, one of the world's largest breeding grounds for migratory birds. Duck eggs were consumed by dozens. Geese and swans were easy targets for the sourdough shotguns. and accounts suggest that these birds weren't wary at all of human presence. Carol's wife Fanny boiled geese whole and saved the water for a makeshift soup. The trapper Joe Ward's duck preparation technique was rather straightforward. Throw them in a metal drum with some water in it, put it over the fire, and, quote, let them go all night. Similar cooking styles were employed for smaller furred game as well. A trapper named Curtis had a system in which he stuck 10 muskrats in a five-gallon oil can, heads down at the bottom with their tails hanging over the side. He'd fill the can with water and put it on the stove where he let it boil for an hour. At that point, he flipped the muskrats so they were boiling heads up and tails down. After another half hour of boiling, He added some flour to the can in order to make a thick white gravy. Those 10 muskrats were his food for three days. At breakfast, lunch, and dinner, Curtis forked a whole muskrat out of the can, dressed it with his special gravy, and savored every bite. Behind Curtis' stove was a pile of muskrat bones described by an observer as being as big as a large muskrat house. The old trapper loved it so much, he took sacks of dried muskrat downriver with him to eat all summer while he was in town. Even though James Carroll described Curtis' muskrat oil can delicacy with some degree of skepticism or mild disgust, He was not averse to muskrat, noting that eight muskrat tails with a piece of bannock is a solid meal for a hungry trapper. And other trappers ate muskrats as well. The anthropologist Robert McKinnon described a similar cooking method used by a group of trappers on the Tanana. Claws and heads still on, and still with rings of fur around their feet, the muskrats were laid in a pan of grease and thrown in an oven. McKinnon described the scene with some horror. Quote, out they came, nice and brown to be sure, but looking frightfully alive to me. The huge incisor teeth gave a diabolical grin to the head. Indeed, the whole picture was much the same as though a fire had swept through a cavalry. He noted that the rats were so greasy, a shared rag to wipe one's fingers was constantly being passed around the crew. Some trappers were no doubt pickier eaters than others, and that dividing line was often determined by the type of animal. Bear, for instance, split opinion sharply. Robert Marshall noted that only about half of the white people he met up the Koyukuk would eat bear meat willingly if nothing else was available. James Carroll, however, incorporated it into his diet regularly. He noted that he never brought any bacon or lard out on his trapline as he figured he would be able to kill a bear and make his own. He described the best-tasting bear as a year-old black bear that had been fattened on berries. Ideally, its stomach contents looked like cranberry jam when you cut it open. Link's provoked an even more visceral divide, one that definitely had less to do with taste than with psychology. At one point, a trapper named Fred served a group of fellow sourdoughs steaks made from Link's burger, so basically burgers, Link's burger patties, but was reluctant to tell his companions what they were eating. The men all agreed that it was delicious, but once they found out Fred had fed them links, they wouldn't touch the meat he served at breakfast the next morning. Carol didn't share their squeamishness, noting that fat links were good to eat as long as they were fresh. If left in a trap too long, they were no good. If you could stomach the idea of eating a cat, Carol observed, Lynx makes for a nice pot roast. This variation in what a man could stomach extended beyond me entirely. Some trappers just needed more variety and more civilized fare than others. Even though he ate bears and lynx without a second thought, Carol, like other trappers, kept a long list of grocery items they considered indispensable. But at one point, Curtis, the guy with a taste for muskrat, offered Carol what he called his extras or his store-bought grub steak and didn't want anything in return. Carol realized that his neighbor just plain didn't want the stuff. The contrast is telling. Where Carol and others needed certain store-bought items to feel provisioned, Curtis was content with rats and flour alone, and, as Carol observed, seemed to relish it. Whether a man needed variety or could get by on the bare minimum, the underlying problem was the same. All of it had to be stored somewhere before the season began. The results of all that fishing and hunting and food preservation ended up in a trapper's cache. Or more accurately, a trapper's caches, plural, because each of his line cabins would need to be stocked up with food so he wouldn't go hungry while running his lines that winter. This brings us back to the importance of food security. The cache was a physical manifestation of the need to always have something tucked away from when times got lean. The need for a cache was necessitated by the fact that the trappers themselves weren't the only hungry carnivores roaming the interior. Bears certainly could get into your food storage, as they still do today, but the one animal that loomed largest in trappers' minds was the wolverine. Any account from this period describes the wolverine and its propensity to ravage your precious food supplies, ruin hard-earned furs, and generally get into your stuff and raise hell in a way that makes it seem like a sworn enemy of the Yukon trapper. Wolverines were known to rip the stovepipe out of an unoccupied cabin in order to gain access and then destroy everything inside. The results were compared to the type of damage that could only otherwise be achieved by a group of soldiers, or as one account puts it, quote, all the fiends of hell. James Carroll called the wolverine a natural-born thief that wouldn't touch an easy meal left out in the open, as if Carroll figured the animal suspected a trick, but would work its ass off to get into a highly suspicious secured cache just for the satisfaction of stealing its contents. A wolverine once made off with Carol's own double-bitted axe, apparently mistaking the blood on the blade for something edible, and packed it 300 yards into the brush before dropping it. When Robert Marshall lost most of the moose he'd shot the previous fall to a wolverine, he blamed the inadequacy of the cache. There was an understanding that anyone stocking up for the winter without a secure cache was asking for trouble. I'll tell you a story that illustrates just how seriously trappers took their caches and how they could mean the literal difference between life and death. In early December of 1943, a U.S. military aircraft, a B-24 bomber, was flying with a crew of five over a tributary of the Yukon when one of its engines failed. At 25,000 feet, the plane entered a violent spiral before tipping into a nosedive from which it would not recover and burrowing into a mountainside. I've seen the wreckage from the air that is still there. Only one of the crew members, co-pilot Leon Crane, survived, having somehow jumped through the bomb bay doors with a parachute before the aircraft impacted the ground in a fiery explosion. Crane then found himself alone in waist-deep snow. He was only equipped with a pocket knife, two packs of matches, and his parachute. After nine days of waiting at the crash site, Hoping for a rescue party, he decided he needed to take matters into his own hands. After a day of following the nearby river, the Charlie River, he came across a trapper's cabin in an elevated cache. There he found food, a rifle, and moose hide mittens. He stayed at the cabin for a week, attempting to recover from the frostbite that had set in on his hands and feet. After some additional exploration in hopes of finding a village, he discovered other cabins and caches. Finally, after weeks of isolation in the frozen interior, Crane set out for good in early February. When his supplies nearly ran out, he stumbled upon yet another trapper's cabin and cache. On March 10, he cut the trail of a dog sled crossing the river and followed it into the timber. Shortly thereafter, he encountered a native trapper, Al Ames, who helped Crane make his way via dog sled to the mining camps on Woodchopper Creek where there was a roadhouse. More than 11 weeks after the crash and long given up for dead, Leon Crane was finally able to radio for help. Later, Crane in fact met the man whose cabin had initially saved his life. Phil B. Rail, an old trapper and miner who had come north as a young man in 1904, who spent his winters running a trap line up near the headwaters of the Charlie River. Leon Crane also happened to meet Evelyn Bergland. Yes, the same Evelyn Bergland who we've been talking about this whole time, who was waiting for the plane at Woodchopper. she actually flew with the stranded airman back to Fairbanks, where she gave birth at the end of March. Although it was a fortunate stroke of luck that led Leon Crane to that cache and cabin on the Charlie River, it would not have been unthinkable to an experienced trapper like Phil B. Rail that someone he'd never met might need to use it. there was an unspoken understanding among the sourdoughs that the sheer danger of their environment made it possible, even likely, that the best equipped, most wood-savvy trapper would someday find himself in a pickle that was out of his control. And it was difficult to judge someone for being in a situation that you knew yourself would eventually find yourself in. Anyone who spent time in interior Alaska was painfully aware that of how desperate things could get. As a result, there was a culture of hospitality and reciprocity among the sourdoughs. Frank Glazer noted that he never locked his trapping cabin at Savage River. Any trapper passing through could stop by, even if Frank wasn't home, and eat some of his food and get out of the weather. Nothing ever went missing, Glazer claimed, and typically his visitors would split some kindling and leave it by the wood stove, a gesture that acknowledged the mutual dependency of two lone trappers out in the wilderness. Evelyn Berglund noted that there was, in her words, quote, a kind of a law which nobody ever broke. that if anyone stopped overnight in someone else's cabin, he always left a note saying who he was and what he had taken, if anything. Some trappers would keep a diary near the door for this purpose, and so a stranger passing through would know where they were staying, paper and pencils being in short supply. It was not uncommon for a trapper to use the protruding lead bullet at the tip of a. 22 cartridge as a makeshift writing instrument. It was also taboo among the sourdoughs to kill a porcupine unless you were really in need. The rationale was that porcupines were so easy to kill, even with just a stick, that they were the perfect target for a hungry trapper. especially one who might be out of ammo. Like all things in interior Alaska, the origins of that porcupine tradition boiled down to the rhythms of scarcity and abundance. In a land of feast and famine, the slightest and most innocent lapses in judgment could lead to the most mightily horrific sets of circumstances.