Ep. 948: MeatEater’s American History: The Alaskans

This is an iHeart podcast, Guaranteed Human. Hey, you might ask, do you need camel on your feet in camp? And I'd say need probably not. There are generally no deer in camp. If you got deer in your camp, I want to hear about it, because that sounds like a sweet camp. But still, we made two shoes with Haydude in first light specter camel anyway, not because you need it just because it's cool. The wally funk and the wally slip camp, because it's the pattern we love and we wanted something comfortable and ultra lightweight for when we're done hunting, okay? Out now at haydude.com and the meat eater store, it's a limited run, so get your feet cozy now. This is the meat eater podcast coming at you shirtless severely, boat bitten, and in my case, underwearless. 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-L-I-T-E dot com. All right, everybody, it's that time of year when you get the 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. The good stuff. The good stuff. Yeah, the good stuff. The stuff that makes your brain, that makes your head tingle. 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. 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. Yeah. And this is a service we provide where we give you, this is the freebie version. Every time we come out with the Meteor's American History series, we do like the freebie version, where you can listen. And then we're going to tell you the basic gist of the, it's, we're going to kind of tell you like the history of Alaska between two, two special dates. And then if you're titillated, yes, if it grabs you by the shorts, good enough. And we're going to tease you. Then you go listen to the whole full ball's deal. I've talked about the, I'm going to explain the setup, I'm going to explain the premise. And in apologies to people that have heard the premise of me, Eater's American History bunch of times, but I'm going to explain the premise. The premise is in this, in this series and, and, 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 that were defined by certain well-known frontier personalities. As an example, and this is when we talked about many times because it's the first one we did, the first meet Eater's American history did was the long hunters. And the long hunters covered the colonial deer skin trade and often through the story of Daniel Boone, okay, where here's, here's this, he was a professional deer hunter. He supplied the deer skin market. And that long hunter series ran from 1763, so I 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. So this is like pre-contin boom, it was the number two thing, getting shipped, hundreds of thousands, getting shipped out of that colony was white tail deer skins, 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 US, Lewis and Clark were dispatched out to explore the area. On their, 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. 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. We argued that the long hunter era ended with the American Revolution for geopolitical reasons. But at the same time was humming along this idea that these guys were literally a limit, like not, not, not extra painting, but, but putting a herd on, putting a herd on, putting a herd on white tail deer numbers as they marched westward to the point where commercially hunting those areas became not viable. 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. 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. As they call them, hunting camps, and the hunting camps had grown, grown, grown, grown, and then people were pretty soon are planning 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 collapse 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. And 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. They were 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 embargoes and trade got really complicated, and also the deer were kind of gone. With the Hide Hunters, it's one thing and one thing only. And the market didn't crash. 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 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 the Hide Hunters, we were kind of kicking around these different options of like, what should we work on next? And Randall, I'd like you to try to reminisce a little bit. For a while, we were going to jump into the Bird Hunters. Yeah. We were going to do the Bird Hunters, like commercial, waterfowl hunting, both for meat, like sold in restaurants and butcher shops, but also the plume trade, where they're shooting exotic shorebirds for feathers that are being used in hats, supplying, I believe, I think it's the military industry as hat makers. Yeah. So they're supplying. 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 consumptive industries have, it led to the creation of the first national wildlife refuge down in Florida, Pelican Island, I believe, and it led to new laws to protect shorebirds and other wildlife like. So if you're looking, 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. Yeah. The downside to doing the bird. I want to hear your down. Yeah. I have two, I have two personal downsides, but I want to hear, why couldn't you get excited about it? 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 would pull 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, having shootouts, like it's risky business. Yeah. I mean, one of the things that I thought about each other, there were shootouts in the bird hunter's story, but it's like warden's shooting at poachers, right? Yeah. Because you kind of after conservation laws get in place and you have these early enforcement efforts, then it becomes a riskier business. But one of the things that we've focused on throughout the first three 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, had now, you know, killing whatever they're killing. And then they're, they're sitting around at 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. 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, like personally appealing aspects of these stories, which is the wilderness survival and just people enduring terrible, terrible shit, you know, I don't want to sound glib, like 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 term. Great. Great term pipe troubadour song. Yeah. They got, they got like the bird hunters. Sure. There was, I couldn't think of a cool name for it. Mm-hmm. It really like set you at a place. Yeah. Um, and the other, the big thing was like, you're saying it wasn't, it's not a frontier story. Mm-hmm. 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. Mm-hmm. 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 think that, like, because 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, it, we'll match that. Yeah. Shootout rich though. The Long Hunters. Yeah. The Long Hunters. There's a lot of death, a lot of dying. A lot of violence. Same for hide Hunters too, at least, like on the southern plains, especially in Texas. 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, we're not, no, that's my, that's my, next thing I was going to ask you, like, walk everyone through, um, walk everyone through, that what is the period of history in Alaska? It's a big window. Mm-hmm. But like, walk everyone through, when, when we think about Alaska and like this formative period of Alaska, and what was going on in Alaska, what people through what, where we landed. Yeah, so we, so it's called the Alaskans, but obviously it's, it's referring to a specific group of Alaskans, um, and, 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 region, who, uh, lived as full-time fur trappers in the first few decades of the 20th century in Alaska, supplying fine fur's to fur years 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, of unparalleled, um, 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, the sort of the aristocrat like Gatsby types at, at like a cocktail party. And they're all wearing these very over the top for, uh, accessories, I mean, fur coats, but also like mink stalls, 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. And so there's this, and, and I'm sort of skirting around 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. Yeah. And there's, so there's like this really interesting sort of duality that is at the core 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's something that, um, oftentimes seems out of sync, meaning these wildlife things combine these different worlds. So, so for instance, with the colonial deer skin trade, you think of a buckskin clad guy like Daniel Boone, but he's shooting deer and those shoot those deer wind up being, could wind up being white leather pants, worn by the aristocracy, worn by the king of England, captured in a portrait painted of some, you know, dandy, you know, posing with his, he's got the pattern with, 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. Um, and so there's, there's this difference, like this guy living in a, you know, in a, in a little half, in a little dugout shelter, maybe he's got a Elm bark over his head and he's hunting deer and those deer are being worn by people far away. The, the same thing occurs with like 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, um, people in Boston, people in New York, like fine hats, yeah, people in London, people in Paris, far away. The, the, the Buffalo trade is like, they're shooting an animal. It's, it's being used to drive the industrial revolution, leather belting, but with the elaskas, excuse me, with the elaskas, it was something kind of like, I don't know, it just struck me more when I read about these, these trap, these frontier trappers from the early decades of the 1900s that, the imagery of who they're supplying. is so fresh in your mind because we watch, 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. Yeah. But your whole life you've been watching mobster movies, alcohol and 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. 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 can 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 20s, the 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 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 it just became remarkable. But then we and and I'd like 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? Blood Trails is a true crime podcast born in the outdoors, hunting trips, remote cabins, quiet mornings in the woods, places people go to get away. But instead, get more than they bargained for. And then all of a sudden, my buddy is reading back and saying, you know, we're hit on bring guns. I believe someone at the cabin knew something happened to know who throws their dead family member in a suburban and drives him straight to the funeral home. The husband of this dead wife immediately calling his mistress from the funeral home. When Brian finally gave up the body, his body was found on my turkey lease. So for four or five or six years, I sat probably within a hundred yards of Mike's body. Murder, disappearance, betrayal, and questions that refuse to stay buried. I'm Jordan Sillers and this is Blood Trails. Get season three now wherever you listen to podcasts. Plus check out the brand new Blood Trails TV YouTube channel. There, you can find video versions of every episode that feature images from each story, recorded interviews, maps, and much more. We'll also be dropping bonus content between seasons. So make sure you're subscribed. That's at Blood Trails TV on YouTube. There's a whole thing behind him, meaning that he was one of a type, right? And so part of this story, then, when we think about the Alaskans is wondering, like, are these just anecdotes? Are these couple of people here and there? And they happen to write some great memoirs. 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 and time in this place. And so 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 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 this was like a golden era of American trapping. There's ups and down because we were looking at such a long window, and I'll talk about that. 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. The market fluctuates a little bit, but you could go out. You know, if you're someone in the lower 48 and you don't have 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 steak and go out and make a living as a wilderness fur trapper. In the 1920s, you know, and beyond and beyond because this world also didn't necessarily collapse. And maybe I'll talk about the dates now, but you could go out and make a good yeah, you had the potential to make a good living. We talked 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, yeah, 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 four dollars 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 were going to fact, you make a dollar a day. If you're Buffalo hide hunter, you sell Buffalo highs 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 but it doesn't work. No, it doesn't work out. 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. And he really made his rep, he sort of lived 10 different lives in Alaska, but he came up to Alaska at the age of 26, I believe, in 1915. 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, a government wolf hunter and trapper. And that was sort of really how he made his name. 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. Um, so yeah, like there was real opportunity there. Um, and this is a time, we can, this is a time when fur exports out of Alaska are competitive against timber exports, competitive against mineral exports, competitive against fisheries exports. Yeah. It was a major business. And so I guess at this point, we've kind of been dancing around the dates. So, 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 he's a couple indigenous guides or companions discovered gold, that was all ended up in San Francisco, sent back on ships, and it triggered this massive stampede to the Klondike Gold Fields. Now the Klondike is in Canada, and the way they're accessing this area at that time is you take a steamer up, like Skagway, Southeast Alaska, and you climb over the coast mountains and get to the headwaters of the Yukon, which are in Canada. And then they're floating down to the Gold Fields, and you have this huge explosion of settlement and all 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, and not all of them make it when they get there, not all of them actually get into mining some, you know, end up working odd jobs, some end up like opening a saloon, things like that. 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 on downstream, 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 between-- Yeah, we make just geographically, we make the point here that you can imagine Alaska, a good way to start understanding Alaska, topography, geography, whatever is the 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 like the Alaska range, being out of layer of the cave, and then south of the Alaska range, being, that's like a five layer cake, or you can imagine as a three layer cake, and it's stuff that, by watershed, stuff that flows north, basically, roughly, I mean, this is all very very weird, but yeah, basically if rain falls in Alaska or snow melts in Alaska, if it's north of the Brooks, Brooks range, it's rolling out to the Arctic sea. Yeah, both for the Arctic Ocean, whatever, in between the Alaska 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. Yeah, and then south of the Alaska range, they get messier, but the Susitna is a big one out going out to cook inlet, and then, but basically what we're looking at in this story is that that center of the cake. Yeah, I should, 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 yeah, this is about the, the, the, the layer everybody wants, man, the middle layer of the cake. The middle layer, and it's the Yukon, it's the, it's called interior Alaska, and it's, 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, all the way from Nome, which is near the mouth of the Yukon, Fairbanks, there's smaller strikes up the Koyakuk. There's, there's strikes in 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 river systems in the lower 48. 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 fur, and, 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, one of the guys we, 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, 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 if within a year, more or less, he's just a full-time fur trapper. Yeah. There's a, there's a family that we look at, the Bergland family, and there's two brothers who come up in 1898, Oscar and George Bergland, they, 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 a woman named Maud, and then they all went back up to the interior, and George and Maud then raised a family in the interior as trappers. And, and the, 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, around the home cabin, but they, they end up just being as bad ass as any trapper that we've, we've covered in this series. So, there's, another one is Sydney Huntington, and Sydney Huntington is an interesting one. He, 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 Sydney and Jimmy are both the products of this collision of, I don't know, collision of cultures is the right term because it's there's not a ton of conflict between the, the native at the basking people and, yeah, hold that thought for me because I want to, I want to talk to them. Yeah, but, but again, in each of those stories, like the burgl, James Carroll, the Berglins, the Huntington's, like all of those origin points stem from this discovery of gold that drew people 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. You know, it's an interesting parallel that didn't even occur to me till right now. How many, how many, how many, Lewis and Clark is like about 40 people? Yeah, the expedition. It's kind of, it's, 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. I mean, at least immediately, one of them, John Colter is like, I'm going back. Yeah. And there's a similar thing with like, when you think about the Alaska and the gold rush, is perhaps for, I think we have some better concrete numbers in here, but it was like 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. I mean, if that, you know, it's like this, this, it's almost like a funnel, right? Or I guess that I'm not coming up with the right. There's, there's this huge number of people that come up. Some of them don't even make it because the journey's 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. Yeah. And not all of them give, I mean, this is another, another point to where we sort of need to draw a distinction between the laskins 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. 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. You know, I mean, Captain Cook came and explored the coleslaw of Alaska. The Russians had been fur trading around sea otters and other belts 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, in this case, native Alaska and Alaska native presence in the landscape. But it's what brought in it initiated like 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 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 you living on the landscape. And they turned to a form of like a subsistence lifestyle. They turned 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 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. Yeah. Yeah. And it's kind of like the first, not this maybe isn't the right analogy, but it's kind of like the beach head. It's like that. The Klondy gold rush is the moment that people from the outside start pouring into the interior and unprecedented numbers. And it begins this whole sort of this evolutionary process by which people from the outside adapt themselves to that environment and figure out how to make a living. It's 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, okay. 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 100%. Yeah. Like the first whites to go into those areas are going into hunt deer. Out of that activity becomes farmers, people engage in other industries, but it was like they were there first. The Rocky Mountains, the first whites to really push in to all these remote areas of the Rockies are going there to trap. Out of their activities comes immigrants and settlers and people establishing agriculture and ski resorts and factories and craft brews. And here's an interesting one where 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. And out of that, instead of the hunters and trappers being sort of the forebears, they're kind of the afterwards. Blood Trails is a true crime podcast born in the outdoors. Hunting trips, remote cabins, quiet mornings in the woods. Places, people go to get away, but instead get more than they bargained for. I believe someone at the cabin knew something happened to know. Who throws their dead family member in a suburban and drives him straight to the funeral home. I'm Jordan Sillers, and this is Blood Trails. Plus, check out the brand new Blood Trails TV YouTube channel. That's @BloodTrailsTV on YouTube. We've sort of covered this throughout the discussion, but there's a lot of weight. 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, we might not necessarily have had to put an end date on our story if it weren't for 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. 41 is obviously when Japan attacks the United States at Pearl Harbor and the United States enters the Second World War. There's several reasons why that upends the world that these these trappers are living in. One is all of a sudden the gut, the federal governments are supporting 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 illusion campaign. This is the thing not widely understood. There were combat operations in the illusions doing World War II. Yeah, there's an amphibious, amphibious assault where American forces retook part of Alaska from the Japanese. Yeah, I'll allow me on the subject because if you're if you're a big World War II guy and you go and look at like 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. Guadalcanal, Okinawa, Iwojima. Like our play was we can't just go and vade 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 that was the strategy. It's like the island hopping. But think about that we weren't the only ones doing this. Japan as well is 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. At to Kisca, these islands in the illusion and we're going to go bomb them bass as a San Francisco. And so there's this huge that 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, 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 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. Sydney 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. Yeah, because his adusors can make anything. Yeah, yeah, buy themselves. 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. - Yeah, tearing outwards apart, putting them back together, fabricating components, and they come down to the list, and they're like, "Body, you're going into like the trades, man." - Yeah, and so you see, I mean, you see in some of these studies of the area, they talk about 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 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 there's a huge renaissance in the '70s, and there's a ton of great memoirs and books of people who've 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, like World War II catalyzes this huge advancement in aviation, manufacturing, aerospace technology, and trains a huge number of pilots, and so general aviation, meaning like private aviation, people flying small planes around, that existed in Alaska before 1941, like the real pioneer aviators, definitely predate World War II, like 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 and general and in Alaska, is like 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 Super Cub, the Cub is the plane that almost every World War II aviator is learning to fly in, and so after the war, 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, 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. - Yeah, there's a crazy thing that I didn't know as 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, it was two soldiers who had learned that the US, in the lead up to the war, the US had started a civilian pilot training program, 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 learn to fly even if they weren't necessarily going to be flying a must and it was flying a potential growth in pilots. - And so, yeah, 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, so they rent a pair of supercubs, I'm sorry, a pair of cubs, and go for a flight scene tour, and then they're actually shot down by Mitsubishi Zeroes 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, which. - Flight scene tour in a cub. - 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 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. So there's sort of like a poetic symmetry there. - Yeah, we talk about in the piece on Alaska, and we talk about, we begin one of the chapters I'm talking about, that there is a, every generation will tell you what ruined Alaska, okay. The bush plane ruined Alaska. It's always from some perspective. The snowmobile ruined Alaska. Satellite communications ruined Alaska. - Whatever, there's always something ruined, yes. - Yeah. - I don't want to use the word ruined, but undeniably it was World War II in the events around World War II, in the events surrounding World War II that like didn't ruin it, but stripped away. We still call it the last frontier, but mostly stripped away its frontier persona. It's frontier reality. And you just talked about like the World War II of it all, but in an off-shoot, like an outcome of World War II was the Cold War, right? And so not only were we using Alaska to supply the Russians in fighting the Nazis, but even after we beat the Nazis, we'll ask a transition to transition immediately to a front lines. - Yeah, to an area of enormous strategic importance in holding off the Red Menace. - Yeah. If Russia's gonna invade, where are they gonna invade from? Right? And so all of a sudden it became like airfields, bomber squads, early warning devices, running a highway, whether forecasting, 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 onto the global consciousness as a place of enormous geopolitical significance. And it just changed the place. - It really like, prior to World War II, Alaska was an American territory, and it was sort of floating out there, like you see on a map that doesn't include all of North America. Alaska's just sort of floating out there, right? But World War II really cemented a brand new type of link between the American mainland and Alaska. And even the Alcan highway, like the physical linkage between the US 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. It sounds funny, that would have been unable to pinpoint it that a year prior would have been unable to show you where it was on a map. - Yeah. - It was on the periphery of American consciousness, but it was not the center of American consciousness. - Yeah, and so I think like you can make a various, and that's what we're doing ultimately in telling history is you're making an argument about the past, right? And you're interpreting the evidence. And so I think our argument is that World War II marked the end of an era for trapping in the interior of Alaska, even though trapping in the interior didn't obviously end with World War II. - Yep. - And I feel it didn't begin with the Klondike. - Right, and so I feel like we've covered a lot of this except for that trapping part. And so maybe at this point, like we want to flesh out what this lifestyle looked like on the ground. - Yeah, yeah, let's talk about 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 I always put it in the context of these other areas. Like if you go into 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 form 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 Mount Man era was generally brigades of guys that did not know each other, 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 perfer basis and that drove the economy. Buffalo hide hunters were these small organizations where you had like kind of a principal figure. He owned 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. They would go out and shoot Buffalo. He would pay them their day rates. He would pay them percentages on the take and it was his business. And he wasn't backed by corporate interests the way Mount Early Mountain and 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 and trading posts 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 steak or a steak. And he would need to go and get to join in the biz to become a frontiersman. He would need to go and get a year's worth of, almost a year's worth of supplies, a winner'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, pulling whatever, your watercraft, oftentimes homemade watercraft. - Yeah. - 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 winner travel was done by sled dog. That's an important thing because 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 upper 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 trap and 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 neat. 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 gonna go out and run traps. And then you'd 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 gonna 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 to cash where bears couldn't get at it. Mm-hmm. 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. What were they trapped before? They were trapped in for Martin. They were trapped in for Lynx. They were trapped in for Wolf. They were trapped in 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 were trapped enormous numbers of muskrats. Yeah. 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 and 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 and ain't tomorrow. Yeah. And it wasn't yesterday, right? There's a bunch of care we were 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 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 we're slowly and very deliberately working your way through that stock pile until the next window of abundance. Hunting trips, remote cabins, quiet mornings in the woods, places people go to get away. And then all of a sudden, my buddy is radioing back and saying, you know, we're hit on bring guns. So for four or five or six years, I sat probably within a hundred yards of my body. - Dearly in Apple at like in Kentucky. Whitetail deer resources were so good. The 10 or 20 long hunters could go into an area and kind of hunt off different directions 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. 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 mornings, 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, When they had it, when they went up to these areas to trap To get there. They're reliant on open water. Mm-hmm 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 break up So once you got there and things locked up you could do these extraordinary dogs led trips and people did in emergencies Avley Norma's 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 break up in the spring and In that spring break up 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. Mm-hmm You'd go in you'd pay back the guy that fronted you you'd not not cash you'd come in with your furs and You'd settle up and you'd wind up Generally, this is like this is what happens so these market hunters also happens to frontier guys You come down and you get like if you're lucky, you got a balance. Mm-hmm. You're positive some money What did they do with the money? Did they and did they invest it in Roth IRAs? Did they like did they did they going by stock? No, they generally Drink Mm-hmm. 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 as we can do they would later marvel about I don't understand What happened to my money. Yeah, I have my money. There's a yeah, there's And then in the summer they're working odd jobs basically until they can go out and trap again and make real money Yeah, you know, they're cutting firewood or Tending a garden and selling vegetables in town. Yeah, there may be they're going out and looking for gold But a lot of them got into the freight business. Yeah, like hauling freight up and down to different mining because they already had a boat Yeah, 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 mining camp there. So these guys have boats. They have knowledge of the rivers They know how to run them and so they'll 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 the Reese I think it's James Cale describes like in the spring time 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 in would be and they're all greeting one another and say how's your season? You know how'd you do out there? Mm-hmm, 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 of you made another year and some of these guys we 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 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 and it's 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. Yeah, it's captured Yeah, someone later tells somebody you get you died here or there 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. Yeah That's not what you get in the interior of Alaska when somebody's out trapping by themselves for months on end Yep, it's they they go through the ice Mm-hmm. They're boat capsizes. Whatever. Yeah, and it just winds up being that they're just missing Someone found their canoe in a place it wasn't supposed to be they'd ever saw him again. You know 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, no, what happens is there's still there's a couple of them where the the the scene or the evidence is Leads you to a fairly compelling explanation of what happened 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 Eight 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 will never know Yeah, there's a thing too that in this in this time The thing you see less of earlier is I think the darkness and the loneliness. Yeah um You see the emergence of I should say the emergence said I don't think it was always lacking but we encounter References to suicides. Mm-hmm Within this story. Yeah a guy that puts a snare around his neck cooks the other end of the snare to a to a dog team Mm-hmm and has this dog team take off Um some strange things like that that you wonder about that loneliness and that cold But I want to touch. I think about this this this this annual life cycle is When these guys are coming down And during one 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 Mm-hmm but The the towns and the trading posts in 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 Um, and you go in there expecting you're gonna be eating this and eating that and eating this But the place hasn't been supplied yet. Yeah the boats coming up river with all the store goods haven't made it there yet Yeah, there was a guy we talked about here There was a guy that wouldn't 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's 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 then 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 you see within this era um It earlier Randall started talking about it. I kind of paused amongst I wanted to touch on it is All of these other errors we've spoken about are marked by extraordinary conflict Between a merit 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 caused tons of friction Right The the mount men are fighting that like like the number one cause of death for mount men is absolutely the black feet hide hunters Comanche Right But here you have and you should talk about it a bit because you kind of you spend a lot of time researching this as we worked on this project Here you have a really different um Engagement yeah Between whites and native Alaskans And I think one one thing that we haven't pointed out yet is that The the native people along the Yukon Had actually gotten into the fur trade before all these guys arrived. Mm-hmm. So the Hudson's Bay Company actually established an outpost Um That would become Fort Yukon uh the the town That sort of the heart of this trading Network And they began buying furs from from the native people of the area who were Athabascan um And and so when Would be gold prospectors or would be gold miners arrived with the Klondike gold rush They're sort of entering an area that had already been remade by the fur trade And trapping was a way of life and 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 they're in some ways they're sort of adopting The this lifestyle that had already been, that had already evolved before their arrival. And like I mentioned Sidney Huntington and Jimmy Huntington, they're the, the sons of a gold rusher and an at the Baskin woman. They, their father, James Huntington, was not the only sort of cross-cultural 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, and spend their time, like 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, that you have Robert Marshall, the, the wilderness advocate, as we best know him, but he traveled to interior Alaska in the late 20s, early 30s and sort of wrote about it from an anthropological sense. There are other anthropologists who go up in the 20s and 30s to study this place. And what's striking to me is oftentimes they'd be describing, oh, you know, we met this trap or named Jimmy, say, and he told us the story and, and he stayed for dinner and whatever. And oftentimes you don't know if that person is native or non-native if they're, if they're, you know, Euro-American ancestry or if they're at the Baskin, until it's actually specified by, by the observer. And that's, I guess, I bring up Marshall and these other anthropologists, because from an outsider's perspective, 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 not a problem when you're reading about the mountain man era. Yeah, you know, exactly. Exactly. Any story for the mountain man area? It's abundantly clear. Yeah. Who's white? And who's Indian? And they're living, they're living very similar lives in terms of their, their annual calendar. I mean, a lot of what the, a lot of what the sourdoughs, a lot of what the Alaskans are doing as trappers, they've learned from at the Baskin culture, like the cash hiding all of your food on an elevated platform, so that bears and wolverines and other critters don't get your foodstuffs. That's something they learn from at the Baskin people, the way that they're splitting their fish and drying their fish and, and storing the salmon for winter and feeding their dogs. Like that's all stuff that they're picking up from at the Baskin 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, there's no, like Indian wars as we see on the great plains. Yeah, that's, it's just a very different. Yeah, it's a very different, just context when it comes to native and non-native relations. I don't want to, I don't want to brush over or pass up that Alaska has its fair share of atrocities. Oh, yeah. Yeah. The atrocities, when I say that, like with the Russians or others, the atrocities, like the massacres, are wound up being a coastal phenomena. And it was, 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, of native villages on the coast of Alaska, getting artillery barrageous, 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 atrocity where we're like European diseases were killing enormous numbers, influenza, killing enormous numbers of native Alaska. And so I'm not trying to act like this, this is a place where white culture, 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, it was relative to other frontier collisions. It was remarkably harmonious, relative to other relative to the American West. Yeah. Relative to Apple Latch, 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. And again, it's just you run into it again and again, as you're reading individual stories on the ground that this is a world of of intermexture between, you know, it's not like a segregated world. 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 that's one of the things that 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 how he became a man and how he learned who he was. But then he goes on to this, this long, long life where he's a very respected elder. He's a very accomplished individual. 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. Yeah. Hit me with one of your favorite from this era. Hit me with one or two of your favorite anecdotes before we go into a sample chapter. Hmm. 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 first. And one of the unexpected things that we highlight in here is the 1920s are really the era of one modern advertising, meaning you're not just listing an item by its qualities 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, dude, shoes, you know, like, it's trying, like, 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 a woman is only as beautiful as the fur on her shoulders is an ad that you see in the 20s, right? And then at the same time, too, this is the dawn of the age of consumer lending where, you know, previously like you had, you know, you could go to a store and you'd sort of have a revolving credit account, something like that. But this is an age where you could go out 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, it makes accessible to, you know, work-a-day folks. 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 and connecting those to like the advertising and the credit to someone like James Carroll being able to make this primitive frontier life workout was really, I think for me, that was one of the things that I kind of made me giddy. And it's not as exciting as someone getting charged by a bear, but I like, I'll do a bear one. - Okay. (laughs) - That was digging. Evelyn Bergland and her sisters come back to the cabin one night and the doors are jar, and they can hear something in there, and they say it sounds sort of like ice gates on the floor, and they realize it's bear claws on the walking round on the wood floor of their cabin. They go in and it's all trashed, and she gets the gun and she pokes her head in, and 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. - Yeah, that's brilliant. - So there's a lot of like really, and here's another Evelyn Bergland line. Evelyn Bergland sure is her married name later that her memoir is published under, but she describes, talk 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 re-freeze, 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, and we didn't have to thank GE for it. - Yeah. - So she's a really clever writer, so that was a fun one. One of the ones that most like doing the research, one of the things that I hit on, I knew would be in here and would have to be in here, is the guy, James Carroll, who like, early job of his was as a camp cook and lumber camp. 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, okay, yeah. - And he would use a fork to flip everything, and he would flip something, and he had a nervous, whatever, where he would flip something, and then stand there and comb his mustache with the fork. (laughing) - There's a lot between flips. - We have a whole section of like, these descriptions of these cooks at the different roadhouses. And one guy, his biscuits always had cat footprints on them because to 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. - To walk, paw around and then lay down and sleep on the bread. He describes another guy. He would go in, he would actually cross the international border 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 sledding boat and go trap across the border. And you'd have to find a county, a Canadian county, to like check in and tell me you were going into Canada. - Yeah. - But he would trap near this old, like real rugged old guy, 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 an oil can 'cause the oil can't 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. 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 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 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, the eight muskrats. And the guy gave him his supplies. Like he just felt more comfortable not having them. - He said, "Take my extras." - You know, which is just like his coffee and sugar. - Yeah, he just, he just, he just liked it. - Simple man, he just liked it simple. And it was, and again, to juxtapose that with the roaring 20s gangster mile dressed in fur. - Yeah. - You know, and like, where was the fur coming from? It was coming from that guy. - Yeah. - No, it's really interesting. - Like the rich story that it is. - It's a really, really interesting chapter in this American frontier history that I knew nothing about going into it and the more and more I read, the more it just like brought me joy and fascinated me. - Tee up the chapter. We're gonna, so we're gonna share a preview of a chapter from the Alaskans, which is available anywhere. You get your audiobooks, Apple Books, Audible. You can listen on Spotify, Premium. This is, this is chapter, it's called Feast and Famine. And it is about sort of the annual cycle of food acquisition and storage and preparation and, and also the lag thereof. - And also the lag thereof. When things go bad, they go real bad. - Yeah. So enjoying again, meat eaters American history, the Alaskans, 1896, to 1941. Thank you. - Blood Trails is a true crime podcast born in the outdoors, hunting trips, remote cabins, quiet mornings in the woods. Places, people go to get away. - And then all of a sudden, my buddy is radioing back and saying, you know, we're hit, bring guns. - Who throws their dead family member in a suburban and drives him straight to the funeral home. - When Brian finally gave up the body, his body was found on my turkey lease. I'm Jordan Cillars, and this is Blood Trails. Get season three now, wherever you listen to podcasts. Chapter five, 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 learn to recognize that rhythm and the abide by it were the ones who lived to sea 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 sourdoles 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 trappers 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 Horne. Hornby and 28-year-old Harold Adlerd in a acquaintance of Hornby. The party's destination was a patch of spruce trees along the Phelan 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 the hunt or 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 cabin. 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 that the men are searching for any meat they can find. By December, Christian notes they are hunting less and less to avoid burning calories unnecessarily. He describes them as "dening up to, quote, "economize grub and rest." They did what they could to get some tarmigan, 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, Horby 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 managed to get a wolverine in their traps from time to time and the occasional snowshoe hair, 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 tracks. Simply lying in bed causes them to cramp up and they grow weaker and weaker. Horby's condition deteriorates until he finally passes away in his sleep. Red-larred and Christian rig up a make-shift animal in hopes of clearing their rectums of plugged animal hair so that they'll be able to hunt when the weather improves in 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 animal, "takes every atom of energy and willpower to carry out." He and Adlard continue to dig through the snow for whatever frozen blood and rancid fish guts they can find. Sometime between April 28th and May 4th, Adlard 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 nose bleeds and sleeping more and more. The makeshift animal 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. This is a story of waste, not one. 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 moves 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, fish 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 and herds that pass for days at a time, sometimes hundreds in a single group, patches of berry 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 way waiting to pick me up when I'm ready, after 7 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 up river. They knew what it felt like when the grub steak 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. was a feast. in famine system, with long stretches of famine between the feasts, and the men who survived at long-term were the ones who understood that distinction completely. They adopted the seasonal rhythm of preparation and preservation. Arctic and sub-Arctic Alaska stand in stark contrast to ecosystems near the equator. In places where seasonal changes are minimal or effectively non-existent, animals become a-rhythmic. Running seasons are very long, or occur all year. Fonds can drop during any month of the year. Access 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 Mildew. 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, using the hard way, the Athabaskan people had already solved the central problem of the interior. How to turn a few weeks of abundance into a winter's worth of survival. 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 a nadromous fish, meaning they live their lives in the saltwater of the ocean and run up into fresh water river systems to lay their eggs. When those eggs hatch, the juvenile fish had 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. We've got King Salmon, also known as Shenooks, Silver Salmon, also known as Koho, Sakai 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 remained 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. Strawberries, 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 it to the migration, and sometimes involving communal hunting techniques, fences of brush and stakes built to channel animals toward waiting hunters. That could produce a large number of animals in a short window of time. When freeze-up and 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 Athabasca 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. The 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 the supplement of some store bought goods, acquiring a full winter's worth of food and dog food 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 and 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 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. Moose is where moose are abundant and thriving today, such as the remote upper drainages of the upper Koyakuk River are periodically devoid of moose. There are accounts from old sourdose, including Sydney Huntington, where seeing a moose track around the Koyakuk 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. tat 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 bears 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 sourdose though, the priority was fur bears. You wanted to be where the Martin 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 a simple fact that moose were not as abundant in the first few decades of the 20th century 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. Different 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 right for sledding, getting that meat home was a seriously challenging task. Didney 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 and 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, season, and the sheer mechanical difficulty of moving heavy deadweight 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 winner 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 the float hunting technique, where he would pull up riveraways and then float back to his cabin. He said, quote, "floating down a stream, one has a chance to spot game easily. Running 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 slews and back channels, the burglant 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 gutter or grunt every few steps that sounds pretty much like this. 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. Whitney Huntington wrote that quote, "Whenever a moose showed up in the Koyakuk, 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 Cantner, who was raised in a dugout in the 1970s near the Katsabi 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. And they were in a trapper's vicinity, he knew it, and he made the most of it. James Carroll described caribou heard 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 Bergland described "the timber moving with caribou" and "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 bodies and I regularly weigh the back legs off bull moose, and they average around 110 to 130 pounds. For one leg, now imagine toting that for 10 miles across Muscage and Tussik, and then having 8 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. When getting meat to a sled or boat, the sourdough's 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. Once 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, sourdough's would stack their quarters on top of bundles of willows placed in the bottom of the boat. trick we still use today. old 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 Bergland joked that her family, "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 steaks, and then laying those steaks out on some canvas and putting them outdoors to let them re-freeze 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 a small game in fish, which they themselves did enjoy on occasion, but these foods played a more significant role in terms of these secondary uses. Travis were one source of food that was never overlooked by the trappers, and when they wrote rabbits and their journals, they meant "snowshoe hairs." They could be easily trapped with wire snares attached to willows or other vegetation. Marshall noted that when snowshoe hair populations were high, it was common to snare 50 in a single day, in thousands in a season. He observed that a good harvest of hairs made it possible to feed one's dogs almost entirely on them alone. Snowshoe hairs 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. Sam and 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. Whitney 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. First you scored the flays 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 other. White fish and suckers were commonly netted. Carroll described setting out a six foot gill net on floats, and, as he said, "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 Bergland recalled that she and her sisters would take a small polling bolt and head up river, 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 river banks with fishing poles, targeting weedy patches and swampy slews that connected to the main river. She said, "Someday as 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 dryflies in prodigious numbers. Evelyn Bergland 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 coyacuck, 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 to 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. Low bush cranberries, blueberries, bearberries, crowberries, and currents were all favorites. Put away for winter, they added variety and flavor to a diet of fish and mousse. The burglands would cook them down and can them in court size mason jars, more than a hundred 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 ones 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. Carroll's wife, Fanny, boiled geese hole, 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 "let them go all night". Similar cooking styles were employed for smaller fird game as well. A trapper named Curtis had a system in which he stuck ten 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 ten muskrats were his food for three days. At breakfast lunch and dinner, Curtis forked a whole muskrat out of the can, dressed it with a special gravy, and savored every bite. Behind Curtis's 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 down river 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 McKennan described a similar cooking method used by a group of trappers on the tanninah, claws and heads still on, and still with rings of fur around their feet, the muskrats relayed in a pan of grease and thrown in an oven. McKennan described the scene with some whore, quote, "out they came, nice and brown to be sure but looking frightfully alive to me. The huge and size or 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 Shard. sharply. Robert Marshall noted that only about half of the white people he met up the coyote cuck 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 trap line 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, his stomach contents looked like cranberry jam when you cut it open. Links 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 sourdough steaks made from links burger, so basically links 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, links 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 links 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 fuel 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 bear 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 cache is 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 "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-secured cache just for the satisfaction of stealing its contents. A wolverine once made off with Carroll's own double-bited axe, apparently mistaking the blood on the blade for something edible, impacted 300 yards into the brush before dropping it. When Robert Marshall lost most of the moves 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 winner 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 US 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 nose dive 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 trappers 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 and 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 trappers cabin and caches. 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 Berail, an old trapper and miner who had come north as a young man in 1904, who spent his winners running a trapline 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 Berail, 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 would-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 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 Bergland noted that there was in her words, quote, "a kind of a law which nobody ever broke, that if anyone stopped overnight and 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 trick." 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 and judgment could lead to the most mightily horrific sets of circumstances. If you got deer in your camp, I want to hear about it because that sounds like a sweet camp. But still, we made two shoes with hay dude in first light Spector Camo anyway, not because you need it just because it's cool. The Wally funk and the Wally slip camp because it's the pattern we love and we wanted something comfortable and ultra light weight for when we're done hunting. Okay. Out now at hey dude.com and the meat eater store. It's a limited run. So get your feet cozy now. This is an I heart podcast guaranteed human.