Shadows on the Koyukuk

by Sidney Huntington

  Language was a major barrier in the early years. The Athapaskan language is complex and dialects vary widely from area to area. Yet some missionaries overcame that. Dr. Chapman, for example, learned to speak the Anvik dialect. I was amazed as a boy to hear him preach the gospel first in English, then in Koyukon Athapaskan. In 1922 at Nulato, I heard Father Rossi, a Catholic Jesuit, preach in three languages: English, Latin, and Athapaskan.

  I was lonely at the mission at first, for I had been close to my mother. In addition to my loneliness, my distrust of almost everyone, especially adults, required years for me to overcome. Reading and studying finally helped me to understand the source of my distrust and to overcome the feeling.

  The Reverend John Bentley—we called him “Mr. Bentley”—was one person I began to trust. He was a kind man and I became very attached to him. Before arriving at Anvik, he had been Captain Bentley, a chaplain with the U.S. Army in France during World War I. He had left the service and, with his wife, had volunteered for missionary work. He seemed to understand me and my problems. On Sunday mornings he occasionally took me with him by dog team or in the mission boat to the Innoko River village of Shageluk where he held services. Occasionally he allowed me to accompany him on gas boat rides on the Yukon River.

  Bishop Rowe, who traveled thousands of miles by dog team and boat, preaching, counseling, marrying, and burying, was respected by the gold rushers, for, two years before the great Klondike gold stampede, he mushed over treacherous Chilkoot Pass, one of the early routes from coastal Southeast Alaska to the headwaters of the Yukon River and Interior Alaska. On his first visit to Fairbanks in 1903–4, he saw that a hospital was needed because stampeders had no families and often no one to care for them when they became ill. Thousands died from diseases that came from dirty and crowded living. Rowe left money, telling the miners to build a hospital with it. The following spring he sent nurses, medicine, and furniture to the new hospital.

  Bishop Rowe had a wonderful sense of humor and a large repertoire of stories. He often told how the famed “Blue Parka Bandit” had held him up, with a group of miners, instructing the party to line up and to lay their pokes of gold dust, watches, and money on the trail. Obediently Rowe placed his money on the heap. Then with a smile and gentle voice, he chided the highwayman for robbing a minister of the gospel.

  “Are you really a minister?” the bandit asked.

  “Yes. I am Bishop Rowe, of the Episcopal Church,” he replied.

  “Oh. Well, I’m pleased to meet you. Of course, I won’t rob you; take your money off the heap, Bishop, and take that poke with the shoestring on it too. Why, damn it, Bishop, I’m a member of your church!”

  Bishop Rowe traveled extensively. He spent little time at Anvik, and had been on one of his long trips into the bush when the Pelican No. 1 happened to pass Hog River at the time of our need.

  Shortly after I arrived at the mission, newly orphaned Athapaskan brothers Ezra and Homer Collins arrived. Like me, they were bruised emotionally. They were also dirt poor and badly clothed. I cried when I first saw their thin, sad faces. I knew from experience what it was to be left alone. Even after they had been fed, bathed, and dressed in new clothing, they looked sad. I did my best to be close to them, to give comfort. I bribed them with food or whatever I had, trying to gain their confidence. Ezra came around in a few days, but Homer took a while.

  The boys’ father had died, leaving the mother alone with the two boys. Following the custom of the Indians of the era, a memorial potlatch was held. Tradition demanded that all of the man’s possessions— including everything owned by his woman—be given to relatives and friends. The woman had no say; everything she owned was given away, including her house, dog team, canoe, pots and pans, even the axe she used for cutting firewood.

  A widow thus stripped of her property was dependent upon the generosity of friends and relatives to get started in life again. Ezra and Homer’s mother had an additional problem: a local medicine man desired her, but she didn’t want anything to do with him. Traditionally, such men wielded great power among the Natives and no one was willing to interfere. There were good medicine men and bad medicine men; this was a bad one.

  The desperate widow solved her problem in the only way she knew how. Carrying a length of telegraph wire, she climbed a cottonwood tree, tied the wire around her neck, fastened the other end to a branch, and jumped. Her violent solution left the boys alone in the world, and Dr. Chapman welcomed the despondent brothers to the mission.

  Jimmy and I became friends with Ezra and Homer, even though we didn’t know each other’s language; Jimmy and I spoke English, although we knew a few words of Athapaskan; they spoke only Athapaskan. Nevertheless we found ways to communicate.

  Homer became my special ward. Where I went, Homer followed. He refused to eat at the table unless he could sit beside me. He was always my bed partner, for, in the crowded boys’ dormitory, we knew no such luxury as having a bed to ourselves.

  Homer fell sick in the spring of 1921. As he grew weaker and weaker, he wanted me by his side all the time, and I tried any way I could to help him feel better. One morning I awoke to find Homer unconscious in our bed. I ran for the nurse and she took him into her little hospital room. He died that day and was buried in the ravine below the mission. The loss of my friend was very painful.

  During my leisure time I often watched an old Native known as Blind Andrew split wood. He lived by himself in a house built for him by the mission. Although he was blind, he held the block to be split with his right hand and swung a double-bitted axe with his left. Sometimes the blade struck close to his fingers, but I never saw him draw blood. Blind Andrew liked me, so I used to help him with his small chores. He earned $1.50 a day for splitting wood for the girls’ dormitory.

  Another village elder I knew was Old Harry, an Indian nicknamed “Sakeroni.” Seeing that I was willing to help those in need, Dr. Chapman sent me to check on Sakeroni from time to time. He couldn’t speak English, but we were able to understand each other. Sometimes if the old man was short of firewood, I would bring him wood split by Blind Andrew. I hauled the wood in a barrel-stave sled that Old Harry had made. Numerous whiskey and wine barrels were available, from which good four-foot-long oak runners could be obtained for such sleds, which were fairly common in villages along the Lower Yukon.

  Harry Lawrence, an Irishman who owned a trading post at Anvik, often bestowed nicknames on the Indians. The Indians had their own Athapaskan names, of course, but when they were baptized, missionaries gave them Anglicized names. Lawrence claimed the Indians couldn’t remember their church names, so he took it on himself to remedy that. He gave them names they could remember, and often his names stuck. Sakeroni was one. Others I remember are Jack Screw, Kentucky, and Sixmile John.

  Lawrence was a colorful old-timer who had a contract to haul mail by dog team from Kaltag to Holy Cross, two Yukon River villages. The last run of that route, driven by Lawrence’s son Herbert, was in 1920. I saw Herbert when he pulled into Anvik—the first time I had seen a team of twenty dogs. They were hooked up to two large mail sleds in one string.

  One day before Christmas, Sakeroni wanted me to go with him across the Anvik River to pick up a big salmon he had buried there the previous summer. This traditional Athapaskan delicacy is still occasionally prepared. A fresh, whole ungutted salmon is wrapped with moss. Next comes two layers of birch bark to keep flies out. Carefully buried, the salmon decomposes throughout the summer and becomes cheeselike.

  After I received permission from Dr. Chapman, we took off with the little barrel-stave sleigh and a small axe. The river was about a half mile wide; about halfway across, the old man said he was tired. He told me the salmon was behind a tree on the far bank, marked by a stick. I left Sakeroni on the river ice, moving back and forth to keep warm. His movements made me nervous, so I kept looking back, afraid he might leave.

  I found the marker stick in the snow, and dug down, pulling out his package, which was abou
t thirty inches long and ten inches in diameter. The package was frozen and very heavy for me, so rolling it onto the sled took some effort. I had to struggle through deep snow as I dragged it back to the river. Once on the river trail, pulling the sled was easier.

  Before I reached the old man, he had started home. I followed as fast as I could, pulling the heavy sled. When I caught up with Sakeroni, Dr. Chapman was scolding him for keeping me out too long. Chapman had been keeping an eye on me from the mission. He sent me to get ready for supper while he helped the old man home.

  The next day when I saw Dr. Chapman, I asked permission to go see Sakeroni. “Fine, but no more trips across the river,” he warned.

  When I knocked on the old man’s cabin, he greeted me in Athapaskan. As I entered, a strong smell hit me. I could have cut the air with a knife. With a broad smile, he offered me some of his prized salmon, which was resting under the stove. He had already eaten a good-sized chunk of the fish.

  I didn’t have the nerve to eat any, because it smelled awful. He explained that the pink parts were really good, but, he warned, “Don’t eat any of the gray.”

  To satisfy him, I used a stick to pick up a piece about the size of a blueberry and popped it into my mouth. It had no taste: perhaps the smell deadened my taste buds.

  When I returned to the boys’ dormitory everyone kept moving away from me because I smelled so bad from that fish. Shortly, Mrs. Bentley opened the door from her quarters and let out a “Wa-hoo, what’s that awful smell?” In she charged, and I had to explain.

  She tried everything she could think of to kill the smell coming from my mouth, without success. The only person who could stand being near me was Ezra Collins. “We used to eat that kind of fish all the time,” he said. For this, poor old Sakeroni again caught hell from Dr. Chapman, and his cabin was off-limits to me for a time.

  I remained at the mission until 1925, with a break of one year when I lived with my dad at Alatna. During the four years at Anvik I learned how to live with others. I learned discipline, for the rules were fairly rigid. I learned to respect my elders.

  I learned to swim during my first summer at Anvik, when I was still five years old. I also learned not to leave my fingers in a doorjamb while it is being slammed: that intelligence cost me part of my index finger shortly after my arrival. I learned not to laugh at people because they were poor or in bad health. Perhaps the most important lesson I learned was the obligation all of us have to try to help those in need.

  Until the late 1920s, the missions were the only source of medical treatment along the Lower Yukon. Every mission had a trained nurse, and I watched nurses and others at the mission give loving care to the sick. Often, with Bible in hand, they remained with the dying for hours and even days until the end.

  For a time I was in a small singing group that went to the homes of sick villagers to sing while Dr. Chapman prayed. I saw many young people dying with no medicine to relieve the pain, aware that death was coming. Their homes were poor, seldom even having beds; generally they slept on the dirt floor on skin mattresses. Little could be done to help. I cried many times for kids my age or younger as I watched the nurse or Dr. Chapman try to give comfort.

  The missions also distributed food to the needy and created small paying jobs such as cutting and splitting wood, a never-ending task on the Alaska frontier in those years, for wood was the primary heating fuel. Dr. Chapman recommended Indians for jobs on government steamboats. He protected the Natives from those who tried to take unfair advantage of their too-trusting nature. The missions provided both social services and welfare assistance.

  During the last year or two at Anvik, I became intensely interested in the fish traps that the Native people made for catching salmon. Although I didn’t realize it, this was to become an important part of my education as I watched these experts make these ingenious traps and fish with them. Using these wooden traps, it was possible then to catch from the Yukon River in one day the number of salmon a Koyukuk River fisherman might catch in an entire season.

  To build one of these beautiful traps, a virtually perfect spruce log was required, and such logs are difficult to find. The grain had to be just right, because the log would be split into hundreds of strips. Each strip was about three-eighths of an inch square and up to twenty feet long. Hoops for the trap were made from spruce roots, and the strips were sewed to the hoops with threadlike spruce roots and willow bark.

  A roughly twenty-foot-long fence diverted salmon into the trap. Each fence was built to fit the site, so that it sloped to fit the bottom of the river. The fence and trap both were moved in and out as the river level changed. When a lot of drift floated down the river, the trap and fence were taken from the water to keep them from being damaged. When the trap was in place and catching fish, a long slim log was tied to the beach and angled out to the end of the fence: this held the fence in place, and it diverted small amounts of downstream drift.

  The trap was an elegantly designed, simple funnel. At the large end it was five or six feet deep and about four feet wide. Fished with the large end upstream, the opening was attached to the outer end of the fence. Migrating fish, following along the bank, encountered the fence and followed it out. The side of the funnel nearest the beach had a gap into which the fish could swim. The funnel had projecting pieces inside to discourage fish from swimming out once they were in it. The old-timers who made these traps were emphatic that they had to be made exactly right, with three sticks poking downstream so the fish wouldn’t turn around and swim out.

  The trap tapered down from the big funneled end to a straight or nontapered section that was twenty or twenty-four feet long, where the fish were held. The fish were removed at the very tail end, through a hatch covered with a lid hinged with spruce roots.

  I watched many times as an Indian in a big birchbark canoe paddled to the end of a trap and opened the gate, using one hand. In the other hand the fisherman held a knife for killing the fish. The knife, usually made out of a bent flat file lashed to a wood or bone handle, resembled the crooked knife, a carving knife found throughout the North in the old days. The salmon-killing knife’s blade was somewhat V-shaped, sharpened on one side. It was used to pierce the fish’s head behind the eyes, instantly immobilizing it. The salmon was then tossed into the canoe. I’ve seen as many as 100 salmon lifted from a trap, killed, and loaded into a birchbark canoe in about twenty minutes.

  As soon as one of these big canoes was loaded, the fisherman paddled to where the women waited to cut up the fish, for in the old days this was women’s work. The women used a tlaabaas, a half-round knife made from the blade of a carpenter’s saw. Eskimos call such a knife an ulu. The tlaabaas of an experienced woman cutting up salmon for drying (the main method of preservation) moves so fast it is a blur. First, the salmon is gutted and the head removed. Next, the fish is filleted, with the two slabs of meat on each side of the backbone left connected at the tail. Usually, but not always, the backbone is removed. Vertical cuts or scores are made on each of the fillets to aid in drying. Then the fish is hung over a pole to dry, with a fillet or slab on each side of the pole.

  These traps must have taken centuries for the Athapaskans to develop and refine. Even as I was learning about these picturesque devices, the more efficient fish wheel (brought to Alaska from the Columbia and Sacramento rivers by whites) and gillnets were replacing them, and while I was still a boy, the art of making the traps essentially disappeared.

  In the spring of 1921 my dad arrived at Anvik for a visit. We five children were on the bank to meet the big sternwheeler he arrived on, when suddenly I panicked. I simply could not run and hug him like my sisters and brother did. I took off on a dead run for the woods where I hid all night and the next day. My sister Ada found me and talked me into returning to the mission. The Reverend Bentley seemed to understand, and talked it over with my dad. It was clear that I still had trouble trusting anyone, and in my mind my dad had abandoned the three of us when my mother had died
.

  Dad, Mr. Bentley, and Dr. Chapman decided that I should spend time with my dad to develop a stronger relationship. After he visited Anvik for a couple of weeks, I agreed to go with him to spend a year at his new trading post at Alatna. Jimmy and my sisters remained at Anvik.

  Dad and I boarded the steamer Jacobs at Anvik and rode to Nulato. We then went to Koyukuk Station in a small gasoline-powered boat to prepare for the trip to Alatna, far up the Koyukuk River.

  5

  ALATNA

  Alatna is a small Koyukuk River village 350 miles northeast of Anvik as the raven flies and twice that distance by river. It was early August when Dad and I left Koyukuk Station and headed up the Koyukuk River on his annual trip with twenty-five tons of food, hardware, clothing, coal oil (kerosene), and white gasoline (new at the time for lamps and lanterns) for the trading post that Dad and John Evans jointly owned at Alatna. Charlie Evans, John’s son, was pilot and captain of the forty-foot, eight-foot-wide Koyukuk that pushed the barge. An impressive (for 1921) twenty-eight-horsepower Redwing gasoline engine swinging a twenty-two-inch-diameter propeller with a twenty-four-inch pitch powered the boat, which belonged to John Evans. There was a cabin with bunks and a place to cook. Charlie was to gain fame in 1925 as one of the dog team drivers who took a turn at rushing diphtheria serum from Fairbanks to Nome in what was to become known as the historic Serum Run.

  During that trip I saw millions of birds along the clear Koyukuk River—ducks, geese, songbirds, and shorebirds in numbers that were to dwindle slowly as I grew older.

  We made frequent stops, for in those days riverboats always stopped at every camp and for every person seen along the bank. At each stop Dad sold supplies, breaking into the load of freight to accommodate. Most people wanted such things as ammunition, beans, clothing, tools, kerosene, traps, or axes.