Shadows on the Koyukuk

by Sidney Huntington

  23

  BOOZE

  I was splitting firewood. The temperature was –50 degrees. In deep cold, dry spruce is brittle, and when struck by a sharp axe it usually splits easily. It is a satisfying chore, splitting firewood. I have always enjoyed seeing the chunks pile up, ready for the stove. It was January 1955, and I was at the Koyukuk River village of Huslia.

  On this day the enjoyment ceased abruptly. The axe struck a knot on a chunk of frozen spruce, and a sliver of the knot flew up and imbedded itself in my right eye. When I pulled at the sliver, some of my eye fluid flowed out. I ran to the schoolhouse, where Eunice Berglund, the itinerant nurse, happened to be. All she could do was put pontocaine, an anesthetic, into my eye.

  I suffered a lot of pain that night. The next day it was too cold for a plane to fly me to medical help, and I went through hell. On the following day, although it was still terribly cold, James “Andy” Anderson, the Wien Airline bush pilot at Bettles, flew to Huslia and took me to the hospital at Tanana. A doctor took one look, gave me more pontocaine, and Andy flew me to Fairbanks to eye specialist Dr. Hugh Fate.

  Dr. Fate worked on my eye all night, removing as much of the wood as possible. I had partial vision with the eye, but the damage caused a reaction to my other eye. By fall, I was using pontocaine daily. Despite the medication, the injured eye throbbed painfully all the time, and I had to go back to Dr. Fate.

  “Sidney, your eye is deteriorating badly and it’s affecting your good eye. That right eye has to be removed. You’ll never see well with it again anyway. Removing the one will help the other.”

  The pain was so persistent and intense that I actually looked forward to having the eye removed. After half a year of steady pain, the relief was simply wonderful. In a short time I was fitted with a glass eye, and strangers seldom spot it. With one eye I could read, work, and manage daily life without difficulty. I lost depth perception, of course, and was unable to shoot flying geese for many years. But I learned the right formula, so now I do fairly well on wing shots. I’ve had no problems aiming with a rifle.

  Prohibition, in effect from 1920 to 1933, didn’t stop people in the Alaska bush from drinking. In fact, it fostered a pretty fair bootlegging industry in the Koyukuk and Lower Yukon country. Beer drinkers could legally make beer at home. A three-pound can of malt syrup and about a pound of sugar could produce about seven gallons of pretty good beer in five days.

  Charlie Swanson liked beer, and Dad drank it occasionally. When we all lived on the trapline together, the job of making beer often fell to Jimmy and me. Dad regarded beer as a food, a beverage to accompany meals. Beer was not a big deal to us kids.

  I got high on alcohol for the first time when I was twelve or thirteen years old. Jimmy and I were bottling beer for Dad and Charlie, pouring it into bottles. We had a capper that fit all sizes of bottles, and we had just made a batch in a twenty-five-gallon barrel. To get the beer out of the keg, we had to siphon it with a small rubber hose. Each time I started the siphon, I sucked a slug of beer into my mouth. Naturally, I swallowed it. By the time we had bottled twenty-five gallons of beer, I felt pretty high and had to go to sleep. When I awoke I was violently ill from all that raw beer.

  Before I married at the age of eighteen, I drank some. Jimmy and I used to make our own whiskey, competing with some of the villagers to see who could make the best booze. At times it seemed as if almost everyone in the Koyukuk and Lower Yukon country owned a still. We bought a twenty-gallon copper clothes boiler with a lid that could be tightly sealed. The boiler held about ten gallons of brew. We made a neat coil from three-eighths-inch copper tubing, and we soldered all our connections. Bootleggers I knew believed that the tubing had to be at least fourteen feet long to make good booze.

  Some Indians dismantled shotguns and rifles, such as a .30–30 Winchester, to use the gun barrel for the condenser to make booze. For some, booze was more important than guns. In the early 1930s, a Model 94 lever-action Winchester cost $23. I knew individuals who would lie down at the end of a gun barrel, waiting for the condensed booze to drip into their mouths. These were the drinkers who suffered. Blindness and even death sometimes resulted from the strong stuff.

  My uncle Hog River Johnny went blind from drinking bad booze, as did many others in the Koyukuk. Some of the bad booze contained fusel oil, an acrid poison that accumulates in insufficiently distilled liquors. Home-distilled whiskey was especially bad if it weren’t run through charcoal or distilled sufficiently.

  In our bootleg business, Jimmy and I sold a ketchup bottle full (slightly more than a pint) of whiskey for $5. We each had our own barrel and we tried to outdo each other in quality. At the time, neither of us drank much.

  In the 1930s, many Koyukon Indians commonly traveled to Cutoff for holidays, or after trapping season ended. Everyone wanted to try the other fellow’s booze. We all feared the government revenuer, a fellow named Senif. He never did come to Cutoff, despite our fears. Nevertheless, we always cached our gallons of booze in snowdrifts and among the trees out of sight before entering the village. After everyone except the revenuer was in the village, we would retrieve the hidden booze and have a big party.

  Some of that stuff was absolutely terrible. I often recall how my friend Little Sammy once reacted to another fellow’s booze. When offered a bottle, Little Sammy gulped a big swallow. He made an awful face and he choked so he could hardly talk. Nevertheless, he croaked, “Boy, that’s good stuff!”

  Drinking was a phase I guess I had to go through. I used to have a good time drinking, or at least I thought I was having a good time. As the years passed, I drank more and more. After Prohibition ended in 1933, I would leave my trapline at the end of the season, go to Cutoff or Koyukuk to pay my bills, charter an airplane to fly to Ruby, and return with a planeload of booze. Everyone who wanted to drink with me would show up and I’d hand each a full bottle. I love the taste of Scotch whiskey, and over the years, I probably drank enough of it to float my house.

  Once at Koyukuk, in the late 1940s, I started drinking with my buddy Haymon Henry, a fine old Koyukon. I don’t know how many days our party lasted, but I forgot to eat. We danced and drank; I don’t remember everything, but I thought we were having a great time. I finally realized it was time to return to my trapline. Haymon had a camp and trapline near mine, up the Yuki River on the south side of the Yukon, near Galena.

  When we left Koyukuk, I didn’t have any whiskey because Dominic Vernetti wouldn’t sell me any, cash or otherwise. “You’ve been drinking long enough, Sidney,” he told me.

  Haymon and I chartered the plane of Hans Rutzebeck, who flew us to Haymon’s camp. Haymon gave me one last drink of whiskey from his bottle, and then Hans flew me to a lake a few hundred yards from my tent camp, where he landed his ski plane in deep snow.

  Hans unloaded me and my gear and took off. Snow blasted high as the little Call Air plane lifted into the air. I staggered around for a while, fell, and had difficulty getting up. That last slug of booze from Haymon’s bottle hadn’t helped my condition.

  Although the temperature was about –50 degrees F., I threw a caribou hide on top of the snow beside the trail, unrolled my sleeping bag on it, and crawled in. I had a new Woods eiderdown sleeping bag for which I had paid $250—a lot of money then. Sometime during the night I awoke, feeling as if something were sitting on my legs. I couldn’t move either leg. But I could move my hands. The Colt Woodsman .22 pistol I always carried was inside my sleeping bag. I found the gun and fired a couple of shots toward the end of my sleeping bag at whatever was sitting on my legs. If anything was there, it got off. It might have been my imagination or a nightmare, I don’t know. I was in bad shape.

  I got up at daylight. The weather seemed warmer, and I felt a little better. I put on snowshoes and walked the several hundred yards to my camp. Snow had collapsed my tent over the woodstove. I straightened up the mess. As I worked, I began to go through withdrawal—I couldn’t eat and I had the shakes. Nonetheless, I thought I
was in good enough shape to cover my ten-mile-long trapline, so I set out.

  On snowshoes, I crossed the lake and started up the hill. Looking ahead, toward the mountain, I saw a huge pink elephant coming over the top of the ridge. I stared at this incredible sight, then closed my eyes. I looked again. The pink elephant was still there, walking toward me.

  I couldn’t handle that. I turned in my tracks and went back to my tent as fast as I could go. After building a fire, I warmed some water and took a sponge bath. Then I drank a little coffee and crawled into my sleeping bag. When I fell asleep, whatever it was again settled on my legs. I awoke, feeling my legs being pushed down. Again I fired my pistol at the unseen something, and the weight seemed to leave my legs.

  The next time I awoke, I was in good enough shape to run my trapline. In a few days, I was all right and eating ravenously. Hans Rutzebeck returned and landed his ski-equipped Call Air on the nearby frozen lake.

  “How you doing, Sidney?” he asked.

  “OK now. I had to chase an elephant off the hill up there the other day, though,” I told him, sheepishly.

  “That bad, were you?” he commented.

  “I guess I was,” I admitted.

  “I wasn’t going to pick you up, but I landed at Haymon’s camp and he was worried about you, so I thought I’d check.”

  I told him I’d run my trapline, had caught quite a bit of fur, and I was ready to fly back to Hog River to take care of my trapline there.

  That winter I ran three traplines. Angela and the kids, with a dog team, lived at Hog River, near one line. I had another trapline on the Huslia River not far from there. My third line was the one at Yuki River where I had seen the pink elephant. Hans flew me between the three traplines all winter. My flying bill came to about $2,800 for the season, and I trapped about $11,000 worth of fur—one of my really big years.

  We loaded my furs, sleeping bag, and other gear into Hans’s plane. The lake, only 650 or 700 feet across, offered a short run for takeoff. The air was still. I had cut down tall trees at the edge of the lake, leaving an opening for a plane to fly through. Hans headed for that opening with the engine wide open, but he couldn’t get airborne. He stopped, turned the plane, and tried to take off in the other direction, taking advantage of the ski tracks he had just made.

  The dense –50 degree air gave the wings good lift, but the engine didn’t run smoothly because of the extreme cold. Finally, Hans lifted the plane off the lake. We were at low altitude, still climbing, when the carburetor iced up, the engine coughed a few times, and died. The airplane staggered on the edge of a stall, one wing dropped, and down we went, nose first into the ground. We hit a stand of small spruce trees and skidded for a ways, splintering trees and ripping fabric from the plane. Then we slid between two large trees and stopped. The wings were half ripped away, and gas poured from the two wing tanks.

  “Get out before it blows!” Hans yelled.

  Neither of us was injured, and we got out quick.

  No explosion occurred, and we hiked back to my camp. Hans was terribly upset about the loss of his $5,000 airplane and he wanted to walk to Galena immediately. In a straight line the distance was about fifty miles, but afoot he would have had to travel closer to 100 miles.

  “Take it easy, Hans. Someone’ll pick us up after while,” I consoled. We waited eight days until a Pan American Airways plane (Pan Am was one of Alaska’s early airlines) circled after the pilot spotted the wreck. He notified another pilot with a small plane who flew in to pick us up.

  Through the thirties and forties I continued to drink. I sold the stuff, but often I was my own best customer. Eventually, in the 1950s I felt I needed booze all the time. I tried tapering off, but it didn’t work. I suppose I would have been classified as an alcoholic.

  I’ve heard people talk about how sick they have been from heavy drinking. Believe me, I’ve been there. One of my worst drunks lasted more than forty days. That binge was a by-product of the 1945 flood of the Yukon River. I was at Galena when the flood came. Everything floated off, including fifty-five gallons of medical alcohol from a warehouse at the Galena Air Force Base. I salvaged the full porcelain-lined barrel and, with friends, mixed the stuff with fruit juice or whatever else was available. It took a couple of us six weeks to drink it up.

  After being on that stuff, I woke up one morning and looked across the Yukon River: everything appeared orange. My eyes were bloodshot, I guess. I was scared enough to quit drinking—for a time. I didn’t stay dry long. When the village of Koyukuk seemed absolutely dead, I’d go to Dominic Vernetti’s store and buy a few cases of booze and beer.

  “C’mon boys, let’s have a dance,” I’d invite. And we’d have a heck of a party. I really enjoyed partying. I met friends that way; some of my best friends were my drinking buddies.

  The Indians in the Koyukuk and along the Yukon have used booze since white men arrived. Many of the villages have liquor stores, although a few have voted themselves dry. I’ve noticed that people who come to Galena from villages where alcohol is not available drink heavily. Some drinkers sell their guns, their traps, their snow machines, any possession worth money, to buy booze. Today, drugs are available in Alaska’s Native villages, and the combination of drugs and booze is frequently lethal.

  Oceans of booze have been sold to Indians, Eskimos, and Aleuts in Alaska’s villages. Money spent on drinking could have paved many village sidewalks with gold. Alcoholism is a tragedy for which the people themselves must develop a solution.

  Throughout my drinking days, I always paid my bills and managed to support my family. But the day arrived when I realized that I had to lay off the booze. Angela contracted tuberculosis and had to go to a hospital for six months, leaving me to care for our fourteen children.

  Tuberculosis, known as “the scourge of Alaska” in the thirties and forties, is a terrible disease that was probably brought to Alaska by the early Russians. It was the most deadly of all the infectious diseases to which Alaska Natives had had no prior exposure and hence no immunity. Wherever explorers, traders, miners, settlers, and missionaries went, the incidence of tuberculosis increased among the Natives.

  Tuberculosis is a bacterial disease that develops slowly compared to diseases like whooping cough, measles, smallpox, and typhoid. It is usually transmitted from one person to another through the air—spray droplets from a sneeze or a cough. Most often attacking the lungs, it leads to difficult breathing and eventually to death. Tuberculosis of the lungs was also known as “consumption.”

  Crowded living conditions, poor ventilation, and undernourishment assisted in the spread of tuberculosis among Athapaskans of Alaska’s Interior. From the 1920s through the 1940s it affected in one way or another virtually every Indian in the Yukon and Koyukuk valleys. It came close to home for me.

  About 1924, while she was at Anvik Mission, my sister Ada went for a long winter walk with a group of girls. One of the weaker girls was poorly dressed and became cold, and Ada removed her own coat and put it on the girl. By the time they returned to the mission Ada was thoroughly chilled and she contracted pneumonia, which broke her health. Her resistance low from pneumonia, she soon was infected with tuberculosis, which killed her several years later.

  When I first started living at Hog River, I remember returning to the Yukon River in spring to discover that many of the pretty young girls I had known and danced with the previous fall were dead from tuberculosis.

  My uncle Hog River Johnny and his wife Molly, living at Cutoff, had six healthy children when the disease struck their family. Within two years all six children, plus a newborn baby, had died. They built a new home and moved into it, also at Cutoff, and started another family. They had seven more children that ranged from three to eighteen. The oldest was married. Then all seven died of tuberculosis.

  Some of those kids were older than I was, some were about my age. I frequently stayed with the family when I was in Cutoff. In the winter of 1933, I offered to take Walter, who was eigh
teen, and his twelve-year-old sister Mildred, to the Tanana hospital with my dog team, but they were too weak with tuberculosis to make the trip; they would be taken by boat after breakup, it was decided. They didn’t live to make it. I happened to be there when Walter and Mildred died within an hour of each other. The poor frightened girl watched Walter gasping for breath as he died, and an hour later she was dead herself. She held my hand right to the last. I tried to comfort and encourage her, but it was hopeless. Being the same age, Walter and I had been close; we had hunted together. It was a sad time.

  Molly contracted the disease and went to a sanitarium in Washington State for three years and returned, apparently cured. After her return, however, she recontracted the disease and died.

  My uncle Weaselheart lost five of his six children to the disease. Why his daughter Liza survived I’ll never know; she lived amidst all of those who died of that terrible disease.

  I saw strong young men contract the disease and die within six months. We called it “galloping TB.” Commonly eight or ten people from a village of forty or fifty died during a year. In the 1930s and ’40s, for every six babies born on the Koyukuk only one survived—the other five died from tuberculosis. I saw it wipe out family after family.

  In Alaska in 1945, tuberculosis caused more than 70 percent of the deaths caused by communicable diseases, and the highest death rate was among the Indians, Eskimos, and Aleuts. The disease reached its peak of destructiveness in Alaska within a year or two of the end of World War II.

  Tuberculosis killed, maimed, or disabled thousands of Alaska Natives and not a few whites until it was gradually brought under control in the 1960s by a combination of intensive case-finding and the development of new antituberculosis drugs, notably isoniazid, which could be used not only as treatment but also as a preventative. Today several antibiotics are used together, taken continuously for several months, to cure the disease.