Shadows on the Koyukuk

by Sidney Huntington

  When my wife, Angela, contracted the disease, it had a sobering effect on me, literally. I went into the Galena bar where about twenty people were sitting around drinking and talking. At the time, drinks cost a dollar each.

  “Set ’em up for everybody,” I told the bartender. Then, for myself, I bought a bottle of beer, something I rarely drank.

  “It’ll be a long time before I have another drink,” I told the crowd, as I set down the empty bottle.

  That was in April 1963. Angela recovered, and I haven’t had a drink since.

  24

  GALENA

  I loved the life of a trapper, but as the family grew, the dollars I made on the trapline didn’t stretch far enough. We had lived in Huslia for about ten years, and I had been trapping winters. Now, in the early 1960s, some of the kids were thinking about going to college, which called for a lot more money. I had friends who worked for the Air Force at Galena making good money year-round, and I decided to try to get a job there as a carpenter.

  During two winters on the trapline I spent every night studying books on carpentering. I memorized the mathematics of the framing square. I learned how to frame a building, how to cut rafters, and how to build cement forms—all from those books. Then we moved to Galena in 1963.

  I passed the union’s written carpenter test and worked six weeks as a union carpenter. I went on to other carpentering jobs at Galena, working for $6 an hour. Next I took the carpenter’s test for the Air Force, and got a high score, which landed me a job as a foreman—a job that lasted for twelve years.

  In my spare time, I built and sold boats. In my life I’ve built 112 boats of various sizes, either for sale or for my own use. I once designed and built a sixty-foot-long scow for Dominic Vernetti to use on the Yukon River for hauling up to twenty tons of salmon. Building it upside down, I turned it over with human power, using double and triple blocks. Dominic also used that scow to haul freight for the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey.

  At Galena, in addition to taking care of all the kids and running the house, Angela made fur slippers, parkas, mittens, and marten fur caps to order. After we were settled in, during the summers Angela and I put a gillnet in the Yukon to catch salmon for our own use. Runs of both chum and king salmon had greatly increased under state management. In fact, starting in the sixties, salmon, moose, caribou, black bear, and beaver were abundant; no one could remember when there had been such natural wealth in and around the Koyukuk.

  After we had been fishing for several seasons, one day we caught far more fish than we could easily use. I called Frank Donaldson, in Anchorage, who owned a market and sold fish. “Send me twenty or thirty and let me see what they’re like,” he said.

  After cleaning those fish until they were as shiny as a new dime, I made boxes for them, and we shipped thirty king salmon that averaged twenty-five pounds. Donaldson paid us thirty cents a pound for whole, uncleaned fish. Freight cost a dime a pound, leaving a profit, less labor, boxes and shipping, of about twenty cents a pound. Not bad.

  At the time, Alaska had a Youth Corps program in which kids could earn a few dollars an hour and gain experience by working. My kids could not qualify for the program because I was employed, and so they had to try to find other jobs. Charlie and Henry, two of my boys, fruitlessly scoured Galena for jobs.

  I remembered my own youth, when Dad, Jimmy, and I needed to make a stake to get back into the trapping business after the flood at Batza River. “We’ll build a fish wheel,” I told the boys. “That’ll give you a way to earn a few dollars.”

  I wrote Whitney-Fidalgo Packing Company in Anchorage and asked if they could use some Yukon River chum salmon. It was fall, near the end of the annual salmon runs, so we had to hurry. The Whitney-Fidalgo buyer wasn’t sure he could use water-marked salmon (salmon that have lost their bright silvery seagoing appearance and are changing color as they approach spawning). Hesitantly, he said he’d take a few.

  I helped Charlie, Henry, and Terry Pitka, one of their friends, build the fish wheel and place it at our fishing site. They caught many chums and cleaned them carefully, and we built boxes and shipped them to Anchorage. “Send more” was the response. With this good news the company sent a supply of wetlock boxes designed for shipping salmon. By the time school opened, each of the three boys had earned about $ 1,000.

  The following two or three seasons we continued to ship salmon to Whitney-Fidalgo, and each year our catch increased. Then a company executive came to Galena to talk with me about getting more salmon. To handle them, a holding facility, complete with a $50,000 ice machine, was necessary.

  “Fine,” I said. “If you want to install a plant, we’ll do the work, but you’ll have to finance it, without interest.” The company agreed.

  We built the plant at Galena for $139,000 in 1971. We then agreed to buy fish for Whitney-Fidalgo for two cents a pound. Local fishermen caught the salmon with gillnets and fish wheels and received the local going price.

  The business grew. At one time, we had eleven boats picking up salmon from fishermen up and down the river from Galena and delivering them to our plant. Powered with big outboard motors, those boats traveled the fifty-five miles between Nulato and Galena in one hour and twenty minutes. Going downriver at sixty miles an hour, they could reach Nulato from Galena in forty-five minutes. On the return, they traveled at forty-five or fifty miles an hour with loads of from 2,000 to 3,000 pounds of salmon.

  Within two years we paid off the construction loan on the fish plant. Once we sent seven full 737 Boeing jets out of Galena in one day. In one summer we handled two million pounds of salmon.

  We operated four years, and in that time we lost to spoilage only one 1,800-pound tote of salmon. Whitney-Fidalgo, and others who received our fish, knew they could depend on receiving a fresh, well-cared-for product. During the last year we operated we had ninety-two employees, all Yukon River residents. Each day we airshipped 50,000 pounds of cleaned fish from Galena to Seattle; from there the fish was transshipped to Norway.

  The air freight bills were frightening. Once I was in debt to Wien Airlines for $130,000. “That’s absurd,” I told a Wien accountant. “Every time a plane lands in Anchorage with our fish in it, send me a bill. Don’t let my account build like that.”

  “We have to wait until the end of the month,” he told me.

  “No. That won’t do,” I insisted.

  Once, for two consecutive months, I wrote checks for air freight bills of $180,000. Every time one of those jets came to Galena it cost $9,000. Sometimes we used Hercules aircraft at a rate of $10,000 per trip. Two trips were required some days. I once watched a Hercules take off from Galena with her belly loaded with our salmon. It was so heavy the tires looked flat, yet that powerful plane used only half of the 6,000-foot runway as it roared off toward Anchorage, 340 miles distant.

  Shipping costs went up and the price we received for handling salmon went down. Our profits dwindled and the margin was close. Finally our only profit was from the salmon eggs we sold to Japanese buyers—the eggs are a delicacy in Japan. I nearly killed myself on that salmon business, with round-the-clock operation for two months each summer and almost full time the rest of the year. When a Japanese firm made an offer to buy the plant in 1984, I was happy to sell it.

  But many local Alaskans lost their summer jobs when I sold, and that worried me, so I looked for other possible business opportunities that could benefit local residents. It suddenly struck me that many people along the Yukon were experts at making fine smoked salmon, and most had sold smoked salmon for years. Even Angela and I had occasionally sold dried king salmon strips, often called “squaw candy.”

  Then one day, the state confiscated some of our salmon strips that had been bought and displayed by a Kotzebue merchant. “The strips don’t meet state standards,” a state official explained. Suddenly, after years of a profitable sideline for many locals, we were all out of business. “Before you can sell this product, you must have approval from state an
d federal agencies,” an official warned me.

  That sounded simple, so I started to follow through. Angela and I had a fine big smokehouse and good indoor working space near it. We decided to upgrade these into a government-approved facility, and to get government approval I started through the bureaucratic maze. I applied for permits, special numbers, and licenses from state and federal agencies. I even had to get a permit to drill for water for my plant. I drove a well twenty-eight feet and got good, pure water; then a different agency insisted I had to drive my well six feet deeper. I followed their instructions; water quality was no better at thirty-four feet than it had been at twenty-eight feet, but the requirement had been met so I was legal.

  My smokehouse floor was washed gravel. The state required cement. The sheet metal walls of my smokehouse were too loose; supposedly they might let in blowflies that could walk on or lay eggs on curing fish. Anyone but a bureaucrat knows flies avoid smoke.

  I drew plans for a new smokehouse and processing building, and submitted them to various agencies. My drawings brought lengthy discussions and new rulings. Patiently, I made the changes they asked for. In addition to buying a business license, I had to post a $10,000 bond to hire help to build it. To buy fish, I had to pay a three percent fish tax in advance, or provide a bond to that effect.

  The plant had to have stainless steel tables with plastic tops on which to cut fish. Sinks had to be stainless steel, with hot and cold running water for washing fish. The entire plant had to be insect-proof, including the smokehouse.

  It required more than a year to get a permit to discharge not more than 500 gallons of water into the Yukon River, and I almost didn’t get that permit. I was told that I had to have a twelve-foot-deep seepage pit to meet the drainage requirements.

  Frustrated by these standards, I traveled from the Lower Yukon River at Marshall to Dawson on the Upper Yukon and found that not one of the dozen or so companies along the river had a seepage pit; I was the only one expected to meet that requirement. All these plants, which were Japanese-owned, were discharging directly into the Yukon River. As an American citizen, I was not permitted to do what aliens were doing. When I pointed this out to some key people in government, I was told I could operate in the same way as the Japanese.

  After two long years of dealing with the bureaucracy, my plans met every requirement of the state and federal agencies. We completed the plant in 1988 for about $70,000 with help from a state grant, and started operating it the following year.

  Most commercial fishermen on the Lower Yukon, from Anvik to Ruby, catch chum salmon mainly for their roe, which they sell to Japanese buyers. Many of the fish themselves go to waste. My smoking operation makes use of these waste fish, and our smoked salmon is a fine product that can now be found in grocery stores competing with similar products from Washington State and Canada.

  It is my hope that other locally owned salmon operations will spring up along the Yukon, using even more parts of each fish by smoking the meat and grinding the livers, hearts, and other organs into a paté for European markets. I hope to be able to share everything I learned about getting permits and the complex physical requirements for constructing a plant. I would like my plant to be a model for others, serving as a training center for anyone who wants to enter this business.

  When I moved my family from Hog River to Huslia in the early 1950s, the village had no school. The Territory refused to grant money to build a village school, but Bishop William J. Gordon of the Episcopal Church promised $2,000 to pay for the roof, floor, doors, and windows, if the villagers would build a log schoolhouse.

  The men of Huslia built a thirty-by-sixty log schoolhouse, and that fall the Territory furnished a teacher and books. Some of the twenty-four pupils were sixteen or seventeen—too old, they thought, to be going to school. Edwin Simon and my brother Jimmy persuaded them otherwise. Some families had already moved to their winter traplines, but Edwin and Jimmy rounded them up and convinced them to return to the village to attend school. At the time, they were not required by law to go to school.

  John Sackett, the half Koyukon son of trader Jack Sackett, was the first graduate of the new school when he was nineteen. Later, he was to become an Alaska state senator. When he started school at Huslia, his desk was a wooden gasoline box from Standard Oil Company, and his seat was a round chunk of wood cut from a tree.

  In the 1950s and after, many Native students left their homes to attend BIA schools at Mount Edgecumbe, at Sitka, in southeastern Alaska. Others went to Eklutna where I had gone, or even to Chimawa, a BIA school in Oregon. Whichever school they chose, students lost the guidance and teaching of their parents while they were so far from home.

  After statehood came in 1959, Alaska’s Department of Education gradually assumed the schooling of rural Alaskan children, taking over from the BIA. It was costly to maintain many small schools in villages scattered across Alaska, and state officials decided to centralize education for Alaska’s Natives by closing many of the rural schools and building dormitories for rural students at Bethel, in western Alaska, and in Fairbanks and Anchorage. The children were to live in these dormitories while attending city schools.

  I served on the Huslia school board until I moved to Galena in 1963, and there I was a member of the Galena school board for twenty-five years. I became a strong advocate of local education for young villagers at least through high school, and I encouraged all youngsters to get as much education as possible beyond that level.

  I was convinced the dormitories were a bad idea. I wanted to give my own children direct guidance and support from home while they were in high school, which they wouldn’t get if they were sent to some distant place for schooling.

  “If you don’t like it, why don’t you tell the Board of Education in Anchorage?” one of the Galena school board members suggested. “I will,” I declared, in the heat of the moment.

  In Anchorage, for three days, I listened to the State Board of Education. Although representatives from other villages were there, none were speaking out against the plan. The board continued to speak in terms of housing village high school students in Bethel, Anchorage, and Fairbanks.

  During a recess I told an elderly woman who was a member of the seven-person board that I opposed their plan.

  “Why don’t you get up and say so?” she encouraged.

  “I’m not used to interrupting people,” I said.

  “You raise your hand and ask for the floor,” she said. “If the chairman doesn’t recognize you, I’ll object. I’ll back you up. That’s what this meeting is about.”

  When the session reconvened, I raised my hand. I was ignored and became embarrassed.

  “This man wants to be heard,” said the woman board member in a loud voice.

  Finally, the chairman of the Board of Education gave me the floor. I walked up front and made my pitch:

  “Schools with dormitories, as you are planning, would be institutions. They would resemble reform schools. The kids living there would have to be under strict discipline—something they have never experienced. Such conditions would create havoc with Indian and Eskimo kids.

  “Kids, even at the high school level, need parental guidance; they need to be close to home.” Then I returned to my seat.

  There was a stunned silence. Suddenly, as if a dam had broken, other voices joined in supporting my view. Many of the Eskimo and Indian people there had been aching to speak, but they were too polite to interrupt the board. In the end, the Commissioner of Education said that this was the kind of response he had wanted.

  That ended the dormitory proposal. Instead of dormitories, the state built high schools in every village. Some were too small to offer a full range of subjects. This brought on the Molly Hootch court case about 1964, which resulted in a ruling that required the state of Alaska to provide village schools comparable in every way to those in urban Alaska. Admittedly, some white elephants resulted, but we had moved in the direction of better education for rural
Alaskans.

  In most interior Alaska villages, books have been learning sources for a relatively short time. Some schools, like the one at Huslia, opened their doors in the mid-1950s or later. The “white man’s education” was new to most Native parents. Gradually they realized the need, and demanded formal education for their children, though sometimes they were uncertain of the reasons.

  Most Native parents were dollar poor, but rich in their knowledge of Native ways of life and how to survive in the harsh wilderness of the North. Traditionally, parents were the teachers; their lifelong task was to educate their children in the old ways. Now their children left home daily to learn another way of life, in another world, and a vital link was often omitted because the parents were not included in the education process. While busy with their school studies, the children failed to acquire a “bush education.”

  But for rural Alaskans, education isn’t just book-learning. It is also knowing how to built a boat, a fish wheel, a log cabin, or how to set a trap or a snare. It is knowing how to build a fire, how to dress for the cold, how to find your way in the woods. Bush education is my Aunt Josie’s skill in removing beaver from a lodge. It is knowing how to be frugal with supplies, and how to care for equipment. It is knowing how to dress a moose or a salmon, how to repair a snow machine or an outboard motor, how to shoot a gun.

  In the past, a bush education was enough. Today, to survive and prosper in rural Alaska, young people need both a bush education, and a white man’s education.

  25

  REFLECTION

  I recently received a fine pocketknife as a gift from a Kobuk Eskimo who is a descendent of the Eskimo trader Schilikuk. I then sent him a present to honor his gift. These gifts are a way of demonstrating that the friendship between the families of my grandfather and the Eskimo trader Schilikuk continues. It is difficult to convey the satisfaction and pleasure that I feel at this continuing, more-than-a-century-old, close relationship.