Chasing Alaska: A Portrait of the Last Frontier Then and Now

by C. B. Bernard

  Buoyed, I found Claus Naske in the phone book and relayed what Bob had told me. Dr. Naske laughed and said that he’d been neither young nor a grad student for nearly three decades, but he confirmed Bob’s story.

  “I still have Captain Bernard’s manuscript,” he added. “Would you like a copy?”

  The manuscript arrived with a Fairbanks postmark in a box big enough to kennel a raccoon. Arctic Voyages of the Schooner Teddy Bear runs better than a thousand pages, broken into two parts, the first, from 1909 to 1914, racking up 700 pages on its own, sandwiched between a 30-page introduction and a 200-page appendix. The whole thing appeared on my doorstep in its cumbersome entirety loose and out of order—as if the copy machine spit the pages onto the floor and a janitor swept them into the box.

  “This work consists simply of extracts from the ship’s log during the years 1909 through 1920 with additions from my journal, memory, and miscellaneous papers,” Joe writes in the introduction. “Some of the entries in the log were so copious, I summarized them, or so uneventful I deleted them; others so brief I retained them to show how many months were spent striving to obtain enough food to keep alive.”

  The pages contain trade ledgers, tallies of gathered artifacts, information about hunts, and detailed geographic and nautical facts and trivia. A sort of bush gossip threads throughout it, covering the Eskimo, Inuit, explorers, and other intrepid souls Joe encountered so far north—nothing sordid, just an accounting of their comings and goings. Keeping abreast of one another’s travels in the Arctic provided those who spent time there with a mental safety net in a place that offered little else in the way of security.

  Moments of brilliance and adventure lie buried beneath countless dry climatologic observations:

  The bear must have heard them for he raised his head and started running down the beach towards them! They turned and ran for the dory; when they got to it, they jumped over it and kneeled down, laid their rifles on the gunwale of the dory and fired. The bear was then about 50 yards from them. At the first volley the bear dropped but was up in a second and he kept on coming. They poured full magazines of cartridges into the bear and he dropped again but got up and started for the bank. They fired some more shots and he finally dropped dead. They skinned him as the skin is fairly good and found 16 bullets in him, of which 12 were in vital spots. He had no fat but they brought some of the meat aboard.

  Other entries ring wistfully:

  While we were there I bought a crate of potatoes from Charlie [Klengenberg] which he has had in the ice house for over 6 years. After cooking them I could not tell that they had ever been in a frozen state. . . . I understand that an American scientist, Clarence Birdseye, is given credit for having invented, in 1921, the process of quick-freezing vegetables. But as is customary in so many things, the discovery was rather made and used by others long before.

  Some create a frame of reference completely removed from the Alaska I was beginning to know, over a thousand miles to the south:

  Early this a.m. a large school of Beluga whale went by but by the time we got out for them they had all disappeared. Richards Island is the best place for beluga whale and the Eskimos consider it quite a prize to get one as the meat is far superior to other aquatic mammals such as seal, walrus and ougruk, and the hide is excellent. In fact, it makes far better mukluk soles than any other skin.

  He came on a whale carcass at which he saw about 20 bears. He turned his dogs loose but soon called them back, for some 60 or 70 more bears got up into view! The bears had been lying down after gorging on the whale meat. Andreasen said there were so many he did not dare go any closer. The next day he went back and shot 4 or 5 bears at the same place, then they disappeared and he got no more. No one has ever seen so many polar bears at one spot since.

  In many he describes Eskimo and Inuit culture,2 which he observed firsthand at a time when the world knew little about it:

  Kaptookin’s wife gave birth to a baby last night. When Anoyou came to the schooner this A.M., I asked him how the baby was. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘he cried but we put him out in a caribou skin on a pile of rocks and he is all right now.’ Infanticide. Well, this is the way with these people. There is no chance for a baby to live which is born at this time of year, when they must travel. A woman must pack equipment and she cannot carry an infant. In the winter, however, when they use sleds, they will keep a baby if they have plenty of food. It is pitiful. Why, I knew one old woman who had given birth to 22 babies but only three were living.

  Such accounts are anecdotal, observational, and raw, biased by Joe’s own beliefs, and without the context or analysis of historical study. He was no anthropologist or ethnologist, not even a dispassionate man of science, though he wanted to be and worked hard at it. Just an adventurer in a foreign world, as susceptible to culture shock as any tourist.

  Living for so long among the people indigenous to the Arctic, he came to learn from and befriend them.

  I am having the Eskimo women make me some summer clothing. They are making it out of seal skins as it is waterproof. In the winter we use caribou skins but in the summer we use caribou for undergarments only. Of course, we cannot use seal skins in the winter as it conducts cold and is not warm enough.

  Collectively, these typed words spoke to me directly in Joe’s voice. Until then, everything I’d read about him had come secondhand. As I read his thoughts and observations, a character began to emerge, humble in some entries, brave in others, often thoughtful and devout, as when he marked the death of the wife of his Inupiat friend, Billy Natkusiak:

  It was a pitiful sight. She and Billy were just a young married couple and his trust and hope in me was such that I, too, was sorrowed that I was too late to be of any help. Her sickness looked to me like it was pneumonia. There was not a stick of wood for fire nor wood for a coffin. Koman, the dead girl’s father, was using boards of the cabin, so I went back home, taking a boy with me. We got in at 3:30 a.m. Then we went right back with lumber and some material to make a coffin. . . . All the family and friends were gathered around shaking hands and kissing the dead woman. I gave Billy a nice piece of white drill to make a burial parka for her; also a piece of Scotch plaid to tie on her head. Poor Billy was so grateful, and he insisted that I conduct funeral services. Koman read from a mission book and they all sang hymns. It was quite a nice Christian funeral. She is buried in the snow until spring.

  Other entries betray nothing other than weather reports, geographical asides, or notes on the animals he and his Eskimo helpers shot, trapped, or otherwise harvested: “Another gale and snowstorm. Six inches of snow fell tonight. Although it was wet, it drifted. Anoyou saw a black-throated loon and a red-throated loon today—the first this season.”

  Part Two picks up in 1916 and devotes a more reasonable seventy-five pages to each of the next five years, concerning itself with day-to-day logistical information, taking more of an analytical and narrative diary voice as Joe aged and grew more confident in his travels. By then he’d probably read the work of explorers he’d met in the Arctic, and their style informed his technique, either intentionally or subconsciously. I tried to imagine his voice, how he sounded based on his words, syntax, and phrasing, but found them at odds with what I knew of him. The language of the manuscript reads surprisingly articulate, despite that he managed just three years of schooling and claimed to speak English—along with French and “Eskimo”—only brokenly.3

  As my research continued, his correspondence varied in the level of language it achieved. Some writing sounded reasonably eloquent, some a mild affront to English. Then I found a letter from Joe’s cousin Augusta, in which she confessed to playing a heavy-handed part in his drafts. I assumed her influence to be the source of the polish, and perhaps the tone of many entries, including overly formal phrasing and a fondness for the exclamation point (“‘Yes,’ I nodded, ‘you have guessed it! A Siberian backscratcher, it is!�
�”) difficult to ascribe to Joe. Someone else had heavily annotated the pages of the manuscript with a pen, haphazardly eliding certain passages and highlighting others, relocating words, reordering sentences with diagrammatic arrows, the collective blueprints for a literary structure left unbuilt. If Augusta stood behind the first draft, who was the editor that had critiqued her? Between the two of them, was the narrative reliable? Or had they molded the blood-and-skin Captain Joseph F. Bernard into an eponymous character, a literary doppelganger, in order to rehabilitate his rough-and-tumble image and steer the texts toward publication? After a thousand pages, I knew much about Joe’s day-to-day life but little about Joe.

  He’d pointed north with the urgency of a compass needle. Why? What had drawn him to the Arctic, and why had he returned again and again? Was it despite the danger the stark and inhospitable land posed and the threats it presented to his survival, or because of them? Life in the Arctic then amounted to feats of endurance strung together by impossible challenges, a twenty-year obstacle course. To seek out such hardship even for a short while seems a curious act, yet Joe spent nearly a third of his life north of North America—“east of Barrow and north of everything,” he described it. What compelled him to choose such a life?

  I had hoped his manuscript might reveal more about his identity, but then I began to hope, too, that it might help me learn more about my own. As I explored my new home in Sitka, struggling to become a better outdoorsman, a better “Alaskan,” Joe’s impossible example made me wonder why so much came so difficult to me. I hungered to learn more about him, and where he had been—because just a few generations back, I’d come from the same place.

  But beneath all my questions lay another: Had something genetic predisposed him to seek out new places, to live his life like an unanchored schooner, aimless and adrift? If so, maybe the same thing flowed in my blood, too, diluted over generations into the vague restlessness I’d always felt. The more I learned about Joe’s history, the more I wondered about my own.

  4

  Prospects

  In the summer of 1902 we bought a boiler so we could dig our hole in the frozen ground, but the biggest hole we made was in our pockets. Our talents were not in mining.

  Nome was booming when Joe arrived on its shores, expanding as rapidly as a balloon. It’s difficult to think of it even now as a big city or urban center, impossibly removed and poised indelicately on the edge of a peninsula just south of the Arctic Circle, but in 1901 it was just that. Twenty-two years old, from a quiet island village on the other edge of the continent, he’d traveled from one extremity to another, from a distant moon to the star of some far-flung galaxy.

  Nearly a century later I turned down a chance to write for the Nome Nugget, the state’s oldest newspaper, before the Daily Sentinel offered me the job in Sitka. I’d visited Alaska before, flown into Juneau and fallen in love with Southeast’s rain and ferries, forests and mountains. I wanted to live on the coast of a sea that didn’t freeze. Nome was all snow and sleds and mukluks, flat, almost entirely treeless. It hosts an annual six-hole golf tournament on the frozen Bering Sea with spent shotgun shells for tees and a forest hazard of Christmas trees nailed to the ice. Still, being offered two jobs in Alaska, one writing for the paper that Joe read each day and that wrote so much about him, the other in a newsroom just a few dozen feet from where he’d lived the last two years of his life, made me want to believe in something more than coincidence.

  Despite my reluctance to choose Nome, you might argue that it better captures the essence of Alaska than Southeast. But even in Alaska, a place that’s a long place from anyplace else, Nome seemed unnecessarily remote for me, 1,100 miles by dogsled from Anchorage as any Iditarod fan knows, jutting into Norton Sound, separated from Siberia by just 200 miles of cold Bering Sea, and close enough to see Russia—at least Russia’s Big Diomede Island.

  If Nome in 1999 seemed rough around the edges, imagine it just months before Peter Bernard arrived fresh from his golden goose chase in the Klondike. Time might have swallowed the informal camp called Anvil City—“Nome” coming later, probably the casualty of a cartographer who misread the notation ? Name on a naval chart as C. Nome, or Cape Nome—if not for a trio of miners who found gold flakes in a creek the summer of 1898. Jafet Lindeberg, Erik Lindblom, and John Brynteson—called the Lucky Swedes, Lindeberg’s being Norwegian doing nothing to disabuse history of their collective nickname—formed a partnership and staked nearly a hundred speculative claims. News spread that winter and triggered a frenzy long before any real gold was found.

  After the Klondike discovery a few years earlier, newspapers hyped tales of endless gold available for the taking. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which got the scoop, chartered a tug to greet the steamer carrying the first miners to strike it rich in Puget Sound. It ran the following headline over a story in a special edition printed before the steamship had even landed:

  GOLD! GOLD! GOLD! GOLD!

  SIXTY-EIGHT RICH MEN ON THE STEAMER PORTLAND.

  STACKS OF YELLOW METAL!

  A huge crowd gathered at the docks, and an even larger one stampeded north. Word traveled quickly beyond the West Coast, even reaching Peter Bernard on a small island in eastern Canada. The Nome find had much the same effect.

  In June 1899 just 200 people lived in Anvil City. By late summer the population had increased tenfold; the following spring, another 10,000 miners arrived, some fresh from the Klondike, like Pete, others by steamship from the Lower 45. By fall the boomtown boasted a dozen general stores, six restaurants, four liquor stores and hotels, eleven doctors, sixteen lawyers, and God knows how many prostitutes.4 Would-be prospectors dropped everything for the chance at striking it rich, including Seattle’s own mayor, William Wood, on business in San Francisco when the story broke, who resigned by telegraph and hopped a steamship north without even returning home.

  Unlike Dawson City, the heart of the Klondike gold rush deep in the Yukon, Nome was relatively easy to reach, and the steamship routes ramped up their service. In 1901 another 15,000 people descended upon the city. Some of these new arrivals, like Wyatt Earp, were already famous. Others earned their fame there or later in life, like Tex Rickard, who went on to build Madison Square Garden and create the New York Rangers NHL franchise. Some weren’t so much famous as infamous, like Ed Jesson, who arrived in Nome on a bicycle after a grueling 800-mile journey through the snow from Dawson City.

  Born overnight, born of greed, Nome reeked of debauchery, alcohol, and violence, a raft of desire carried on a current of desperation. In an article about Nome’s founding, author Tricia Brown recounts Dr. Sheldon Jackson, a Presbyterian minister and special agent for education in Alaska, meeting a missionary heading to the burgeoning city. “Hurry on to Nome,” Jackson urged him. “You will find the greatest task of your life in that new camp.”

  By the time the second- and third-wave prospectors arrived, most of the best claims were already staked, some doubly or triply so. True to human nature, some people found ways to pull gold from the ground, some from the rivers, while others found ways to extract it from one another. The Alaska Mining Hall of Fame notes that “Nome also had a perhaps inordinate number of the parasites who mined the miners.” The new arrivals, frustrated and desperate, perpetrated a chaos of claim-jumping and frenetic lawyering as they filed claims for themselves and others on land already staked, often spuriously. A North Dakota politician and a district judge on his bankroll stole the more successful claims from the miners who’d signed for them, a conspiracy immortalized by novelist Rex Beach—himself among the thousands who arrived in Nome, and a friend of Pete’s—in his bestseller, The Spoilers, which reached the silver screen five times, including a 1930 iteration starring Gary Cooper and a 1942 remake starring John Wayne and Marlene Dietrich.

  Typhoid, smallpox, and German measles spread through the camp, new outbreaks triggered by each steamship carrying an influx
of prospectors. Disease thinned the population at a frightening rate, but still the new arrivals poured into town, undeterred. They camped by the thousands on the beach in a tent city that stretched nearly 30 miles—and then someone discovered gold in the sand on that very beach.

  Infrastructure grew exponentially to support the population growth, including a narrow-gauge railroad and phone line to Anvil Creek to facilitate mining. By 1900 the town exceeded 12,000 residents, a population increase of more than 6,000 percent over two years. Nome’s prospectors accounted for a full third of Alaska’s white population that year.

  Still they came, and for good reason: gold in abundance. Overnight, fortunes changed. Nome was “shortly a city of millionaires and soon-to-be millionaires, housed in comparative luxury on the edge of nowhere,” wrote Alice Osborne, a former Nome schoolteacher and journalist, in a 1974 Alaska Journal article that captured the dichotomy of the wilderness boomtown.

  “Although it was thousands of miles from Paris and New York, the ladies of Nome sent to those far centers for the latest fashions, and wore them despite the mud or the dust or the snow and ice,” she wrote. “But it was also a city where bathtubs were almost unknown, where water had to be trucked from house to house and delivered into barrels, and where the honey bucket was a fact of life.” Today, Alaska still has the lowest percentage of indoor plumbing of any state, and in rural Alaska, especially Native villages in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta region on the Bering Sea coast, honey buckets—five-gallon plastic pails positioned beneath a wooden frame and emptied by hand—remain a way of life.5 You’re less likely, however, to see the latest fashions. A recent Travel & Leisure article declared Anchorage America’s “Worst-Dressed City”—perhaps an evolution of a trend that began long ago. Osborne quotes someone who lived in Nome during the gold rush telling of women wearing woolen long johns beneath their Parisian gowns to protect against the bitter cold of winter. “Some of the dresses had plunging necklines and you’d see a touch of red wool showing at the bottom of the V,” she said. Alaska fashion at its finest.