Shadows on the Koyukuk Read online

  SHADOWS ON THE

  KOYUKUK

  ALSO BY JIM REARDEN

  Alaska’s First Bush Pilots, 1923–30

  AND THE WINTER SEARCH IN SIBERIA FOR EIELSON AND BORLAND

  In the Shadow of Eagles

  FROM BARNSTORMER TO ALASKA BUSH PILOT, A FLYER’S STORY

  Alaska’s Wolf Man

  THE 1915–55 WILDERNESS ADVENTURES OF FRANK GLASER

  Sam O. White, Alaskan

  TALES OF A LEGENDARY WILDLIFE AGENT AND BUSH PILOT

  Castner’s Cutthroats

  SAGA OF THE ALASKA SCOUTS

  The Wolves of Alaska

  A FACT-BASED SAGA

  Forgotten Warriors of the Aleutian Campaign

  Koga’s Zero

  THE FIGHTER THAT CHANGED WORLD WAR II

  Slim Moore: Alaska Master Guide

  A SOURDOUGH’S HUNTING ADVENTURES AND WISDOM

  Jim Rearden’s Alaska

  FIFTY YEARS OF FRONTIER ADVENTURE

  Travel Air NC9084

  THE HISTORY OF A 75-YEAR-OLD WORKING AIRPLANE

  Hunting Alaska’s Far Places

  Fifty Years With Rifle and Shotgun

  All of the above are available directly from Pictorial Histories Publishing Company, 1-888-763-8530.

  Arctic Bush Pilot

  FROM NAVY COMBAT TO FLYING ALASKA’S NORTHERN WILDERNESS

  Tales of Alaska’s Big Bears

  SHADOWS ON THE

  KOYUKUK

  An Alaskan Native's Life

  Along the River

  SIDNEY HUNTINGTON

  AS TOLD TO JIM WARDEN

  Copyright © 1993 by Sidney Huntington and Jim Rearden

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission of the publisher.

  The print edition is available from Pictorial Histories Publishing Company, Inc. pictorialhistoriespublishing.com

  Library of Congress Control Number 2010931576

  ISBN 978-1-57510-153-8

  ISBN (e-book) 978-0-88240-930-6

  Cover and book design by Bergh Jensen, Seattle

  Map by Bill Vaughn, Arrow Graphics

  Cover Painting: Twilight by Sydney Laurence, c. 1919. Oil on canvas over board, 15⅜ × 11⅝ inches. Reproduced courtesy of the Masonic Grand Lodge of Washington.

  Photograph by Paul Macapia.

  Published by Alaska Northwest Books®

  An imprint of

  P.O. Box 56118

  Portland, Oregon 97238-6118

  503-254-5591

  www.graphicartsbooks.com

  TO THE MEMORY OF

  MY FATHER, JAMES S. HUNTINGTON,

  MY MOTHER, ANNA,

  MY BROTHER JIMMY, AND

  MY SISTER ADA

  CONTENTS

  PREFACE

  MAP

  1 ANNA

  2 KALLYHOCUSES

  3 THREE BABES ALONE

  4 ANVIK

  5 ALATNA

  6 EKLUTNA

  7 NULATO

  8 THE BATZA RIVER TRAPLINE

  9 DEEP COLD

  10 MY FIRST BOAT

  11 THE FLOOD

  12 SNARING A GRIZZLY

  13 ON OUR OWN

  14 NO MAN’S LAND

  15 THE OLD KOYUKON WAYS

  16 SIWASH

  17 KOYUKUK GOLD

  18 SLED DOGS

  19 BEAVER

  20 SPEARING GRIZZLY BEARS

  21 KOYUKUK MOOSE

  22 KOYUKUK WOLVES

  23 BOOZE

  24 GALENA

  25 REFLECTION

  EPILOGUE

  RELATED READING

  INDEX

  PREFACE

  I met Sidney Huntington in 1972, when he was appointed to the Alaska Board of Fish and Game on which I served. At our meetings, which often lasted weeks, the twelve members decided all fish and game policies and regulations for the state of Alaska. And the depth of Sidney’s knowledge of wildlife soon became evident. To make a point, he’d often tell the board wonderful stories of his life in the Koyukuk River country in northern Alaska, and I was fascinated by his experiences.

  In 1975 Alaska’s legislature split the Board of Fish and Game into two bodies, each with seven members. Sidney and I, now friends, found ourselves serving on the Board of Game.

  At a Fairbanks meeting I saw another side to Sidney when we encountered a young Indian from Galena, Sidney’s current Yukon River home. “I thought you were at school,” Sidney said.

  “No more money, Sidney. I’m going home to earn more so I can go back,” the young man answered.

  “How much you need?” Sidney asked.

  “Eight hundred dollars.”

  Sidney opened his wallet and handed the young man eight $100 bills.

  “You go back to school,” he said.

  The young man stared at the money in his hand as if he couldn’t believe his eyes, then he said softly, “Thank you, Sidney. Maybe I pay you back one day.” He walked off with a spring in his step.

  I asked Sidney if he thought he’d ever get the money back, and he said, “I don’t care if I don’t. That boy belongs in school.”

  I learned later that Sidney has financed schooling for many young people from the Koyukuk.

  I left the game board in 1982, but Sidney remained, apparently impervious to political winds which, with each change in governor, produced a virtually new board. He finally resigned in 1992, after twenty years of unpaid service to the state.

  In 1988, recalling his wonderful stories, I proposed writing a book with him about his adventurous life. When he agreed, I flew to Galena with a tape recorder. I discovered that he had spent the weeks before my arrival writing down many details of his life. Shadows on the Koyukuk was assembled from those written accounts and my tape-recorded interviews with him.

  About that $800: while I was at Galena, I asked Sidney if the young man he had given the money to in Fairbanks had ever repaid him. “He paid me back after he got an education,” Sidney replied. “He now has a family, a home, and a job. He’s doing well.”

  The Koyukuk valley, where Sidney Huntington was born and where his family ties extend into the dim past, covers about 33,000 square miles of wildland drained by Alaska’s Koyukuk River. This gin-clear stream, Alaska’s third-largest river, arises in the arctic Central Brooks Range and meanders southwest for 554 miles before it pours into the Lower Yukon. Immense forests of birch, aspen, and tall spruce thrive on its banks. In the uplands, the northern taiga gives way to treeless tundra, with tree line at 2,000 to 3,000 feet. Moose, caribou, wolf, grizzly, and black bear populate the region, and in season, the area teems with birds.

  Koyukuk country is a land of extremes. At winter solstice, the sun appears at Bettles for only an hour and forty minutes. But between June 2 and July 10, the sun circles endlessly, never dropping below the horizon. Winter temperatures commonly skid to 60 degrees below 0 Fahrenheit or colder, and summer temperatures can reach the 90s. Most of the soil is rock-hard permafrost—permanently frozen ground— which traps surface water, and so lakes, ponds, and marshes abound. Precipitation is only ten to twenty inches annually, which may include up to six feet of fluffy snow.

  Most Americans might think of Koyukuk country as unpopulated wilderness. Even in the last decade of the twentieth century, fewer than 600 men, women, and children live along the wild Koyukuk River. These predominantly Koyukon Athapaskan Indian residents (named for the Koyukuk and Yukon rivers where they live) reside primarily in four riverbank villages: Allakaket, Bettles, Hughes, and Huslia. Villages situated along the Yukon River and occupie
d by another 2,500 Koyukon Indians are Stevens Village, Rampart, Tanana, Ruby, Galena, Koyukuk, Nulato, and Kaltag.

  The Athapaskans are a large and diverse family of Indians who live throughout much of central Alaska and across a vast region of western Canada. In Alaska, there are eleven cultural groups, including the Koyukons, who live along major river drainages, in the uplands, and on the Pacific coast.

  Shortly after 1900, Klondike gold rusher James S. Huntington wandered down the Yukon River, where he met and married Anna, a Koyukon daughter of the land. Their son Sidney has now lived for nearly a century in the Koyukuk country where he was born. His life’s story is a fascinating slice of Alaskan history.

  Sidney grew up in a subarctic wildland of birchbark canoes, dog teams, trappers, gold miners, and Koyukon Indians. He continues to live in essentially the same culture, now modernized with snow machines, bush planes, and satellite TV. He is a product of the land, who thoroughly knows his region, the animals, and the people who live there. The memories he shares in this book bring alive a way of life that is gone forever, for as a teenager and young man he lived primarily off the land; his interest in traditional Koyukon tales provides an intriguing peek into Koyukon Indian prehistory.

  In addition to leading an incredibly adventurous life, Sidney Huntington is a special kind of person. His is a bootstraps-up, inspirational success story of survival. Despite this, Sidney has always found time to help others—a trait that in recent years has brought him statewide respect and an honorary doctorate from the University of Alaska. Long before he received that degree, I regarded Sidney as holding a doctorate in life, for he is self-educated, with knowledge that extends far beyond the horizons of Alaska’s Koyukuk country.

  In telling Sidney’s story, I have made every effort to retain his straightforward, honest, laconic style, because I want the reader to hear it as he told it to me. I hope I have succeeded, for Sidney Huntington has left a clear, straight trail that is worth following.

  Jim Rearden Homer, Alaska

  Sprucewood September 1992

  The Koyukuk Region

  1

  ANNA

  It was the Koyukon “month of the hawk.” The long days of March had arrived, when migratory hawks return to the Koyukuk River valley. Schilikuk, a coastal Eskimo trader, had come to visit and trade with my Athapaskan mother. He was a big man, perhaps six feet tall and 190 pounds. On his face, instead of tattoos carried by some Eskimos, he had tribal cuts through his cheeks on each side. He amazed me, a four-year-old, by putting his crooked stem pipe through the slit on one cheek and blowing smoke out the other cheek. This was one of my earliest memories.

  My mother’s family lived at Hogatzakaket (kaket is “river” in the Athapaskan tongue), which on maps is simply called Hogatza. We call it Hog River. It is a tributary to the big Koyukuk River, which in turn flows into the Lower Yukon River.

  My grandmother—I’ve always called her “Old Mama”—had fifteen children. Eight of them, five daughters and three sons, survived to adulthood. Of these, my mother, Anna, was the oldest. She was born sometime in the late 1870s.

  Her father—my grandfather—was a Koyukon Indian who traded, not only with his own people of the Koyukuk Valley, but also with Schilikuk, although the Eskimos were traditional enemies of the Athapaskans. Peaceful contacts between these peoples were few, but my grandfather’s unusual relationship with Schilikuk was approved by both Eskimo and Indian leaders because each side needed goods that the other had. By the time I met Schilikuk, in 1920, the enmity between our peoples was mostly forgotten.

  My mother told me how each year my grandfather and Schilikuk enacted an age-old drama—that of two dissimilar peoples trading goods. Grandfather would load a dogsled with birchbark baskets, furs of wolverine, beaver, marten, fox, and lynx, and chunks of soft red rock found along the Koyukuk River. When crushed and mixed with water, the rocks made a colorful dye used to paint snowshoe frames, ceremonial wood masks, and porcupine quills for decorating garments and other objects.

  Each March, Grandfather traveled from the Koyukuk River up the Dakli River into the Zane Hills, where he camped on the Dakli side of a low pass. This was as far as it was safe for him to venture. The mountainous land that lay before him, between Eskimo and Atha-paskan country, was then known as “No Man’s Land.”

  Meanwhile, Schilikuk would make his way up the Selawik River on the other side of the pass, his dogsled full of coastal products— sealskins, fawn caribou hides, mukluks (both waterproof and warm winter types), seal oil, salt, and walrus ivory. He would camp on the Selawik side, for he dared go no farther.

  My grandfather would walk, alone and unarmed, to the pass, carrying a long pole. If he saw no sign of Schilikuk, he thrust his pole into the deep snow and returned to camp. Every day he snowshoed to the pass to see whether a second pole was planted in the snow beside his—the signal that Schilikuk had arrived and trading could begin.

  When there were two poles in the snow, Grandfather took his loaded sled to the pass to meet Schilikuk. Each would lay everything out for the other’s inspection. The Eskimo especially wanted fine wolverine furs, prized for use as a face liner in wolf-fur ruffs in the hoods of parkas. Although any long-haired fur can be used for this purpose, wolverine is the best because the hairs do not easily break or pull out when built-up frost from the wearer’s breath is pulled off.

  My grandfather was eager to get caribou fawn skins, which are easily made into soft winter undergarments and socks. Also in demand in the Koyukuk valley were seal oil, which is a high-energy food, walrus ivory tusks from which useful items could be carved, sealskins for winter outer garments, and tough-as-iron ropes made from walrus skin.

  Each trader always went through the motions of being offended at the offers of the other. My grandfather, for example, would act insulted at an offer of three caribou fawn skins for one wolverine skin. He would pick out of the Eskimo’s pile two or three more fawn skins and add them to the stack, insisting that this particular wolverine skin was worth at least five, maybe six fawn skins. Sometimes it would take hours for a single transaction. Time wasn’t important. They might haggle for days.

  When my mother was old enough, in the late 1880s and early 1890s, she accompanied her father on these annual trading trips to the Dakli. From Schilikuk she learned to speak some Eskimo.

  In 1900 or 1901, my mother married Victor Bifelt, a Finn who, like about a thousand other gold rushers, had left the Klondike to prospect and trap in the Koyukuk country, where gold had been found several years earlier. “Marriage” in the Koyukuk in those days consisted of choosing a partner and living together. If the relationship was good, it lasted; if not, it dissolved. At that time, whites lived with Koyukon women and there were no bad feelings; only the missionaries resented the practice. Although rough-spoken, Bifelt treated my mother well, and the couple had two children, Fred and Edith.

  They settled in Hogatza country, where they built a log cabin two miles below where Hog River runs into the Koyukuk, and Victor began trapping. He enjoyed living off the land, but he wanted the whole country to himself and didn’t respect the claims of others.

  Their nearest neighbors were at Hog River, where Ned Regan, another white, lived with my mother’s mother, Old Mama. These two had a daughter, Eliza, whose son, George Attla, would one day become one of Alaska’s most famous sled dog racers. Ned trapped from his Hog River cabin.

  Victor and Ned soon began quarreling over trapline rights. Koyukon Indians often spend a winter, or even years, in close vicinity of friends or family without conflict, but these two hard-headed white men were different. Since they both sold firewood to steamboats plying the Koyukuk River and were trapping in the same region, they regarded each other as competitors and their dispute became a bitter feud.

  Bifelt accused Regan of trying to take over his trapline and ordered him off, but Regan refused to leave. “I’m going to kill Regan,” Victor told my mother one day, after the two men had clashed. Frightened, the next
day while Victor was away, my mother hurried to Hog River to warn Old Mama. “Get out of here, Mama,” she warned. “I think Victor is going to shoot Regan.” Old Mama, capable of living from the land as were all Athapaskan women of her generation, fled and set up camp some distance away.

  She also told Regan about Victor’s threat. “I’ll take care of myself,” Regan said, and my mother ran home.

  The murder must have taken place a short time later. Regan saw Bifelt coming, and when Bifelt walked through the door of his cabin, Regan blasted him at point-blank range with a double-barreled shotgun.

  Details have dimmed with time, but I believe that Regan buried Bifelt before he went to the Yukon River village of Nulato to turn himself in. The local marshal took Regan to Nome, the center of legal matters in those gold rush days.

  The following summer, two deputies arrived to take Anna to Nome as a witness at the trial set for February of the next year. They had to leave quickly before the winter freeze closed their watery route. Anna was distraught at having to leave her children with Old Mama for the many months that she would be gone. Also, she dreaded going into forbidden Eskimo territory. All her life she had heard of the savagery of the Eskimos, who always killed Athapaskans who ventured into their country, with the truce between her father and Schilikuk being one of few exceptions.

  My mother was a small woman (about ninety pounds) but she was strong and courageous. With the deputies, she traveled by river steamer down the Koyukuk and Yukon rivers to St. Michael, near the mouth of the Yukon. From there they crossed Norton Sound on the last steamboat of the year, arriving at Nome in September 1904. Theirs was a trip of about 1,000 miles, although the distance was only 320 miles as the raven flies.

  Nome was then a chaotic boomtown filled with gold rushers. Tents stretched along the beach in a solid row for five miles. The air was filled with sounds of hammering and sawing, as residents prepared for the coming subarctic winter. To Anna, who had spent her life in the wilderness, twenty-five people was a crowd; Nome, with its 15,000-plus people was a nightmare. The court found a couple to feed and house Anna until the trial. Throughout the five-month wait, she was homesick and lonely.