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Internview with Stewart Branborg, March 3, 2003, by Roger Kaye (also present: Mrs. Branborg)
No full textOral history interview with Stewart Branborg. Roger Kaye was the interviewer.
Stewart Brandborg was a former Conservation Director of the National Wildlife Federation.
Name: Stewart Brandborg
Keywords: History, Biography, Congressional operations, Connecting people with nature, Forest conservation, Human impacts, Parks, Subpolar environments, Wilderness, Olaus Murie, Howard Zanhiser, Mardy MurieINTERVIEW WITH STEWART BRANBORG
MARCH 3, 2003 BY ROGER KAYE
(Also present, Mrs. Branborg)
MR. KAYE: This is an interview with Stewart Branborg conducted March 3, 2003 in
Darby, Montana by Roger Kaye. Stewart, thank you so much for doing this with me
today. I’d like to ask you to begin with a brief biographical sketch of your background,
where you are from, and how you got into this wilderness work.
MR. BRANBORG: I was raised in a family with a mother and dad who had a great
appreciation for wildlife and wild country. They took me and my sister on major
expeditions into the wilderness of Idaho and western Montana. This partially, or
substantially, I would say, because of my Dad’s service for forty old years in the U. S.
Forest Service here in the Bitter Root. He was Supervisor for twenty years. I was
influenced by a fine biologist at the Rocky Mountain Laboratory, William Jelison, who
took young people, a group of young men into the woods and on to the ranges of our
wonderful game animals. I decided to take up Wildlife Biology. I attended the University
of Montana for my undergraduate work. I became involved with field studies, range and
timber surveys. I had the opportunity to live on wilderness lookouts for a couple of
years. All of this I grew to value more and more through the years. In that process I was
invited to be part of a Mountain Goat life history study. I picked up on that in 1947.
During the next seven years, I devoted a major part of my time research while attending
the University of Idaho, Wildlife Research Unit. It was with the Fish and Game
Departments of Idaho and Montana that I worked on Mountain Goat studies. I had
become an area game Biologist for the northern part of Idaho and I was offered a job with
the National Wildlife Federation in 1954 by Charles Callison, the then Conservation
Director. That took me in to four and a half years of legislative work with Callison
working in all areas of conservation. Particular areas of concern with wildlife and of
course very strong support for the Wilderness bill offered by the Wildlife Federation, lead
by Callison. This put me in contact with Howard Zanhiser in about 1955. I became a
member of the governing council in 1956, of the Wilderness Society. Then, as a part of
the Executive Committee, I worked closely with Zanhiser. I was given great latitude and
freedom to pursue the Wilderness bill in support of the Zanhiser campaign. Indeed the
Wildlife Federation was one of his stalwart organizations that did much to promoting
understanding of the Bill. That took me through some four years with the Federation. In
1960, when the Federation became embroiled in a controversy, Callison and others within
my friendship circle departed. I went to the Society and asked for a job. Zanhiser
encouraged me to be in touch with the then President Harvey Broom. It was decided that
if I could make my magnificent salary of $8000.00 through use of direct mail and other
skills that I had captured at the Federation, I could go to work. So, I was enlisted for a
position as Director of Special Projects, I think the title was. From that after a couple of
years I became Associate Director under Zanhiser and when he succumbed in 1964, in
May, I was appointed to succeed him. The rest is history.
MR. KAYE: So you were Director of the Wilderness Society then?
MR. BRANBORG: I became his replacement in May of 1964, on the eve the final
signing of the Bill in September. It was my task at that point…we had waged this long
campaign from 1956 to 1964. There were seventeen Congressional hearings. There was a
strenuous effort of organize grass roots people for the wilderness cause and in support of
the Bill. It was my task to make people aware that in this great accomplishment of
setting the national policy in a preservation program we had only included some eight
million acres in the wilderness system. All the rest had to come through the laborious
process of public hearings, local studies, the passage of proposals up through the
hierarchy in the agencies and Congress. There would again be a round of hearings to see
the inclusion of these areas into the wilderness system. So that took me into
implementation and what I feel was my contribution; in organizing grass roots teams in
some forty states, in support of wilderness.
MR. KAYE: When you were with the National Wildlife Federation as Conservation
Director you were their representative on the refuge issue. What were some of the things
that you did with the Wildlife Federation in support of the campaign to establish the
Arctic Refuge?
MR. BRANBORG: I of course had fallen under the influence of Howard Zanhiser,
Callison at the Federation, and the Muries. Olaus had come to the University of
Montana in the 1940s to a northwest section meeting of the Wildlife Society. Here was
this sweet, humble epitome of a fine biologist.
The infusions from Olaus and Zanny I think crystallized by thinking about the
rich experience I had had in the backcountry. Those months on the lookout, and working
on trail and telephone line and wild country, and the great trips that I had had with my
family. It gave a framework for something that was deep in my psyche, my life. But
here it was brought together that needed our best effort to realize protection of all of the
unique things that we had experienced in the wild setting. I was working under Callison
on legislation, on educational campaigns. I am sure that part of my job was to make
contact with those members of Congress and their staffs to give them background on the
Arctic Range, and to support this effort. Of course in effective lobbying, the best job you
can do is to say, “Here in Olaus Murie. Here is Mardy Murie.” I had the realization of
the value of those people, so wherever we could convene good, open minded staff people,
members of Congress, House or Senate, we would do that. That was my expertise, not
that I had fully accomplished all that I ultimately as a base of my competence as a
lobbyist. I know that these people had touched me, and as a representative of the
Federation, I could speak with real conviction and eloquence because of my tie to these
spirited people.
MR. KAYE: Interesting! Were the people, the legislators and so on that you lobbied
touched or influenced my the Muries and their philosophy about wilderness?
MR. BRANBORG: Some were. The John Sailers, the Lee Metcalfs, just to name a
couple. In that period, conservation and the environment were not popular causes. You
introduced yourself with your card. The best way to get into a Congressional office was
have people call from the home state, or district saying, “we’re sending in Steward
Branborg to discuss this issue with you.”
MR. KAYE: Oh really?
MR. BRANBORG: I had a lot of background in doing that. So if I really wanted to get
in I would call the local affiliate of the Wildlife Federation; a Sportsmen’s group and say,
“Would you mind writing and or calling that office and telling them we have this
important issue to bring to them?” That would prepare the groundwork. But at that
time, when you walked in you didn’t necessarily get a warm reception if you didn’t have
that kind of introduction. But there were those, lets say epitomized by John Sailor, who
embraced the concept. He knew it and he felt it. And so he would steep in the presence
of Olaus, and Zanny and Mardy. He savored them for what they stood for as people,
and their testimonials. He loved what they spoke for. He sensed the values that they
represented. Some others later, the Udalls, they were good. Senator Nelson was good.
Hubert Humphrey in Minnesota, the first introducer of the Wilderness Bill on the Senate
side. These people had the feeling. They had the measure of the quality of these spirited
folks who spoke for the wilderness. And they themselves sensed what we valued.
MR. KAYE: What did you do as far as your position with the Wildlife Federation to
encourage members to write their Representatives and get involved? Did you have a
campaign to involve members?
MR. BRANBORG: There was a very strenuous campaign particularly as we went into
the hearings for the Wilderness Bill. It was outreach, mobilizing people. In Idaho, as a
matter of fact I was assigned to go with Ted Trueblood with my 35mm slides on the life
history of the Mountain Goat. We held meetings at the Rotary and the schools all the
way from southern Idaho up to Sand Point and the Canadian line in every community we
could reach. It was just proselytizing for the Bill, explaining why it was so very
important to gain its passage. But in every instance, when there was a field hearing, we as
the Wilderness Society would go into the grass roots communities, bring together those
who shared this concern about wilderness. That concern had been nurtured through a
series of mailings that Zanhiser had engineered from Congress, to the citizens using the
mailing list of the Wildlife Federation and most of the conservation groups. They
numbered into the hundreds of thousands as I recall. The Federation was some three
hundred thousand. And there was Audubon, the Sierra Club, the National Parks
Association and other groups. Everybody on those lists had received these descriptions
of the Bill, its purposes, the rationale for its passage, the speeches that were made by
Sailor and Humphrey upon introduction. People had had repeated mailings saying, ‘here
is the Wilderness Bill. Here is the effort that we’re making. Here is why people from all
over the country must be in touch with their members of Congress to voice their
support.’ It was that foundation that gave us the starting point.
MR. KAYE: Was this the same approaching, but probably on a much smaller scale in
your advocacy for the Arctic Wildlife Refuge?
MR. BRANBORG: I think with the Arctic Wildlife Refuge of course you focused on the
key committees in the House and Senate. You focus on those members who will be
friendly. You do that systematic approach. You call and mail to your membership out in
that state, and the key leaders. You say, “Here’s the Arctic. Here’s what it means. Here
are the magnificent dimensions of what it represents for wildlife and wildness.” Then you
have those people apply words of encouragement and pressure to those who are on that
Committee. Of course you are watching that vote. You are going in from the Washington
level to say, “How’s the Congressman doing? What will the Senator do on this?” You are
talking to staff. You are talking to the member. You’re walking with the member to the
House floor or Senate floor. You are catching him wherever you can. But you’re nailing
down his vote. I am damnably sure that was my job on the Arctic, along with Callison
and Zanhiser. The Muries of course were not in the Washington scene except when they
came to visit. I think C. R. Goudermooth, the Wildlife Management Institute, Ira
Gabrielson, I think they were fully in ownership of this campaign. You probably read in
the context of this documentation their testimony. They were working with Zanny, with
Callison in coalition.
MR. KAYE: The document that you point out is a hearing record for a Senate testimony
that you gave on behalf of the National Wildlife Federation in 1959, recommending the
establishment of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. In reading through this, one thing
that interested me was that it was very eloquently written. You are representing a group
that is largely hunters and hunting interests, yet you don’t focus on that as being the
value of setting this place aside.
MR. BRANBORG: I believe that’s because of my own personal feeling and love for the
living creature. The appreciation emanates I believe, from my parents. But having come
out of Wildlife Management schools you know the heavy emphasis on harvest. Having
survived with Annalee on Elk and Deer meet through the winters, and being a hunter, I
was increasingly appreciative of the living creature. While I had to represent the interests
of the hunting community and recognize appropriateness of hunting in specific places, I
didn’t feel in my heart that this was the function of the Arctic; to provide hunting
opportunities any more than any of us emphasized recreation.
MR. KAYE: What did you see as the primary value of what became the Arctic Range?
MR. BRANBORG: I believe I saw through the eyes of Olaus and Mardy the
magnificence of the area, the rich community of wildlife and this spacious, endless
panorama. And here was the community of life and this spectacle, this museum. These
people were so articulate and so persuasive that that influence came on what I had had as
a kid and as a young biologist in the field and it coalesced with all of the things in my
background to make me see that in the wild untrammeled setting we had things that far
transcended the human experience of taking an animal or indulging in one kind of
recreation or another. Putting oneself in that setting as an observer who traveled as
quietly and unobtrusively as he could, but to savor it, to measure it, to watch it and above
all, to leave it untouched as much as humanly possible.
MR. KAYE: In your testimony to the Senate in 1959, you talked about the importance
of an area, “free from man’s domineering influence.” Tell me what you meant by that in
the context of the Arctic Refuge.
MR. BRANBORG: Significant signs of course, of human presence. Really, I get down
to any signs of human presence. What I was thinking about then, I can’t bring back. But
basically, leaving the setting without any signs of having been there, as much as possible.
And I think that is incumbent upon us. And I think that’s the test that we face now.
How do we give support to wilderness with a public that says ‘this is the ultimate
criterion, we will come, we will savor, we will indulge ourselves, but we will leave it
basically untouched’. Well of course it’s almost impossible to not leave some sign. But I
think that that is what I felt at the time, as much as I can project into that time fifty years
ago almost.
MR. KAYE: Your quote, “free of man’s domineering influence’ is very similar to the
Wilderness Act statement of ‘wilderness is in contrast where man and his works
dominate”. It seems like your advocacy for the Arctic Refuge and the Wilderness Act
was very much the same.
MR. BRANBORG: Undoubtedly, because I had been one of the early readers of the
Wilderness Bill drafts. Zanhiser was leaning on me to look for imperfections as he was
looking for people like you in the agencies. There were Dick Griffith, and people in the
Forest Service and many different disciplines to whom he presented the draft of the
Wilderness Bill and asked that they read it and study it. He wanted them to refine the
language and make it as good as they could for the purpose of the wilderness. By this
time almost on the eve of the introduction of the Wilderness Bill, right in this period, I
had been exposed to those words and those thoughts, most of which had fallen from
Zanhiser’s good mental process to the tablet where he did his first draft of the Bill. That
stuff was being fed into my system.
MR. KAYE: I noticed you used the word ‘wildness’ as an adjective, as a descriptive of
the values of this place in some of your writings. Tell me what you meant by ‘wildness’,
and what some of the parts of it are.
MR. BRANBORG: Of course, coming on the scene as a visitor, watching the land within
vision of the magnificent glaciated mountain basin, the meadow, the lichens the mosses,
the Labrador Key, that’s some of the country that we both know. I think there’s in
periods of isolation, when you’re by yourself, you do feel that there is energy and a
presence that is much greater than self. You are just there. You watch and feel this and
you listen and you hear. You marvel at what’s there. And you absorb what’s there to
the best of you ability in the absence of the knowledge of all that goes on within the
lichen or the Lemming, but you are the furry Marmot, the Caribou. It’s enveloping. It
comes over you. You sit and absorb the marvel of it.
MR. KAYE: Is this the wildness of the wilderness that you refer to?
MR. BRANBORG: This is the wildness, yes. No patterns of conformity, no impacts of
human beings are present. The communities of animal and plants, the glacial and
geological forces, they are all there working in their timeless way. Any reflection brings
you to the realization that this is the evolutionary process of life and the landforms. You
are here as an observer. And you are here as a humble agent who gets to see this without
any interference on what is taking place.
MR. KAYE: It’s interesting that you mention the word evolution. Olaus Murie used
that work very often in his wilderness writings. The idea being, let me ask if I understand
Murie correctly from your understanding of him; that a part of the value of this place
would the evolutionary process would be free to continue here unhendering by people.
Was that a value of this place to you?
MR. BRANBORG: I think very definitely. Here is the stop where things are continuing.
The landforms are changing. The animals are changing. The plants are changing, and the
climate may change. It is an epitome of evolutionary process if we can keep our hands
off of it.
MR. KAYE: Does that contribute to the scientific value of the place? Was that a
concern of yours, or a value to this place?
MR. BRANBORG: Yes, I always identified the scientific value, but I recognized that
scientific exploration would pose a threat to wilderness if we got carried away with it.
The intrusion of science in a way that interfered with or inhibited natural evolutionary
process would itself be destructive to the wilderness and the wildness. That was
something that came to us as it is here today. We can’t tolerate intrusions on the
wilderness that are destructive in the name of science.
MR. KAYE: Olaus used the words spiritual value and intangible value quite a bit. Did
this place hold some intangible value for you? I think that some of the values we have
talked about are intangible, but…
MR. BRANBORG: I believe so. Interestingly, in references to spiritual values from
Zanhiser, Murie and the two that I knew the best; Harvey Broom, Sig Olson, Oberholser,
and I am not mentioning others that were rich in their philosophical base and their
spiritual base. I don’t read to remember their references to the deity, to God. But I think
in those people and in myself, there’s a rich spiritual feeling that comes. And some of the
best expressions of that were from Olaus in describing what had happened to him when
he walked around the block waiting for a bus. I think it was in Pennsylvania when he was
on his way to Washington. He met me for dinner with Mardy. He said that he came to a
place were the ‘beautiful leaves of fall had come together.” He looked into that montage,
and he saw that there were transcendent things, beyond us. I remember conversations
with Mardy where said that some of these things that flow together in our lives are by
some design. There is synchronicity. Things come together and are meant to be. Many
times in my life in the Salmon River Canyon and in the high basins of the Bob Marshall or
the Selkirk Mountains of northern Idaho, and I had my wilderness experience in these
areas on my Mountain Goat research that I was doing. I think you feel a spiritual
influence, and I don’t think I’d tie that to any specific higher power. But I felt that there
was a strong spiritual influence. I don’t know that I ever really discussed that with
Howard Zanhiser. We both had spiritual experiences in the Cathedrals of Washington. It
was our habit, when I drove with him to and from work, to stop by the Cathedral, or the
Catholic Shrine and stand in awe within these structures.
Finding ourselves, I guess, in the midst of the flurry to do all of these things for the
Wilderness Bill and the membership of the Wilderness Society and holding the operation
together. Certainly, there was a heavy feeling of spirituality within these rich characters.
Harvey Broom, Howard Zanhiser, Sig Olson, and of course Olaus and Mardy.
MR. KAYE: How about Bob Marshall? You were probably pretty young in his time,
but I know you met him as a child and your father knew him didn’t he?
MR. BRANBORG: Yeah. When Bob Marshall retired from the Forest Service his
brother George had run on to some old notes. Those old notes indicated that there were
five people in the Forest Service that Bob recommended for his replacement in the Office
of Recreation, as the Chief. One of them was my father.
MR. KAYE: Oh really?
MR. BRANBORG: I don’t know whether my dad had been with him on more than the
one occasion when I remember Bob coming to our home. He had hiked from the Salway
River over the Montana Divide, down into Boulder Creek on the west fork of the Bitter
Root in one day. That was a tremendous exertion of forty or fifty miles. His face was
sunburned, and he was at our dining room table when my mother served dinner. I
remember him, I suppose, that would have been in the 1930’s before his death. I think he
passed on in 1939. It would have been in the period of 1935
Interview with Bella Francis with Roger Kaye, February 26, 1993
No full textOral history interview with Bella Francis and Roger Kaye as interviewer.INTERVIEW WITH BELLA FRANCIS
WITH ROGER KAYE, FEBRUARY 26, 1993
This is Roger Kaye with Bella Francis.
MR. KAYE: Bella, tell me, where were you born?
MRS. FRANCIS: I was born in Orland Park, up the Porcupine River.
MR. KAYE: What year?
MRS. FRANCIS: 1928
MR. KAYE: How long did you stay up there?
MRS. FRANCIS: I stayed up there until 1941.
MR. KAYE: Who were your parents Bella?
MRS. FRANCIS: My father was Charlie Francis. And Blanche is my mother’s name.
MR. KAYE: And you were adopted?
MRS. FRANCIS: I was adopted by my Dad.
MR. KAYE: Who was that?
MRS. FRANCIS: Charlie Strong.
MR. KAYE: Tell me about Charlie Strong.
MRS. FRANCIS: Charlie Strong married Mom when she was very young. He went up
to Orland Park. They had a little trading post there for the people. There was about
eighty people there. A lot of people from all over come there because he had a little store
there.
MR. KAYE: What kind of people came?
MRS. FRANCIS: Well, Indians, and sometimes Eskimos. And a lot from Old Crow.
MR. KAYE: Where did the Eskimos come from?
MRS. FRANCIS: Well, there used to be a lot of Eskimos from up around Artic Village,
up that way.
MR. KAYE: Did you ever talk to them?
MRS. FRANCIS: No. I see them, bit I didn’t talk to them.
MR. KAYE: They didn’t bring kids?
MRS. FRANCIS: No. They didn’t bring no kids. They probably did, but I don’t know
I guess.
MR. KAYE: What was your Dad’s trading post like?
MRS. FRANCIS: Oh it just a log house. There was a drum stove over there to burn
wood. It was just like other stores, you got a counter in there and shelves. He’d get all
his stuff by getting it on a inboard launch and barge nanovik. He would go up the
Porcupine River, that’s how he’d get his stuff up there.
MR. KAYE: Where did he come from?
MRS. FRANCIS: He came from Sweden.
MR. KAYE: What brought him to Alaska?
MRS. FRANCIS: He told me that he just ran away from his family when he was
fourteen year old. Because of the hard times, and there were a lot of them, and he wanted
to go to Alaska. So he made it up to Alaska around the time when he was twenty-five
year old he said.
MR. KAYE: Was he a good father?
MRS. FRANCIS: Oh yeah! He was a really good father. He really brought me up good.
MR. KAYE: Tell me about your mother, where was she from?
MRS. FRANCIS: My mother is from Fort Yukon. They were pretty young too, all of
them, my aunts and uncles they were pretty young when my grandpa, Dick Martin
drownded. So, my grandma had quite a bit of kids to raise up by herself.
MR. KAYE: Did you go to any school up at Old Rampart?
MRS. FRANCIS: We had no school in Old Rampart. There was a school in Fort Yukon,
but my Dad doesn’t want me, and my sisters to go to school. Even though we wanted to.
He doesn’t trust anybody, that’s why he doesn’t want us to go to school in Fort Yukon.
MR. KAYE: Why didn’t he trust people there?
MRS. FRANCIS: Well, thinks we were going to get hurt, and things like that I guess.
MR. KAYE: Did you want to go to Fort Yukon? Was it lonely being way out, way up
the Porcupine, away from the village?
MRS. FRANCIS: Oh no. Oh no. When we were in Fort Yukon, two month out of the
year, we were in a hurry to go back. The reason we were in a hurry to go back was
because we were in a hurry to pick berries, and go fishing and things like that.
MR. KAYE: So, about two months out of the year you spent at Fort Yukon then.
MRS. FRANCIS: Yes, from the first of June to the first of September.
MR. KAYE: Was that to bring furs in and send them out?
MRS. FRANCIS: Yes. He would bring all his furs, and he’d wait for his groceries what
he sent for. All of that got to be taken care of. While we were there in Fort Yukon for
two months people would help him, and he’d take all of the stuff up for the store and for
us. He works year round.
MR. KAYE: Tell me about the boat trip from Old Rampart up to Fort Yukon.
MRS. FRANCIS: That was fun. When the first of June would come we’d like it. Up
there, there were certain kinds of birds that we don’t have up that way, and we see all
that. And we see a lot of people up the Porcupine River at that time. We see villages,
and when we get close to Fort Yukon, we see tents. You know people go out camping in
the springtime for muskrats and ducks, and fishing and everything like that. We really
enjoyed ourselves. And they got in nice in the barge that we won’t be crowded.
MR. KAYE: Tell me about your fathers barge. How big was it? And did he make it
himself?
MRS. FRANCIS: No, there’s a guy named Andy Johnson at Fort Yukon that made it.
SIMON: It was Stanley too.
MRS. FRANCIS: Stanley Luke too.
MR. KAYE: How big was it?
MRS. FRANCIS: Oh I don’t know. How big is it?
MR. KAYE: A wooden barge?
SIMON: Thirty feet, maybe forty.
MR. KAYE: A plank boat?
MRS. FRANCIS: It was a barge.
SIMON: The barge was about forty feet.
MRS. FRANCIS: Yeah, about forty feet.
MR. KAYE: How many people would ride this barge down to Fort Yukon?
MRS. FRANCIS: Lots. A lot of people. We’d pick people up on the way.
SIMON: That barge could hold about twelve tons.
MRS. FRANCES: We would pick them up on the way, that want to go in. Or help them
out because their boat is small. Sometimes they had this small boat. They don’t all have
big boats. So we helped them. You know, you have to take your dogs and all that with
you because there was nobody in the came who will take care of them. You can’t go
without dogs because don’t have no “snow goes” and things like that in those days.
MR. KAYE: So how many people in your family rode the barge to Fort Yukon?
MRS. FRANCIS: My family? All of us.
MR. KAYE: How many, who was that?
MRS. FRANCIS: Oh well, me, and my sisters, and we got one brother. My sister next
to me is Doris, and there’s Jean, and Barbara and Bessie and Dick Strong.
MR. KAYE: And how long would it take to get to Fort Yukon?
MRS. FRANCIS: It’d take about a day and a half.
MR. KAYE: A day and a half. Did he have a motor on the boat? An inboard?
MRS. FRANCIS: Yeah, an inboard.
MR. KAYE: And he had all of the furs that he had traded?
MRS. FRANCIS: Yes.
MR. KAYE: And how many dogs?
MRS. FRANCIS: Oh, a lot of dogs sometimes. I will say maybe over ten.
MR. KAYE: Oh really?
MRS. FRANCIS: Yes.
MR. KAYE: It must have been really crowded.
MRS. FRANCES: No, it’s not crowded.
SIMON: Sometimes there were five families on the barge, dogs and all.
MR. KAYE: Oh really? So, as a little girl when you were living at Old Rampart, what
did you do? How did you spend your days?
MRS. FRANCIS: Oh gee, the days would just go so fast. Normally we would get up
and Dad would talk to us about what we’re supposed to do. Help our mother around the
house. When I was young I didn’t work outdoor too much. And when I got older I
would work out. When we got big enough, maybe around eight or nice year old we
always helped her out with cooking, and sweeping the floors, and things like that. There
was always a lot of things to do. Making beds too. After lunch, then we all get dressed
in all of our furs, and go down to the river and then we’d make our house. All the kids get
on down there. It’s always so windy. The snow would get so hard you can just saw it
out. Saw, it out and get it in a square. And we’d all make a house for ourselves. Just like
we helped our mother, we’d do the same thing at our house. We would get our wooden
knives and carve things.
MR. KAYE: This was a kid’s house?
MRS. FRANCIS: Yeah. Then if we’d get tired of that, we’d get together and we’d slide
down, all the village kids. We’d go way up on the hill and pack the big toboggan up and
we’d all pile in it and slide down. Or we’d play football.
MR. KAYE: Oh really?
MRS. FRANCIS: Oh, sometimes we’d do that until moonlight. Then they’d have to tell
us to come in the house now. Next day, we’d do that again. We had all kinds of games.
MR. KAYE: Tell me about the playhouses that you made as a kid at Old Rampart.
MRS. FRANCIS. Well, the snowdrift would get so hard we’d cut it out. Sometimes we
would saw, or axe and cut it in squares, and pile it up and make a house out of it. Big
enough for two maybe three to sit in it. Some kids make it big, they got a lot of room in
there. After we do that, we’d play in there. We’d carve. Maybe we’d carve doughnuts,
and little biscuits, and plates and pots, and all that. We’d make a stove, and pretend we
were cooking. And there were chairs and tables. We’d make it real nice. Then we
pretended to visit each other, and send a biscuit over to the next snow house. Things like
that. That’s what we’d do.
MR. KAYE: And you had just your brother and sisters to play with at Old Rampart?
MRS. FRANCIS: No. Other village kids too.
MR. KAYE: At Old Rampart?
MRS. FRANCIS: Yeah, at Old Rampart.
MR. KAYE: And these were children of Indians?
MRS. FRANCIS: Yes, all Indian kids. Then you’d get little snacks. Mother would give
us little snacks. Me, I was always getting crackers from the store. Or some kids get
dried, smoked meat. We pass around and share with each other. And we’d chew that.
And we really enjoyed ourself that way.
MR. KAYE: Did you have more store bought things ‘cause your father owned the store?
MRS. FRANCIS: We had more than other kids.
MR. KAYE: More than other kids?
MRS. FRANCIS: Yeah. Because we got it right there you know.
MR. KAYE: Besides you family, your brother and sisters, how many kids lived up at
Old Rampart then?
MRS. FRANCIS: Well, I don’t know, I can’t remember, but just one family was my
husband’s family. When I remember it, I’d say there were about maybe ten boys, ten or
eleven there at one house. Then another family had maybe eight or seven. That was
Cyrus Blakely. Then another family that’s Henry Wilham, he had about seven or eight.
So we’ll say that there’s more kids there than adults. There’s about maybe fifty, sixty
kids. There were a lot of childrens. They did make a log schoolhouse, but they couldn’t
get teacher. They had a hard time. They tried to get a teacher In those days you know,
they had a Chief and Council. Our Chief really tried, but he couldn’t get anybody to
teach. That’s why we couldn’t go to school.
MR. KAYE: Did you plays with dolls when you were a girl?
MRS. FRANCIS: Well, we didn’t have very much toys.
MR. KAYE: You didn’t?
MRS. FRANCIS: Unless our relatives sent us some. I had a china doll but I dropped it
and that was it. We never had Christmas tree. Didn’t have no Christmas tree. And at
Christmas time we had a potlatch we called it. Everybody would get together and eat
together. Then they’d pass out presents. We didn’t have no toys so they’d give us,
sometimes they’d sew things. They would give us, some people would get fur coats, new
ones, and moccasins, mitts, or a scarf. We’d get a lot of goodies though. Hard candy
come in big buckets in those days. And cookies. Cookies come in fifty or maybe sixty
pound box, they come in. All different kind of cookies, real good ones. And all the dried
fruits , they all come in boxes. Raisins come in boxes. Crackers come in boxes.
Everything is boxed. The elderly would get leaf tobacco it come in a box. So, at
Christmas they would have potlatch all the way to New Years. And they have good
time. And they have a dance. They played just like now, a fiddle. They’d have a dance,
and teach the kids how to dance.
MR. KAYE: Really? Where was the dance held?
MRS. FRANCES: They had a dance hall.
MR. KAYE: Really? There in Old Rampart?
MRS. FRANCIS: Yeah. They had a dance hall.
MR. KAYE: How many buildings where there, about, in Old Rampart?
MRS. FRANCIS: Gosh, I don’t know. There was a lot of buildings, but they all went
down.
MR. KAYE: How many would you say, Simon?
SIMON: There was about twelve.
MRS. FRANCIS: But there was more houses that went down. A lot of people stay in
tents in those days. There was a log around the bottom and they staid in tents. Even in a
blow. Even in Fort Yukon they used to do that. They all staid in tents, down in the
village. Nowadays, they don’t do that. You know why they don’t do that? Because
there’s danger nowadays.
MR. KAYE: Oh really?
MRS. FRANCIS: Those days, I remember when we live in the village, everything is
outdoors. Like in front of the door, when they’d come back from hunting, they’d just put
their gun against the wall there. They’d put their gun there, their axe there, their
snowshoes there, till next time they go out again.
MR. KAYE: What did you do for mosquitoes?
MRS. FRANCIS: We had smudge. Up there’s a lot of bluffs, you know. There’s a
certain kind of weeds that grow, like grass just like. They pick that up, and they make a
fire. And they put that on it. That’s what kill mosquitoes. It smelled strong. Like
buhack. The mosquito medicine smelled strong. That what they use.
MR. KAYE: Looking back, what was the biggest hardship of living up there?
MRS. FRANCIS: I don’t know. But sometime it really hard for people. “Cause its kind
of way up, and it’s in a canyon you know. Sometime it’s hard to get food. I mean like
meat and things like that. Or furs.
MR. KAYE: Did you consider life a hardship being so far from town when you were a
girl?
MRS. FRANCIS: That’s true, that’s true. It’s hard to go to town you know. You have
to go all the way with dogs. And sometime the weather is bad.
MR. KAYE: Did you make the trip with dogs from Old Rampart?
MRS. FRANCIS: Oh yeah, a lot of people come from Fort Yukon.
MR. KAYE: What about you? Did you make that trip?
MRS. FRANCIS: No, not me.
MR. KAYE: What did your father do besides trade there? Did he trap at all?
MRS. FRANCIS: He trapped.
MR. KAYE: He trapped which way from Old Rampart?
MRS. FRANCIS: Saminkut, he traps up that way. He traps over to Old Crow, up that
way.
MR. KAYE: Did you ever go with him?
MRS. FRANCIS: No, at that time, I never go with him.
MR. KAYE: You were still very young then?
MRS. FRANCIS: Yeah, very young then. Then when we moved thirty-five mile below
where they call Burnt Paw, when we moved there I was sixteen year old. So then he was
getting ill.
MR. KAYE: Oh, I see.
MRS. FRANCIS: He was getting short of breath. I can’t go out very much. So when he
went out with us, he taught me and my sister how to set trap and all that stuff. What do
to, and all that stuff. We kind of know little bit from before, we see a lot of people do
that in the village. So we start out. And sixteen, seventeen, eighteen and nineteen I trap.
I trap all the way around up the Colling River, over the mountain, all over around there I
trap.
MR. KAYE: Before you tell me about living at Burnt Paw, as far as Old Rampart goes,
didn’t they expand when you were there, and start building houses across the river?
MRS. FRANCIS: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Like some of those houses are very old. There
was about four families. They built across the river, where there was nice timber there.
They make a whole bunch of nice houses there and they move across. All of them got big
family too. And we still stay on this side. A few families stay on this side. Every time
we want to visit we get a little boat and go across the river to visit. We can wait til it
freeze up too. After it freeze up, then we harness up two dogs and we go over.
MR. KAYE: Oh really?
MRS. FRANCIS: We visit like that, even at nighttime. Lot of time, we holler, and we
holler, and tell kids to come over. So they’d do that.
MR. KAYE: Was it dangerous, the Porcupine River? Did anyone drown when you were
there?
MRS. FRANCIS: No, nobody drowned when I was there.
MR. KAYE: So, what year was it when you left Old Rampart?
MRS. FRANCIS: 1941.
MR. KAYE: In 1941. And you moved on to Burnt Paw?
MRS. FRANCIS: Um hum. (agreeing)
MR. KAYE: Why did your father move there?
MRS. FRANCIS: Because he was ill. And it’s really hard for us up there you know,
because it’s canyon, all over. Hard for us. Where we moved to is my uncle’s place, uncle
Richard Martin’s place. He went to the Army, so he want us to move down there. It
more easy.
MR. KAYE: To Burnt Paw?
MRS. FRANCIS: Yes, it’s easier than Old Rampart. That’s why we move.
MR. KAYE: Did you build the cabin that’s there now? At Burnt Paw?
MRS. FRANCIS: Yeah, in 1944 I build it.
MR. KAYE: In 1944. There was a cabin there before?
MRS. FRANCIS: It burned down.
MR. KAYE: It burned down. Where did Burnt Paw get its name from?
MRS. FRANCIS: I guess that long ago when people travel a lot, you know, always
traveling out for food, and for things like that, I guess this one kit, this is what they told
me, that one kit fell on the fire or hot ashes or something and burned the foot.
MR. KAYE: Oh, I see.
MRS. FRANCIS: So, in our language they say “burned foot”. So they just made it Burnt
Paw.
MR. KAYE: So you were about sixteen when you moved to Burnt Paw.
MRS. FRANCIS: Yes.
MR. KAYE: It that about when you started your own trap lines?
MRS. FRANCIS: Yes.
MR. KAYE: Tell me about your trapping. I remember we mapped it, and it was a
tremendous length. Tell me about what you did, and how you went about it.
MRS. FRANCIS: Your mean how I start out?
MR. KAYE: Yes
MRS. FRANCIS: Oh well, before we start out, like we said, on September first we go
back up to village. The first thing we do, is we fish. Put nets in. I put maybe four or five
nets in and try to get fish for the dogs.
MR. KAYE: How many dogs did your family have at this time?
MRS. FRANCIS: I always had nine, nine dogs. The rest of my sisters have dogs too.
We get all the dog feed we can.
MR. KAYE: How many salmon would that be, do you think?
MRS. FRANCIS: For a year?
MR. KAYE: Yes.
MRS. FRANCIS: Oh gee, I don’t know. I can’t guess. But we get a lot of corn meal and
tallows and all that too besides the fish. Probably, maybe eight hundred, a thousand
maybe. We’d get all kinds of fish. Like whitefish. We put fishnet under ice. For eating
and for dogs. My mom fished lots too. Sometimes fish ‘til Christmas. Depends on how
the ice is too, how thick it gets. If it get too thick, then you have to pull your net out.
Then while you’re doing that, you get your wood. We go back, and we get wood.
Maybe three weeks we cut wood. Cut it all up, haul it. When snow come we haul it in.
Then we cut it all up, and then we split it all up. We got to make kitchen wood, we call it
kindling for cooking stove. We don’t have no propane stove. So, then outdoors we put
big tarp over it. That’s for winter. We’d get meat, and caribou and moose. Then we’d get
everything ready. Then, when snow come, when season opened, we fix our toboggan.
Fix all the harness, and all our gears. Mom fixed all our clothes. Then we’d just start off.
MR. KAYE: When you started trapping did you go alone, or did you go with someone?
MRS. FRANCIS: Lot of time my sister went with me.
MR. KAYE: Which one?
MRS. FRANCIS: Doris, she was next to me. She was fourteen year old when she
started. I was sixteen. But, I lost her after about a year. A lot of time I had to go alone.
MR. KAYE: Did you think it unusual for a young girl to have a long trap line ?
MRS. FRANCIS: I think it’s fun. When I see those women go in the races, in the dog
races, I know how they feel. Because I really enjoyed myself when I was out alone. Out
alone, and my dogs. Have a good time with the dogs.
MR. KAYE: Were you ever afraid to go out?
MRS. FRANCIS: Never! Never afraid to go out, never. Because in Colling River,
there’s always a lot of bears. Even my dogs try to pull me in the brush because the first
bear tracks go in the brush you know. I just hold them down. One thing, I was not
afraid.
MR. KAYE: When you trapped alone, how many nights would you be out on the trap
line?
MRS. FRANCIS: I didn’t stay long. The longest I stay out is maybe three nights, or
two nights.
MR. KAYE: I remember when we traced it on a map it was about ninety miles once.
You must have gone a long ways.
MRS. FRANCIS: I do go a long ways when I’m alone. That’s the funnest part. When
you are alone you can go a long ways. When somebody’s with you, gee, you waste a lot
of time. I can go up the Colling River to the cabin just like that, you know. But if my
sister, or mother go with me, gee it’d take all day!
MR. KAYE: Did you stay in tent camps sometimes?
MRS. FRANCIS: Sometime tent camp, sometime little houses. We build one at let’s see,
we build one at Colling River, at Fishkil we build one. That’s one, two, three, four, below
our place, six mile, there’s a house too. So we had about five trapping houses. We had
about two tents.
MR. KAYE: Two tent camps? And how many dogs were you running now?
MRS. FRANCIS: At that time? Nine. I always run nine.
MR. KAYE: You had pretty good fur catches?
MRS. FRANCIS: Oh yeah! Gee. . .
MR. KAYE: What would you catch?
MRS. FRANCIS: Well, one time was pretty good for link, I remember. It was pretty
good for link. And I caught forty-two lynx. And a lot of other animals like fox . . .
MR. KAYE: Was that in one year?
MRS. FRANCIS: One year.
MR. KAYE: And martins?
MRS. FRANCIS: Martins, and the fox, and coyotes.
MR. KAYE: Oh yeah?
MRS. FRANCIS: We had about two or three coyotes one year. And wolverine, things
like that.
MR. KAYE: Did you skin them yourself?
MRS. FRANCIS: No. That’s one thing, I don’t skin them.
MR. KAYE: Who does?
MRS. FRANCIS: I bring them home. My mom does.
MR. KAYE: Oh really?
MRS. FRANCIS: I only thing I don’t like is when we haul it. We have a tough time
when we haul the lynx.
MR. KAYE: Oh, the furs?
MRS. FRANCIS: Yeah, when they’re frozen.
MR. KAYE: Are you using traps, or snares?
MRS. FRANCIS: Everything. Trap and snares. When we trap lynx, we make a house,
and put trap, and then we put s
Interview with Bill and Jean Thomas by Roger Kaye, November 12, 2002
No full textBill and Jean Thomas oral history interview with Roger Kaye.
Mr. and Mrs. Thomas were not Fish and Wildlife Service employees, but were long time residents of the Upper Porcupine and Upper Black Rivers in Alaska.
Names: Bill and Jean Thomas
Keywords: History, Biography, Camping, HuntingINTERVIEW WITH BILL AND JEAN THOMAS
BY ROGER KAYE NOVEMBER 12, 2002
MR. KAYE: This is an Oral History interview with Bill and Jean Thomas, conducted in
Wasilla, Alaska on November 12, 2002. The subject is their life on the upper Porcupine
and upper Black Rivers. Roger Kaye is conducted the interview. Jean and Bill, thank
you for participating in this. I’ll begin with you first, Jean. What years did you live on
the Porcupine River? I believe it was at the Salmon, Trout and Porcupine River areas.
MRS. THOMAS: I don’t remember years, we were pretty young anyway. Bobbie was
about seven or eight years old when we left Old Rampart to go to Burnt Paw because of
my dad’s health. My brother was born there, and that was in 1961 I guess. So that was
quiet a number of years ago I guess.
MR. KAYE: So you lived there, and your father had a trading post. There was your
mother, and your sisters; Bella, Doris, Barbara and Bessie.
MRS. THOMAS: Bessie’s real name is Blanche, Blanche Williams now. My dad had a
trading post and he was also a trapper.
MR. KAYE: Your father was Charlie Strong, is that right?
MRS. THOMAS: Yes.
MR. KAYE: Tell me about him.
MRS. THOMAS: I was just a little kid when we were up there. One of the highlights I
always remember when my dad came home from the trap line was us kids looking
forward to taking his boots off, and putting his slippers on for him. That was such a joy
to do that.
MR. KAYE: You were about 170 miles up the Porcupine from Fort Yukon. Was there a
sense of isolation, or being far away from everybody else?
MRS. THOMAS: I can remember times when it seems that way, but there was our
family and there was another family across the river. There were at least two or three
other families. In the wintertime we could go across the ice and visit back and forth. Of
course, my Grandmother lived near us there too.
MR. KAYE: What was her name?
MRS. THOMAS: May, May Martin.
MR. KAYE: Was she married to John Herbert then?
MRS. THOMAS: I guess she was married to him, but I don’t remember him at all. So he
must have died before I could remember.
MR. KAYE: What is most memorable about childhood way up the river there?
MRS. THOMAS: I guess we always thinking of the fun things. We don’t think of all of
the hard work! Of course, I was so young, that in the summer time and in fall, or about
August I guess, when the Salmon start coming in. My dad had a what we called a [sounds
like] petta bar. He would go out and check the nets and the petta bar would be half full
three times a day. Mom and the older kids had a lot of fish to cut. We’d cut it and dry it
and bale it and smoke it and just every way we could fix it. That is one of the things I
remember. It was always a lot of hard work. They worked hard, but I was too young to
cut fish. I helped carry it up the bank. We’d put it in a burlap bag and put it over our
shoulder, with all of this stuff running down our backs. I helped that way but I wasn’t
allowed to cut the fish because mom thought that I’d cut myself.
MR. KAYE: So, when you were seven or eight you went to Burnt Paw, just down the
river. Then you moved to Fort Yukon, is that right?
MRS. THOMAS: Yeah, my dad’s health was not very good, so we had to move.
MR. KAYE: Was that in the late 1940’s?
MRS. THOMAS: It was later than that, but I don’t remember the years.
MR. KAYE: Did you meet Bill here, in Fort Yukon?
MRS. THOMAS: I have known his family for years. I guess all my life I have known
his family.
MR. KAYE: Well Bill, let me ask you a couple of questions now. You grew up in a
trapping camp on the Black River, is that right? Just south of where Jean grew up?
MR. THOMAS: I am not sure about the distances, but it is approximately 300 miles
from Fort Yukon up the river. It used to take us seven days traveling, long days on the
boat, to get there.
MR. KAYE: Who were your parents?
MR. THOMAS: Jacob Thomas. “Tommy the Mate”, they called him. He was a Mate
on a steamer there for many years. My mother was Margaret. I think my dad came to
Alaska in 1905 or 1906. He was working on the river boats as First Mate and from there
he took on the trapping.
MR. KAYE: When did your father move up to the upper Black River?
MR. THOMAS: It was a long time ago. Let’s see, it was probably in the early 1930’s.
MR. KAYE: So, you really grew up there?
MR. THOMAS: Yes.
MR. KAYE: And how old were you when you left that area?
MR. THOMAS: I left in 1942.
MR. KAYE: So you left during the War?
MR. THOMAS: Yes.
MR. KAYE: What was childhood like up there?
MR. THOMAS: It was beautiful. There was a nice, clean environment. You don’t catch
no “bugs” because there was no people! We’d be there approximately nine months out of
the year. Then it got to be just our family. Our nearest neighbor up river was about
twenty-five miles. And the nearest one down river was about forty miles.
MR. KAYE: Was there a sense of isolation, being away from everybody?
MR. THOMAS: Yes, but you get used to it. We actually enjoy it. But it does get kind
of lonesome once in a while. You think about what all the other young people are doing,
you know, but other than that we enjoyed it. It was a good, clean life.
MR. KAYE: Was that lifestyle then, based on trapping? Was that the main thing?
MR. THOMAS: Yeah, trapping.
MR. KAYE: When you were young, what was an average day like for you?
MR. THOMAS: Well, let’s see, it depends on what time of the year it is.
MR. KAYE: Say, trapping season?
MR. THOMAS: We’d have lines going out to different areas. Then we’d have either a
small trapping cabin or in some cases we used a 7’ x 7’ wall tent if there was no timber in
the area to build with. You’d go out for three or four days at a time and come back. Then
you’d go out in another direction for a few more days and come back. You could cover a
lot of area that way. It was interesting. It was a good life, but it’s gone now.
MR. KAYE: It’s gone now! So you left during World War II. Did you serve in the War?
MR. THOMAS: Yeah.
MR. KAYE: Where at?
MR. THOMAS: I was in the Coast Guard. I shipped out to Ketchikan, to the base there
for a while. Then I was on a patrol boat up west of there in the [unintelligible] Straits
area for three or four months. I came back and joined the parachute rescue squad. I didn’t
jump, but the crew, the jumpers that had gone off for training and another fellow and I
joined afterwards. They picked us because we were equipped, you know, used to it, in
case they had to hall somebody out of the bush or someplace. They did that with a
helicopter.
MR. KAYE: Wow! So after the War then, did you ever go back to Black River to trap?
MR. THOMAS: No. When I got out of the service a took a years training at [sounds
like] Care River Technical Institute to be a mechanic. There was really nothing left to go
back to.
MR. KAYE: So you had had enough of that lifestyle, and wanted to…?
MR. THOMAS: Oh, no! Not us. It’s just that things had changed. The prices of fur
and the costs. You had to have a steady job in order to go out and trap!
MR. KAYE: I see.
MR. THOMAS: It’s a good life. I enjoy getting out, and staying there.
MR. KAYE: So, your seasonal cycle during the year then was you trapped the main fur
animals, and then in the spring would you trap beaver and rats?
MR. THOMAS: Yes and in the early days you were allowed to shoot beaver too. But
later on it was trapping only, mostly muskrat and beavers.
MR. KAYE: Then what would you do after the muskrat and beaver season?
MR. THOMAS: Then we’d head for town and celebrate! A little recreation!
MR. KAYE: Tell me about the trip from upper Black River to Fort Yukon. You had
homemade boats?
MR. THOMAS: Oh yeah. We had a large river boat and a smaller poling boat that we
towed. It’s takes about two days to get there going down river.
MR. KAYE: So who all would be in the boat? Would it be pretty crowded?
MR. THOMAS: No, just my family, my mother and dad and all my brothers.
MR. KAYE: Did you have dog teams too that went?
MR. THOMAS: The dog team went in the poling boat.
MR. KAYE: So you’d float down to Fort Yukon, and that was the first time you’d seen
other people for quite a while?
MR. THOMAS: Oh yeah. Like I say, we had a few neighbors up river, but they just
passed going one way or the other.
MR. KAYE: So what’s it like for a young boy to be entering Fort Yukon after being out
in the woods for nine months?
MR. THOMAS: Well, you enjoyed it. You notice I’m not much of a talker. You stay
out in the woods for nine months and you get used to not talking very much. Of course,
you’d talk to your family, but when you’re out by yourself for a week at a time, you’re
not used to talking.
MR. KAYE: Did you have your own dog team as a boy?
MR. THOMAS: Oh yeah. I used dog teams all of the time. It was the only way to get
around in the wintertime, unless you wanted to use snowshoes.
MR. KAYE: As a boy or young man would you go out by yourself?
MR. THOMAS: Oh yeah.
MR. KAYE: How long would you be out by yourself?
MR. THOMAS: Well, mostly ten days or so when you were out building a cabin or
something like that. But normally, if you were just trapping, five days was about the
most you were out there. Out there it would get down to sixty-five below, you’ve got to
keep going because you’ve got only so much food and fuel. It was interesting in a way.
MR. KAYE: Were you ever scared, going out that far, alone?
MR. THOMAS: No. Didn’t even think about it. You get past that after a while.
MR. KAYE: Jean, did you make the same trips from the Porcupine down to Fort Yukon
in a plank boat?
MRS. THOMAS: My dad had a big barge made out of wood. And he had a big inboard
motor that had the power. That’s what we used to go down the river with in the
springtime and coming back in the fall. They put a tent over the big barge and that kept
the wind and rain out. That’s the kind of boat we had for going back and forth.
MR. KAYE: Jean, tell me what it was like; the trip from Salmon Trout, or Old Rampart
house, it was called, down to Fort Yukon.
MRS. THOMAS: In the springtime, sometime in May, or when the ice goes, that’s
when we headed down. Of course there was high water from bank to bank and it was
very swift. I believe we had our dogs on the raft next to our boat. We had to watch them
as we were going down river. I remember that was kind of scary because the water was
so high bank to bank, and so swift. Our dogs were on the raft next to our boat.
MR. KAYE: Before you got to Fort Yukon, did you stop and dress up, or get ready?
MRS. THOMAS: We probably did. I don’t remember exactly. Of course, we were very
anxious to see our relatives that were there, our Aunt especially. Aunt Fanny and Jimmy
Carroll had a general store. Our Aunt always had us up for lunch. I remember after being
up home all winter long, you run out of different things. My dad always bought things
by case lot, but towards spring you’d begin to run out of various foods and things. She
used to open up a can of peaches and we thought that was just the most delicious thing!
We used to look forward to that so much!
MR. KAYE: I’ve got a picture that I took of the place years ago. That’s your father’s
place right, the house that you grew up in?
MRS. THOMAS: Probably, I don’t remember that far back. But that might be.
MR. KAYE: If that old building could talk, what do you think it would tell for stories?
MRS. THOMAS: “I miss you all!” I remember that it was a very nice place. We had a
kitchen. And my mom had everything so nice and clean. We had a wooden floor that was
white. It wasn’t painted or anything. Mom kept it so clean. We just utilized whatever
was available. We didn’t have a store to go to buy Comet or anything, so what my mom
used on the floor was wood ash. She scrubbed the floor with that and it made it nice and
white, just like Comet would do. That’s one of the things I remember. Of course, the
back rooms were hard wood floors. I remember that my mom baked all of the bread and
rolls and cinnamon rolls and things like that. She always had a big bowl of rolls on the
table. Even when we were outdoors playing and we came in, we would never just go to
the table and help ourselves. We had to ask, I remember. It was always nice to have that
on the table. There were always cinnamon rolls, of fresh rolls, or fried bread. She would
take part of the dough and fry it in Crisco. That’s what they used all of the time. It was
so delicious. I still like homemade bread today. My mom would bake as much as
fourteen or fifteen loaves at a time because there was no place to go to buy anything like
that.
MR. KAYE: So, your father was a trader. And he had a trading post there. Who came
to buy goods from your father?
MRS. THOMAS: People came from across the river, like I said. And the native people
that trapped, they came bought their supplies from Dad.
MR. KAYE: Did people come from Old Crow and from up on the coast?
MRS. THOMAS: I don’t remember from how far they would come up. But I know
there were quite a number of people. I just don’t know where they all came from.
MR. KAYE: What were your happiest times there as a child? What are the most
memorable things that you did?
MRS. THOMAS: I think the most fun thing we did was sledding. My dad made a
toboggan for us and we would slide down the bank and out on to the river. It was all
frozen and packed with snow from the wind that blows so much there. My dad would
help us pull it back up and we’d do it again. Then, we’d make snow houses too, like the
Eskimos do I guess. Sometimes my mom, and dad would haul the blocks of snow, square
blocks, and she’s make a house for us; just stacking them up. Sometimes we would just
make a pile of snow and make a hole inside. That was our little snow house. My mom
used to make little furniture for me, for inside of the house. There was a stove and a sink
and different pieces of furniture. When the spring came, I wanted to keep my furniture. I
didn’t want it to melt on me. So I would put it behind the house and try and preserve it
as long as I could before it melted on me.
MR. KAYE: What did you do during the summer?
MRS. THOMAS: Well, as soon as the ice was gone we went to Fort Yukon.
MR. KAYE: What did you do there in Fort Yukon?
MRS. THOMAS: We had a lot of friends and relatives that we visited we. And we had a
lot of cousins that we played with. We made little clothes for our dolls, and little fur
coats out of squirrel and rabbit skins. I used to enjoy doing that.
MR. KAYE: Was it hard for you to go back up the Porcupine River in the fall and leave
Fort Yukon?
MRS. THOMAS: No, we enjoyed it. We actually looked forward to going back up
there. It was so much fun. We never got sick when we were up there. It’s just amazing
how none of us ever got hurt or anything as much we did. My older sisters would cut
and chop the wood. That’s just the way of life. Nobody ever got hurt. Nobody ever got
sick until we came to town, and we all would catch a cold. But it was a fun way of life.
We liked it.
MR. KAYE: You mentioned the natives that lived across the river. Your mother was
native, what that right, and your father was a Scotsman?
MRS. THOMAS: A Swede.
MR. KAYE: Ok, what did you consider yourself? Was there a question about your
identity at all?
MRS. THOMAS: The kids used to just make fun of me. I guess I was lighter that they
were. And they told me that my hair was like grass in the fall. I would cry. I would
come in and say that to my mom. I would go back out and say that my hair was that
color because my mom put Mentholatum in my hair! That was kind of hard because the
kids made fun of me. I different that they were I guess.
MR. KAYE: Your father was probably a leader in that area, being a white person and
being educated and having a store. Were you kind of different from other Indian kids
whose families trapped and traveled through the area?
MRS. THOMAS: We didn’t think we were really different. We were all so close there.
I guess the only thing I can remember is that they made fun of the color of my hair and
things like that. But other than that, I think we got along pretty well.
MR. KAYE: Bill, what did you do when you were a very young boy; too young to be
out trapping? What did you do up the Black River as a child?
MR. THOMAS: I can’t remember too much before trapping. We started awful early.
We probably started at about ten years old. Of course we went to school too. Yeah we
started quite early with the trapping. I spent several years at Fort Yukon going to school
when I quite small. When we got older, why, we were part of the team. It would take
everybody to make things go.
MR. KAYE: So when did you quit school?
MR. THOMAS: I don’t remember the date, of course. I was mostly self-taught. I read a
lot so I could pass my GED. We did get too much book learning.
MR. KAYE: You were also part white, and part [sounds like] Cochin. What did you
consider yourself, or did you even think about it?
MR. THOMAS: I didn’t think about. Mother was half, and dad of course was white.
We were three quarters native, but it just never crossed your mind, really. You were just
like anybody else.
MR. KAYE: When you were a kid, living way up the Black River, you must have read
about the lower forty-eight and the outside world. What did you think of that far away
place?
MR. THOMAS: Well, I doubt we gave it much thought. As I remember, we had another
schoolboy from stateside writing back and forth as a pen pal. He mentioned some of the
things, but I don’t think we were really interested. We were more interested in what we
were doing.
MR. KAYE: Jean, when you were a very small girl living up on the Porcupine, you
probably read your father’s magazines about the lower forty-eight. What did you think
about that far away place?
MRS. THOMAS: Well, I guess it was something like a dream I guess. You just never
thought much about it I guess because you just know you’ll never go there. It was just so
impossible. We were way up there. We were so busy when we were up there, making a
living, and with chores and everything we had to do that a person didn’t think too much
about anything else. Just about what you needed to do. You were so exhausted in the
evening you’d just go to sleep. We just really didn’t think too much about it.
MR. KAYE: When you were a young girl, was there any sense of change, or any sense
that old native ways and that traditional lifestyle were disappearing?
MRS. THOMAS: Not that I can remember.
MR. KAYE: Looking back at it today, it’s gone pretty much, as a lifestyle. What do
you think about that? Is it unfortunate? Was anything lost with that change?
MRS. THOMAS: I think so. It’s such a good and peaceful life. It’s a wonderful life.
And it was clean. Instead of what the kids are getting into nowadays, you know, with all
crimes. All of the drinking and drugs and things we were spared. So we never got into
anything like that out there. In a lot of ways the younger people who live around Fort
Yukon may have a better education, but from our standpoint and with the way we were
raised, we just had better morals and things like that. We were sparred from all of that. I
don’t know which one way is the other. I prefer the other way myself, the way I was
raised. I have seen relatives, and other people that I know just going down the tubes the
way they are living nowadays and it’s really a shame. Becoming an alcoholic and using
drugs and things like that that we never even heard of when we were growing up. We
were just away from all of that.
MR. KAYE: So you think you’re a better person for having grown up that way, out
there?
MRS. THOMAS: I think so.
MR. KAYE: How about you Bill? Do you feel that having grown up and worked hard
out there in that kind life was important to the person that you became?
MR. THOMAS: I wouldn’t be important if you could make everything easy. But with
the price of fur down and the cost of everything is up, why, nowadays it would be kind
of hard to make a go of it. We’d have to work all summer in order to be able to trap all
winter. It was a good life. I really enjoyed it. I would have liked to have kept right on
with the way it was. But it’s gone.
MR. KAYE: Looking at the future now: Back when you two were young there was no
sense that the area where you grew up and trapped in would become a National Wildlife
Refuge. In 1980, a law was passed, the Lands Act. Bill your area became the Yukon
Flats Refuge, and Jean, your area became the Arctic Refuge. Do you recalled hearing
about the Alaska lands issue? It was very controversial in Fort Yukon and other places in
the 1970s. The idea of putting your area within a refuge to protect it; what did you think
of that when you heard about that idea?
MRS. THOMAS: I think it’s wonderful to preserve the land that we grew up on there.
With all of the animals, and the Caribou migrating there. They stayed up a hill out behind
our place all winter long. I’d just like to see that continue. It’s such a beautiful place. If I
was thirty years younger, I’d go back there. It’s such a beautiful country, and it’s really
neat.
MR. KAYE: How about you Bill? Do you remember the controversy to protect that
area? What do you think about the idea of being protected as a Wildlife Refuge?
MR. THOMAS: I would like to see it protected. They are all f
Interview with George Collins by Roger Kaye
No full textOral history interview with George Collins. Interviewed by Roger Kaye. Reference to National Park Service and Alaska.
George Collins helped to establish the Arctic Refuge
Name: George Collins
Keywords: History, Biography, Law enforcement, Wildlife refuges, National Park ServiceINTERVIEW WITH GEORGE COLLINS BY ROGER KAYE
PHOENIX, ARIZONA MARCH 28, 1993
MR. KAYE: George, could you tell me a little about your background, your
history, where you were born?
MR. COLLINS: All right. I was born on May 31, 1903 in St. Paul,
Minnesota. And my father’s name was Lynne, L-Y-double N-E Collins. My
mother was Emma Lincoln Walker. My father was in the newspaper business
in St. Paul, with the “St. Paul Pioneer Press.” He was a machinist in the
composing room. My mother was a proofreader and junior editor for the
West Publishing Company in Midway. I don’t know where their business
offices were exactly, but somewhere between St. Paul and Minneapolis, and
we called it Midway.
MR. KAYE: How did you happen to work for the Park Service?
MR. COLLINS: The Park Service? Well, when my parents and my brother and
I, with them, of course, moved to California about 1908, or so, we settled
in the upper Sacramento Valley. And in 1914, 15 or 16, a Congressman from
that district in California was a friend of Steven T. Mather and Horace
Albright who were the first two Directors. Mr. Mather was the first
Director of the National Park Service. And he was the man who conceived
the idea of having a National Park Service. And the Secretary of the
Interior at the time was very friendly toward Mr. Mather, and he said,
“you know so much about it, and like it so well, you go run it.” So
that’s how Mr. Mather became the first Director of the National Park
Service. And Mr. Albright had graduated in Mining Law from the University
of California at Berkley, where Mr. Mather had gone to school himself. So
while Horace Albright wanted to get into the mining business, Mr. Mather
prevailed upon him to become his assistant in the new National Park
Service. So naturally, when Mr. Mather had to retire because of illness
and age, why, Mr. Albright succeeded him as Director of the Service.
Well, my parents and our family up there in northern California knew
Mather pretty well and my brother went into the Park Service, and so did
I. We just sort of followed along with those people. And I worked odd
times in the summer, when I was going to school in Berkley. And finally,
what I did at the time was be a Summer Ranger, or worked as a laborer or
something for the Park Service. Then I took the Park Service Ranger
Examination about 1929, and was appointed to the Grand Canyon. I spent a
little time at Yosemite, and lots of time up at Lassen before the time I
went into the Service permanently. My first permanent job in the Service
was in 1930, at Grand Canyon, as a Ranger. I became not an Assistant
Superintendent, but Assistant to the Superintendent, for Grand Canyon
National Park. There is a lot of difference between those two titles.
See, when I finished going to school, and my folks thought I was never
going to quit going to school, and wondered what I was going to do, I
became a landscape architect, professionally. And they didn’t have any
jobs open for landscape architects, and I liked the Ranger work. I liked
the idea of being a Ranger, and I had passed the Ranger Examination at the
Civil Service, and, as I say, had a couple of little jobs, one at
2
Yosemite, and one at Lassen. Then I moved to Arizona, and was a Ranger
there at Grand Canyon National Park. I spent most of my time as the North
Rim Ranger. In those days we didn’t have a road all the way out, that is,
a good road for tourists.
[tape stops and begins again]
Representation in Alaska improved. We had Sitka, and we had Mt. McKinley,
and the big one at Katmi.. Those where rather remote places in those
days. McKinley was on the railroad, but not a lot of people got there. I
think the first time I went up there, it had a big season, about 900
people or something like that. Anyway, it was about 1949 or 1950 that Mr.
Connie Wirth who later became Park Service Director, he was then Chief of
Lands, he ran into me in San Diego where I was running an exhibition of
Interior Department activities. And he said, “what the hell are you doing
here?” I told him and he said, “you go on back to the Grand Canyon, I’ve
got other work for you, more in line with what I want you to be doing.”
So it was Connie who sent me to Alaska. The idea was to make a recreation
survey of the entire territory. And I went everywhere you could get with
an airplane and a boat. I went everywhere I thought I ought to go. So I
covered that territory and I found that most Alaskans, except for those
who fly, professional aviators, and so on, most of them know a lot about
their own little part of Alaska, but they don’t know very much of anything
about the rest of it. I found that they didn’t even see the thing in
their mind’s eye in its full proportion. From down in the southeastern
end of the territory, clear up to the islands of the chain and up north to
St. George, and St. . . .the names go out of my mind, up in the Bering
Sea. Well, I went to all of those places and got a tremendous perspective
of the territory. Of course, I just fell in love with that whole country.
It was country that I could feel at home in. I liked the people, the
wildlife and all that. I was married, with family, and I was torn between
Alaska and California where I had my family. At the time, I couldn’t
think of taking my wife and children up to Alaska. Because they were in
school, they had their home, and that’s where my home was. I felt at the
time like I shouldn’t do that, and I believe today that I made up my mind
in the right direction.
[tape stops and begins]
Around the top of the world, there were in Lapland, which is pretty well
settled, over in Siberia, and elsewhere, in Sweden, and Norway, and so on.
There were only four, five or six, nations that had very much to do in the
Artic. There was not a whole lot of activity nationally amount nations
that had responsibilities in the Arctic. Well, Canada was pretty
outstanding, they took it seriously. They had lot of people, not a lot,
the population of Canada, even today, isn’t all that big, but there were a
lot of people, Indians, Eskimos, and others. There was also an amazing
configuration of lakes and rivers flowing into the Arctic Ocean. That
always fascinated me. Also, as I went into northeastern Alaska, the first
river was very impressive because it started in Alaska, and wandered
around, and it too emptied into the Artic Ocean! The way I was raised,
where I went to school, and all, we never thought of any rivers that
didn’t go south and flow into the Gulf of Mexico, or into the Pacific or
Atlantic Oceans or something. Geographically, it was an amazing
3
revelation to me, to realize that there was an Arctic orientation to a
great deal of the country that the United States was responsible for. I
won’t say, “owned.” We don’t “own” anything. But we were fortunate
enough to have been given responsibility over that part of the world that
is up in the Arctic. And we know of it as Alaska, at least the north
coast of it.
[tape stops and begins]
My partner in most of the work that I did in Alaska and other activities
is dead now. But Lowell Sumner and I thought that we ought to recommend a
Conservation Area. We didn’t necessarily think it should be a National
Park, because you had native people living there who had established
themselves and their own ways. They had gotten firearms finally, and some
of them still used bows and arrows and spears and so on, and maybe they
still do today. I guess they do. But anyway, we didn’t want any of that
to change. And we thought that the best thing in the world for that
northeastern part of Alaska and the northern Yukon would be a great
international conservation area. It would be established for the purpose
of simply protecting it, and letting it alone, as it was.
And that was our recommendation.
MR. KAYE: Did you make this before you went up in 1952, or after?
MR. COLLINS: No, after we’d been there and seen a lot of it. We flew all
of the time.
MR. KAYE: You made two trips to the Arctic Refuge in the 1950s didn’t
you? Didn’t you spend two Sumners there?
MR. COLLINS: At least, I think I made more than that.
MR. KAYE: Your first trip, was that to Peters Schrader Lake area?
MR. COLLINS: We went to Schrader Lake from Barrow. We didn’t know
anything about the country. And John Reed didn’t know anything about that
part of the world, except that he had been in northeast Alaska, and a
little bit of the upper end of the Yukon. But he knew enough to realize
that what we were interested in from the standpoint of scenery,
configuration, and wildlife and all that, was best exemplified over in
that region.
MR. KAYE: The northeast?
MR. COLLINS: Yeah.
MR. KAYE: Now, Reed is with the U. S. Geological Survey isn’t he?
MR. COLLINS: Yes, that’s right.
MR. KAYE: Did he want you to stay east of the Canning River, to be away
from his area?
4
MR. COLLINS: He said, “your National Park.” He never did get over
referring to my interests up there in other than National Park terms. I
explained to him time and time again, in Washington, and up there in
Alaska and everywhere else, that I didn’t give a damn what they called it.
But I thought that a Conservation area wouldn’t fit particularly well into
the National Park Service system of protection area. And that we’d just
have to let people who were more concerned about things like that than I
was, decide, in the department, what to do. And my work was at the
department level, not any particular organization of the department,
except the Secretary’s office.
MR. KAYE: The Interior Department?
MR. COLLINS: Yeah, so I looked at this whole thing from a departmental
standpoint. The Secretary’s office, not from the National Park Service,
the U.S. Geological Survey or any of the rest of them. Well that was
good, to take that stand, that attitude. It was the only way to do good
land use planning. If you started out from a National Park Service
viewpoint, or from Fish and Wildlife, or Land Management, or USGS, you
would miss an awful lot. So I had to hold a general thought of Arctic
land use and conservation in my mind. And right away, I started going
over into the Yukon because it’s all one country. If you stop at the
international borders, you miss half of it. So, I went to Whitehorse, and
the Commissioner of the Yukon Territory was named “Collins.” That was a
peculiar thing to me. There was absolutely no blood relationship that
either one of us could imagine. He was an intelligent fellow, except that
he was drunk all of the time! He was as drunk as a skunk, most of the
time whenever I saw him! And the few times that I got his attention well
enough so that he understood what I was talking about, he was fine. And I
did more good for our interests in the Arctic by sitting in Whitehorse and
help write things for him to sign than I think I did anywhere else. But
we got along fine as representatives of the two countries. And the
interest in…[unintelligible town name] one of those pretty good sized
towns over there, where I used to go and stay, the name won’t come to my
mind right now. But, those people could never think of anything except
mining, and what you could get out of the ground, what you could sell or
convert into money. I didn’t find a good solid conservation thinker in
that whole country over there for a long time. I think there are a number
of them now, who are conservation minded. In the sense that you preserve
and protect something that is an important part of the ethical concept of
your country. You don’t have to do anything with it, just see that it’s
let alone. That’s the way that “Doc”[Sumner] and I felt about that whole
thing up there. It hadn’t been ruined, and why should it be? Well, it
should be because more and more traffic was increasing along the Arctic
coast between the Canadian outposts and Barrow, and those places, and
others in between.
[tape stops and begins again]
Our recommendations were more in line with Fish and Wildlife Service. The
head of that organization in Alaska was Clarence Rhode. I had known
Clarence for a long time, and we were very good friends. He said, “well,
you’ve got to put this in the hands of some outfit to take care it,
5
somebody had to be responsible.” And Clarence wasn’t unhappy, because we
both agreed that it should be U. S. Fish and Wildlife. And I think we
made the right decision. I don’t think that it was utterly National Park
in caliber. And there’s nothing like it and nothing in the National Park
system up there in the Arctic. In fact if I could have justified, in
fact, I wrote justifications, in my own mind, that maybe I should
recommend a National Park, but I fought against that. I didn’t think that
that was the proper attitude to have. I think I was right. I think today
that this was one of the best decisions in land use management terms that
I ever made in my own mind. Which was to keep a National Park out of
there.
MR. KAYE: Why was that George?
MR. COLLINS: Because, right off of the bat, if you have a National Park,
based on the popular concept of what parks are for, you would have to
endorse the idea of all kinds of people going up there. And I didn’t want
that. I didn’t think that there should be a whole lot of people from San
Francisco and Los Angeles running around up there. I thought that you
ought to preserve what was there, whether or not anybody ever got to see
it anymore than they did then. I always felt I was right about that. And
Conrad Worth did too. He is a landscape architect himself, and he said,
“I’ll go along with what you recommend.” So, we would have gotten a
National Park if any one of half a dozen other guys had been in the
position I was in, at that time. Because a lot of people think that
National Park means money. What “Doc” Sumner and I were after wasn’t
going to make any money for anybody.
MR. KAYE: What vision did you and “Doc” Sumner have for the future of
what’s in the Arctic Refuge? What did you see for it?
MR. COLLINS: Only to make sure that the Canadian people saw conservation
in that region pretty much as we did, and would agree that the great thing
about it was to let it alone. The international line divided it in half,
you might say, and we thought that it should be a common bond between the
two nations there, in terms of policy and practice in conserving that
whole region. We did a boundary that reached over on the Canadian side,
and not many years later, they came out with their own boundary on the
Canadian side, and it put ours to shame. They had a much better boundary
than we did.
MR. KAYE: You mean a better park?
MR. COLLINS: They did lean towards the park thing. I’m not sure but I
believe it is a park now. It was an established singular boundary with
provisions for expansion to the south. That surprised us, it surprised
me, but I didn’t raise any questions about it. Because to have them do
anything would help keep those damn prospectors and miners from tearing
the country to pieces. This was a big step ahead. Then Fish and Wildlife
did establish the area on the American side. That was pretty well taken
care of in principal and policy. So that you could, in those main
6
concepts of government, principal and policy, you could go forward and do
more and more with it in terms of protecting and saving it.
MR: KAYE: Let me go back a little ways. You and Clarence Rhode discussed
whether the area should be a park, or a wildlife area, who else was
involved in those discussions back in the 1950s, and tell me how they
went? What things were considered? Who was on what side?
MR. COLLINS: Well, there was a man from Stanford University whose name
escapes me for the moment. I’ve got it somewhere. And he ran the Arctic
Research Laboratory for a couple of years up at Barrow. We would go over
to Barrow and write up reports. Write up what we thought we had learned.
We’d go over there once in a while. And he came over to northeast Alaska
and he went down in the Sheenjek too with us. He was a fine professor of
geology, I think, at Stanford. He was great guy. He understood exactly
what we were doing. And he made available to us stenographic help and
things like that over at Barrow when we’d go over there. We were able to
keep up our reports pretty well. And they looked pretty good when we sent
them outside to San Francisco, and Washington. Of course, that’s all gone
now. No laboratory up there anymore. I think it’s been closed out, which
I think is wrong, absolutely wrong! They never should have discontinued
that effort. They need something, even though our part of the Arctic is
small compared to Canada.
[tape stops and restarts]
The Assistant Director of the National Park Service in Washington, a man
I’d known many, many years and most of my adult life, and of course
Clarence Rhode. Although Clarence was head of Fish and Wildlife in
Alaska, he thought first of the land, and the wildlife. [tape stops] He
was a great man, I think. There was this little fellow from Stanford who
was ahead of any of us. He could see your point of view, just like that.
And I can’t think of his name. But I don’t think, well, Ben Thompson, . .
.
The Superintendent of McKinley was “Mush” Pearson. He was a dog Musher.
He could have been up there for 100 years, and wouldn’t have known anymore
about Alaska than the Alaska Railroad and how to get from Fairbanks to
Anchorage. He was a hunter, and just wasn’t a conservation minded guy.
Those were the only people who had ever been there, who knew anything.
You couldn’t discuss this stuff with anyone. There were more people on
the Canadian side, by far, than there were on the Alaskan side who could
have discussed our views on the Artic with far reaching views.
MR. KAYE: Let’s go back to Clarence Rhode. Did he fly you around? Was
he involved in your survey?
MR. COLLINS: He flew me whenever he was up there in that region on his
own business for Fish and Wildlife. He’d take the time, I flew a lot with
Clarence. He was a good pilot, an excellent pilot. Highly trained, and
skilled. Not a man of great formal training or education, but he had
enough. Clarence had a tremendous business head, when it came to running
his outfit there. He and I talked about it all the time. You might say
7
that he and John Reed were my strongest confederates in discussions and
analysis of what the Arctic was, and why it should be left alone, and
things like that. I don’t remember other people. You had to have been
there and learned a little about it in order to have anything to say about
it. I know I couldn’t talk intelligently about it until after I had been
there for awhile, and I went there for that purpose.
MR. KAYE: Your second trip, was that to the Firth River, Joel Creek area?
MR. COLLINS: No, I don’t remember for sure. I made a couple of trips up
there to the Artic area before I got a consciousness of the vastness of
it. I could see, as anybody would, from a map that it was a big thing,
but the personality of the land, and when my concept came to the point of
thinking in terms of everything north of the Yukon River being another
world. I included the Brooks Range. But now, as I look back, that my
mind gradually took the crest of the Brooks Range on up to the Artic as
that world in itself. And south of there, I thought, was the Yukon, and
more Alaska. It was a normal way of dividing up the land, to even think
about it.
MR. KAYE: What was the best area, the area that you most enjoyed in Artic
Refuge? You camped all over, Joel Creek, Schrader Lake, and Sheenjek,
what did you like best?
MR. COLLINS: Well, it’s hard to answer that. I never spent a lifetime
there. I never spent enough time to be greatly impressed by, as I know I
would have been, by many other places besides Joel Creek. But in the
experience that I did have, I felt that Joel Creek was one of the most
representative and distinguished parts of the Artic region that I knew
anything about. And even now, in my mind’s eye when I think about the
Artic, I think first about Joel Creek. Where it started over there, up
Joel Creek and through the hills a little ways. And then, the next river
south, Manchu Creek, which runs into the Firth River. It seemed to me
that the difference between those two places, Manchu Creek in it’s own
way, and the Firth in the way that appealed to me so much. Then the whole
setting, going back to Peter’s Lake and Schrader Lake and the big mountain
that sticks up there. I include all that when I talk about the area where
“Doc” and I camped and worked so much. You can land a plane in there
pretty safely and comfortably.
MR. KAYE: With a float- plane? At Peter’s Lake you mean?
MR. COLLINS: No, I meant over at Joel Creek. Yeah, we had that big
willow patch. And there was a family of moose that lived in there. And
we lived on one end of it. But we went out and dug around a little bit,
and made a good enough strip so you could get in and out.
MR. KAYE: Who flew you in there?
MR. COLLINS: For heavens sake, (thinking) it was an Alaskan Airlines guy
who lived up on the coast there. Do you remember him?
8
MR. KAYE: No
MR. COLLINS: He had a place down Fairbanks.
MR. KAYE: Did he live at Barter Island?
MR. COLLINS: No, Barter Island is over on the Canadian side. He lived
about half way between Barter Island and Barrow. His
Judith S. Kaye
No full textChief Judge of the New York Court of Appeals, Judith Kaye addresses faculty and students of Fordham Law School. In 2002, Kaye was awarded the Fordham-Stein Prize for her dedication to improving the administration of justice.https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/events_programs_miscellanea/1006/thumbnail.jp
Interview with Jim King by Roger Kaye, November 24, 2003
No full textOral history interview with Jim King. Roger Kaye as interviewer.
Jim King discusses the creation of Arctic NWR.
Organization: FWS
Name: Jim King
Years: 1951-1983, 1983-2013
Program: Refuges
Keywords: History, Biography, Aircraft, Aviation, Biologists (USFWS), Employees (USFWS), Wildlife refuges, Work of the Service, Wildlife managementINTERVIEW WITH JIM KING
BY ROGER KAYE NOVEMBER 24, 2003
MR. KAYE: This is a telephonic interview with retired FWS Biologist and Pilot Jim
King who is in Juneau. It is November 24, 2003. It is conducted by Roger Kaye in
Fairbanks. The subject of our discussion today is the creation of the Arctic National
Wildlife Refuge. Jim, thanks for talking with me today. To begin, tell us about your
position with the FWS in the mid 1950’s.
MR. KING: I started working for FWS in 1951. I think we were called Enforcement
Agents then. Actually, I started as a Stream Guard under Hogar Larsen in Cook Inlet. I
moved to Fairbanks in the fall of 1951 as an Agent Trainee. We had several titles that
came along, but we wound up as Game Management Agents. That was the normal title of
people in the management and enforcement divisions. Alaska was kind of separate from
the rest of the country at that time so we didn’t have to take civil service exams or
anything like that. They just hired people that they felt were appropriate.
MR. KAYE: So in 1956, I know you flew John Buckley up to Last Lake to visit the
Muries during their expedition there. What was your position in 1956?
MR. KING: I guess it was Game Management Agent. We didn’t actually land in the
lake. We landed in the Sheenjek River, which was pretty close to where the Muries were
camped. The lake was a little ways away, but that’s where Keith Harrington had landed.
He was a Wein pilot that took them up there initially.
MR. KAYE: Can you tell me a little bit about that trip and why you went up and what
you knew about the effort that the Muries were involved in there?
MR. KING: We had done flying at that time with the university wildlife unit people and
the wildlife unit that had started in 1950, I guess. It had been pretty new. The first
leader was Doc Cosley and then he began Dean of Students. Then John Buckley took
over. They were kind of learning the country. Ray Wolford, who was the Agent in
Charge in Fairbanks, helped them out as much as possible and we did flying for them
periodically when they requested it. Buckley wanted to go up there. I don’t remember
exactly the details but I assume that he talked to me or to Wolford to arrange it. So it was
set, I flew him up in a Piper Pacer as I recall.
MR. KAYE: So did he visit with the Muries then? Were they discussing strategy? Do
you recall what they were discussing?
MR. KING: Well, we went to their camp and Marty and Olaus were there. There was a
Doctor there. Maybe Brina Kessell was there. George Schaller was off somewhere. He
was staying there but he was off hiking that day. As a matter of fact, I think when we
first got there Olaus was off somewhere. He had been making track casts and other things
around the lake. He came back. But I don’t remember any great details about the
conservation regarding the Arctic Refuge. It was actually the south slope of the Brooks
Range and it isn’t a very arctic-like place. It’s more like the interior arboreal forest.
MR. KAYE: When did you move to Juneau?
MR. KING: I came here in 1964.
MR. KAYE: I know that you knew Clarence Rhode. Maybe you could tell me a little bit
about what you knew of Clarence and what your association with him was?
MR. KING: Clarence was the Regional Director. He was really a vibrant and dynamic
person. He just had a way of dealing with everybody that was really appealing.
Although he did have enemies because he was a very powerful person.
MR. KAYE: What kind of enemies would Clarence have?
MR. KING: He was Regional Director at a time when Commercial Fisheries was part of
the region. Clarence had no college degrees of any sort that I know of. I don’t think he
had ever been to college. Here he was in charge of Ph. D. Fisheries people. I think there
was some tension over that. I can’t remember the year, but it was some time in the 1950s
when Commercial Fisheries was split off. There was that, and then Clarence and Albert
Day who was the Director in Washington. They were very, I don’t know if I’d say close,
but Clarence was able to get what he wanted from Albert Day. Day was one of the great
Directors of the Service. I think there was some resentment on the part of other Regional
Directors that Clarence could get what he wanted out of the Director and they sometimes
couldn’t. Those were the two things I was aware of. Of course there was some political
criticism by Alaska lawyers and politicians. He had a way of just riding over all of that
kind of stuff.
MR. KAYE: Do you know how he might have gotten along with a fellow named
Anderson who was a Commissioner of Fish and Game, who was very much against the
Arctic Proposal?
MR. KING: Well, Clarence Anderson was hired as the Director of the Territorial
Department of Fisheries somewhere in the mid 1950s. He wasn’t anywhere near the
strong personality that Rhodes was. At that time, one of the things I remember was that
the Territory established a fishing stamp that people were supposed to buy and attach to
their fishing license. It cost a few bucks, but not much. There was a question as to
whether it was legal or not. So the way it was handled was that people were advised to
buy this thing by territorial authorities but the Territory didn’t have any wildlife
enforcement people. We of course were checking hunting and fishing licenses and we
were told not to take any cases to court regarding that stamp. That was one of the things
that brought politics into the picture. Fish and Wildlife was accused of, and I think
maybe Anderson was involved in this sort of thing, of not supporting the Department
because we weren’t supporting the stamp from which they got money. It started to get
political then, and Ernest Greuning was Governor. He was working on Statehood and one
of his gimmicks was federal mismanagement of the wildlife and fish resources. He said
that the Territory needed to manage it’s own resources because the federal government
had done such a bad job. This was just politics. It was true that the salmon were down
because I think primarily during World War II there were hardly any FWS people around.
Producing food was part of the war effort. A lot of the fishermen were fishing up the
creeks and indulging in practices that were illegalized. There were huge salmon catches
during the war and they couldn’t be sustained. Greuning made a big deal out of that sort
of thing. He attacked Ira Gabrielson who was the Director and a national figure before
Day. Greuning really made some hard accusations against Gabrielson. Gabrielson came
to Alaska every summer for a number of years. The interesting thing is that as the
Director, he spent his summers bird watching, which resulted in this monumental book
with Frederick Lincoln. The excuse for Gabrielson to come here was that he went to
Fisheries Hearings. With fish not producing as much, and then there was the fish trap
thing going on; Greuning used Gabrielson as a target.
Clarence Anderson came in to this arena. It seems like he picked up on this thing
of federal mismanagement. He would preach that when Rhodes wasn’t around. But he
didn’t dare say anything like that when Rhodes was present. A lot of the things were not
true. I went to a Tanana Valley Sportsmen’s meeting one time when Anderson was there
giving a talk on what the Department of Fish was doing and how they were going to
develop a Department of Game after Statehood. I don’t remember exactly the points he
made, but while he was speaking Rhodes and Ray Wolford walked in. You could almost
see Anderson’s face drop! He finished his talk and walked right out the door. Then, the
group were pretty much supporters of Rhodes. They asked him what he thought about
what Anderson had been saying. He gave a little talk about why he thought certain things
wouldn’t work. But they had this funny relationship. I didn’t know too much about it.
But I did know that as a guy in the field we got some of the pay off on this federal
mismanagement stuff.
MR. KAYE: It’s interesting that you suggested that Rhodes got along pretty well with
the Sportsmen’s groups. Was that your impression? Was he well connected, or well
liked by the Outdoor Council or the sportsmen’s organizations?
MR. KING: Yes, I think very much so. One more comment on that controversy over
federal mismanagement; after Statehood, the first Governor, who was Governor Egan
wrote a letter to the Game Commissioners complementing them on the good condition
that the wildlife recourses were in when the new State took over. It just canceled all of
this nonsense about federal mismanagement. This letter did that. On the sportsmen’s
end of things, I think it was around 1945 that the Territorial Sportsmen’s group organized
in Juneau. They were an exceedingly active bunch. The FWS people in Juneau became
pretty active in that organization. A lot of them were officers in it. One of the things
that they did fairly soon was that they started having this Salmon Derby. You’ve
probably heard of the Juneau Salmon Derby. It produced a lot of money. The Territorial
Sportsmen’s group always had a lot of money to spend on things. They built cabins for
the Forest Service rentals and established a scholarship fund for kids that has produced
over a million dollars over the years. A lot of kids have had the benefit of those
Territorial Sportsmen scholarships, including one of my daughters. They were just riding
high, that bunch, and they commented on game laws. There were hearings then, as now,
about game laws. They testified that the way the laws were set up was that the
Commission would meet in Juneau every winter. Of course, the Regional Director was
the executive officer and a member of the Game Commission. Then were four other
members who were not government employees from each of the judicial divisions. They
would have this meeting in Juneau and all of the Agents and Refuge Managers would
come in. Pretty much all of the FWS people would come in. The Agents would talk
about the condition of wildlife in their districts and changes that were needed in the game
laws. There weren’t many Biologists involved. Biologists started coming in about 1948.
The Agents in the districts had been doing a pretty good job of restoring moose and
furbearers that had been sorely depleted before the Alaska Game Law began in 1925. The
Game Commission would talk with the Agents about needed changes and the public could
testify about things that they wanted. Then, the Commission would come up with knew
regulations that the Secretary of the Interior would adopt and would become law. That’s
the way that worked. The Territorial Sportsmen were right here in Juneau and they were
always attending these Commission meetings and they knew all of the Commission
members. Some of the Commissioners were pretty powerful people. I always think of
the guy in Petersburg, Earl Ohmer. He had a cannery in Petersburg and he was kind of a
strong personality. He was the guy that got involved when there were all kinds of
military conflicts that went on over hunting during World War II. Earl Ohmer would talk
to General Nathan Twining who was a pretty powerful General; and he called him “Son”!
Andy Simon and he and I were friends. He had a lot of connections with powerful people
from taking them hunting. This was the kind of the field. In the early 1950s, Bud Boddie
was the prime mover. He was the second President of the Territorial Sportsmen. I am
not sure, he was here right from the start, and so he probably was involved with the
President. He was an extremely good speaker. He could control a room full of people
just beautifully and get whatever he wanted out of them. He was a really close friend of
Clarence Rhodes. Boddie was the one that was really the impetus behind the Alaska
Sportsmen’s Council, which was affiliated with the National Wildlife Federation. The
NWF was started by Ding Darling as a federation of sportsmen’s clubs. I don’t think
Darling felt that it had worked out as well as he had hoped in his lifetime. But the bright
spot was Alaska, where the Territorial Sportsmen and the other really lively group at that
time was the Tanana Valley Sportsmen in Fairbanks. So Boddie came back and forth to
Fairbanks fairly regularly there for a few years. I knew him.
MR. KAYE: Where was Boddie coming from philosophically? He was very influential
in the Arctic Refuge issue. Where did he come from?
MR. KING: He grew up in Idaho. Other than that I don’t know much about his youth.
But he was a really avid sportsman in the classic term. He loved to hunt and fish. He
was really interested in game laws and game conservation. When he came to Alaska I
know he had a trawling boat for a while. And he had a cabin on Douglas Island where he
did his deer hunting in the fall. I went over there deer hunting with him one year. He was
one of these guys that was really into hunting and fishing. A couple of other players in
what was going on at this time would be Dave Spencer, who was the Chief of Refuges and
a pilot. Spencer was a very quite person and didn’t attract very much attention in groups
or at meetings. He had two things that were really important to him. One was that he
had been a student of Aldo Leopold’s and he’d also been a friend of Olaus Murie’s. He
was involved with Olaus in Wyoming. The other person was the Assistant Regional
Director; Urban Nelson, who we called Pete Nelson. Pete was also a student of Aldo
Leopold’s. I don’t think there was much sense in Alaska of a wilderness philosophy that
was used to support the ANWR. The other important player in this was George Collins.
I think it was him, with the Park Service who had….he was familiar with the writings of
Robert Marshall who had first suggested a National Park for everything north of the
Yukon, as a wilderness area back in the 1930s. Collins, in the 1950s was some kind of a
planning person in San Francisco. He was a very personable guy. He knew everybody
and talked to everybody.
MR. KAYE: Did you know George Collins?
MR. KING: I did.
MR. KAYE: Tell me more about your impressions of him. He was with the Park
Service. Did that make hunters and sportsmen leery of what he was proposing?
MR. KING: Everybody liked him. But his proposal was for a Park for the Arctic. The
Sportsmen’s Council could not go along with that because there would be no hunting in
the Park. I don’t think it was an adversarial thing at that point. The players which were
the people that I just talked about agreed that they probably couldn’t sell a National Park
up there in Alaska, but they could sell a Refuge. As far as I know, George Collins
couldn’t object to that. He was an interesting guy, and a really dynamic person. I guess
he knew everybody in Washington, but at that time, I was just a young guy. I think I met
him when I worked for the McKinley Park in 1950. Then, after I got to be working as an
Agent in Fairbanks, just as a district Game Warden. But I remember running into him on
the street and here and there. He always just wanted to talk was just a very pleasant
person to be around.
MR. KAYE: George Collins in his personal journal was very critical of wolf control
program that Clarence Rhodes carried out in northeast Alaska in what became the Arctic
Refuge. Did you ever talk to either Rhodes or Collins about that, or the disagreement that
they obviously had over wolf control?
MR. KING: That was a big issue at the time, and always had been. When I worked in
Fairbanks trapping was still very important in a lot of areas. The trappers really
supported wolf control because a lot of the trappers weren’t all that well educated or well
organized and a lot of them couldn’t deal with the wolves that could wipe out their fur
catch. They were constantly appealing to the FWS for reduction in wolves. The people
in Petersburg were always worried about the wolves there that were wiping out deer. The
reindeer people who in the 1950s were concentrated around Kotzebue and Selawik
couldn’t deal with the wolves. The wolf program had a lot of support. The Territorial
Legislature maintained wolf bounties. This didn’t fit with the kind of philosophy that
came from Bob Marshall and Aldo Leopold. But it certainly was something that Rhodes
had to deal with.
MR. KAYE: Do you think Rhodes was personally invested in it, or was just doing it
because it was popular and expected of him?
MR. KING: The Sportsmen supported the wolf control too. It supposedly produced
more moose. I would assume that Rhodes was just fulfilling the popular demand. He
was hearing from sportsmen’s groups and native groups.
MR. KAYE: Would you have any impression whether he was actually a “wolf hater” as
some people thought he really was? Or was he just politically required to carry out these
programs?
MR. KING: Oh, I don’t think he was a wolf hater! He was trying to administer a
wildlife agency that depended, like all government organizations on a certain amount of
public good will. He was responding to that. He didn’t have that kind of personal
prejudice. If he had a personal prejudice, it would be against the violators of the game
laws and that sort of thing. He was interested in management of wildlife. There were
things that were considered important then than that were not involved any more like…
Oh, I think it must have welled up in the 1930s; the prejudice against killing cows and doe
deer. That was just considered basic information; you didn’t shoot the females. There
were things like that going on. Another thing was that there used to be a closer along the
roads, a quarter of a mile back from the road, just because it was considered poor
sportsmanship to stand on the road and shoot things.
MR. KAYE: Do you thing Clarence was one of those interested in sportsmanship for the
more traditional or more venerated hunting tradition and trying to keep that alive?
MR. KING: Yeah, I think so. I would say that he felt that hunting and fishing is a sport
and should be dealt with as a sport.
MR. KAYE: Would you say that this was a motivation of the Territorial Sportsmen’s
group?
MR. KING: Oh, very much.
MR. KAYE: Were they concerned, do you think, about the degradation of the tradition
of hunting like you read about going on in the 1950s with the advent of technology and so
on? Was that a concern that they had?
MR. KING: Oh, very much. I think things like the prohibition of things like using
helicopters came right out of the sportsmen’s groups.
MR. KAYE: This is very interesting. I see a lot of reference to that. What was the
issue, or concern? Did it come from the military use of choppers? Was the worry that
this would further depreciate hunting if they started to be used for that?
MR. KING: Well, I think it was just that there were getting to be helicopters around and
it was considered that it would be un-sportsmanlike to go in and land next to animals and
shoot them down. There should be a fair chase. The Boone and Crockett Club used to
talk a lot about fair chase. There was a big element of that in the sportsmen’s clubs. I
think that the Sportsmen’s Council; I can’t remember exactly when the prohibition of
helicopters happened, but it didn’t result from the abuse of helicopters, that I know of.
Helicopters were extremely expensive and the public wasn’t using them. The government
and military were using them a little bit. That was the sportsmen sort of getting ahead of
the game in saying that we needed to stop this before it starts.
MR. KAYE: Interesting, that a kind of visionary thing.
MR. KING: Yeah, and there was a lot of that going on. And the wolf thing was sort of
mixed up in that some. I don’t remember feeling that anybody really hated wolves except
the trappers and the reindeer people. The sportsmen felt that they were a trophy animal
although they were furbearers. I don’t remember there being any feeling that wolves had
to be exterminated. They had to be managed like any other wildlife resource. I think that
would be Rhodes’ feeling on it. If you were going to manage for a surplus for humans
you needed to reduce the predation.
MR. KAYE: I don’t know if you have a sense of this, but Collins brought a certain
idealism to the Arctic Refuge proposal. Part of it was based on the new ecology-based
environmental perspective. I wonder if Clarence shared that view, or how he might have
responded to the idealism that Collins had for this place.
MR. KING: I don’t remember people vocalizing much about the idealism of Bob
Marshall. He was better known for his book on Arctic Village, and Wiseman there.
There wasn’t a whole lot of the idealism that was expressed by Muir and people who
followed. There was a strong sense of what a wonderful place Alaska was and how
exciting it was to be able to get out and do things, and to have animals. I think one of the
things that Bud Boddie used to say was that he didn’t want to see Alaska spoiled the
way that Idaho had been spoiled. I am not sure what he was referring to there. That was
sort of in the back of a lot of people’s heads. They didn’t want Alaska treated the way
other states had treated their natural areas and wildlife. They didn’t want to see things
torn up. It was a protective thing. I don’t remember vocalizing on the wilderness
philosophy and that sort o
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