Denali Historic Resource Study

Distinct from the older mining camps, the railroad created new towns that began as construction camps and persisted as trading and transportation centers. Nenana, Cantwell, and the revived Talkeetna illustrate this progression. Healy, just north of the park, also got its start as a town with arrival of the railroad builders. Its continuing history would rest on a combination of railroad operations and mining of the great coal deposits bordering Healy and Lignite creeks, which opened up with the advent of railroad transportation.

Healy's early settlers came in the train of strikes at the Bonnifield and Kantishna fields. Soon appeared a roadhouse and a store, a moonshiner's still, a cafe, and the cabin of a commercial meat hunter named Colvin who also trapped and guided. As more trappers and prospectors came into the camp, they settled near Colvin's cabin on the Nenana River bluff opposite the mouth of Healy Creek. The ABC's Construction Camp 358 (from the railroad milepost) suddenly picked up the settlement's pace. Flanking Camp Creek was a big camp of 120 people, a construction headquarters designed to push the rails through the Nenana Canyon. By 1920 the AEC had built dormitory, mess hall, hospital, store, warehouse, barn, and blacksmith shop. Thus the straggling settlement transformed into a railroad "company town." The imminence of the railroad's completion spurred development of a succession of coal mines: up Lignite Creek, in the Nenana River terrace underlying the railroad camp and townsite, and about 4 miles up Healy Creek at Suntrana. The greater Healy-Suntrana community was evolving into a dual company town as a railroad and coal-mining center.

Once the line was completed freight trains overnighted at Healy. Passenger trains overnighted at Curry to the south, but stopped for lunch at Healy, where as many as 200 passengers filed daily into the new railroad-hotel dining room. Singleton's private roadhouse-hotel deferred to this modem accommodation, becoming a store where railroad workers swapped yarns with Healy's old-timers around the pot-bellied stove.

Curry Hotel, on the Alaska Railroad near Talkeetna. Herbert Heller Collection, UAF.

At the end of World War II the railroad reestablished Healy's center about one-half mile north of the old depot and town, which had suffered a fire that destroyed the hotel. More urgently, the settlement, perched on the eroding river bluff, was sliding into the water. What was left of the old town was torn down and scattered, except for Colvin's cabin, which was guyed to its precarious overhang for sentimental reasons.

Railroad cutbacks of recent years led to the operational demise of the second-generation railroad depot, hotel, and utility functions. Except for the concrete-block engine house the buildings were auctioned off and moved. Today, trains pass through but seldom stop. With opening of the Parks Highway in 1972, Healy began its second relocation, now centering on the highway 11/2 miles west of the river. [33]

In 1922, Mining engineer John A. Davis (the same who in 1921 journeyed to the Kantishna with his wife Mary) documented the shift in the nature of Denali region coal mining—from small-scale local to big-scale export—with the coming of the railroad. He reported that the Healy River Coal Company mine at Suntrana was the sole producer of coal in the Nenana fields. A 4-mile-long railroad spur line, completed that year, now connected the mine with the mainline of the railroad, and bulk shipments could begin. The earlier hauling of coal from mine to railroad—by horse-drawn sleds in winter and tractor-drawn wagons in summer—could meet local AEC and domestic needs. But it took the mine-mouth railroad to establish the bulk market in Fairbanks. [34]

Once that market was established—for Fairbanks' power and domestic uses, and for dredge and dragline placer operations in surrounding gold fields—the underground Suntrana mine would weather Alaska's boom-and-bust economy for 40 years. (World War II increased the demand for coal, and soldiers helped man the mine and the railroad.)

Today, the successor Usibelli Coal Company employs a giant dragline to strip-mine the vast deposits between Lignite and Healy creeks (the underground mine at Suntrana flooded in the early Sixties). Long trains load at a slow roll through a modern tipple opposite Lignite Creek, whence the coal is transported to Seward, then loaded in ocean ships bound for Korea.

Community history and Healy and Suntrana included founding of one-room schools in 1937 (Healy) and 1942 (Suntrana). Before then children studied by correspondence, as was (and still is) typical in isolated bush communities.

The poor road between Suntrana and Healy and lack of an automobile bridge across the Nenana encouraged motive innovations. In the late Thirties one boy ice-skated the frozen creek from Suntrana to Healy for his classes. The Healy River Coal Company rigged an old truck with railroad wheels to shuttle local residents across the railroad bridge. This conveyance, called the Doodlebug, also took ladies of the evening to the Goat Ranch near Suntrana on payday weekends. "Goat Mary" Thompson had opened a beer parlor there in 1935. Her establishment converted to a brothel when payday came. One informant told local historian Beverly Mitchell that her first husband went up to the goat ranch one night "to settle a disturbance." When he failed to return she went up herself and shot the place up with a shotgun, whereupon several customers in various states of undress cleared the premises.

More typical of community recreation were the practical pastimes of hunting, gardening, and berry-picking. The self-sufficient residents of these isolated communities filled evening hours with readings, dramatic presentations, cards, and dancing. Summer holidays were observed with baseball games and community picnics. [35]

To provide a base for railroad construction, the AEC laid out the Nenana townsite and built the yards, government structures, and a hospital. The new town joined the Indian village of Tortella and St. Mark's Episcopal Mission (est. 1907) at the confluence of the Nenana and Tanana rivers. By 1920 what had started as the railroad's northern construction headquarters had grown to an Alaskan metropolis of more than 600 people.

Private businesses served and supplied the AEC and its workers. Other entrepreneurs laid the groundwork for river transportation systems, which, upon completion of the railroad from Seward, would make Nenana the chief port of the Yukon-Tanana drainage. Known as the Hub City of Interior Alaska, this crossroads of rail and riverine transport gave access to the world's products, brought first by ocean ships to the railroad's southern terminus at Seward.

For the isolated camps and settlements of the northern Denali region—their own industry limited to frontier blacksmithing—the crated machinery in Nenana warehouses meant a future of progress and prosperity. Here, too, shined bright lights that illuminated the trappings of civilization: hotels, taverns, restaurants, and a high-class billiard hall. Groceries, hardware, clothing, and modern domestic fixtures filled the racks and floors of Nenana's stores.

During the early history of Mount McKinley National Park—its orientation northward as dictated by the Alaska Range—Nenana's goods and services provided a mercantile Mecca, a chance to get out of the bush and meet old friends, and medical help unavailable on the far creeks. [36]

Some of the men on the far creeks—the lone or partnered trappers—looked to the trading centers only for bare necessities: ammunition, steel traps, and a few staples. They were going backwards in time, trying to find in Alaska a last resort for the mountain-man life that had ended in the Rockies a century earlier. One of these, Fabian Carey of the Minchumina area, described in later years the rewards of this historic lifeway: "Only a handful of us live to fulfill our boyhood dream of following the far trails and seeking lost horizons. . . . My blazes are weathering at many a remote campsite and along many an unmapped stream and mountain glade. . . . I am well content." [37]

Perhaps less romantic, less conscious of reliving a past era was the austere Hjalmar "Slim" Carlson. One story about him shows the difference between his kind of loner and the camp and community people—who, though on civilization's edge, formed a loose society that sought progress and its benefits. It seems that Joe Quigley went over to see Slim at one of his cabins on Birch or Slippery Creek, taking some coffee as a treat. As the two men sat down to a meal of wild meat Joe offered a steaming cup to Slim. He refused, saying that he could not afford coffee or tea, so didn't want to taste it and then be unhappy about not having it later. His usual hot drink was Hudson Bay tea brewed from the leaves of a local plant. [38]

A Native of Sweden, Carlson had immigrated to the United States as a youth and made his way across the country to the Northwest where he worked in logging camps. He came to Alaska in 1914 for railroad work, and in 1918 crossed over Anderson Pass to the sheep hills and McKinley River country north of Mount McKinley. For several years he prospected and worked as a mine laborer in the Kantishna, but finally decided against them as uncertain and not worth the effort, given camp prices. So he settled into hunting and trapping. Establishment of the park would force him northward to the Castle Rocks area. Later he trapped along Birch and Slippery Creeks. Cabin remains and place names within the old and expanded park trace the course of his wanderings. [39]

Carlson was a practical man. Once he walked up Muldrow Glacier with an old dog, thinking he might climb the mountain. Near the head of the glacier he contemplated the distance yet to go:

I said, my goodness, what the dickens, I got nothing up there. Why should I go up there? I decided, I'm going to go back again, there's no use for me to go up there, but to look around . . . . Well then I went down to my camp again. Took it easy and stayed home a few days.

Slim got his meat in the fall ("caribou as thick as buffalo on the plains"), trapped until it got too cold, then hibernated in the cabin until it warmed up a little in February. He took his furs to trade for supplies in Nenana: '"nothing but flour and sugar and a little salt . . . . That was just about all I could afford to buy. I almost lived on the country. I made my own clothes out of caribou and moose skin."

Carlson was hard and strong. Cold didn't seem to bother him while on the trail. One time he met some Indians while driving his sled "with no hat or cap on me, no coat, and plenty warm." The Indians were freezing and told him that he must be a tough man. "And I probably was."

Once while sheep hunting near McGonagall Pass, Slim found some boxes of tea left by early mountaineers. That night he cooked up some sheep and brewed a big pot of tea. Next morning he had terrible diarrhea ("thought I was going to die"). Was it caused by the sheep meat or the old tea? Carlson's friend Slim Avery was expected at the hunting camp the next day. Avery drank tea morning, noon, and night. So before Carlson took off to hunt, he left the tea out. Avery arrived and helped himself to a kettle-full. When Slim got back he observed that Avery seemed to be feeling fine, then told him about the diarrhea. Avery laughed at the joke on him—Carlson's testing the tea on him. Then, applying the logical process of elimination, they blamed the sheep meat and brewed another batch.

Trapping right under the mountain did not pay. Slim got only a few mink and wolverines. About that time, too, in the early Twenties, the park rangers began cruising into his territory. So he moved north to the woods, beyond the park boundary. There he hunted black bear, rendered their fat ("just as clear as the regular lard you buy") and sold what he didn't need to the families at Kantishna for 40 cents a pound.

It was about 1924 that Carlson left his cabin on Clearwater Creek in the park. He first built a cabin at Castle Rock, then bought out Gus Johnson's productive trapline on Birch Creek, where he built a fine home cabin. Yet later, the overflow and flooding on Birch Creek impelled him to shift over to Slippery Creek where he built another big cabin. This was rich country and he "made it pretty good after that."

Slim liked this independent life with nobody to argue with or tell him what to do. He left prospecting and wage labor behind to trap exclusively. Shortly he mastered the trapper's art, devising his own techniques after exhausting the arcane scent and set formulas published in trappers' books and magazines. Fur prices were high in the Twenties: $80 for a red fox, $45 to $60 for a lynx. Marten were closed then, but sometimes one wandered into a trap. "Of course you were supposed to turn them into the territory, and I guess most of the trappers did." With good trapping, high fur prices, and plenty of caribou it was a good life.

When caribou declined in the Thirties, particularly in the park in the vicinity of his old Clearwater cabin, Slim rejected the theory that wolves were to blame. "There was very few wolves up there." He figured that wolves had got a bad name, and he did not favor the bounty for their control. He speculated that the caribou had just migrated out, shifted their range.

In those days a good salmon run came up Birch Creek. Slim trapped enough fish to feed his dogs, so he didn't need to kill deer for them.

Living by himself, and with only 3 or 4 other trappers scattered in the flats north of the park, Slim seldom saw anyone except during town visits. People in Nenana wondered how he stood it, why he didn't go crazy. "But it didn't interfere with me at all. I had no trouble there . . . . I never thought of it."

But one thing, I always was busy, always had something to do. In the summer when the mosquitoes was so thick, well I didn't rush out and cut no trail or make no cabins then, but so soon as they thinned down a little I was on the trail and went out the trap lines and scouted over the country and looked around all the time. Always busy.

Slim remembered that mosquitoes seemed more vicious then. And no one came up with any dope that worked. In fact the bugs homed in on the various mixes of lard and Creolin and other ingredients that people tried. The dogs suffered horribly. When Slim put mixtures on them, though, they just licked them off. Nets, hats, gloves, and the thickest underwear you could get were the only protection.

Once in a while something happened that made him blue (like when he axed his thumb off and nearly bled to death) and he wished he could talk to someone to shake it. But usually he just worked harder and the blues went away. Sure he talked to himself, but he didn't come back with feisty answers. Slim said that was the time to get out, a sure sign that a man had got "bushed." The secret was a nice disposition and not being the worrying kind.

Slim's adventures included scrapes with bears, but mainly he tried to get along with them as fellow travelers in the woods. One September he killed several caribou, then went back for his dogs to pack in the harvest. Meanwhile, a big grizzly had taken over his kills. Slim didn't want to mess with the bear, but he did want his meat. So he loosed the dogs, which got into a running, dodging battle with the bear. While this went on Slim built a temporary 12-foot-high cache in the trees. There he put his meat to freeze and be retrieved later.

Once Slim caught a handsome black wolf in a trap. He was caught by two toes and couldn't get away. "So I sat and talked to him for a while, and he wagged his tail to me and kind of whined . . . . I talk to him just like a big man. I got to kill you, that's all there is to it." He had tried to release the wolf, but it grabbed his leg in its jaws, not breaking the skin. That scared Slim, so there was nothing else to do, though "I hated like the dickens to kill him."

Slim got on well with the Indians. He was glad to see them when they came by ("because I never seed no body else") and he always laid a big spread for them. If he had something they needed he gave it to them, if he could, and accepted no pay even though they offered. He respected them and what they did; they respected him and his trapping territory.

Slim Carlson died in 1975. His life in the country had spanned nearly the entire history of the park. Fittingly, friends at Minchumina—where he spent his last years—buried his ashes near a lake called Lonely, under the shadow of Mount McKinley.

As the modern world moved into the Denali region, the environment of the Native people underwent drastic change. These shifting conditions, many of them devastating to the lifeways of traditional people, called for radical adaptive responses. Change and movement had distinguished Native culture long before white men came into the country. But the acceleration of change brought by the newcomers, and the breakdown of protective isolation—both physical and cultural—severely distorted the patterns of Indian life.

Even in the remote region north of the Alaska Range disease had early wreaked havoc with the Kolchan, Koyukon, and Tanana bands. Smallpox brought by 19th Century Russian and Yankee traders and travelers had spread into the Interior along the rivers, reaching remote places by intermediate Native traders. By the turn of the century the Kuskokwim-Tanana Lowlands had suffered significant population losses and relocations. Hudson Stuck noted in 1911 that the Minchumina people were a weak band of survivors, most of them destroyed by measles in 1900 and diphtheria in 1906. Influenza in the 1920s and 1930s, along with hideous forms of tuberculosis, further depleted the region's Native population. [40]

Bands and families regrouped and consolidated. Some went to Nenana or villages on the Yukon. Others grouped together at Telida and Nikolai on the upper Kuskokwim. Once populous seasonal camps such as Bearpaw, Birch Creek, and Toklat now numbered only one or two families comprising the survivors of many families. Nearby cemeteries held the relatives who made up entire family trees, now reduced to only a few living representatives.

For the survivors, the influx of gold miners, explorers, mountaineers, and other travelers on the Nenana-Kantishna-McGrath trail had brought temporary economic opportunity. The services rendered by the Indians in transport, accommodations, and provision of meat made them functional in the evolving economy. Cash earned from these services buttressed their basic economy of trapping, hunting, and fishing.

But growing dependence on the cash economy had its downside. Time on the land for family hunting and fishing—and for training young people in these arts and skills—decreased. Individualized hunting with rifles replaced communal hunting patterns, which weakened the social elements of the hunt: ceremonials, family integration through participation, joint processing of the harvest of the hunt, and the sharing of products amongst all members of the society.

Trapping itself, though a land-based activity, accentuated dependence on cash income. Trapping took time from hunting and fishing, thus forcing more dependence on trading-post foods. Money spent for store food was wasted. Native food offered better nutrition—physically, socially, and spiritually.

In time fixed villages replaced the seasonal rounds and camps of semi-nomadic tradition. The family stayed home while the hunter-trapper roamed. In-place domestic functions were different from those of the nomadic family. Old social roles and integrative divisions of labor—necessary when the whole family moved from camp to camp—ceased to apply.

From the fixed villages, fast travel (as distinct from deliberate seasonal migration) was required to get to hunting places, to run extensive traplines, and to visit towns for trading. This style required more dogs, more dependence on fish to feed them, less time for the season-long hunts in the upland caribou ranges. Lacking game meat, the family itself depended more on fish as the staple food. The adoption of fishwheels about 1918 contributed to removal of families and bands toward the big rivers where these large contraptions could be used. These movements took the people farther away from the highlands bordering the range. Thus, even before World War II, except for a few families pursuing more traditional patterns in the Minchumina and near-rivers area, the Indian population of the northern Denali region had largely evacuated to its fringes.

A few hunters and trappers still made seasonal forays in the northside highlands. They came from Minchumina, Nenana, and Telida. Men from Nikolai still hunted sheep in the mountains north of Rainy Pass. But the old rounds that had long led whole bands of hunters to the very foot of the Denali massif were essentially over by the time the new park became operational in the early Twenties.

Both north and south of the range, white miners had occupied the near foothills bordering the future park. Some of these stampeders, cursed with barren claims, shifted to full-scale market hunting to supply their luckier fellows. When the early rushes ended, the remaining miners turned to a combined mining and subsistence lifestyle, with hunting and trapping critical elements. Their influence thus spread to the fringing hills and lowlands where game and furs were plentiful. Coincidentally, the number of full time white trappers was gradually increasing. Some of these hunters and trappers, knowing the country well, began guiding Outside trophy hunters. Among them were rich clients who could spend weeks killing animals whose meat was only selectively used.

Depopulation, relocation, and competition from newcomers on the land had worked together to severely reduce the Indian presence in the central Denali region. Transportation innovations played a strong part in this transition. On the northside, the introduction of airplanes for transportation and hauling of mail and freight had by 1930 made obsolete the old trail systems, roadhouses, and supply services that for awhile gave the Indians a functional role in the new economy. Contributing to this demise, the park road, even before its completion, siphoned transportation through the park and away from the old trails.

The airplane also opened up the most remote regions with amazing rapidity. Prospectors, hunters, trappers, scientists, and others suddenly showed up at places where distance and terrain had once held the map blank, where logistics had blocked all but the most temporary traverse. There were no longer refugia where Native people could pursue their own ways in isolation. To the south and east the railroad transformed the Susitna-Nenana corridor into a string of transportation and supply centers catering to the mining camps and towns along the way. Indian life at places like Talkeetna, Cantwell, and Nenana was overwhelmed by wage-work opportunities and the flood of non-Native people and activities. Here the Natives' integration into the cheap labor phase of the transportation and mining economy was nearly complete. For many of these people, hunting, fishing, and trapping became adjuncts to wage work instead of the other way around as in more isolated places. [41]

As ties to traditional territories and activities attenuated, and as relocation to permanent villages accelerated, schools—both mission and government—exerted ever stronger influence on Indian life. St. Mark's Mission and School at Nenana, founded by the Episcopal Church in 1907, offered benign assistance to many Indian children, including health care, education, and spiritual instruction. Given the tragedies of mass death by disease and the orphanage of many Indian children, the mission is remembered by students of those days as an oasis of order in a disordered world. This memory was enhanced by the school's philosophy, which was shaped by Archdeacon Hudson Stuck's knowledge of bush life. He knew that Indian students must not be torn whole from traditional ways, that they must apprentice in the wilderness arts and skills employed by their elders. The schools under his jurisdiction were instructed to give the young people time on the land with their Native guardians to get that training. Otherwise, he maintained, they would become disfunctional in their own societies, unable to support their families in adulthood.

Tanana Mission, at Tanana, 1934. J.B. Mertie, Jr. Collection, USGS.

Stuck feared that the government would impose compulsory education on the Natives, with a philosophy that would deprecate and suppress traditional ways. And indeed this happened. As a result, remaining traditional families had to leave the woods and live in towns or school villages, or they had to board their children at distant schools. Thus the organic, participatory education of the traditional society ceased to function. Young people in these inhospitable schools heard constant criticism of their parents' mores and customs, were forbidden under threat of punishment to use their own language. They came back from school confused, ignorant of the woods, lacking respect for their elders. In this way, too, the traditional social fabric was rent, and recruits to carry on the old customs and crafts were lost. Individually, students caught between two worlds lost self esteem. Many could not function well in their own society. And their rudimentary schooling—stacked against prevailing biases and lack of opportunity in all but the lowest stations of the white world—gave little chance for real assimilation into that world. Tragically, assimilation had been the rationale for this destructive educational regime. In the upshot, traditional families and societies were sacrificed to educate children for a life they rejected or could not attain. They had been forced along the path of directed change by a dominant society secure in its own dogmatic beliefs.

Only in recent times has the value of cultural diversity been recognized, and the rich knowledge of indigenous peoples appreciated in school programs for Native children. Amazingly, after all these hurts and hindrances, many young people—now middle-aged and with their own grandchildren—went back to school in the woods with their elders and today function as tradition-bearers in their own right. The way continues long and difficult, however, toward a balanced education that makes possible productive lives in both Native and white cultures. [42]

A few old cabins and cemeteries provide reminders of recent Native history in Denali National Park and Preserve. Aside from ancient lithic scatters and the rare stone tool, few other material remains can be found, short of archeological excavation to document the long span of Native occupation here. During the prehistoric and early historic period uncounted shelters, drying racks, caches, and other temporary camp structures briefly marked the landscape. Made of wood, skin, or earth, they have long since faded back into Nature's scene. Selected place names along with natural landmarks and rock shelters are still recalled by the few elders yet alive who lived through the transitions described above. [43]

Historical developments in the Denali region during the years around 1920 shaped the context of the new park. This was the world that first Superintendent Harry Karstens would deal with beginning in 1921. As important, certain key themes proved so persistent over the years that Karstens' successors still deal with them. Many of these themes stem directly from the railroad-park road connection, which dominated the development of the park, the experiences of visitors, and the logistics of its northside neighbors for 50 years.

If anything, that dominance has been accentuated in the recent past, since opening of the Parks Highway. This is so because the railroad park of the 1920s through 1960s—its essential infrastructure completed in 1939—continues to function as the rickety stage upon which today's events transpire.

Remaining chapters of this history trace first, the pioneering of the park; second, the consolidation of the park to meet pre-World War II conditions; third, the hauling and tugging to meet the onset of the automobile, as illustrated by the development debates of the Sixties; and finally, the attempt to consolidate the expanded park through environmental (and politically feasible) design to meet modern conditions. This last phase is still in progress, with the issue still in doubt.

Many other themes come into focus as the above structural sequence unfolds. One of these, the wolf-sheep controversy (ca. 1930 to 1950) forced the adoption of ecological management principles in this park well before such terminology became commonly understood, much less applied.

Paradoxically, because this park was until just yesterday so remote—so unbuffered and alone in its singularity, so spotlighted as the premier Alaskan symbol—it became a testing ground for the evolution of park policies that would ramify far beyond its boundaries.