Kenai Fjords A Stern and Rock-Bound Coast: Historic Resource Study

Harbor Seal Harvesting, 1960 to Present

During the early 1960s the harvesting of harbor seals, both along the Kenai Peninsula and elsewhere in Alaska, continued at a low level (less than 20,000 per year statewide), and the prices garnered for seal pelts likewise remained low ($10 or less per pelt). [91] Then, in the fall of 1962, the demand for seal pelts began to increase because of changes taking place thousands of miles to the east. During the 1950s and early 1960s, the commercial seal market–particularly the huge Scandinavian market–had depended on seals that were harvested in the North Atlantic and Arctic oceans. (Europeans, and to a lesser extent North Americans, used seal pelts for a variety of clothing and accessory items, including shoes, purses, coats, hats, and other items of over-clothing.) By 1962, however, overharvesting in the traditional hunting areas had reduced the available supply. European fur processors, which were located primarily in Norway and West Germany, began to look elsewhere for seal pelts. [92]

Many fur buyers eyed the huge Alaskan fur resource. Between the fall of 1962 and March 1964, the value of both spotted [harbor] and ringed seal pelts more than doubled; in response, there was a "tremendous increase" in seal–mainly harbor seal–harvests beginning in 1963. (It had a "considerably less effect" on the take of bearded and ringed seals, which are a dietary mainstay of northwest coastal residents.) The value of seal pelts continued to rise until 1965. By the mid-1960s, black harbor seals (with large, black hides and definite spots) were worth $60, while young plain grays brought $15 to $20. The annual pelt harvest, which before 1962 had exceeded 20,000 only thrice–in 1907, 1949 and 1950–shot up to 30,000 in 1963, to 40,000 in 1964, and to 60,000 in 1965. After reaching that high point, prices decreased again, though not to former low levels, and the harvest declined as well. [93]

The "bubble" in fur prices brought increased harvesting activity to the southern Kenai Peninsula as well as to other parts of the state. In Aialik Bay, for example, 649 seals were harvested in 1964, and in Harris Bay, 946 were harvested in 1964 and 596 in 1965. In Nuka Bay, more than a thousand seals were taken per year during the mid-1960s; a total of 3,420 were taken between 1964 and 1966, inclusive. These numbers, though impressive, constituted only a small percentage of the estimated 145,000 harbor seals harvested in Alaska during the 1964-66 period. Most of the state's harvest took place in Prince William Sound, the Alaska Peninsula, the Aleutian Islands, and the Kodiak Island archipelago; the state's largest specific harvesting sites were at Tugidak Island (south of Kodiak Island), Port Moller (on the north side of the Alaska Peninsula), and Port Heiden (near Port Moller). [94]

Several of the Seward-area residents who had hunted seals in the area prior to 1960 continued to do so, but others (including Pete Kesselring and Pete Sather) did not. The increased prices, moreover, attracted new hunters. Two were the Burch brothers, Al and Oral, Seward fisherman who supplemented their income by hunting seals near Aialik and Holgate glaciers from October until February. Two brothers from Homer were also "real serious hunters." Pete Elvsaas of Seldovia hunted "all along the outer coast," and hunters also came to the area from Prince William Sound. Other Seward seal hunters included Jesse Hatch and his brother Ralph, Roy and Lloyd Cabana, Martin Goreson, Ben Suddath, Irving Campbell, Fred Moore, Bill Johnston, Frank Woods, and Ed ("Beetle") Bailey. [95]

An estimated 300 Alaskans during this period derived some income from seal hunting. Bounty records for 1965 tabulated 168 hunters in south central Alaska, and according to researcher Richard Bishop, perhaps 20 to 25 people each year hunted southern Kenai Peninsula seals during the mid-1960s, when prices were at their peak. Some Seward-area hunters apparently took seals just for the bounty; most, however, sold the hides as well. [96] They sold them either to itinerant buyers who traveled through Alaska or to fur buyers in Seattle. A third outlet was Victor ("Vaughn") Reventlow, the manager and director of the Alaska Tanning and Dressing Division of the Pacific Seal Corporation. By 1966, the firm was said to handle "the lion's share of hair seal coming out of Alaska." Reventlow, a West German living in Anchorage, often drove to Seward and spent a day grading the pelts before buying them. [97]

With the rise in pelt prices, the bounty became less important as an incentive to hunt seals than it had in former years. Alaska legislators, who had not acted when confronted with the program's inefficiency and misdirected expense, moved to cut back on the bounty program when shown that the $3 bounty was far less than the value of the seal pelts. (The legislators made no attempt to eliminate the bounty statewide, because they recognized that in western and northwestern Alaska, the seals were a major food source and that the bounty was "more of a welfare measure than an attempt at controlling seal populations"). [98] Bills intended to eliminate the bounty had first been introduced in 1964; HB 381 that year had been sponsored by the House Finance Committee, while SB 244 was sponsored by Sen. Harold Z. Hansen, a fisherman who chaired the Resources Committee. On March 10, HB 381 passed the House, but the following day Robert Blodgett, a Teller Democrat, changed his vote and the House voted down the bill on a reconsideration vote. The Senate bill did slightly better; it passed the Senate on March 17, then was referred to the House Finance Committee. That bill quietly died because Harold Strandberg, an Anchorage Republican and the committee's chair, failed to act on it. [99]

Three years later, after Walter Hickel became governor, the Rules Committee of the Alaska Senate, at Hickel's request, submitted SB 131, a bill that, like the 1964 effort, would eliminate the hair seal bounty. The 1967 bill was introduced on February 21. On March 24, it failed to pass the Senate, but a day later, Sen. Brad Phillips changed his vote and the bill passed. Nine days later, it passed the house with 13 dissenting votes, and Governor Hickel signed the bill on April 6. The bill, which immediately became law, eliminated the bounty for all seals harvested in the waters of Kenai Peninsula and many other parts of Alaska. [100]

The repealing of the bounty slightly reduced the financial incentive for Kenai Peninsula seal hunters. A more important factor in reducing seal harvests was a drop in the price of seal skins. Because of the publicity surrounding the clubbing of seals by Canadian harvesters, Europeans organized a boycott on products made of seal skins. By 1966, therefore, seal skins were worth anywhere from $4 to $30, their value averaging about $13. In later years, the value of seal skins continued to slide, and by 1972 there were "depressed prices in the hair seal market." [101]

If the dual blow of the bounty removal and the slide in prices were not bad enough, seal hunters after 1965 recognized, for perhaps the first time ever, clear signs of seal overharvesting. Hunters found fewer seals and in less accessible locations, and because most had simple equipment, it took more work to locate them. Not surprisingly, therefore, the number of seals harvested from southcentral and southeastern Alaska waters dropped from more than 50,000 in 1965, to 27,000 in 1966, and to between 15,000 and 20,000 in 1968. By 1969, harvests had leveled off; for the next four years, hunters harvested between 6,000 and 12,000 skins annually. Given the falling harvest levels, the number of hunters fell as well; in just a single year, the number of southcentral area hunters dropped from 168 (in 1965) to 90 (in 1966). Within the present park boundaries, hunters continued to utilize the seal resource. Neither the number of hunters nor the size of the harvest during this period is known, although the level of activity was doubtless less than it had been during the mid-1960s. [102]

A far more dramatic action affecting the seal harvest, both on the Kenai Peninsula and elsewhere in Alaska, was the passage of the Marine Mammal Protection Act. This act, which was signed by President Nixon on October 21, 1972 and went into effect two months later, nullified all state laws relating to the taking of all marine mammals (including seals) and placed the authority for regulating the take of seals under the U.S. Secretary of Commerce. The law prevented non-Natives from taking seals. Section 101(b) of the act allowed Alaska Natives to do so without limit, so long as such taking was either for subsistence or handicrafts purpose and was not done in a wasteful manner. [103]

So far as is known, most Alaska seal hunting ceased after the passage of this act. In 1971, the statewide harvest had exceeded 25,000 seals, but in 1973, the harvest "probably did not exceed 1,000 animals." Within the present park boundaries, a 1975 Interior Department planning document noted that "Hair seal ... are hunted in the Chiswell Islands" and that "Some seal hunting may be done for the sale of furs." This statement, if accurate (it may have been based on data collected prior to the passage of the Marine Mammal Protection Act), was based on Native activity from residents of either Seward, Port Graham, or English Bay. [104] As to more recent activity, harvests appear to have been minimal. When Seward's 410 Native residents were interviewed in 1991, 20.5% of Native households reported using harbor seals, although only 2.6% of the Native households harvested them. A year later, the percentages were far lower; only 0.8% of Seward Native households used harbor seals, and no households (0.0%) harvested them. [105]