Clarence Prest poses in the Polar Bear II before leaving Buffalo, New York for Alaska and beyond.
Buffalo Courier-Sun, October 8, 1922
A Young Daredevil
Clarence O. Prest was born to take risks. As a teenager in San Bernardino, California, he raced motorcycles on motordromes and performed high-speed tricks in a small vertical track called the “Wall of Death.” With encouragement from his father, he built his own gliders and airplanes and sometimes took his sisters as passengers. By the time he was twenty-five, he had become famous in the American West for his innovative airplane designs and for breaking speed and altitude records. During World War I, he wanted to join the American Air Corps, but his many accident-related injuries disqualified him. Instead he created a flying school and trained Army pilots to fly combat missions in Europe.
"Mr. Prest looks young, and probably is, but he talks ‘old’ and impresses one as a mighty shrewd, intelligent and experienced man. He was flying before the war broke out, and he will be flying when ‘taps’ sound . . . and every time he flies he learns something else again about the flying game."
—Fairbanks Daily News-Miner
August 22, 1922
Clarence O. Prest poses in Whitehorse, Yukon with an RCMP officer. He planned to fly his bi-plane Polar Bear II to Siberia in 1922, but the attempt ended in a tundra bog near today’s Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve.
Yukon Archives, Claude and Mary Tidd Collection (7794)
Air-Route to Siberia
In 1921, he and his friend Mort Bach decided to pioneer an air route from Mexico to Alaska and across the Bering Strait to Siberia. Their first attempt ended in Prince Rupert, British Columbia when a storm demolished their fragile bi-plane. The following year, Prest tried again, but this time he flew alone and brought a movie camera to create a travelogue to offset his expenses. He began in Buffalo, New York with plans to be in Fairbanks, Alaska to participate in Fourth of July celebrations. By the time he reached Seattle, some observers were questioning his planning and his sanity. A writer for the Seattle Star came to his defense, stating, “Who is there who can say that 20 years hence there will not be large fleets of planes operating in this lane? It is always the pioneer who gets the most criticism. If he succeeds, he is a wonder; if he fails, he was a ‘nut.’”
When Prest failed to arrive in Fairbanks, Alaska, the City Council offered a reward to anyone who could locate the missing flier. Several search parties set out from Fairbanks and Eagle.
Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, July 18, 1922
Backcountry Mishap
After reaching Juneau, Skagway, and Dawson City, Prest became the first pilot to land on the banks of the Yukon River at Eagle, and the next day he took off again with a compass, a map, and a .32 pistol. He planned to follow the Seventymile River to the Charley River headwaters and beyond to the Tanana River and Fairbanks. But after a day of waiting, the residents of Fairbanks grew concerned. The city offered $250 for news of his whereabouts, search parties set out from Eagle, and in Fairbanks the News-Miner editor eventually wrote,
This map shows with an X where Clarence Prest crashed near the Seventymile River. He left the biplane about thirty miles from Eagle and began to walk. Note the caribou is labelled “One he didn’t kill.”
Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, July 21, 1922
"If alive, he has been three days without food, the prey of myriads of mosquitos, in a wooded or swampy land in which it would be hard to locate him. If his machine is not smashed, it is where he cannot get out with it. If he isn’t dead or hurt, he should have ‘made’ a cabin or roadhouse by now, and there is no knowledge that he has."
Two days later they found him in an old log cabin about twenty miles from Eagle. His rescuers learned that engine trouble forced him down in a tussock bog, and that the propeller snapped when he tried to take off again. He had killed a caribou with his pistol, which supplied him with food, but wandered in the rain without sleep for three days. His rescuers, led by Deputy Marshal Clarence Dudney, took Prest back to town and then returned to salvage the plane’s wheels and Prest’s personal items. Dudney later retrieved the rest of the Polar Bear II and it spent several years in the mule barn of the abandoned U.S. Army fort at Eagle.
A sketch of the Polar Bear II after it flipped on its nose and broke the propeller when Prest tried to take off in a tussock bog.
Buffalo Courier-Sun, October 8, 1922
Pioneering Bush Pilot
Prest had not been the first pilot to travel across North America to Canada and Alaska—the Army’s Black Wolf Squadron had done the same with four planes in 1920—but he was the first solo pilot, supported only by his wits and ambition, to attempt to “open” Alaska to aviation. In this sense, Prest was Alaska’s first bush pilot and he inspired future fliers wherever he went. As one observer wrote,
"The Prest expedition may have failed temporarily from the technical standpoint, but it has done much to bring [aviation] to the public eye and to demonstrate how one should prepare for flights in this region, and to further the development of aerial navigation and exploitation of the Northland."
As he predicted, Alaska became a playground for private pilots—who routinely land planes on gravel bars and backcountry airstrips—and a major hub for commercial carriers and global air traffic.
