"First One to the Lake"

Early morning mist beyond Don Culver's dock on Longmere Lake, 1947. (All photos courtesy of the Culver family)

FIRST ONE TO THE LAKE

March 2011

Around Longmere Lake today, 102 individual parcels of land make contact with the waterline. The largest of these parcels is 27.06 acres. The smallest is a triangular sliver of only 0.07 acres.

In the spring of 1947, however, there was only a single private parcel of land—a 167.29-acre homestead along the northwest shoreline.

The lake today features an air taxi service, several bed-and-breakfast establishments and a lodge, in addition to the homes of dozens of families and individuals. As such, Longmere is a busy place, frenetic with activity. In the summer, as swimmers and canoeists ply the waters, the lake is abuzz with floatplanes and jet-skis; in the winter, ice-fishermen bore holes into the lake to jig for trout as snowmachines roar up and down its frozen length.

In the early summer of 1947, common loons were the most frequent breakers of the natural quiet, and a single white canvas tent was the only sign of civilization along the 1.5-mile stretch of fresh water that runs diagonally from northeast to southwest on a topographic map.

In 1947, the Alaska Road Commission had cleared a pioneer trail suitable for Caterpillars and other road-building equipment; this trail would one day be a permanent road (the Sterling Highway) from Cooper Landing to Kenai and Homer, with a junction near the mouth of Soldotna Creek, where homesteading land was just becoming available. The new road was slated to pass less than 500 feet from the lake’s northernmost tip.

The single man in the white canvas tent liked this situation. And even a nearly disastrous turn of events later that summer could not dissuade him.

*****

Don Culver may have been just 20 years old when he landed for the first time on Longmere Lake, but already his was a life rich with experience. His step-father had taught him to fly when Don was only 14 or 15. In February 1945, a month before his 18^th birthday, he had enlisted in the U.S. Navy to assist the American effort in World War II. Because the war ended before that year was out, Culver found himself released from military duty in July 1946, when he was only 19. Back home in Palo Alto, California, he decided to head north to visit his biological father, Ben Culver, in Anchorage.

Ben, who had traveled to Alaska during the war as a field officer with the American Red Cross, was an Anchorage realtor with political leanings and plenty of connections. Ben had been to Alaska at an even earlier time to visit his brother, Walter Culver, who had been hired by the Bureau of Indian Affairs to come to Alaska in 1915 with his wife, Mildred, and teach Eskimo and Aleut children at Port Moller.

By the time Don arrived in Anchorage and found employment, Uncle Walter had already been through town—acting as a deputy game warden, a chief special agent for the Alaska Railroad, a U.S. deputy marshal, and the Anchorage chief of police—and had moved on, mining and prospecting in the Goodnews Bay area for a decade before retiring in California in 1943.

Ben, on the other hand, was fully immersed in the Anchorage scene. One day, when Don was visiting his father, he met an influential man whose information changed the course of his life. “(Dad) was having dinner with a friend of his who was named Hawley Sterling,” Don said. “He was the engineer for the section of road from Cooper’s Landing through to Homer, and at that time it had been engineered and had a Cat trail roughed out at least as far as Soldotna, and then hooking on to the old Kenai road.”

Hawley Sterling was the man for whom this stretch of highway (as well as the community just east of Soldotna) would one day be named. During that particular dinner conversation, however, Culver knew him simply as man with an intriguing document.

“Hawley told my dad that while he was in the process of surveying, he said he had camped on this lake, and that if he wasn’t involved in something else, it was a place he’d love to settle. So that made me think, ‘Oh, man, that’s pretty good,’ and he had a survey map, and he gave us a copy of it. And it showed this lake…. Well, officially the survey had not been published as such, but he had the information and the location, and I had a fresh pilot’s license.”

So in mid-March 1947, Don and Ben Culver paid a visit to Jack Carr’s Flying Service at Merrill Field and rented a single-engine airplane affixed with snow-skis. They flew south and located the lake about five air miles west of the wooden bridge over the Moose River near its confluence with the Kenai River. After viewing from the air the snowy survey lines, they landed on the frozen lake surface and used the survey map to locate corner posts and stake out a homestead claim.

Map in hand, they were able to stake almost exactly 160 acres, despite the curving shoreline of the lake. Then, in the tradition of many claim-stakers before them, they located a section corner and made Don’s claim official. “We did the old miners’ thing of taking a Prince Albert tobacco can and nailing it to a tree. We put my claim in there and made a copy of it and went back to Anchorage to the District Land Office and filed it with the clerk.”

The romanticized name for the lake was Ben Culver’s contribution: “Because of its shape—a long lake—and because he had some old Scottish history—‘mere’ being an Old English word for water or pond or lake—‘Longmere’ came out of that.”

In early May, Don chartered Bill Cuffel’s Waco floatplane to haul himself and his gear down to his homestead, and he established a camp just north of the first point of land protruding into the lake from the western shore. He erected an 8x10-foot white canvas wall tent and constructed a log cache designed to keep his foodstuffs eight feet off the ground and away from hungry bears. Inside his tent, he placed a “little bitty cookstove,” a cot and his tools.

As soon as he had settled in, he selected a cabin site just south of the same point of land and began clearing trees and preparing to build. He had decided to use the materials most readily available, and from a mostly deciduous patch of trees he selected aspen logs for the foundation and walls of his new home. Two of the four corner posts on which his cabin would rest were stumps left behind by his clearing process.

The aspens for the first four or five horizontal courses of the cabin he cut in the spring when the sap was running thick under the bark; as a result, these logs—as can be seen clearly in early photographs of the cabin—darkened substantially more than those he cut later in the summer.

Start of the Culver cabin, constructed mainly of peeled aspen logs.

By the end of June, Culver had laid in about three courses of those early logs, and he had ordered materials he would need as the cabin construction progressed, including framed glass windows, eight-inch shiplap for the cabin floor and roof, aluminum roofing, and a stovepipe. During that dry June, however, a spark kindled near Hidden Lake (almost 20 miles to the east) broke out into a conflagration that threatened Culver’s construction venture and his peaceful new existence.

By late July, the 1947 Kenai Burn had blackened nearly 300,000 acres of the central peninsula lowlands. The forest fire moved relentlessly westward, and during this month Culver found it necessary to take action.

“The Army sent a team of people down to supposedly protect stuff and try to see what they could do if the fire headed toward Kenai,” Culver said. “They came through and invited me to join them. They sort of considered me as a local scout , so I took all my camp and buried the stuff—made a pit and covered it over so it wouldn’t burn, and I put foodstuffs and other things up on the cache—and then I went and joined them for about 10 days.”

During those 10 days, the massive fire at last began to die. When Culver returned to his homestead, he discovered that that he had been lucky: The blaze had barely encroached on the eastern edge of his property before dissipating.

Culver quickly settled back into a work routine. He began laying new horizontal courses of aspen logs, while preparing to set the shorter vertical logs that would form the stockade-style upper half of each wall. By hand, he felled each tree, cut it into lengths and then stripped it of its bark; he fitted logs together, notching where necessary, planning carefully.

The back wall, which faced east toward the lake, would feature two framed windows that he had ordered from Anchorage. He planned to install a third window next to the door in the front of the cabin, and a fourth in the south wall, facing down the lake.

As Culver worked, he was blithely unaware that he was about to have company for the very first time.

Don enjoys a roaring campfire at the lake in 1947.

*****

Two hardy individuals, both natives of Chicago, were trudging westward out of the mountains and across the flats—as unaware of Culver’s existence as he was of theirs. They were on their way toward Soldotna Creek, where they planned to stake a homestead of their own.

Frank and Marge Mullen had flown in 1945 from Chicago to Anchorage in Frank’s three-place, single-engine Stinson 105. In Anchorage, they had worked and lived until homestead land became available on the peninsula, at which point they had flown over the available areas and picked out the spot they liked.

In August 1947, the two city slickers rode the train out of Anchorage to Moose Pass, hitched a ride along a jeep trail to a point just west of Tern Lake, and then donned their heavy, uncomfortable backpacks and began to walk the Cat trail.

After leaving behind Henton’s Lodge in Cooper Landing, they saw no one until they reached the Alaska Road Commission camp at Hidden Lake. In camp, ARC boss Ralph Soberg was a congenial host and asked them what their intentions were. “We told him we were going down there to be farmers,” Marge Mullen recalled. “’Oh, no,’ he says. ‘Go down there and build a roadhouse—have a bar. That’s the way you make money.’ I didn’t show any reaction to him, I hope. I had two little babies at that time. I wasn’t going to be a barmaid.”

Marge shrugged back into her Trapper Nelson, and the couple moved on. After spending the night in their mosquito tent at Skilak Lake, where “it rained like Billy Be Damned,” they wrung out their sopping sleeping bags and continued on down the road. They traveled through a smoldering landscape and had no human encounter until just before the wooden bridge across Moose River, where they visited the new homesteads of Aletha and John McFarland and Lucy and Edgar Law.

The Mullens crossed the bridge and camped along the west bank of the river. Then the next day, five miles further west, they approached Longmere Lake.

“Somehow Frank saw this really small notice on a tree—not any more than a piece of paper, a paper that gave a physical description of the land, and it was signed ‘Don Culver’ and said, ‘Come in and see me,’” Mullen said. “So then we found his little foot trail and went down there. It was a really sunny, beautiful night, and we just stayed the one night with him and talked a lot about what he was doing and what we planned to do.”

Culver treated his new acquaintances to a meal—“probably beans,” he said, although Mullen suspected it may have been Army rations—and he offered them what little accommodations he had.

The Mullens spent the night in Culver’s tent, and in the morning trundled back out to the Cat trail to walk the remaining five miles to Soldotna Creek and the junction of the main highway corridor with its spur road to Kenai. Despite the brevity of their first time together, Culver and the Mullens became close friends and remained as such.

When Culver later came into Soldotna for supplies or just human companionship—sometimes as often as once a week—he stayed with the Mullens. And when he married Dolores “Dee” Mulqueen in Anchorage in 1950, the Mullens were in attendance.

The newlywed Culvers and their friends, the Mullens, 1950.

While Marge has continued to live in the same spot for more than 60 years, Culver’s later career with Alaska Airlines—seven years as a mechanic, then 30 more as a pilot—moved him frequently away from the lake and then finally away from the state entirely. Still, Culver and Mullen have never lost touch; in fact, Culver, now 84, flew up last summer for Mullen’s 90^th birthday party.

After the Mullens departed, Culver resumed his labor. As autumn approached, he completed the walls of his cabin—working solo except on the rare occasions that his father and step-mother flew in for a visit. Atop the vertical aspen logs, he switched to peeled spruce, which he used to create the ridgepole, rafters and purlins that framed the roof. The ends of each gable he also fashioned from spruce that he laid in horizontally.

With winter approaching, Culver needed to bring in from Kenai the flooring and roofing materials that he had ordered. Unfortunately, due the primitive road conditions, the Kenai building supply company could bring the materials no farther than Soldotna, so Culver borrowed a tractor, skidded the items out to his foot trail, and then hand-carried them the rest of the way to his cabin site.

*****

At some point that fall, his construction project was interrupted by the sound of a small airplane circling briefly and then landing with floats on the lake. Inside the plane were four men: the pilot Bill Cuffel and three friends planning to homestead on the lake—Lyle Edgington, Bob Murray, and Carl Weber.

According to Edgington, each of the friends staked out a section of land, visited briefly with Culver and helped him install his roof, and then flew back to Anchorage to file their claims. They said they planned to return the following spring to build cabins on the lake.

Culver was about to have neighbors.

By the time the snow began to fly, he had completely enclosed his cabin but had done none of the chinking necessary to keep the place warm; consequently, he moved his canvas tent indoors and set up camp there, out of the weather, while he did some finish work.

On Nov. 1, Edgington, Murray and Weber—along with a German short-haired pointer that had been given to them by a Yellow Cab driver in Anchorage—showed up at the lake again. They announced that they had changed their plans, deciding to build right away so that they would be free to work throughout the summer. They pitched a canvas tent in the snow over on Edgington’s homestead, built rough beds out of spruce logs and boughs, installed a small wood-burning cookstove inside, and then began cutting and processing logs for a cabin of their own.

Just before Thanksgiving, Culver—needing a paying job in order to keep himself in groceries and finance the continuation of his homesteading project—returned to Anchorage on a plane sent by his father.

He left the trio of friends to their own devices.

*****

In 2011, the drive from the eastern edge of Cooper Landing to Longmere Lake is somewhat less than 45 miles on a firm bed of two-lane, lined blacktop. Despite the reduced-speed areas through Cooper Landing and Sterling, it is not uncommon for a driver to make this journey in an hour or less.

Consequently, it may be difficult for modern drivers to comprehend how it managed to take 21-year-old Don Culver five days to drive that distance in the spring of 1948.

“I went down as soon as the road was clear,” Culver said. “I had bought a (military) surplus truck and barged it across from Anchorage over to the little town of Hope and then down the old forest road from there to Henton’s Lodge. I could get as far as Cooper’s Landing on the forest road, and that’s where the new road was to start. It was just a Cat trail then, but I had a 4x4 weapons carrier and all my gear for the year, a couple, three drums of fuel, and things like that.”

Don's truck parked on Sterling Highway.

And thus loaded down in breakup conditions, the truck sank easily in the soft, exposed soil.

“I required two or three assists from Road Commission tractors that were working in the neighborhood to get me out of mudholes, or (had to do it) myself by digging and then corduroying through and around swamps and things,” he said. “I would go and get stuck and have to dig out, and cut wood to fill the holes and make a little corduroy patch to get on to the next place with the four-wheel drive. It did not have a winch, but it was a pretty good rig to drive around.”

Virtually every bog or mudhole required either assistance or hours of toil and sweat, and the bogs and mudholes were plentiful. Eventually, however, Culver arrived at the lake. When he had begun his building project, he had been the first and the only owner of private property on the lake. Now he was one of three.

*****

Edgington, Murray and Weber had built a rough cabin with logs cut from trees on the property and made the floor and roof with lumber trucked overland from Seward. It had been cold enough during the construction process that they kept a fire burning nearby throughout the day, and their dog had sat constantly by the fire while the men worked. At night in the tent, they had wrapped the animal in a big Army overcoat to keep it warm.

They hadn’t been working long, however, when Weber decided to give up on homesteading and headed to Seward to become a longshoreman.

“Weber, he couldn’t get along with Bob Murray,” Edgington said. “I could see his point, too. He (Murray) was a screwball son of a bitch as far as I was concerned. I had to keep them apart most of the time. They were always arguing and quarreling.”

By early January 1948, Edgington and Murray had constructed a livable structure with a small woodstove, and they struggled against the elements as the coldest part of winter set in. Shortly after Culver returned that spring, both men went to work for the summer—Murray at the Libby McNeil & Libby cannery on the lower Kenai River, and Edgington back to Anchorage to see what he could find. Both returned to their homesteads whenever they were able.

Meanwhile, Culver continued to work on his land. He cleared and sowed about two acres to meet homesteading standards. He finished chinking his cabin walls and made the place livable. He cut and split and stacked cords of firewood. He built a dock down at the lake.

Finished cabin at Longmere Lake, 1948.

He also walked or drove his truck into Soldotna nearly every week, visiting and staying with the Mullens. Often, he said, he would fish for salmon in the Soldotna area, but occasionally he would walk the length of Longmere Lake and travel through the woods south to the middle river to wet his line. On one such excursion, he returned to his cabin to discover that a well-known boozer from Kenai had stopped by his place, consumed some of his food and divested Culver of his small supply of alcohol.

“He left me a note that he’d had supper and drank my brandy—I had a small bottle there to have on hand and wasn’t drinking it at all—but he drank that all up and left a note saying he’d come back one day and replace it, and of course he never did.”

Generally, however, life on the lake was sedate and seldom interrupted. When winter arrived, Culver packed up and returned to Anchorage once more, working at Merrill Field sometimes, and other times for the ARC. That same year, Culver began his relationship with “Dee” Mulqueen, and in 1950 they married in the Catholic church in downtown Anchorage.

Around this same time, Culver began a new job as a mechanic for Alaska Airlines, and his subsequent transfer to Bethel for the next two years took him away from Longmere and his peninsula friends for most of each year.

Dee and Don Culver and two of their
kids at the lake cabin, 1952.

In 1953, Culver began doing his mechanical work out of Anchorage International Airport, and he was building steadily toward a commercial pilot’s license. Often, particularly in the summer months, Dee and their children would stay in the Longmere cabin, and Don would join them on the weekends. The kids—the Culvers would eventually have one son and four daughters—loved the time on the homestead, fishing, boating, swimming, playing, gathering water, listening to the loons, and watching what their father called “sea smoke” form over the water.

At times, Culver, who still sings every Sunday in his church choir in Seattle, would fill the cabin with music. “I can remember as a little kid at the cabin, he’d play the harmonica and just kind of quietly sing along,” said Terri Culver, the eldest daughter. Even now, she said, hearing him sing transports her back across the years. “It makes you a little kid again, definitely just makes you sit back and remember home.”

In 1956, Culver achieved his dream job as a commercial pilot, flying DC-3’s for Alaska Airlines out of Anchorage, but by the end of 1957 he was faced with a difficult choice: transfer to Seattle and remain a pilot, or stay in Alaska and look for another job. In 1958, the Culvers moved to Washington, where Don would conclude a 37-year career with the airlines with his retirement in 1987.

Of the Culver children, only the oldest, Marc, still lives in Alaska. The daughters live in Washington and California. Dee passed away in 2005, and Don lives on a sailboat and spends most of his spare time restoring old aircraft.

The Culvers had surveyed their lake property into sections and sold the first piece in about 1980, holding onto the final piece until 1998. Even all the way from Washington, Culver said, he felt some pain in letting go.

“It’s just circumstances and family needs and choices that took me right from it,” Culver said. “I wish I had it still. I just have great, fond memories of it. That’s where I enjoyed visiting. And having a bit of Alaska reminded me of where my adult life started.”

Before Culver sold the cabin property, the cabin itself was used periodically by squatters and sometimes, by arrangement, by Boy Scouts or campers from the Catholic church. Over the course of time, it began to become run-down and ramshackle. Today, a new house sits where the cabin once stood. After he sold homesite, the new owners bulldozed the old cabin and started fresh.

When he visited Longmere about 10 years ago, he said he felt “amazement” at the growth he saw. “People had built nice houses and roads, and I had my name on one of them, and I felt a little bit of pride in having started that and having been one of the early folks in the country. But also there was the realization that I wished I hadn’t sold it all. So that combined a little sadness with not being a part of it anymore.

“But having achieved several years in my life, well, you’ve got to be philosophical about some stuff, and you make choices and you live with them.”

The loons still visit Longmere Lake each summer, but they’ve got a lot more company these days.

Culver visits the lake in 2000 and is amazed at the progress.