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Hank Knackstedt, pre-1952, at his original homestead cabin near Mile 17 of the Kenai River.
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HANK
& THE BEAR
November 2010
“Henry Knackstedt is still alive, though why, neither he nor
anyone else knows.” Those are the words of Jim Woodworth in the introductory
chapter of his 1958 book, The Kodiak
Bear.
Over the course of the next several pages, Woodworth attempts
to explain this conundrum as he simultaneously tries to illustrate some of the
reasons that bears attack humans. The 1952 mauling of Hank Knackstedt provided his
readers with some of the desired answers, while supplying them also with more
questions.
To better understand the attack and its aftermath, it is
probably best to start at the beginning of the story, Sept. 1, 1952, the
opening day of moose-hunting season on the Kenai Peninsula.
At about eight o’clock that morning—which was breezy after
several days of fairly steady rain—Henry “Hank” Knackstedt of Kenai was ready
to start hunting. More than ready, in fact. He decided that he had waited long
enough for his hunting partner, Waldo Coyle, to show up. Further, he decided to
leave without him.
Knackstedt, a World War II tank mechanic who had been
wounded in Europe and fought in the Battle of the Bulge, had traveled to Alaska
in 1947, arriving by ship in Seward and then traveling overland to Kenai. He
had worked at Libby, McNeil & Libby cannery that summer, and in 1948 had homesteaded
on the southern bank of the Kenai River at about Mile 17.
In 1951, he had moved closer to town after purchasing the
home and property of Charles “Windy” Wagner at Mile 6 of the river, and it was
from there on Aug. 31 that he launched his boat toward his homestead hunting
cabin.
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Knackstedt at the old Wagner cabin.
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After motoring upstream to the cabin, the 39-year-old
Knackstedt spent the night and then waited—probably impatiently—for the arrival
of Coyle, who lived just 500 feet upriver from the old Wagner property.
Knackstedt and Coyle were good friends, but the depth of
that friendship might not have been apparent to the casual observer. According
to Knackstedt’s son, Henry, the two men shared a common avocation for
commercial fishing and a love of the outdoors, but they were prone to arguments
that often resulted in hurt feelings and considerable time spent sulking apart.
“They wouldn’t talk to each other for months because they
were pissed off at each other,” said Henry, who now lives on the same piece of
land his father purchased from Wagner. “Then Waldo would need a hoe or
something, and he’d show up wanting something—or my dad would, perhaps—and it
was like nothing ever happened … until the next time.”
Their backgrounds and belief systems were also different
enough to cause friction. The frugal, conservative Knackstedt had been born Hans
Heinrich Knackstedt in Germany in 1912, and he had immigrated to the United
States after World War I. Coyle, on the other hand, was of Irish stock and
decidedly less conservative. Both were undeniably stubborn men.
Once, in an attempt to demonstrate how wrong Coyle was about
a particular point, Knackstedt reached for a volume from his set of Encyclopedia Britannica; when the book
failed to support his view, Knackstedt insisted that the encyclopedia itself
was wrong.
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| Knackstedt with king salmon, pre-1952, |
“This (type of behavior) happened all the time,” Henry said.
“Even at Christmas dinner, they’d be arguing.”
It is not difficult, therefore, to believe that Hank
Knackstedt would be frustrated by Coyle’s tardiness and would choose to set out
on his own. He grabbed his old wooden packboard and his 30-caliber Model 1903
Springfield rifle and headed into the woods and the wind, following a well-worn
game trail that led in the general direction of a large clearing about a mile
inland.
According to Knackstedt’s story in the Woodworth book, he
hadn’t gone far when his “woodsman’s eye” made a crucial observation:
“The trail was worn deep into the moss of the forest floor
and at this particular spot was about three feet wide. Low brush and the usual
rye grass bordered the trail on both sides. It had been raining more or less
steadily for days, and every sprig of grass contained great drops of rain. The
whole country was saturated, but this section of the trail was dry!
“The water had been shaken from the foliage by something
wider than the lower legs of a moose. There were no tracks in the spongy
moss-covered trail. It had to be a bear—probably more than one!”
Having no desire to encounter a bear with cubs in thick
brush, Knackstedt, who was an expert marksman, according to his service record,
decided to angle away from the trail for about two hundred yards before
breaking back toward the clearing where he hoped to hunt.
Unbeknownst to him, however, the bears—a sow with twin
cubs—had made a similar detour nearby and were now sleeping in the tall grass in
a smaller clearing directly in his path.
“Sure that I had missed the bears on the trail, I was
walking in a sort of a daze, as men will when dreaming of sizzling moose
T-bones,” Knackstedt reported in Woodworth’s book. “I had traveled this area
dozens of times with never a sight of a brownie—nothing was farther from my
mind. But she was in my trail, and her precious cubs were draped around her
hind legs—the wind had been wrong all the time.”
According to Knackstedt’s own version of events, he had been
walking without a chambered round in his rifle, believing that “it takes only a
second or two to pull down on the magazine safety and work a shell into the
chamber.” But he didn’t have one or
two seconds.
“A low ominous growl snapped me back to reality. My rifle
moved upward even as I turned toward the sound. Not an inch more than 15 feet
to my left, the big sow was already in a half-crouch rising to her haunches.
After this, I was conscious for three, perhaps five seconds.”
And in those few seconds, Knackstedt recognized an awful
reality: He would never get off a shot.
“As I swung my gun upward, I instinctively pulled back the
bolt and started it forward when I noticed that the magazine wasn’t feeding.
The bolt had failed to pick up a shell!”
Knackstedt’s rifle, like all M1903 Springfields, had a
cut-off switch on the left side; when this switch was in the down position, the
bolt would not travel far enough back to work a shell into the chamber—even
with the safety off.
Later, in retrospect, Knackstedt wondered whether the switch
had been knocked by brush into the down position or whether he had failed to
make sure that it was pointed up in the first place.
“It was sure down at the
wrong time,” he said, “for at this moment, I could have put a bullet right into
her snarling mouth.”
Knackstedt said he remembers jerking his rifle up in both
hands for protection from “those murderous claws and that head full of snarling
ivory.” He said he had a “faint memory of smelling rotten fish,” and then: “I
was out as though a 10-ton truck had hit me.”
“I lay unconscious in
a pool of blood with my left eye gone and the left side of my face and head a
gory mess. Part of my skull had been bitten or clawed away, exposing brain
tissue to the open air. There was a hell of a big hole in the back of my neck,
and my rifle had been tossed 30 feet in the brush.”
When Hank Knackstedt awoke, he found himself face down on
ground wet with his own blood and the previous days’ rain. On his back was his
old wooden packboard—minus “a few healthy bites”—which may have saved his life
after he was battered about the head and neck and knocked out and left for
dead.
Knackstedt awoke without a concrete sense of the amount of
time passed or the location of his attacker.
He tried to lie still and listen, but his injuries made both
movement and the lack of movement excruciating. “Try as I might, it was
impossible for me to feign death,” Knackstedt related in Woodworth’s book. “I was breathing heavily and shaking,
(and) my body was racked with pain. In desperation I had to move, and if she
were still around—well, the sooner the better. I didn’t much care one way or
the other.”
Eventually, Knackstedt determined that the bears had
departed, and he decided that he must find his rifle and try to signal for
help. A U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service plane, performing a moose count, flew directly
overhead, but those aboard missed the hunter lying in plain view in the little
grassy clearing where he’d been attacked.
Grimly, then, he began to crawl and drag himself around
until he was able to locate his rifle, and he chambered and fired a few evenly
spaced rounds in the hope that they would be taken as signals, and not mistaken
for the shots of another hunter. As he awaited a response, Knackstedt passed
out a second time.
When he reawakened, he fired his remaining rounds and hoped
for the best. And this time luck was on his side.
Waldo Coyle was in the woods nearby and heard the shots. He
fired a volley in return and then began moving toward the sound.
For Knackstedt, Coyle’s arrival probably seemed like both a
blessing and a curse. Knackstedt certainly wanted to live and knew he needed
help, but he probably would have been happier to see almost any person other
than his friend. Later, in fact, Knackstedt would partly blame Coyle’s lateness
for what had happened, while Coyle, in turn, would constantly remind Knackstedt
that he had saved his life.
According to Knackstedt’s son, many years later—after Hank
had passed away—Coyle brought Henry into his home to tell him his version of
the events that day. “Waldo wanted to talk to me about the past,” Henry said.
“He wanted to tell what really happened with my dad. He knew that I’d probably
got some wrong information, and he wanted to set the record straight.”
Henry said that he was skeptical at first because of Waldo
and Hank’s argumentative past, but he said that Waldo got so choked up as he
narrated that in the end Henry believed everything he told him.
“He finds my dad, and my dad was a mess—blood all over the
place. A mess. His eye was kind of hanging out—it’s just tore up. And he got my
dad up—he was real weak—and my dad didn’t want any help. ‘I’ll find my own
way!’ My dad started going off in the wrong direction. ‘No, you need to go this
way!’ He kept redirecting Dad to try to get back. The direction to go was
toward the Kenai River to get in a boat. He needed to get to Kenai.”
It was difficult, but the lean, shorter Coyle managed to
steer the taller, stockier Knackstedt through the woods, and then down a steep
wooded bank to the river. There, they began to slowly motor downstream. By the
time they had traveled nearly three miles—to the bend where Big Eddy is
located—Coyle decided that they needed to rest. He pulled the boat into slack
water, and that is when they caught their first big break.
On the high bank above them they spotted a group of
soldiers, who had driven in a bus down the graveled Spur Highway to the river
either from an Anchorage base or from Wildwood Station to go fishing. “And
there was a bunch of medics on board,” said Henry.
The medics immediately went into triage mode. They patched
up Knackstedt as well as they could and realized that he needed help far beyond
the emergency care they could supply along the river bank. They loaded
Knackstedt into their vehicle and rumbled straight for the Kenai Airport.
Already lying on a gurney at the airport was Soldotna’s
Marge Mullen, who was 32 years old at the time and was pregnant with (and four days
from delivering) her youngest child, Mary. She was about to be loaded onto a
waiting airplane when Knackstedt was brought in, all bloody and being carried
by a group of G.I.’s. She insisted that Knackstedt be attended to first.
Minutes later, the plane was winging toward Anchorage, where
an ambulance would be waiting to carry Knackstedt to Providence Hospital—his
second trip to a hospital for a serious injury in only eight years.
On Sept. 17, 1944, Technician 5th Grade Hank
Knackstedt of the 67th Armored Regiment, 2nd Armored
Division of the U.S. Army, had been shot in the upper-right chest while
fighting against Nazi forces in Holland. He had been evacuated from the battle
scene to the 111th General Hospital near Cirencester, England, about
90 miles northwest of London, and he was awarded a Purple Heart 10 days later.
This time, however, Knackstedt’s condition was much more
dire.
In the days to follow, he would undergo numerous
examinations and procedures, racking up more air miles and some huge medical
bills. He would also transform from a locally known bachelor and commercial
fisherman to a nationally known “Bear Battler,” photographed in his bandages by
the Associated Press.
And his plight would attract unexpected attention from
someone thousands of miles away.
***************
A partial list of medical expenses for Hank Knackstedt,
1952:
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Flight from Kenai to Anchorage $11.21
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Ambulance to Providence Hospital $20
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Dr. Milo Fritz (twice) $25
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Hospital bill (Anchorage) $256.65
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Ambulance to Airport $20
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Flight to Seattle (+Nurse) $281
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Virginia Mason Hospital (Seattle) $1,214.92
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Dr. Carl Chism (Virginia Mason) $1,000
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Eye patches $15
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Tooth pulled $5
On and on the expenses mounted—hundreds of dollars more for
insurance, doctor’s fees, clinic fees, medicine, more flights, more procedures.
A rough estimate of the medical costs alone incurred by Knackstedt in 1952
totaled nearly $4,700—at a time when, according to government reports, the
average American wage earner brought home about $2,300.
Despite being a
commercial fisherman and a dues-paying member of the carpenters union, according
to Knackstedt’s son, “it was a fairly bleak existence” economically.
“I know he tended fish traps early on and was also an
employee of the Libby McNeil Libby cannery,” Henry said. “He came to Alaska and
didn’t want to be beholding to anyone. I think if he made enough money to
survive, plus some, that was fine with him.
“When I was a kid, we got most of our stores from the
cannery in the fall—some on credit—so we literally owed the company store.
Money was always tight through the winter, and Dad always paid his bill in the
summer during fishing.”
When Knackstedt arrived at Providence Hospital in
Anchorage—with puncture wounds to his skull and neck, his left eye dangling
from its socket, and his left cheekbone shattered—he was tended to initially by
Dr. Milo Fritz—who would later become a popular physician and politician out of
Anchor Point. Fritz patched up Knackstedt as well as he was able, but he knew
that his patient needed specialized care and would have to be flown out of
state as soon as possible.
Later that day, a Dr. Johnson from the hospital sent a
message via the Civil Aeronautics Administration to Waldo Coyle. It read: “To W. D. Coil Kenai
Alaska. Mr Henry Knackstad condition critical. Must go to Seattle on Strato
Cruiser tomorrow morning for sure accompanyed by nurse. Come immediately to
Anc. Wire answer. They advised the hospital needs some money.”
“I recall Waldo saying that he sent some money as needed,”
Henry said. “I asked him if Dad paid him back. Waldo seemed surprised and
acknowledged that Dad had paid him back. I know Dad was very particular about
being honest with money and promises. He for sure would never have allowed a
debt to Waldo to linger any longer than absolutely necessary.”
The next day, Knackstedt was driven by ambulance back to the
Anchorage airport and loaded into a Boeing 377 Stratocruiser—a post-World War
II commercial jet—and whisked away to the Virginia Mason Hospital in Seattle,
where he was treated first by Dr. Joel Baker and later by a surgeon named Dr.
Carl Chism.
Meanwhile, back in Knackstedt’s home, his relatives were
worried.
In 1951, Hank’s nephew, Ernie Knackstedt, had come with his
wife, Laura, and daughter, Sharon, to live with Hank until they could find a
place of their own. Laura said that receiving complete and accurate information
about Hank’s condition was difficult—especially for her because of the
“condition” she was in.
“I was pregnant, so they wouldn’t hardly tell me anything
because they thought it would scare me,” she said. It irritated her that the
men believed that she needed to be protected, even though she was only three
months along.
A week after Knackstedt was flown to Seattle, Dr. Chism sent
a letter to Laura to inform her of Hank’s progress. He said that care of
Knackstedt had been turned over to him because his main problem now was
“primarily one of plastic and reconstructive surgery.”
Chism termed Knackstedt’s general condition “excellent,”
although he was still weak. He said that the “main immediate problem” concerned
whether or not the left eye could be saved. The amount of reconstruction work
to Knackstedt’s eyelid, he said, would be determined by the fate of the eye
itself. Additionally, he said, Knackstedt would need a “revision” of his scars
after they had healed, and he would also require “some cartilage inserted into
his face to make up for the areas of bony loss.”
In the end, Knackstedt would lose the eye and would eschew
the notion of a glass replacement. Besides, according to Henry, “someone said
he looked good with a patch.”
In Kenai, meanwhile, the laborers and Teamsters were
sponsoring a drive to raise contributions to assist Knackstedt with his growing
medical tab. Henry still has a list of some of the individuals and businesses
who promised to donate to the cause—from $1 to $10 each. Among the more
well-known contributors were Herman Hermansen, Larry Lancashire, Joe Cochrane,
Les Holt, J.K. Jones, Jack Hinerman, John Stanton, and Howard Binkley.
About this same time, an Associated Press photographer came
to Knackstedt’s room in Virginia Mason to photograph the patient, who was shown
sitting in a striped bathrobe, the left side of his face almost completely
hidden by a large white triangular bandage that began near his high blond
hairline. Knackstedt was also interviewed about what the writer would call his
“nightmarish experience.”
And across the country at some later date, a woman named
Loretta Dunlap—a single mother of three school-age children, living in Fort
Wayne, Indiana—would read of Knackstedt’s harrowing misadventure and would
decide to write to the handsome bachelor.
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| Loretta, little Henry, and Hank Knackstedt, early 1960s. |
Over the next several years, according to Henry, Loretta and
Hank became “pen pals.”
“She had read about him, and she was intrigued,” Henry said.
In 1960, Knackstedt—now sporting a black patch over his empty left eye
socket—loaded up his big black 1954 Ford in Kenai and drove all the way to Fort
Wayne to see Dunlap. Until he arrived, they had seen each other only in
photographs.
They got married in Indiana, and in May the new family of
five filled the Ford and began the long drive back to Kenai. Nine months later,
Hank and Loretta became the proud parents of a fourth child, Henry.
“I did the math,” Henry said, “and I was probably conceived
along the way.”
Knackstedt, who died of a heart attack in 1969, spent the
1960s fishing commercially, and raising chickens and a big garden at his home
along the river. Henry said that the family had two or three freezers continually
full of food, including big game.
Every year, Henry said, his sharp-shooting father would bend
his blue right eye onto the sight of his trusty rifle and add another moose to
the freezer.
When Knackstedt had been interviewed in 1952, as a patient
in Virginia Mason, the reporter had asked him if—in consideration of the
mauling—he ever intended to hunt again.
“Of course,” Knackstedt had said. “Just as soon as I’m able.
You can’t let the bears chase you out.”
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| Hank Knackstedt, at home along the Kenai River, 1968. |
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