"Losing the Battle to Save an Old Cabin"



This photo, reportedly from 1943, shows the Manitoba cabin in the foreground and the Michaelson cabin in the background. The pile of timbers next to the Manitoba cabin belonged to structure that Willard Dunham said was used to unite the two structures that form the Manitoba cabin in this picture. All photos, unless otherwise noted, are courtesy of Theresa Zimmerman.

LOSING THE BATTLE TO SAVE AN OLD CABIN

NOVEMBER 2012

Willard Dunham answered the phone, listened for a few moments, and immediately boiled over.

It was the early 1970s, and he was working as a longshoreman in Seward when he received a phone call from a gold miner named Ron Newcome, who operated several claims on Canyon Creek near a cabin that Dunham’s family had owned since the early 1940s. Newcome wanted to alert Dunham to the movements of a U.S. Forest Service crew that was planning to destroy Dunham’s cabin.

Delbert and Lenore Robbins (mother of Willard Dunham) do a little cross-

country skiing, probably in the vicinity of the Mills Creek drainage.

It wasn’t the first time that the Forest Service had threatened the existence of the cabin, and it wouldn’t be the last. But on this particular occasion, Dunham was determined to meet the threat head on and deal eyeball to eyeball with the federal agents to whom he referred frequently as “bastards” and “sons o’ bitches.” He climbed immediately into his vehicle and sped down the Seward Highway toward his property beyond the northern end of Lower Summit Lake nearly 50 miles away.

Newcome had explained that “a so-called team of experts out of Anchorage” had approached the Dunham place—located near the southwestern base of Mount Manitoba, just north of the confluence of Mills, Fresno and Canyon creeks—and dug a hole to test the validity of the minerals claim attached to the property. Finding no “color” at their test site, the experts had affixed to a nearby tree a yellow tag reading: AREA CLOSED TO MINING. NO MINERAL CONTENT FOUND.

According to Dunham, he arrived just in time to confront these experts as they prepared to ignite his place.

“I told ‘em, ‘Yeah, that’s fine,’ and I took pictures of ‘em. And I said, ‘When you do it, I’ve got it insured, so I’ll turn you in for arson.’ (The man in charge) looked at me and said, ‘Well, you can’t do this,’ and I said, ‘Watch me.’ And then they bundled up all of their stuff and left.”

Dunham hadn’t been bluffing. The cabin was insured. He said that at that point the Forest Service had been trying to destroy all the buildings on the property for 30 years, and buying insurance had been a recent safeguard against government interference. Many years earlier, Forest Service agents had burned down an abandoned mining cabin—one of the oldest—on the same property, and Dunham said that they had been destroying old mining relics throughout the Chugach National Forest.

“Then Newcome took me up and showed me the so-called test hole they’d dug, and it was in the middle of the goddamned highway,” Dunham said. He was referring to a remnant of the old Seward-Hope Highway, part of a connecting route to the historic Iditarod Trail that began in Seward. The road bed for that old highway sat well above gold-bearing Mills Creek, and Dunham said that a test hole dug down by the creek itself would have yielded plenty of mineral content.

“I still get upset when I think about all the crap the Forest Service pulled,” Dunham said. “My dad said, ‘Those bastards like the Forest Service, you have to train them because they couldn’t possibly be born that way.’”

Shortly after his confrontation with the team of experts, Dunham and his wife, Beverly, decided to sell the property. “I got tired of fighting with them,” Willard said.

“We sold it to a young couple (Whitey and Mickey Van Deusen),” said Beverly, “and I told them, ‘You’re probably not going to be able to keep the cabin. They’re probably going to succeed in getting rid of it at some point.’”

Although the Van Deusens were eventually challenged by the feds, their initial troubles with the place were of a much more personal nature. “The woman was having her first baby,” Beverly said. “They were going to have it out there (at the cabin). They were going to deliver it. They were going to do all of it themselves. And I told her, ‘I don’t think this is a good idea. Since this is your first baby, you don’t have any idea what this is going to be like. And what if something goes wrong?’ ‘Oh, no, no,’ they said. ‘Everything’s going to be just fine. We’re going to do just great.’

“And so what happened? Things did not go well at all—and they had to snowshoe out (to the highway). And she’s snowshoeing out in labor. And it turned out the baby was breach, and chances are they would have never been able to do what was needed done correctly. And she got to Anchorage just in time before something serious happened.”

The Van Deusens later sold out and moved to Seward, where they started a bus service for tourists, Beverly said, and Mickey used to enjoy telling the story of her pregnancy to their aghast clientele.

Meanwhile, the property moved into the hands of Ted and Ruth McHenry.

According to Mary Barry in her book, A History of Mining on the Kenai Peninsula, Alaska, Ted McHenry “was a state fish biologist, outdoorsman and occasional miner” who became the new owner of the Manitoba Cabin and its adjoining claims. Barry says that the Forest Service quickly “started procedures” to wrest control of the cabin away from the McHenrys.

The Forest Service contended that McHenry had not proven “the validity of his claim regarding its mineral content.” McHenry protested. The Forest Service fought back. The case went to court and bounced to higher and higher authorities. And by the late 1970s, the McHenrys had lost.

Since the McHenrys had not removed the cabin from the property, the court awarded control of the structure to the Forest Service, which did not destroy it after all. Instead, the agency decided to lease the cabin and its remaining outbuildings to the Nordic Skiing Association of Anchorage. And for nearly two decades, the denizens of cross-country and telemark skiing employed a special permit to keep the cabin standing.

Thus, its future, while always somewhat shaky—much like the cabin’s sagging foundation—seemed assured.

Meanwhile, its past seemed shrouded in mystery and missing records. It was a past that included one of the richest payloads of gold on the entire Kenai Peninsula, a most remarkable woman named Polly, and a debate concerning whether the Manitoba Cabin had ever truly been a link in the transportation chain responsible for the delivery of the U.S. mail.

PEERING DEEPER INTO THE PAST

The Manitoba cabin was already well entrenched in the family history by the time Willard and Beverly Dunham—away from the presence of their disapproving parents—got married in Fairbanks in 1951.

While Beverly was in college in Oregon, she had received a wire from Willard in Fairbanks to tell her that he had just won $2,000 playing craps, and he wanted her to head north and get hitched. So she quit school and flew to Fairbanks to say her vows. “Our families,” said Beverly, “were not pleased at all.”

According to Willard Dunham, one-time owner

of the Manitoba cabin, seen here are Jack and

Marie Shield, who lived in the Manitoba cabin

in the late 1930s. The Shields are standing in

front of the old entryway to the cabin.

Fortunately, Willard’s parents—mother Violet Lenore (Dunham) Robbins and step-father Delbert Robbins—were not so displeased with Willard that they were willing to disown him. When the Robbinses, who had purchased the Manitoba cabin in 1942 from Jack and Marie Shield, decided after statehood to leave Alaska, they deeded the cabin and adjoining property in 1961 over to Willard and Beverly for a dollar.

The Dunhams said they kept the property in the family for another decade before they wearied of Forest Service efforts to destroy the place, which they considered an important link to the area’s long mining history.

The validity of that “link,” however, has long been a source of controversy.

The mining history of the area begins with a confluence of gold-bearing creeks and what came to be known as the Cook Inlet Gold Rush. East of the rocky promontory upon which sits the Manitoba cabin, Juneau and Mills creeks unite to travel westward into Fresno Creek to form Canyon Creek, which then tumbles through a jagged gorge before descending northward toward Sixmile Creek near the Hope Road. All of these creeks began receiving heavy mining pressure in about 1895.

According to Mary Barry, Mills Creek was named for Sanford J. Mills, who acted as recorder for the Sunrise District and had planned to locate gold claims on the stream named for him. After he changed his mind and abandoned his claim in July 1895, opportunities arose for mining partners Robert Michaelson and John Renner, who journeyed to Mills Creek and found coarse gold.

Oscar Dahl’s hydraulic mining operation along upper Canyon Creek,

circa the 1930s.

In August 1895, Michaelson and Renner formed a partnership with three other miners, claimed all of the Mills Creek mineral rights from its confluence with Juneau Creek to its confluence with Fresno Creek, and called their enterprise the Polly Mining Company, after Renner’s remarkable wife.

Born Parascovia Kalashnikoff in 1866, according to Kaylene Johnson in her book Trails Across Time, “Polly” was the daughter of a Russian father and an Athabaskan mother. In the late 1880s, she married Phenice Shell and gave birth in 1890 to a son they named Lewis. Polly became a widow shortly thereafter when Phenice was killed in an accident. Then, in the same year that Renner and Michaelson discovered gold on Mills Creek, Renner discovered and married Polly.

In gold country, Polly simply refused to be a cabin-bound wife. Instead, she picked up a shovel and worked side by side with her husband. At the same time, however, she displayed a keen fashion sense and used her prodigious skills as a seamstress to create her own elegant clothing. And she could easily afford such fineries because the Polly Mining Company struck it rich. The partners pulled $40,000 in gold (more than $1 million by 2012 standards) out of their claims in just the first year.

Soon, Michaelson and Renner bought out their partners, and their mining fortunes continued. According to USGS reports filed in 1905 and 1906 by geologist Fred Howard Moffitt, the most important gold-bearing gravels of Mills Creek were in a narrow canyon three-quarters of a mile above its confluence with Canyon Creek, but there was also plenty of gold to be found, he said, “on top of a blue clay” near the mouth of Juneau Creek.

Handwriting on two of the oldest known photographs of the Manitoba cabin refers to a “Blue Gulch Cabin,” and Mary Barry mentions the name Blue Gulch when discussing Mills Creek mining. However, it is likely that the Manitoba cabin and the “Blue Gulch cabin” are not the same structure. The Blue Gulch cabin almost certainly belonged to Michaelson. The Manitoba cabin almost certainly did not.

This photo, purportedly also taken in 1943, shows the Manitoba
cabin in the foreground and Michaelson cabin in the background.

The photographs themselves—one taken in summer, one in winter, both from the same vantage point, purportedly in 1943—account for much of the confusion. Prominent in the foreground is the Manitoba cabin, but clearly visible in the background is the Michaelson cabin, according to Willard Dunham.

Back around the turn of the century, Renner and a miner named Louis Lauritsen constructed homes near the Fresno Creek confluence, south of Mills Creek, while Michaelson built himself a place to the north of Mills Creek, probably on or near the high rocky promontory.

The revised edition of Mary Barry’s mining-history book features a 1910 map of area mining cabins and mine locations. The only structure shown immediately north of Mills Creek is called the Michaelson cabin. The only structures shown immediately south of Michaelson’s place are called the Renner and Lauritsen cabins.

When Willard Dunham’s parents bought the Manitoba cabin, another structure nearby was called “the Michaelson cabin,” Willard said, but almost certainly all the early structures there—including outbuildings and outhouses, a miner’s dormitory and at least one ore-testing shed, a blacksmith shop and a meat house—belonged to Michaelson himself or to the Polly Mining Company in general.

But it is also possible that one or more of the buildings in existence at that time belonged to Jack and Marie Shield. Willard Dunham said that Shield had used material from an older structure on the property to join together two other buildings and create what became known as the Manitoba cabin. Willard said he remembers being told that one of the buildings involved in the lumber scavenging had been the old miners’ dormitory.

In 1933, the Shields, along with a man named Judge H. Mellon, obtained the Sweepstake Mining Claim via a deed from miner and Seward hotel proprietor Oscar Dahl. According to a 2007 Forest Service document, Dahl’s claim was located “on Canyon Creek just above Mills Creek” and lay “south of Robert Michaelson’s Blue Gulch ditch.”

This description could be somewhat confusing, unless the ditch location refers to Michaelson’s cabin site instead of the Blue Gulch clays. Most of Dahl’s hydraulic mining efforts occurred on Canyon Creek, just north of the Mills-Fresno confluence. In fact, the large gravel pit along the Seward Highway and north of the Manitoba cabin is mostly the rearranged rocks and soil from the powerful blasts of water that Dahl used to scour the creek banks for gold. Also, the phrase “just above Mills Creek” could refer to elevation, not a location upstream, since the cabin site lay high above the confluence.

Lenore Robbins, mother of Willard Dunham, holds her bird dog, Judy, near the front porch of

her family’s cabin by Mount Manitoba in the 1940s. Behind Robbins is the bolt-action.22-

caliber rifle she had recently used to kill the ptarmigan lying on the roof at upper right.

The Forest Service document also refers to an interview with Moose Pass resident Ed Estes—a cousin of Willard Dunham—who claimed that the Manitoba cabin was built in the late 1930s by a man named Ray Thurston. A bill of sale, says the report, places the construction year as 1936.

A 1938 Forest Service report mentions that Jack Shield was mining on his claim at this time. The following year, according to the annual territorial filing report, Shield had been joined on the claim by Delbert Robbins, the step-father of Willard Dunham. Then on May 8, 1942, a conditional bill of sale called for the transfer of the Manitoba cabin to the Robbinses once the full price of $500 had been paid to the Shields.

Delbert and Lenore Robbins put down $100 and agreed to pay the rest in increments of $50 a month, plus seven percent interest.

Later that same year, Gentry Schuster, owner and operator of a recently completed Glacier Ski Lodge on Mount Manitoba, created a map of the area and included the “Manitoba cabin” at its current location.

In 1943, when the final payment had been made on the cabin, Jack and Marie Shield filed a quit claim deed that transferred the property to the Robbinses, who continued mining on the property through 1949, according to the Forest Service.

Their mining activity beyond that is unclear, but by the time they deeded the property over to the Dunhams in 1961, the phrase “Sweepstake Claim” had disappeared from the records. And the apparent absence of continual mining activity associated with the property seemed to have opened the door to the eventual federal takeover of the cabin.

THE CABIN’S ODD HISTORY … AND ITS FUTURE

A nearly forgotten chapter in the history of the Manitoba cabin concerns its startling brief ownership by Dr. Steven Harris.

On Jan. 21, 1976, the Manitoba cabin—part of claims A, B and C of what by then had become known as the Good Rock Claims—were conveyed to Dr. Harris by owners Michael “Whitey” and Patricia “Mickey” Van Deusen. Shortly thereafter, Harris was contacted by U.S. Forest Service officials who wanted him to know of pending class-action legal proceedings against the property.

About three years earlier, Wesley Moulton of the U.S. Dept. of the Interior had performed a “geological examination” of the claims in question in order to determine their mineral potential. Although former owner Willard Dunham had disputed the authenticity of the examination, Moulton’s findings were accepted by his agency.

Moulton wrote: “There have been several prospectors but no mining activity since prior to World War II. [This contradicts the Forest Service observation that Dunham’s parents had been mining on the property between 1943 and 1949.] The present claimants [the Dunhams] are not miners and at the time of the examination did not even have gold pans or sluice boxes. There is no evidence of new prospecting, and it appears the claims are not being used for mining.”

From the snowy yard near her cabin, Lenore Robbins looks out over
Mills Creek and several nearby mining cabins.

Moulton’s assessment initiated a process of deeming the area “mineral withdrawn.” Since Forest Service regulations stated that no mining could occur in such an area, any mining claims there could be voided. Just as the feds were about to void the Good Rock Claims, however, the Dunhams put the property up for sale, and the Forest Service postponed action until a new owner took over.

That new owner was the Van Deusens, who paid the Dunhams $1,750 for the property in a sale in September 1973. Almost immediately, Whitey Van Deusen filed the proper labor notices for mining operations with the Bureau of Land Management, and so the Forest Service was forced to wait again … until Dr. Harris bought the place in 1976.

Understandably, Harris wanted to avoid legal problems with the federal government. He announced that, although he wanted to continue to own the land, he was willing to transfer his mineral rights to the Forest Service.

One month later, before completing that transfer, Dr. Harris was dead.

The Forest Service, in its 2007 report authored by archaeologist Shannon Huber and entitled “Determination of Eligibility, Manitoba Cabin,” does not specify the cause of Harris’s death, but does go into some detail concerning the fate of the property.

In February, Harris’s wife announced that she planned to fulfill her husband’s wishes concerning the mineral rights for the Manitoba cabin property, but she also stated that she wished to donate ownership of the cabin itself to the Resurrection Bay Historical Society in Seward. The Forest Service then decided to wait until the estate was settled before taking further action.

But the property did not go to the historical society. Instead, Mrs. Harris sold it in December 1976 to Edward “Ted” and Ruth McHenry. The following summer, the McHenrys corresponded with the State Historic Preservation Office regarding the historic value of the cabin. The SHPO began but failed to complete an assessment of that value for possible inclusion in the National Register of Historic Places.

Meanwhile, the Forest Service reinitiated its legal proceedings, this time versus the McHenrys, and based upon Moulton’s 1973 “mineral withdrawn” assessment. In 1978, after a nearly two-year legal battle with the McHenrys, the Forest Service gained official ownership of the cabin.

But the agency—despite its threats, its past actions, and the deteriorating condition of the cabin itself—did not destroy the structure.

Instead, the Forest Service began work on an agreement with the Nordic Ski Club of Anchorage to create a non-profit special-use permit for the club to use the cabin recreationally. The 20-year permit was finalized and issued in 1982 and stayed in place until it was terminated on Dec. 31, 2001, because the agency perceived serious safety concerns, despite numerous repairs and renovations by the club over the years.

Those renovations and repairs included additional rafters, a lean-to, a new ladder to the upstairs, improved roofing materials, and a new window. A work room had been torn down to create a bunk room. A new foundation, floor, roof and entrance had been added to the main cabin. The woodshed and the outhouse had been repaired and altered.

Despite improvements, however, Seward District Ranger Duane Harp reported in 1991 that the buildings on the property “can no longer be safely inhabited without incurring excessive liability.”

SHPO representative Veronica Gilbert agreed: “I concur with your proposal to remove the structure as soon as possible due to its deteriorating condition.”

Instead of destruction, however, the cabin received more repairs, and ski club use continued until the special-use permit ran out.

Meanwhile, the debate continued over the historic importance of the Manitoba cabin. Although the Forest Service argued that the cabin was and always had been primarily for recreation, the Dunhams and others continued to dispute those claims.

The main Michaelson cabin, which an ill and nearly blind Michaelson had abandoned in 1930, had been burned to the ground by the Forest Service many years earlier.

Dunham also said—assertions supported by the writings of mining historian Mary Barry—that two of his cousins (Bill and Ed Estes of Moose Pass), who hauled both freight and mail, used to spend the night during their travels in the Michaelson cabin when the miner was still living in the territory and then in the Manitoba cabin in the 1930s when it was owned by Jack and Marie Shield.

The Forest Service stance, however, did not jibe with Dunham’s sense of the structure’s importance.

During the years of the special-use permit, and since, official attempts have been made to assess the historic value of the Manitoba cabin. The most recent, and the most thorough, is the Huber report, which appears to set the matter to rest.

Huber stated that over the years, the numerous repairs, alterations and additions by the owners and users of the Manitoba cabin—while obviously allowing the cabin to continue its useful existence—had actually decreased the structure’s historical integrity.

The well-preserved Lauritsen cabin in the early 21st century.

Ironically—even if the cabin could now be shown to have any inherent historic value—the importance of the Manitoba cabin had been diminished by efforts to improve and save it.

From the National Register of Historic Places evaluation: “Historic cabins associated with productive mining prospects should be evaluated in terms of their overall importance to the mining industry of the region in which they are located—if they are to retain sufficient integrity to visually convey their importance. The Manitoba cabin was used as a modest recreational cabin constructed in the mid-1930s. This cabin is near the historic Robert Michaelson Blue Gulch claim and the well-preserved National Register-listed Lauritsen Cabin, although not associated with them. The Manitoba cabin is linked with the post-gold rush period, not the original rush of the early days. The ownership of the cabin has passed through many hands since the construction of the structure. Over the years, Nordic Ski Club recreational use, past and present mining, and general erosion have obliterated the archaeological record.”