"The Lodge that Went up in Smoke"

Photo by Theresa Zimmerman, courtesy of Alaska Lost Ski Areas Project. The Glacier Ski Lodge at Manitoba in 1946 with the Kenai Mountains to the west of the Seward Highway in the background.

THE LODGE THAT WENT UP IN SMOKE

OCTOBER 2012

Oliver Amend was working in Seward in the spring of 1960 when he heard that his ski lodge on Mount Manitoba was on fire. As soon as he could, he fired up his single-engine airplane and flew over the mountains to check things out.

By the time he arrived, Glacier Ski Lodge was gone.

Photo by Bruce McClellan, courtesy of Alaska Lost Ski Areas Project. The view is from

the top of the ski run on Manitoba in 1942.

Five years earlier, Amend had been given the lodge by its original builder, Gentry Schuster, when Schuster decided he was too busy with his bush-flying business, Safeway Airways, to bother any longer with an alpine skiing venture. “He just turned it over to Oliver Amend to operate—no sale—just a ‘you take it,’” said Schuster’s ex-wife, Virginia, in a 2006 letter published on the Alaska Lost Ski Areas Project website.

Mount Manitoba is located along the Seward Highway near the confluence of Mills and Canyon creeks, about three miles north of Summit Lake Lodge. When Schuster built Glacier Ski Lodge in 1941, no Seward Highway existed, so the road designation was Mile 50 of the Seward-Hope Highway.

By the time Amend took control in 1955, the Schuster marriage was ending, and neither Gentry nor Virginia continued with the lodge in any capacity. Amend, a resident of Seward who had a regular job during the week, ran the place as “strictly a weekend affair,” according to the ALSAP website.



Photo by Virginia Schuster, courtesy of Alaska Lost Ski Areas Project. Army personnel from

Seward are ready to ski on Manitoba in 1942.

Whenever he was gone from the mountain, however, problems occurred. While the lodge was vacated during the weekdays, Amend’s absence left it vulnerable to uninvited and often destructive visitors.

During the week, these vandals—Amend blamed Army soldiers then stationed at Seward—took residence at the lodge without permission. They often burned through the firewood that Amend had stored there for the weekend, and once they apparently began incinerating wooden skis for warmth when they exhausted the supply of stove wood.

According to ALSAP, Amend suspected that in the spring of 1960 the perpetrators were more careless than usual and caught the whole place on fire. Glacier Ski Lodge was never rebuilt, and its special-use permit with the Chugach National Forest was never renewed.

Before disaster struck, however, Amend had put in considerable work to make the lodge an enjoyable recreation destination. The current switchback trail along the base of the mountain’s southern flank was created by Amend with a willing buddy and a D-8 Caterpillar.

Photo by Bruce McClellan, courtesy of Alaska Lost Ski Areas Project . Gentry Schuster works

to build his Glacier Ski Lodge in 1942, referred to at the time by the Schuster family as simply

“the cabin.”

He used tracked military-surplus vehicles called “Weasels” to haul skiers in a sleigh up the mountain, and he often flew to the mountain with ribbon-festooned Jerry jugs full of gasoline and dropped them into the snow so he could retrieve them later with Weasels and fuel up the Model A Ford truck engines that powered his rope-tow system.

He also used dynamite, according to ALSAP, to “shape” the ski slopes up on Manitoba: “Apparently he was doing enough blasting to raise the brow of the local mining community. He remembers one day when a fellow showed up with $30,000 cash. He was hoping Oliver would sell, as there was bound to be something good in the rock to justify all the blasting. It took some time for Oliver to convince the fellow otherwise.”

Photo by Bruce McClellan, courtesy of Alaska Lost Ski Areas Project. A Model A truck

engine was used to power a tram for hauling materials to the construction site in 1942. Later,

it helped power the system of rope tows on the mountain.

From 1955 until the demise of Glacier Ski Lodge, Amend did all the shuttling of skiers and all of the maintenance, while his wife, Cecilia, did all the cooking. Skiers who volunteered to help set up equipment at the beginning of the day and help take it down at the end were able to earn “free days” on the mountain; otherwise, the Amends charged $2 for a ride up the hill and $3 to ski all day.

But the lodge would never have existed if not for Gentry Schuster.

On Oct. 22, 1941, Schuster applied to the U.S. Forest Service to build a ski tow and a “ski hut” above timberline on Mount Manitoba. On Nov. 25, he was granted a permit to build, and he paid a $5.40 first-year fee.

Photo courtesy of Alaska Lost Ski Areas Project. A special-use permit card for

Manitoba ski area in 1942.

By the summer of 1942, he had constructed a rough tram system to haul his building materials to timberline and was busy framing the structure, with physical and financial assistance from his friend, Dick Blissner.

“We had intended the place to be for the use of ourselves and friends, but World War II put about 5,000 troops in the Seward area, and a great many of them were skiers, so we just welcomed all who came up,” said Virginia Schuster.

The lodge had two bedrooms, a dormitory that slept eight, and a loft with open space for numerous guests with sleeping bags. Although no liquor was allowed in the lodge, Virginia said, the G.I.’s sneaked in plenty of booze. “After the war, when Gentry entered the loft, he was annoyed to find thousands of beer ‘empties’ and spent the weekend clearing out the loft,” she said.

Photo by Virginia Schuster, courtesy of Alaska Lost Ski Areas Project.

Lunch is served in the lodge in 1942. Gentry Schuster is seated at far

right. This table reportedly seated 20. The interior was heated with a wood

stove constructed from an old oil drum.

Downstairs, the lodge had a boarded-off area with a large cast-iron woodstove and served as the kitchen. “One Sunday,” Virginia said, “I served a roast beef, mashed potatoes and gravy and coleslaw lunch to 67 persons. Since the table seated (up to) 20, that meant setting it four times and washing dishes in melting snow—no sink. That was the straw that broke the camel’s back, so to speak, and thereafter lunch consisted of cold cuts, cheese, canned fruit and cookies.”

Like Amend, Gentry Schuster was a weekend lodge operator. (He was chief operating officer of the Seward dock during the week.) Unlike Amend, he suffered no vandalism, according to Virginia.

But the lodge was not without conflicts. Virginia indicated that Gentry may have had his fingers in too many proverbial pies: “During the war, a pilot wandered into town in a Taylorcraft, and Gentry learned to fly and as soon as he could, bought a small plane and with a private pilot’s license, bought a bush operation,” said Virginia. “Starr Airways of Anchorage went into receivership upon the death of the owner, and Gentry bought their place from the bank, and that become our Anchorage headquarters. He had the Harley-Davidson franchise for Alaska from about 1936, and just as he was in Jack Haven, Penn., to pick up a new plane (Piper) he’d purchased, the Piper Co. had a default by the then-distributor in Alaska, and in disgust they asked Gentry if he’d like the franchise, and of course he said yes.”



Photo by Seth DePasqual, courtesy of Alaska

Lost Ski Areas Project. In 2005, Chugach National

Forest archaeologist Seth DePasqual performed an

archaeological study of the old Glacier Ski Lodge

site on Manitoba. Pictured are a few of the cans

he discovered in the lodge’s dump site.

Gentry was also a lieutenant in the Alaska National Guard during the war years.

Eventually, his other interests took precedence over managing a ski lodge, and he dropped the Manitoba operation into the lap of Oliver Amend.

Remains of the Glacier Ski Lodge can still be viewed in the summer in the hemlocks at timberline. Chugach National Forest archaeologist Seth DePasqual performed an archaeological survey of the lodge site during the summer of 2005, and some photos from the relics he discovered are available on the ALSAP site.

Photo by Tim Kelley, courtesy of Alaska Lost Ski Areas Project.

Pictured in 2011, a section of cable wrapped around a hemlock stump

indicates where the top anchor of the rope tow was.

 

 

"Kaknu Days"

Some of the very first high school cheerleaders in Kenai.

KAKNU DAYS

JULY 2011

Going ‘Old School’

The history of schooling, public or otherwise, in Kenai stretches back more than a hundred years. In that time, there have been odd and sometimes unfortunate occurrences, periods of staggering growth, and the laying down of high school traditions that are carried on in the present time.

Once a Kenai High School was established as part of the Kenai School, for instance, students wove into the fabric of their educational experience the “Kardinal” as mascot, red and white as school colors, and Kaknu as the official name of the yearbook. Following traditions established across the United States, they also began the first sports and cheerleading programs, set up the first pep club, performed the first stage plays, and put on the first prom.

But the deeper origins of the Kenai school system delve deeper—to  Russian occupation. The first school on the Kenai Peninsula was the Russian Church School in Kenai, and it remained operational—with classes taught primarily in Russian, and with Native languages forbidden—until the school closed in 1921. After that, it was used mainly for parish

The old Russian school building as it appeared in 1930 when Paul Wilson delivered the
mail by dog team.

functions before being torn down in the late 1950s, according to Once Upon the Kenai by the Kenai Historical Society.

By the time of the Russian school’s closure, a $5,500 U.S. government-run public school was already in business, having been built in 1907. This one-and-a-half-story building was 55 feet long and 22 feet wide, and its first teacher was a Missourian named Arch R. Law. Two years after it opened its doors, the U.S. school had 58 students.

In 1911, two Midwestern sisters took over teaching duties and later wrote about their three-year stint in the school and the village. The sisters, Willietta and Alice Dolan, penned The Clenched Fist (published in 1948 under their married names, Alice M. Brooks and Willietta E. Kuppler), a revealing but controversial book. Valuable historically, the book illustrates the sisters’ missionary-like zeal for “enlightening” the uncivilized of Kenai, and their sometimes pejorative views regarding the local Natives.

The first territorial school in Kenai, seen here in 1928.

In 1917, the U.S. Congress granted the Territory of Alaska the right to control its own schools, so the Kenai site became an official territorial school and was allocated funds to keep it running. By the time it burned down in 1930, however, it had already been replaced by the newer Kenai Territorial School, which was constructed in 1926.

Kenai Territorial School featured four classrooms on the ground floor and two teacher apartments on the second floor, and in 1941 it was the educational home to Kenai’s first-ever high school student. Two years later, long-time Kasilof educator, Enid McLane, became the school’s principal.

By the late 1940s, the school was “in poor shape,” according to the historical society, so a lobbyist was sent to Juneau to petition the territorial legislature for a new school. The successful lobbying effort resulted in the Kenai School (currently the home of the Boys & Girls Club and the Aurora Borealis Charter School).

The second Kenai Territorial School, 1949.

The Kenai School opened its doors in the fall of 1951 and rapidly began to fill. Propelled by population spikes from a new highway system and homesteading opportunities, the installation of the Wildwood Army Station, oil and natural gas discoveries, and statehood, enrollment numbers skyrocketed.

Starting with 86 students in 1951-52, the enrollment more than doubled to 178 the following year, shot up to 285 in 1954-55, to 415 in 1957-58, and to 543 in 1959-60. The burgeoning enrollment figures prompted new staff hirings, occasional overcrowding, new classroom construction, and, in 1957, a whole new addition, including a new gymnasium, that gave the entire structure an L-shape and became known separately as Kenai High School.

Despite all the growth and modernization, however, there were constant reminders of Kenai’s more rustic village days.

Carol (Covich) Anderson, a former student of the Kenai School, recalled the day that she and a friend were accosted by a belligerent moose while they were walking to school, according to a brief account in Once upon the Kenai. The moose was so aggressive that the two elementary-age girls were forced to climb a tree to escape, and they stayed there until the school’s first principal, O.C. Connelly, came to their rescue with gun in hand and chased the moose away.

The Kenai School, before the addition of the high school and gym, 1953.

Several students and former teachers also remember the days when George J. Fabricius, who came from Wrangell to become Kenai’s principal in 1952, would open a window in one of the teacher apartments above the school, cradle a BB rifle, and draw a bead on one of the many dogs that regularly invaded the playground and carried off sack lunches. “Sometimes it wasn’t a BB gun,” added Mary France, who began teaching at the Kenai School in 1954.

There were many encounters with animals in those days, France said. In the coldest part of the winters, the moose enjoyed entering the playground and lying next to the building for warmth. “We went outside to play,” France said. “You played outside until it was 20 below, and everybody went out. Mr. Fabricius or one of the teachers would have to go check to see if there were moose out there. If there were, you couldn’t go out for recess.”

Reunited

On the spine of the 2011 Kenai Central High School yearbook—and nowhere else in or on the publication—is the word “Kaknu,” a variant of a Dena’ina name (Kahtnu) for the Kenai River; it is also the lone remnant of the name given 50 years ago to the first-ever high school yearbook in Kenai.

The first Kenai High School yearbook.

In 1961, “Kaknu” linked the language of a once-dominant culture to an educational tradition of the present time. Simultaneously, it united two eras via a symbol of the central Kenai Peninsula’s lifeblood—the river itself—and implied with that symbolism the flow or passage of time.

How fitting it was, then, that in early July the woman who concocted the name for the first yearbook jetted across country from her home in western New York to join other members of the Kenai High School Class of 1961 for a 50-year reunion.

At a Friday dinner at Paradisos Restaurant in Kenai and a Saturday picnic on the old Cotton Moore homestead in Sterling, class members, now mostly in their late 60s, united to celebrate old times and catch up on more recent ones.

Among the graduates was Kathy “Dolly” (Wilson) Lecceardone, who had submitted the name Kaknu for the yearbook after brainstorming with her former gradeschool teacher, Jettie Petersen. Wilson, who was born in 1943 in a house on Mission Avenue in Kenai, and whose family continues to have a long history in the area, was well aware of the important ties between the fishing village that Kenai had been before statehood and the river that lured the salmon home each summer.

She was also aware that the area was beginning a period of rapid growth, and the Kenai School was bursting at the seams because of it.

She said she remembered leaving behind the old Kenai Territorial School, where she was once allowed to toll the large bell on the roof, for the new one in the early 1950s. She remembered all of the students placing their chairs upon their heads one day at the old school and marching down the street to the new one.

Quickly that new school also filled with students, and in 1957—when the members of the Class of ’61 were freshmen—the addition was constructed on the end nearest the Methodist Church. It was the precursor to the current Kenai Central High School, which was constructed east of Kenai along the Spur Highway, and which opened its doors in the fall of 1964.

The first Kaknu pictured 35 members of the graduating senior class. Of those 35, five—Don Lewis, Gary and Grant Wilson, Stanley Brower, and William “Bill” Robinson—have died. Of the 30 remaining, 21 (or 70 percent) still live in Alaska—mostly on the Kenai Peninsula.

Of the 30 graduates still living, 20 attended the reunion festivities, many of them with spouses or significant others. The dinner drew about 70 individuals, while the picnic drew about 80. Also in attendance were a smattering of former teachers, a bus driver, a school board member, and other students who also attended either Kenai High School or the Kenai Territorial School through the spring of 1964.

Not everyone who had been a part of the KHS Class of ’61, however, was able to graduate with the 35 students pictured in the yearbook. Carroll (Madden) Knutson, for instance, got married during her senior year and left school; she did finish her schooling but missed the graduation ceremony. And Nancy Savage and Virginia Murto were sent to high school in Homer for their senior year, apparently because the school boundaries south of Kenai were changed as enrollments climbed.

The reunion effort was spearheaded by class president Patricia (McCollum) Falkenberg, without whom, according to several attendees, the get-together never would have taken place. Falkenberg put together a six-person committee more than a year in advance of the event, and the number of volunteers grew as the reunion dates neared. Besides event planning, committee members also gathered information about their classmates. One of the many lists they kept showed how many students’ families had been tied into businesses in the local economy.

The parents of Doug Jones owned Kenai Commercial. Eric Thompson’s folks owned the Kenai Korners lumber yard. Mike Seaman’s parents owned Seaman’s Furniture. Martha (Lancashire) Merry’s parents owned Larry’s Club. Other businesses tied to students included: Bing’s Landing, Dianne (Moran) Cooper; “Ribs by Cotton,” Myla (Moore) McFarland; Gibbs’ Apparel, Jimmy Gibbs; Reger’s Garage, Doug Reger; Northern Oil Operations, Falkenberg.

Students from the Class of ’61 included Native kids, homestead kids, fishing-family kids, military kids, oilfield kids, and Alaska Road Commission kids, among others. They came to school from as far south as Anchor Point and as far north as Nikiski. They were a reflection of the times.

Just getting to school each day back then could be a time-consuming trial for some students. McFarland was a Sterling girl back in the late 1950s and early ’60s, and she lived on the Cotton Moore homestead down two miles of bad road from the graveled Sterling Highway. The road crossed two swamps, but in the early days the road itself was uncrossable except when frozen; consequently, McFarland had to walk to the highway, at times balancing precariously upon poles that had been laid in the marsh for safe foot travel. “If you fell off, you were ruined for the day,” she said.

At the highway, she and her buddy, Cooper, caught a regularly scheduled ride into town to the Sky Bowl, where a school bus driven by Dan France picked them up and drove them into Kenai. During their junior and senior years, the bus route expanded to include Sterling, but the journey was just as long.

McFarland said that she occasionally rowed a boat down the lazy waters of the Moose River to the bridge to catch a ride, and on cold winter days she sometimes skated down the meandering ribbon of river ice to the main road. “It was a long day by the time you got 26 miles into Kenai,” Cooper said. “And then you’d get back, and heaven forbid if you wanted to do something in the evening.”

“My dad, all he had (in those days) was a ’49 Jeep,” said McFarland, “and so if I was coming home late, I can remember coming down the Sterling Highway looking for—you know how Jeep headlights are close together—I remember looking to make sure if he was coming after me.”

In the Class of ’61, the class officers besides Falkenberg were Jimmy Gibbs, vice president; Karin (Mainwaring) Newcomb, secretary; Barbara (O’Rourke) Minich, treasurer. The class valedictorian was Merry, and the salutatorian was Newcomb.

Class colors were blue and white, the class flower was the lupine, and the class motto was “First in Work, First in Fun, Senior Class of ’61.” And the class song was “Memories Are Made of This,” a tune written in 1955 by Terry Gilkyson, Richard Dehr and Frank Miller, and popularized by Dean Martin, whose version spent six weeks as Number One on the Billboard Top 40 charts in 1956.

At the reunion dinner, one of the featured speakers was former KHS (and KCHS) chemistry teacher, Shirley (Denison) Henley, who entertained the crowd with funny stories and a few playful jabs at administrators of the time.

Former KHS chemistry teacher, Shirley Denison, circa 1960.

Henley had transferred from Tustumena Elementary School, where she was helping to run a small pilot high school program, to KHS during the 1959-60 school year after being asked to teach some typing classes. “The only course I ever dropped in high school was typing,” she said. “I just am totally uncoordinated.”

At the dinner, she apologized to the students who had taken her first-ever chemistry offering: “I told them about the asbestos plates that were used under the Bunsen burners,” she said. “Now I see these advertisements for mesothelioma, and I think, ‘Oh my God, what have I done!’”

Fortunately for everyone concerned, the members of the Class of ’61 seem to have done just fine. Many of them married within a year or two of graduation. Myla and Lee McFarland, for instance, recently celebrated their 50^th wedding anniversary, and several others aren’t far behind in celebrating their own.

The graduates have also produced plenty of offspring, traveled far and wide, hve created businesses and had careers, made a substantive difference in their communities, and shared the bond of once belonging to a small collective called the Class of ’61.

Many of them were friends in high school and have remained so, regardless of distances and the long passage of time.

Sports & Other Traditions

The first KHS prom occurred in the spring of 1959. The theme was “Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White.” Music for the evening came from long-running vinyl records played over the loud speakers from the main office.



At the recent 50-year reunion for the KHS Class of '61, there was some disagreement over the genesis of the current KCHS mascot, but one former member of that class, Shane Griffin, who moved to Missouri to complete his final year of school--offered this email explanation concerning the origin: "I can assure you, with no equivocation whatsoever, that it was the valedictorian of the Class of '59, then student council president, Kim Griffin, that submitted, campaigned and secured the Kenai Kardinal as our mascot." Shane was a KHS sophomore when his older sister, Kim, succeeded in her mascot-naming efforts.

"Just as the Bald Eagle is not spread over all America, I (not anyone I know) have never seen a cardinal in the Kenai area," Griffin wrote. "But Kim's mother was from Missouri, and we had been there a lot visiting our grandparents, etc. So, for the same reasons the baseball team of St. Louis, Missouri, chose the Cardinal as their namesake and mascot, Kim was enamored of the red (C)Kardinal, and got enough support to get it voted in."

Most of the other mascot choices have been lost to memories fading over more than five decades, but one of the possibilities not selected in the school vote was the “Kenai Koyotes.”

There is also some disagreement about who drew the first Kardinal once the mascot was decided upon. Some insist that first image came from Cary Bear, but Myla (Moore) McFarland was the creator of the first-ever Kenai Kardinals banner.

“I designed the Kardinal banner and won the contest for the design,” said McFarland. “It (the banner) was at Kenai High for a long time until someone stole it, and they made a new one with a similar design.”



With a mascot and colors selected, and a new gymnasium in place, it was natural that basketball became an official school sport, starting in 1958-59. Coached by Paul Smith and playing against mainly JV squads from other schools, the fledgling Kards hit the hardwood to the boisterous approval of local fans.

Mary France remembers the first game in the old gym (which later became a sort of multi-purpose room): “It was packed. I mean there was standing room only in there. It was the first time anybody in town had ever even seen a (local) basketball game. I can’t tell you who the team was that came there to play, but I took tickets at the first game. Everybody in town was there.”

Basketball gave area residents an excuse to venture out into the cold and also gave them a unified rooting interest. “All of the teachers there, we went with the basketball team to Seldovia to watch them play,” France said. “We went over by boat and stayed the night. The boys played ball, and we came back the next day.”

In addition to the ballplayers there were newly minted cheerleaders and a pep club to boost team spirits and stir up the crowd.

In the second year, under new coach Jim Evenson, the Kardinals began playing varsity ball. Among the best players in those early seasons, according to Evenson, were Ross and Chris Cooper, Bill Robinson, Eric Thompson, Vic Tyler, Doug Jones and Gary Davis. Evenson said that his teams fared well against the other squads in the Southcentral League—Kodiak, Homer and Seward—and even won occasionally against teams from the much bigger Anchorage schools.




Before hoops became a hit, however, other high school sports got their starts. A 1956-57 copy of the student gazette, The Moosepaper, makes reference to school teams in track, softball, volleyball and soccer. Track meets in Homer were held out on the spit until the 1964 Good Friday Earthquake altered the geography and forced the athletes to compete farther inland.

One of the sports that may go back the furthest in time is ice hockey, which France recalls being played as far back as 1954 on a rink between the Kenai School (pre-expansion) and the Methodist Church.

“When I taught Home Ec one year, I ended up driving part of the team to Ninilchik,” France said. “Wayne Tachick was playing, and he got hit in the mouth with a hockey stick, and he skated over to me and handed me half of his two front teeth.”

After 104 years of public school in Kenai, some of the rules have changed: Most Kenai students are now actually from Kenai itself; hockey players have better protection for their mouths; and neither principals nor anyone else is allowed to bring guns onto campus, even to confront surly moose or mooching dogs.

But much of the rest has remained the same: Students still start in the fall, still battle the snows of winter and Kenai’s persistent wind, and still graduate in the spring when most of the frost has left the soil. And in KCHS, students are still urged not to step on the part of the commons floor containing the Kardinal logo—thereby demonstrating a sign of respect for a traditional symbol concocted more than a half-century before many of those students enrolled as freshmen.

 

 

"The Innovative Mathison Brothers"

Photo courtesy of the Mathison collection. In the late 1930s, Bob and Charlie Mathison hand-made this “skimobile” to help them work their trapline. The vehicle, constructed from a Model A Ford truck, is parked in front of their Chickaloon River home in 1938.

THE INNOVATIVE MATHISON BROTHERS

JULY 2012

Improvisation was a way of life for the Mathison brothers.

The younger sons of Scottish-born Robert Burns and Lavinia Clark Mathison, Robert Lewis (Bob) and Charles (Charlie) grew up around a remote Alaska lumber mill and then involved themselves in the hardscrabble careers of gold mining, fur trapping and supply ferrying in and around the community of Hope throughout the first half of the 20^th century. In these venues, they frequently had to “make do” with whatever was available to get the job done.

Photo courtesy of Laurel Downing Bill. Robert Burns Mathison, originally from Scotland (his

father was gardener to poet Robert Burns, hence his name) arrived in Hope in 1896 via Texas.

He helped build the schoolhouse in Hope, where his sons,Bob and Charles, attended school.

Among the displays of their inventiveness and determination were gold-mining and supply-hauling methods, clever barging systems, and the first “skimobile” ever developed to work a trapline in Alaska.

Born in Texas late in the 1800s, Bob and Charlie moved to Alaska with their mother, older brother John, and sickly sister Bessie, to join their father in the gold rush town of Hope in 1899. The elder Robert was running a prosperous sawmill up on Bear Creek, just outside of Hope; soon, John, who was 18 at the time of the move, became his assistant and, according to several reports, the financial brains of the operation.

John and Robert also moved successfully into the creation of a “major” store on Main Street in Hope and into mining ventures on gold-rich Resurrection Creek, pulling thousands of dollars of profits out of gravels that other miners had claimed were no good, according to Mary Barry in her comprehensive A History of Mining on the Kenai Peninsula.

But as good as the Mathison luck was in the mines and at the mill, it soured elsewhere.

Photo courtesy of Bob Mathison’s granddaughter,

Laurel Downing Bill, author of the critically

acclaimed Aunt Phil’s Trunk Alaska history series.

Bob and Charlie Mathison walk down the street in

Seward circa the 1920-30s.

The elder Robert traveled back to Texas in 1913 and apparently never returned to Alaska, according to Hope historian Diane Olthuis. In 1915 John became ill with appendicitis and died in an Anchorage hospital. Bessie died in 1920 at the age of 35, and the family store burned down in the early 1920s.

While their mother continued to live in the area and to grow into a Hope community leader, Bob and Charlie kept mining every summer into the 1930s. Each winter, they traveled to the Chickaloon River area (west of Hope) to do some trapping, and they also developed a supply-barging business between Anchorage and Hope.

In 1937, the brothers encountered Alaska newcomers Erv and Joyce Rheingans, whose history is described by their daughter, Lisa Augustine, in her book, The Dragline Kid. The Rheinganses were down on their luck at the time. After a summer of difficult mining work near Hope, they had only $100 of savings—“not enough to leave and not enough to live the winter on,” Augustine wrote.

They made their way to Anchorage, hoping for better employment luck, but as September drifted in October they found their prospects unimproved—which is when they ran into the brothers, who were in town shopping for supplies and who were sympathetic to their plight.

The Mathisons made them an offer they couldn’t refuse: Erv and Joyce would help 46-year-old Bob and 54-year-old Charlie with their trapline and live out at their cabin on the Chickaloon. Joyce would do the cooking and help Charlie with his invalid wife, Ann. In exchange, the Mathisons would give the Rheinganses one-third of the total fur take, minus the cost of the food they consumed over the winter.

The deal saved the Rheingans family considerable hardship and allowed them to prosper in Hope and eventually Kenai, where Joyce went on to become the postmaster for many years.

Bob with his violin.

Augustine describes the brothers clearly in her book: “Charlie was a funny little guy. He talked a lot, very fast, chomping on gum and compulsively wiping the tips of his fingers on the front of his shirt. He was the only person I’ve ever met who kept a gum board. On this homely piece of wood he arranged his wads of gum, re-chewing them in a sequence known only to himself…. Bob was taller, and thin, with a shock of straight dark hair falling over his forehead. He was a poet and a musician—played the violin. He was also a boatman. He built a scow and piloted it back and forth across Turnagain Arm to Anchorage, weather and tides permitting and depending on the necessity.”

Bob’s boat was another innovative method of raising cash and staying busy.

In the opening chapter of his brief memoir, The Hope Truckline and 75 Miles of Women, Dennie McCart recounts the events of mid-May 1938, when Bob Mathison cruised into Anchorage in his 34-foot round-bottom boat called The Fiber. Mathison was there to pick up McCart and to haul him and a 40-foot barge to Big Indian Creek (just east of the Chickaloon River), where they planned to load the barge with mining supplies and a Model T Ford truck, and then haul all those materials into Hope. McCart had been contracted to bring all the materials from Hope up a narrow, winding mountain road into the Palmer Creek drainage.

The community of Hope in 1905. Photos by Laurel Downing Bill.

The Fiber, equipped with a four-cylinder Chevrolet engine, could reach a top speed of about seven knots, but Mathison, according to McCart, employed a masterful use of Turnagain Arm’s rapid tidal movements into a sort of slingshot affair, motoring from Anchorage to Fire Island, where they anchored and waited for the tide to turn, then across Cook Inlet and into Big Indian Creek just as the tide was cresting. There, Mathison grounded the crafts, and he and McCart loaded and secured the supplies.

Many hours later, as the incoming tide lifted them free, they cruised back in the direction of Fire Island until the tide allowed them to turn out of muddy Chickaloon Bay and zip eastward up the inlet toward the Resurrection Creek landing at Hope.

Sometime during the 1930s, the Mathisons appear to have made the switch away from mining out of Hope to running a full-time barge operation, in addition to keeping up their winter trapline. They also appear during this time to have made the Chickaloon cabin, including a machine shop in which they produced everything through manual labor, into their permanent residence.

When Kenai National Moose Range manager John Hakala and assistant manager Bob Wade traveled through the Chickaloon area in March 1961, they spoke with Bob Mathison. Later, in his annual report, Hakala noted: “An interesting discussion was had with Mr. Mathison who has lived in the area these past 30 years.”



Photo courtesy of the Hope and Sunrise Historical Society. This is the Bear Creek sawmill

owned and operated by Robert Burns Mathison in the early 20th century near Hope. The

Mathisons still had the mill in 1914.

It was during those three decades, said Mary Barry, that the “always mechanically inventive” Bob and Charlie built power scows for a cannery across the inlet at Ship Creek and devised their “skimobile” to replace the teams of dogs with which they had been working the trapline most of their lives.

They began their creation by moving the front axle behind the engine and adding a third axle to the chassis of a Model A Ford truck. Then they added a third wheel to each side. They connected the wheels with metal tracks to give the base the appearance of a crude bulldozer. Atop the truck bed they constructed a boxlike cabin somewhat akin to a modern truck canopy, in an attempt to balance the weight from the engine in the front. Finally, they allowed the vehicle’s engine to protrude over a single large ski that would glide over the snow in front.

“Better than dogs for the trapline. With it, we run the line in half the time and cheaper,” boasted the brothers, according to Kenai National Wildlife Refuge historian Gary Titus in his 2009 “Refuge Notebook” article in the Peninsula Clarion.

Charlie Mathison, 1950.

Olthuis said there is a rumor that both brothers suffered from ill health as they grew older, and that each of them committed suicide during a different part of the 1960s. According to Barry, 77-year-old Charlie suffered a “paralytic stroke” in 1960 and died shortly thereafter. In a remembrance about the Mathison home, Kenneth Atkinson says that he visited with Bob, who told him that Charlie had become ill and had ended his own life in order to avoid becoming a burden to his brother.

Regardless of the exact circumstances, Bob from then on lived alone at Chickaloon, Barry said, until 1967 when a fire destroyed his cabin and took his life.

In his final years, according to Barry, 70-something Bob continued to cross the inlet to Anchorage for supplies, despite the fact that the Seward Highway had been completed from Anchorage to the Sterling Highway in 1951. The completion of the road eliminated the need for the freighting of supplies across the water, and it also changed life for Bob out on Chickaloon. Suddenly his cabin was no longer so isolated. Hunters flew in to remote lakes nearby. Snowmobiles and other vehicles crossed the open country with relative ease, and soon a natural gas pipeline was laid in his neighborhood.

But perhaps even more illustrative of the changes being wrought comes from this Mary Barry short story about Bob Mathison: “He became friends with the animals around his home, especially the moose. When winters were difficult, he cut brush for them. One of his favorites was a young bull he called Sad Sam. He saved the little antlers from Sam, dropped during his first three years. Then came an unhappy day when he found the last antlers of Sam, who had been shot by a hunter.”

For many years, the skeletons of the Mathison cabins and their many projects lay scattered about their property on the middle Chickaloon River. Most of those materials have since decayed or been carted away, as the countryside they loved so much absorbs their history.

Photo courtesy of USFWS. In 1970, the old Mathison property offered only scattered relics as a glimpse into the past.

 

"Part of the Story of Hope"

Billy Miller tells visitors stories of the history of the community of Hope in 2010.

PART OF THE STORY OF HOPE

AUGUST 2010

Nate White’s beefy wife had finished her business in the outhouse and was stepping outside when a brown bear lunged at her. She retreated into the odorous confines just as the bear smacked the door, slamming it shut.

More angry than afraid, Mrs. White peered through a crack in the boards of the structure and watched as her husband’s pet bear prowled around her, restrained by its collar, a length of chain, and the running line to which Mr. White had secured the animal before leaving to act as a substitute deliveryman on the mail boat out of Hope.

Nate White had raised the bear from a cub, and the two-year-old was now large enough to pull White’s dogsled into the woods surrounding Hope and help him haul out loads of birch for firewood. Nate had a fondness for the burly bruin. His wife detested it.

At one point, she saw a group of men strolling toward the local pool hall and she hollered for help, but although they heard her cries the men seemed unable to ascertain their direction, and so they ambled away. After more than half an hour passed, Mrs. White noticed that the bear had drifted away and so she made a break for it. As fast as she could move her large frame, she bolted away from the outhouse and lumbered home. There, she gathered up a loaded shotgun, strode purposefully back outdoors, and dispatched her husband’s pet.

 

Visitors to the Hope-Sunrise Historical and Mining Museum are likely to hear this story because they are likely to ask about a 1917 photograph on the wall in the main building. The photo depicts Nate White standing at the ready behind his sled, with his trusty brown bear out in front on the end of a lead line. When visitors ask about the photo, the museum’s main guides and caretakers, Ann and Billy Miller, delight in telling the tale, just as they enjoy regaling guests with dozens of other stories and hundreds of interesting facts about the community in which they have lived for almost 50 years.

But the Millers—Ann, 84, and Billy, 80—also have stories of their own. Sometimes it takes a little longer to jar those stories loose, however, since their main repertoire involves primarily the communities of Hope and Sunrise. But since the Millers are largely responsible for the very existence of the museum, it can be difficult to separate much of Hope’s history from their own.

Ann Miller walks among the buildings of the Hope-Sunrise Historical and Mining Museum.

This connection is especially true of Billy, who has hunted and trapped and guided for many decades in the area, and to whom Ann often defers for the telling of tales.

Billy first came to Alaska in 1949 as a member of the United States Army stationed in Whittier. As a youngster in Maryland, Billy had taken his recruiting sergeant hunting for grey squirrels out on his grandmother’s farm, and he’d told the officer of his desire to one day go to Alaska. “In high school, he come to see me and asked do I still want to go to Alaska,” Billy said. “I said, ‘You betcha!’ He said, ‘If you’ll sign up with me, I’ll guarantee that you’ll get sent to Alaska.’ He kept his word. I did.”

In the year that he was stationed in Whittier, 18-year-old Billy spent nearly all of his free time outdoors. On free weekends, he hiked up Neil’s Pass onto Portage Glacier and walked down the ice to Bear Valley. With a three-day pass, he hiked the train tunnel through the mountain to Portage, and to Diamond Jim’s bar, where he had befriended an old Norwegian trapper named Ben Goodland.

“Him and me got along real good right off the bat,” Billy said of Goodland. “He had a little cabin on the Placer River. He took me on his trapline he was running out of Portage. I snowshoed with him and stuff, and I got interested in trapping, and he told me when I got out (of the Army), we’ll go up Twentymile (River). He had one cabin up there, and he wanted to build a couple more. He says, ‘You help me, and we’ll split the fur money, whatever we catch during the trapping season.’”

The trapping partnership deal was on the table, but the transaction didn’t occur until 1953, when Billy had completed his Army duties, including stints with the 10^th Combat Engineers at Fort Devens in Massachusetts, and with the First Cavalry Division during the Korean War. Once he was back in Alaska, he trapped with Goodland in the winters and worked for the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service the rest of the year as a fish hawk and a game warden. His work in law enforcement took him to various parts of the state, and he reveled in his many wilderness experiences. He quit his job a year after Alaska became a state, however, because he disliked the rigidity of state rules. “They wanted me to wear a uniform and all that crap,” he said.

Through his acquaintance with Hope big-game guide, Keith Specking, Billy became involved in Specking’s guiding business and worked with him on Brushkana Creek off the Denali Highway near Cantwell. After he learned the business, he bought a pair of horses of his own, got his own guide’s license, moved to Hope in 1962, and began guiding hunters out of a tent camp on Fox Creek, a tributary of Resurrection Creek on the Resurrection Pass Trail.

And in those early days in Hope he met Ann, who had moved to the area with her Air Force photographer husband at about the same time. Ann, originally from farm country near Dover, Delaware (ironically only about 90 miles from the place Billy had been raised), and who had come to Alaska with her husband to be stationed at Elmendorf Air Force Base, had been lured to Hope by the prospect of building and operating a trading post with Specking.

A friendship formed between Ann and Billy, and, when Ann became single again, they married in 1969 and shortly thereafter became involved in the Hope & Sunrise Historical Society. As they became more deeply immersed in the community and its rich history, Billy continued guiding, eventually going in with Jim Strong to buy the old Harry Johnson cabins high up in the pass and to operate his business from them.

Of his law enforcement and guiding days, Billy recalls a litany of experiences. He remembers the time in 1954 when he was working as a game warden north of Anchorage, got caught in a snowstorm, and had to sleep in a four-foot culvert until the front moved through.

He also remembers a time in the mid-1950s when no one flew in groceries to his remote enforcement outpost, so for two weeks he subsisted on hotcakes, a small portion of bacon and fireweed, and meal after meal of pink salmon. He hadn’t been fond of fish before that assignment, and his predicament failed to change his appetite.

And both he and Ann remember the moose-hunting trip they took about 20 years ago up by Fox Creek.

“Here’s this great big bull moose standing right by the trail, with a beautiful palm sticking out,” Ann said. “And Billy said, ‘Well, I don’t know why that bull’s standing there, but if you’re ever going to shoot, you better hurry up.’” The moose was standing, apparently oblivious to the Millers, only about 30 feet off the trail.

“So I shot, and he started running. And we were running after him because I knew I’d hit him. And then he went down. And then we discovered why he was standing there.” The bull had an irregular antler growth on the side closest to the Millers. One portion of the antler had grown down over the eye on that side, effectively blinding him, so he’d never known the Millers were nearby. “That was a big old fat bull,” Ann said. “And I look at that (set of antlers, which she still has), and I think, there’s nothing perfect in this world.”



A visitor to the museum examines one of the old Bruhn-Ray buildings.

Today, with Billy retired from the guiding business and Ann retired as Hope entrepreneur and postmaster, their main focus is their home and the museum, which will remain open this year from noon to 4 p.m. every day through Labor Day.

Billy performed or supervised most of the construction of the museum in 1993, and the museum opened for business in 1994. Visitors to its Second Street location today will also be treated by Billy to a tour of the grounds, where he has restored and arrayed several relics and historic buildings, including the first “school” in Hope, and the barn, bunkhouse and blacksmith shop from the Bruhn-Ray mine on Colorado Creek, just across the Seward Highway from the Hope Road.

The school was actually the home of Oscar Grimes, who many decades ago offered to teach the children of Hope and first introduced them to the McGuffey Readers.

After Billy briefly introduces visitors to these buildings, he allows them to wander freely among the structures, where voice recordings and well-designed posters allow them to learn the rest of the history and view the artifacts at whatever pace they desire.

If they wander back into the main building, there are always other intriguing photographs on the wall, almost begging for an explanation that the Millers are happy to supply.