"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.