"Betty, Get Your Gun"



Betty VanDevere gathers firewood outside her family's homestead cabin on Parsons Lake in Nikiski in the late 1950s.



BETTY, GET YOUR GUN

JUNE 2010

Since the early 1960s, Elizabeth Florence “Betty” Idleman has been living comfortably in her Island Lake home nearly 20 miles north of Kenai—but her life on the Kenai Peninsula didn’t begin in such comfort. The early days involved privation, isolation, and more than the occasional gunfire.

There was, for instance, the time that she and her first husband, Lester Dyer “Les” VanDevere, Jr., desired to have a well with a pump in their first home on nearby Parsons Lake. They had a sand point ready to drive into the earth, but their home already had a solid wooden floor covering their intended well site. They had a keyhole saw with which to cut the proper aperture, but they lacked a hand drill to bore a small hole in which to start the action of the saw.

“My husband put an X on the floor where the well was supposed to be, at the edge of the sink, and he stood on a chair and shot a hole in the floor,” Idleman said. Her husband’s bolt-action Springfield 30.06 blasted through the floorboards and provided the opening they needed. They struck water at a depth of only seven feet.

Parsons Lake homestead cabin.

After they installed a pitcher-pump, Idleman said, she was the only one in the area with both running water and a sink that drained.

But life on Parsons Lake was far from being filled with such luxuries.

In 1956, the VanDeveres’ first year in Alaska, they filed on a homestead that had been defaulted on by the man for whom the lake was named. Idleman said she was told that Mr. Parson had gone into town to Eadie’s Frontier Club during the winter and got caught in a “hellacious snowstorm.” Thinking back to his half-completed cabin on the lake, he decided to forget the whole homesteading adventure and leave the state.

In Kenai, through “scuttlebutt from fishermen in town and the locals,” Les and Betty heard about Parson’s abandoned property (the structure and nearly 140 acres) and took actions through the land office to secure it for themselves.

When the VanDeveres arrived at the lake in late autumn of 1956, they discovered a roofless cabin made of unpeeled spruce logs. On the ground nearby, the logs to finish the rest of the cabin had lain since Parson’s exit, and, with no prior building experience, Les and Betty erected a tent as a temporary dwelling and set to work to complete the structure before the onset of winter.

Once completed, the cabin sat just back from the water on the tip of a small peninsula projecting into the lake from the southern shore. To reach their new home, the VanDeveres had to drive from Kenai on the graveled Kenai Spur Highway, then follow the narrow Island Lake Road until they reached a series of even narrower Cat trails that led eventually to the northwest shore of Parsons Lake. There, in summer, they had to row a small boat across to their property; in winter they used snowshoes.

The isolation and the inaccessibility at Parsons Lake began to work on Idleman, although she said she never felt homesick for the rural Pennsylvania environs in which she grew up. In fact, she said, “if his parents and my mother hadn’t sent us five dollars every so often, or stamps for envelopes, they wouldn’t have heard from us.”

A late 1950s photo of Betty bringing in firewood from one of the many snow-covered piles on the front porch illustrates the austere yet homey nature of their cabin on the lake. Hanging below the center ridgepole is a large set of moose antlers, below which hangs a homemade Christmas wreath. The wood-frame cabin windows are made entirely of plastic, smoke is issuing from the metal stack protruding from the rooftop, and a smiling Betty, with an armload of wood, is wearing a dress and an apron.

Born in 1937, she graduated in 1955 from Neshaminy High School in Bucks County—just north of Philadelphia, but far enough away that cornfields were growing out behind the community’s elementary school. Only a year removed from public school, she was married to Les and they were angling across country in their 1954 Ford pickup, with a homemade wooden canopy packed with belongings in the back, and with every intention to turn north toward Alaska.

Big Les and little Les (Dyer), with some company out by the woodpile.

Because they slept out under the stars for the first few nights, Idleman said, they reached Wyoming before they realized that they had neglected to pack the poles for their tent. They made do with sticks the rest of the way.

Subsisting on whatever they could make, find, hunt or gather became a pattern for the VanDeveres over the next several years. They cooked with a three-burner Coleman stove all the way up the Alaskan Highway and during all the years they lived on Parsons Lake. When they stopped along the Alcan, they dropped the tailgate and set up the stove there, extracting a card table and a pair of folding chairs for their open-air dining room.

At Parsons Lake, the Coleman was even more utilitarian. “There was an oven you could set on top of the Coleman—could put three or four loaves of bread in it,” she said. She also had a pressure cooker that she could place atop the burners when it came time to can meat, vegetables or berries.

Cranberries and blueberries grew plentifully around the lake, schools of rainbow trout and spawning sockeye from Bishop Creek plied the waters, and moose were frequent—and sometimes unlucky—visitors.

According to a Donnis Thompson article about the VanDeveres in the Philadelphia Enquirer’s magazine section in May 1959, Idleman canned 112 containers of moose and trout in 1958. They also grew potatoes, cabbage and carrots in the summer and canned them for winter use. A moose shot late enough in the season could be hung under the eaves, where it would stay frozen until a portion was needed for a meal.

Idleman baked her own bread because store-bought bread was too expensive (45 cents per loaf, according to Thompson’s article), and she used powdered milk for the same reason. Regular milk in a store at the time cost about 45 cents a quart. For a family surviving on commercial fishing and sporadic seasonal employment during the rest of the year, pinching every penny was crucial.

One year they managed a fish trap on the west side of Cook Inlet and netted only $400, which was most of their total income until the next fishing season. “It bought a chainsaw or a drum of Blazo for the Coleman, and maybe a drum of gas for the outboard or the chainsaw,” Idleman said.

When they fished the east side of Cook Inlet, they sold their catch to the cannery owned by Harold Daubenspeck, and in turn Daubenspeck, who traveled north to Alaska each spring from Washington state, aided them with their foodstuffs.

“You’d send your grocery order, what you figured out that you needed for the whole year. So when he would come up in the spring, he’d bring your grocery order and you’d pick it up,” Idleman said.

“The first time that happened, I had to buy groceries for a whole winter, and I was only about 18. I didn’t know what the heck I wanted. It took a long time. You try to decide how much flour, how much corn meal, you know, something like that. And a dozen eggs needed to last a couple of months because you couldn’t afford eggs.”

In the early days, she said, nine families lived in the general vicinity—Island Lake, Dogbone Lake, Parsons Lake and Bishop Lake, among others—but it was almost five years before anyone lived close enough to her to easily walk to visit.

In the wintertime, Tony Johansen ran a trapline in the area and stopped in to see the VanDeveres once or twice a week. Otherwise, especially when Les was away on a job, Betty would be alone in the cabin. Even after the birth of their first son, Lester Dyer VanDevere III, child care did little to alleviate the loneliness.

She spent much of each day tending to her infant, preparing food, cleaning, and feeding the woodstove from the numerous head-high piles of firewood covering the porch and the surrounding ground. In Thompson’s article, Les said, “We’ve had some tough times, but Betty never has become upset. In fact, when things are really tough, Betty is at her best.”

Once, in fact, Betty, who in her early 20s was already learning that sometimes extreme measures were necessary in order to make a point or defend what was hers, had to be tough with a neighbor.

Betty often had a gun close at hand during early homesteading life.

Every time her neighbor across the lake brought G.I. friends down from Anchorage to visit, she said, Idleman had to deal with the shooting—even on one occasion when she had to use her outhouse.

“They were always shooting. You get away and you gotta shoot, you know,” Idleman said. “Well, my outhouse was tin—and the guys over there were shooting, and the pellets—the buckshot, whatever it was—were raining down on the tin roof. I started screaming and hollering, but the shooting kept on going. I knew they heard me.”

From her cabin, it was only a few hundred yards across to the shooters on the other side. Angrily she exited the outhouse and marched down to the lakeshore. “I could hear them holler, so they could hear me holler. So I took a .22 rifle and I aimed right across the lake where I thought the shots were coming from. And I aimed high enough so that bullet got across the lake.”

After her single shot, the blasts from the opposite shore stopped immediately. “No more shots—ever,” she said. “One was enough.”

After fishing the east side for a couple of years, the VanDeveres switched to the west side, first in Tuxedni Bay and later in Chinitna Bay. On one particular summer when their first son was less than a year old, they found themselves encamped on Harriet Point (west of Kalgin Island) when the need for firepower arose again—twice.

For a few days while Les was out fishing and then motoring over to the cannery to pick up a paycheck, Betty practiced her shooting by taking potshots at seagulls. The problems began when another area fisherman who had given Les an outboard motor decided to come calling at the VanDevere wall tent and demand the motor back.

“Well, the only place to keep that outboard is under the bed in the tent, and he wanted it. And he was going to take it,” Idleman said. “So I held a .22 on him. I sat on the bed; Dyer’s sleeping behind me. And I sat there a good half-hour. I said, ‘You know I’ve been shooting. You can see that the safety’s off, and you can see that my finger’s on the trigger. It’s up to you whether you stay or go.’ I had to say that to him a couple of times, and he finally left.”

A day or two later, a sow brown bear with three large juvenile cubs paid a visit to the wall tent, which was situated on a large rock that fronted the tide at high water. The VanDevere dogs started “acting up something fierce,” prompting Idleman to peer outside to see what the problem was. She saw the sow lying contentedly a short distance away while her cubs played, slowly moving closer to the tent, where once again the baby lay sleeping.

“I took a frying pan and a spoon and I banged them together. It didn’t bother them one iota,” said Idleman. “It was just about dark, and ‘Tundra Tom-Tom’ was on the radio. Anyway, the bears kept coming, and I banged the thing and shot off the .22 a couple of times, and that didn’t bother them any.”

Idleman, who had never seen a brown bear before that day, looked at the rising tide, watched the cubs drawing nearer, noticed that the sow was growing edgy, and determined that there was no way those bears were coming through her home.

“I took the old 30.06 and sat down on the step of the penthouse and I got myself all aimed up,” she said. “And mama’s coming now. Mama’s coming. And she got pretty damn close, and she stood up, and I shot her.”

The single round into her left upper chest knocked the sow flat, and she lay dying only a few feet away. The agitated cubs approached and were crying over her as she made murmuring noises and tried to move.

“Well, here’s these three cubs. So now I gotta kill them. So I did. Four bears took 11 shots, and one of (those shots) was going out and making sure mama was really, truly dead.”

Betty became a successful gardener at the lake property.

In the tight-knit fishing community, word of the young woman who single-handedly gunned down four brown bears at once made the rounds rapidly. By the time Les returned a day or two later, he’d already heard, too, and the man who wanted his outboard back pointedly avoided the VanDevere tent for the remainder of the summer.

“After the bears were dead on the beach, he was the tiniest pimple out there going around our place,” Idleman said.

Back on the homestead in winter, the VanDeveres typically parked their truck at Dogbone Lake near the home of Guy Moore because Moore worked every weekday at the Wildwood army station and so he kept the road open. If the weather was particularly severe, they dug out the snow under the truck and placed a lighted Coleman stove there to heat the oil pan. They covered the engine with blankets and then visited with Moore until the truck was ready to start.

If too much snow (or mud in springtime) prevented driving to Kenai, they adopted an alternate strategy: They walked, knowing that if no one picked them up and gave them a ride within six miles, they’d turn around and walk all the way home, hoping in the meantime that someone would save them some legwork.

If they made it all the way into town, Idleman said, they could always count on a ride most of the way home from Morris and Bertha Porter, who lived nearby and operated the telephone company in Kenai.

By 1961, because they found the Parsons Lake property “too inaccessible,” the VanDeveres purchased three lots on Island Lake and created a new home where the roads and neighbors were more plentiful.

The use of firepower, however, remained a constant.

While they were having a new house constructed, the VanDeveres stayed in a small cabin owned by a friend over on Wik Road. One night while Les was away doing longshoreman work, their dog began “barking up a storm.” It was about 5 a.m., and Betty looked out of the cabin to see a black bear chasing the dog one way, then the dog chasing the bear back in the opposite direction. She grabbed for the 30.06 and rushed outside.

In a long nightgown, with mosquitoes buzzing and biting, she aimed at the bear and killed it with a single shot. Later, she found a couple of men who volunteered to butcher the bear, with the idea of barbecuing it at the Forelands Bar that evening.

Meanwhile, that afternoon, a surveyor arrived, wanting to survey some of the property around the cabin where she was staying. As she spoke with him, the dog started barking again, and they both looked up into a nearby aspen to see a frightened black bear cub clinging for all it was worth.

Idleman was matter-of-fact about what had to be done: “I asked the surveyor, ‘Well, you want to shoot, or shall I?’ ‘Oh, I will,’ he said. And he was shaking. It took him seven shots to shoot that bear—he was so shook up. So I went down to the bar that night for the barbecue, and he’s in there telling everybody what a big bear hunter he is. I walked in, and he left.”

These days, as president of the Kenai Historical Society and a member of the Garden Club, 73-year-old Betty Idleman still stays busy but finds little need to go for her gun.