"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.

 

"A Tale Worth the Telling"

Author Scott Ransom with his younger brother, Jeff.

A TALE WORTH THE TELLING

FEBRUARY 2010

Author’s note:  In a slight departure, I offer  a book review, but a book about an important local history, a history that needs telling, and one that goes beyond what the author himself calls “a tale of a young man who went to Alaska, met some amazing people, and had a crazy adventure.”

As Scott Ransom indicates in the epilogue of his recently published memoir, the community about which he wrote, the types of people he portrayed, and the way of life he depicted are all still there—but much changed. What an accomplishment, then, to capture these moments in time and to leave them to posterity, frozen word-bound in 515 pages.

Clam Gulch is an engaging, well-paced narrative that illustrates the life of the Cook Inlet commercial fisherman pursuing various creatures of the sea—salmon, halibut, shrimp, crab, and herring—and does so with good humor, an occasional bluntness or shocking episode, and a voice that the reader can trust through the best and worst of times.

One of the major triumphs of the work is that Ransom so carefully characterizes the main cast that the reader is able to feel a certain kinship with these characters and share in the smiles of their successes and the tears of their tragedies. Even if Ransom misses an occasional minor fact (the exact location of Soldotna’s old Little Ski-Mo’s restaurant) or misspells an occasional name (Ray LaFrenere of the Corea Bar), he misses very little of the spirit of the community and its denizens.

Borough Assembly President Pete Sprague, who was Ransom’s college roommate and came to Alaska a year after Ransom did, said that his old friend “did a heck of a job” re-creating those times, noting that the book was remarkably accurate considering that more than 35 years had passed since the earliest events portrayed.

Dean Osmar, whose extended family is at the epicenter of this story, said, “I think (Scott) got most of it accurate. I mean, you can pick a few things out here and there that are wrong, but anybody that writes a book that complex and about that long ago, you can’t get it all right. Scott, he knows that it’s not a hundred percent accurate, but that’s his remembrance of it.”

Ransom himself admits as much in his preface: “Perspective is important. This story is told from the author’s point of view. Others may be of the opinion that events occurred differently or that their participation in them is not properly represented. Although I was always careful to entertain another viewpoint, my memory was often the final arbiter.”

He said recently that he began writing the book “as a catharsis” after a personal tragedy that occurred in 1994 and is central to the story. Over the intervening years, he continued to labor at his writing, constructing a detailed timeline of events, people and places to lay the groundwork, and interviewing friends and family in an attempt to get his story right.

As a result, the reader is treated to a slice of Kenai Peninsula history and a cast of characters that includes Per Osmar, patriarch of the Osmar clan; Seth Wright, a hard-smoking, hard-working, tale-telling commercial fisherman; Kevin Duffy, another commercial-fishing buddy whose good fortune seemed almost guaranteed; Jeff Ransom, Scott’s kid brother who became jokingly known as “Rico”; and Marcia Ransom, Scott’s wife, to whom the book is dedicated, and whom Scott married inauspiciously on a Friday the 13^th.

Ransom first ventured to Alaska in 1972 when he hitchhiked all the way from upstate New York, ostensibly to spend the summer fighting forest fires in the Interior. As fate would have it, he couldn’t find work in the fire-fighting business, and so he kept accepting rides until the last one dropped him off at a Clam Gulch fish-processing plant known as Osmar’s Ocean Specialties. From that moment, he became a part of the Clam Gulch story, bunking in one of the battered trailers at the Osmar complex, working with Wright on the deceptively dependable Tanner, learning to long-line for halibut, and spending a considerable portion of his free time and some of his money swilling Olys at the Clam Shell bar with the usual crowd.

It was at the Clam Shell that Ransom listened to deal-making and fishery lore, that he expanded his circle of friends and acquaintances, and that he proposed to Marcia. It was also where he and Marcia held a raucous wedding reception that roared on in various intensities for more than 24 hours.

“The Clam Shell was the center of the universe,” said Sprague recently. “The cannery was up on the hill, and the Clam Shell and the grocery store, and they had the gas station, and that was kind of the center of it all.”

Ransom spent so much time there because almost all of them back then spent so much time there. “You know, we were all 25 then, and bullet-proof,” Sprague said. They worked hard and played hard. Sometimes they took chances, and usually they got away with them.

Meanwhile, some of the faces changed, but a core of them returned year after year throughout the 1970s and much of the ’80s and ’90s. “For the most part, we were all very well educated and were out for a sense of adventure,” Sprague said. “And no one was saying you have to go live in the subarctic with very little money and do a lot of hard work but you didn’t have a dollar in your pocket. People come and go, and we just chose to stay.”

The memoir detours on occasion into smaller chapters on hunting, on working on the North Slope, on Dean Osmar’s involvement with the Iditarod, and on the Exxon Valdez oil spill, but always Ransom returns—in his writing, as he did in his life—to the sea. He fishes off Humpy Point and out of Ninilchik, across Kachemak Bay and deep in Bear Cove, across the inlet in Chinitna Bay and around the horn in Resurrection Bay and even Prince William Sound. The lure of another harvest calls him again and again.

Pete Sprague at Clam Gulch in 1979.

And it is this detailed recollection of the way it used to be—in the days before east-side set-netters were pushed into narrower and narrower openings, before the rules and regulations changed the industry, and before the “old guard” was replaced by the succeeding generation—that Ransom offers his best gift to the reader:  the rollicking, difficult lifestyle that the fishermen loved, and that the tourists never saw.

Ransom builds his story slowly, beginning with a brief but interesting scene-setting history of how Per and Fran Osmar homesteaded in Clam Gulch in 1948. Most of the longer chapters occur in the first two-thirds of the book, wherein the majority of the main characters are introduced and Ransom’s eyes are widest open, taking in new environments and fresh experiences, learning one new aspect after another of the craft of commercial fishing.

Scott Ransom on a steamer to Alaska, early 1970s.

After that point, the years speed by more quickly and the chapters appear more staccato, until the multiple resolutions in the thoughtful, often touching epilogue.

Precisely halfway through the book are 25 pages of black-and-white photographs, many of them excellent, and the majority of them taken by Kevin Duffy. The only color photographs occur on the front and back covers—the back photo showing Scott and Jeff Ransom in 1979 on their way to Chinitna Bay, and the front photo, incongruous under the large letters of the title, showing Snug Harbor in Tuxedni Bay.

Ransom said he struggled with his choice of front-cover photo. “A cover needs to attract attention,” he said. “None of the Clam Gulch/Redoubt photos that I ran by my editors and a small focus-group of friends raised much enthusiasm. They all picked the Snug Harbor photo. Also, the picture was taken by my friend Kevin Duffy, so it was a bit of a sentimental choice, also.”

As he memorialized the contribution of his friend, he also memorialized a time and a place, and the inhabitants of that place. His book is well worth the time and energy necessary to journey through the colorful chapters occupying its many pages.

Clam Gulch: A Memoir, by Scott Ransom, was self-published. It is available locally at River City Books in Soldotna.

 

"Mortician Elementary School"

Soldotna Elementary School undergoes one of its many expansions during the 1960s.

MORTICIAN ELEMENTARY SCHOOL

APRIL 2011

Nineteenth-century American essayist Charles Dudley Warner once wrote, “Politics makes strange bedfellows.” In the mid-20th century in Soldotna, however, the strangeness emanated from burgeoning school enrollment—pairing one elementary school class with a public library, and three others with a mortician.

To understand the rationale behind these pairings, one must first understand the times in which they occurred.

Soldotna Elementary School opened for business in 1960, the same year Soldotna became a fourth-class city, only one year after Alaska became a state, and only three years after the discovery of commercial quantities of oil at Swanson River. There was money to be made and opportunities to be had, and new residents thronged the central Kenai Peninsula in order to get a piece of the action.

The original Soldotna Elementary School structure, which even today sits at the core of the facility, consisted of only four classrooms. In those classrooms were 104 students, under the guidance of superintendent/teacher Charley Griffin, a Georgia transplant who was the autocrat of his own district since the Kenai Peninsula Borough had yet to be formed.

The backside of the 1962 expansion.

In its second year, the enrollment leaped to 248 students, and the expansions began. Classrooms were added in 1961-62, again in 1962-63, and again in 1963-64. Although the school finally managed to get ahead of the enrollment increases, the borough, created in 1964, found it necessary to expand Soldotna Elementary again in 1968 and then open Soldotna Junior High School in early 1970.

Even then, after grades 6-8 were moved to the junior high, the borough expanded Soldotna Elementary again in 1975 and once more in 1987.

But it was the earliest of these expansions that created the odd educational symbiosis in Soldotna.

While new rooms were being added in 1961-62, Soldotna went looking for a place to house two classes of students until construction was complete. Fortunately, within easy walking distance of the school was a newly built structure containing two empty offices. Rent was paid to the building’s owners, entrepreneur Madison L. “Red” Grange and his wife Beulah, who recognized a good opportunity.

The following year, with enrollment spiking again, the Granges expanded their office building, adding new units to accommodate new classes.

In 1961-62, Superintendent Griffin had moved his two oldest classes. The following year, however, he moved his four youngest. Into the hastily constructed Grange units went the first-grade classes of Jean Bardelli (now Brockel) and Dorothy Knight, and the second-grade class of a very pregnant Rose Ann English. Into a portion of the fledgling Soldotna Public Library went a combination class of second- and third-graders.

Versions vary—and tend to be hazy—as to how this blended arrangement worked. Three of the early board members and helpers at the library—Katherine Parker, Dolly Farnsworth and Betty Smith—remember the time with slight variations.



One of the first Soldotna librarians, Joyce Carver eyes the collection in 1965.

All of them agree—more or less—on the following: The library had its grand opening only a few weeks before the first day of school, during the July celebration of Soldotna Progress Days. During the festivities, Gov. Bill Egan had come to visit the small facility tucked into the lower left side of the downstairs of the Central Kenai Peninsula Medical Clinic. Next door, downstairs, was the dental office of Dr. Calvin Fair, D.D.S., who had moved in a year earlier.

Probably, in the space later occupied by the library, a certified public account named Ted Gaines had his office. And probably, once he departed and the library books were shelved there in his place, a temporary space was made for a small group of students.

Meanwhile, over in the Grange building, situated perpendicular to and just across a gravel parking lot from the clinic, a small fence separated the closest three units, all containing classrooms, from the last two units, containing the office and lab of John R. Bacak, director of the Copper Delta Mortuary.

Bacak, who had come from Ohio to Alaska in April, had in late June established his “peninsula-wide service,” a branch of a Cordova mortuary, owned and operated by 30-year Cordova resident and then Cordova postmaster, Hollis Hendricks.

First-grade teacher Brockel, whose room abutted Bacak’s office, remembers that generally her students paid more attention to their neighbor than she did: “They would see a car there, parked outside, and they would come in and say, ‘Well, there must be a body next door because the car is there.’”

At the other end of the building, in Rose Ann English’s classroom, then-second-grader Penny McClain said she remembered the mortician and thought his presence there was “spooky.” Despite her youth, she was aware of Bacak’s occupation, partly because of an experience by her older sister, an eighth-grader named Patricia.

Patricia used to babysit for Soldotna Elementary’s eighth-grade teacher, Frank Dunlap, who happened to be a friend of the mortician. One day, Patricia got a ride either to or from the Dunlap residence in Bacak’s vehicle at a time that a body was in the back. She was told that they had “extra company” on the trip.

The worst thing about being away from the main school, however, was not the cramped conditions in the library or the idea of dead bodies next door. The worst thing, according to Brockel and to Mary France, who filled in for English during her maternity leave, was the quality of the rooms themselves in the Grange building.

Since the wood-framed building sat on pilings, a crude set of steps led up to the single door leading into each classroom. Since each door led directly to the outside, each time the door was opened in winter, a blast of cold air was sent inside.

Indoors, a small heater sat under the single large window in front, with a second heater against the back wall. In winter, the heaters and the weak insulation offered poor warmth, so some of the children wore their winter garments indoors all day long.

Each classroom held one teacher’s desk, one teacher’s chair, and an array of student desks. Partitioned off in the back of the room was a small bathroom containing a single toilet and a single sink, with only cold running water.

No classroom contained a blackboard; instead, teachers unrolled long sheets of blank newsprint and affixed them to the walls with strips of masking tape. When the papers were filled, the teachers took them down and put up fresh ones. All custodial duties in these classrooms were the responsibility of the teachers.

On one particular Sunday that winter, Brockel came to her classroom to catch up on some work, and discovered that the flimsy latch on her door had not held during that weekend’s snowstorm. “It had blown open,” she said. “And the plumbing had frozen, and somehow or another a pipe had just burst, and there was water all over the floor, like an inch and a  half or two inches of water—just from wall to wall. You’d just go in and slosh-slosh-slosh. Oh God, what a mess! But that was the only time that year that that floor got washed.”

The playground was the driveway/parking lot in front of the Grange building, and Brockel said that the lack of equipment there was almost compensated for by the freedom of the teachers to have recess whenever they chose.

“If everybody was climbing walls and going crazy, you could say, ‘Okay, put on your coats. Get on your hats. And get out of here,’” said Brockel.

During especially cold winter recesses, recalled McClain, students would sometimes huddle around the exhaust vents from the indoor heaters to stay warm.

The best news about these arrangements was their temporary nature. On Feb. 6, 1963, according to the Cheechako News, 117 students were brought back into the fold—joining the rest of the school for the remainder of the year.

Meanwhile, Bacak lasted only a few months longer in Soldotna, the Grange building stood only a few more years, and the public library eventually moved out of its confined space in the clinic basement and into a home of its own.

 

"Named 'Mud' No Longer"

Tern Lake (shown here) once had a much less attractive moniker.

NAMED ‘MUD’ NO LONGER

JUNE 2010

Every year, thousands of tourists and other travelers stop at Tern Lake, at the junction of the Seward and Sterling highways, to gawk at terns or swans, to photograph waterfowl, to capture the reflection of the surrounding mountains, or simply to stand in awe of this freshwater jewel glistening in the summer sun. Most of these visitors to the lake are blithely unaware, however, that half a century ago this body of water was basically just a marsh, and that it was not always named Tern Lake.

In the late 1940s, when tour bus driver Willard Dunham used to haul passengers from the steamships docking in Seward’s harbor up the rough new Seward Highway, one of his regular stops along the way was what was then called Mud Lake because it was—despite its attraction to terns even then—little more than a spongy bog.

In fact, a 1915 reconnaissance map of the area depicts no body of water there at all.

Today, Tern Lake sits at a confluence of asphalt ribbons and alpine valleys. Travelers can drive west toward Seward, north toward Anchorage, or east toward Soldotna and Kenai. To the west lies Trail Lake and Trail River; to the north, the upper Quartz Creek and Summit Creek drainages; and to the east the lower Quartz Creek and upper Kenai River drainages. Tern Lake itself is drained by the narrow, meandering waters of Daves Creek, which parallels the Sterling Highway east until it dumps into Quartz Creek and continues toward Sunrise Inn on lower Kenai Lake. Tern Lake is fed largely by snow melt from the surrounding mountains, chiefly Wrong Mountain, just west of Crescent Lake.

Daves Creek and Tern Lake form high-quality spawning and rearing habitat for chinook, coho and sockeye salmon, rainbow trout and Dolly Varden char, slimy sculpin and round whitefish. These fish in their various stages attract predators such as the terns, and the flora in the lake and along its perimeter attract browsing moose and feeding, dam-building beavers.

A tourist admires the mirror-like surface of Tern Lake.

Because of the lake’s location, it is an ideal spot for wildlife viewing, and throughout the summer camera-toting passersby can be seen sliding from the seats of their vehicles parked in the large turnout along the lake’s northern shore.

Even back in Dunham’s day, the lake was an attraction because the terns were so plentiful. “I’d stop at Mud Lake and let (the tourists) watch the terns—feeding, chasing ducks, and nesting,” Dunham said. “And the terns were always there. Loads of ‘em, and they were great to watch.”

Dunham, who arrived in Seward as a teen-ager in 1943, drove one of three 1937 buses that his boss had purchased from Washington State Transit and had shipped north to Seward. Up and down the graveled highway, Dunham carried 27 passengers at a time into the Cooper Landing area. Each trip—a two-way distance of approximately 110 miles—took almost eight hours to complete, including sight-seeing stops, and Dunham made this trip twice a week, every Tuesday and Thursday throughout the summer months of 1948, ’49 and ’50.

“We used to pick up the passengers and sell trips to what was called Henton’s Lodge at that time—where they cross on the ferry and the combat fishing is now. Henton’s was the Sportsman’s Lodge. That was the end of my trip.”

Along the way, Dunham stopped in Moose Pass or near Crescent Creek to see if any miners were on hand to perform a demonstration, spin a few yarns, and give a spiel to the tourists. He also turned in at Lawing to show them Alaska Nellie’s place, and he pulled in for a few minutes at Our Point of View above Kenai Lake. Dunham also fed his patrons—usually a cold beef sandwich, some chips and hot coffee at Henton’s—before turning back toward Seward.

It was a good gig, Dunham said, until a few tour-bus competitors arrived in Seward and took away some of his business. Until then, he said, the tours had been going strong, and the tourists had especially enjoyed the terns at Mud Lake.

Of course, Dunham said, tourists weren’t the only ones who enjoyed the Mud Lake area. He said that it was fairly easy to circumnavigate the lake on foot in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and he was among a number of men who used to pack in their shotguns to get at the abundant waterfowl. “I used to do a lot of duck hunting in there,” Dunham said. “It was a great fall place because the flocks came up through the canyon there. When the weather was bad or socked in on either side, they would land in Mud Lake because it was a great place to feed.”

Hikers on the unnamed mountain just north of the lake gain a truer perspective on the lake's size.

He also recalled that moose hunters occasionally trod the bogs to nail a feeding bull. “I remember one time some fool shot a bull over there. It went in about belly-deep in the water, and he had a helluva time. Finally, he was just going to leave it, but we forced him to go get a boat and go get it out of there.”

Over time, the Tern Lake basin has continued to fill, and some topographic maps now show it to be nearly three-quarters of a mile long in places, although it is dotted with tiny mossy islands, making it difficult to fully appreciate it size when standing at lake level.

Although the outlet of Daves Creek was altered when the Sterling Highway was constructed in the late 1940s, and changed somewhat again when the highway was realigned in the 1960s, Dunham believes that these changes don’t fully account for the lake’s growth. He does, however, believe that a combination of nearby roadbeds and building construction may have altered the water table.

He also believes that melting pockets of glacier ice in the surrounding mountains have gradually filled the Tern Lake basin.

According to Cooper Landing historian, Mona Painter, the “driving force” in changing the name of the lake from Mud to Tern was a Seward resident named Luella McMullen James, who owned an apparel store named McMullen’s on Fourth Avenue in Seward. James also owned a summer cabin on lower Kenai Lake, and she didn’t think that “Mud” adequately suited the beauty and all it had to offer.

The change became official sometime in the 1960s.

As the Forest Service plan goes forward to upgrade the headwaters of Daves Creek—to improve the passage of salmon and other fish in and out of the lake—other plans (boardwalks and viewing stations, some of them connected to the Tern Lake campground) should keep Tern Lake an active tourist stop for generations to come.

 

"Ray Lights the Way"

Ray Burton with one of his lamps.

RAY LIGHTS THE WAY

AUGUST 2011

In November 1962, Raymond E. Burton of Cohoe received a polite Dear John letter concerning his job as a lamplighter for the U.S. Coast Guard.

According to the January 1963 Alaska Sportsman magazine, that letter, written by Capt. Albert E. Harned, Chief of Staff for the 17th Coast Guard District, informed the 54-year-old Burton that, although his “faithful service” had been “completely satisfactory in every respect” for seven and a half years, he was being dropped from the payroll.

Such a termination may seem a rude way to reward faithful, satisfactory performance—especially for the last lamplighter of his kind in the nation—but Burton was not being punished. He was simply a victim of progress. Marine lamplighting—a navigational aid in America’s coastal waterways and obscure inlets—had changed before, and it was about to change again.

According to a brief article about Burton in the Nov. 12, 1962, Newsweek magazine, the first colonial lighthouse was erected on Great Brewster Island at the entrance to Boston Harbor in 1716. This lighthouse burned a wick in whale oil, which colonists considered progressive compared to the candle-powered lighthouses still being employed in some locations by the British.

Eventually, however, whale oil gave way to kerosene and, more than two centuries later, to electricity. In 1962, when his lamps were extinguished and replaced by battery-powered electric lights, Burton’s services were rendered superfluous.

Of course, the proverbial handwriting had been on the wall for some time: The Coast Guard, which in 1939 had assumed the nation’s lamplighting duties, had been slowly, inexorably reducing staff. In Alaska, for instance, the number of lamplighters in 1950 was 32; only eight years later only 13 fuel-burning range lamps were still in service.

The progress toward full electrification—the Homer Electric Association brought power into the Cohoe area in 1957—meant that eventually all range lamps would soon operate without continual refueling by lamplighters. And on Nov. 15, 1962, Burton’s lamplighting contract flickered out as the final such operation in the United States.

Since the mid-1950s, Burton had tended a pair of kerosene-powered range lights set in towers near the Kasilof River mouth. In summer, he usually drove in his Jeep down the beach the mile and a half from his spruce-ensconced Cohoe home, and in the winter he made the semi-weekly trip via snowshoes. It was the lamplighter’s job to keep such navigational lights burning, regardless of the weather, and Burton, a commercial fisherman and school bus driver, took his duty seriously.

Both of the Kasilof lights stood near the river mouth on the Cohoe side. The tower containing one of the lights stood 15-20 feet tall, while the second tower stood about two-thirds as tall and was located closer to the waters of Cook Inlet. Anyone entering the Kasilof River after dark could line up the two lights—one over the top of the other—and safely navigate the entrance, assuming that the tide was appropriately high.

“The Kasilof range lights have aided many fishing fleets and tenders to find their way to a safe mooring, and have been used as guide markers for hunters in the Tustumena area,” said the Cheechako News in a Nov. 30, 1962, article.

Burton, who died at age 65 in December 1975, was married to Florence, the sister of Elfrida “Freda” Lewis, who in 1950 opened Cohoe’s first post office in her home and served as its postmistress there for a quarter-century.

Freda, her husband Charlie and their son and daughter traveled in 1948 with Ray and Florence and their three sons up the Alaskan Highway from Berkeley, California, in trucks containing camping equipment and many of their belongings. The two families combined their financial resources to purchase the Victor Holm homestead, and after settling in, Ray and Charlie went to work for the Alaska Road Commission building the Sterling Highway between Soldotna and Homer.

Burton with the VW wan he used initially as a school bus for the Tustumena School.

Although Charlie continued working for the ARC, Ray moved on to commercial fishing and then in 1955 he employed a two-tone Volkswagen van as the first school bus serving the fledgling Tustumena School.  Burton transported students for free until a few years later when he was awarded a busing contract with the school district. By the early 1960s, he was using four larger buses to haul students to Tustumena and to Kenai High School. Later, he sold his bus business to Burton Carver, who already owned buses serving Kenai and Soldotna.

Burton also served as president of the Soldotna Square Dance Club, was involved with the Cohoe Characters acting group, and for a time presided as president of the local Parent Teachers Association. In 1970, three years after Florence had passed away, he donated 10 acres of his land to the Tustumena School.

The Burtons’ youngest son, Greg, who is 64 and lives in Colorado, was about seven years old when his father began working as a lamplighter for the Coast Guard. He remembers the lamplighting routine: “There was a ladder permanently affixed to each lighthouse,” Greg said. “Dad would climb up to retrieve the lanterns, extinguish them, fill them on the ground and take the lanterns back up and relight. They were easy to light. They were like any of the old chimney kerosene lanterns with a wick, only bigger. A couple of times of year, the government would deliver kerosene in five-gallon cans that Dad would store and use to fuel the two lighthouses. I can’t remember precisely how often Dad had to refuel the lights (but) the lights were never extinguished or went out, to my knowledge.”

Upon ending his lamplighting career, according to the Newsweek article, Ray, “unlike a lot of men left behind in the march of progress (would) not be jobless after this technological advance.” A former Berkeley fireman, Burton said that he hoped to dedicate more time to the clearing of his 30-acre homestead. After 14 years of “spare-time stump-pulling,” he reported, he had thus far cleared only three acres.

In recognition of the long history and important service Burton represented, his old-fashioned oil-burning lamps were shipped to Washington, D.C., to be placed in the permanent Coast Guard display in the Smithsonian Institution.

Other lamplighters had preceded Burton in his oil-toting and lamp-refueling duties on the Kasilof River, so, although he was not the first, he clearly was the last.

 

The Lewis and Burton families, late 1940s. (Photo from Once Upon the Kenai)

"The Long Journey Finally Ends"

This two-page spread was part of a 1972 National Geographic story on what was then the four-year-old village of Nikolaevsk.

THE LONG JOURNEY FINALLY ENDS

MAY 2012

On June 19, 1975, the list before the court contained the names of 59 adults. The members of four extended families—the Reutovs, the Martushevs, the Kuzmins and the Basargins—accounted for more than 40 of the names, all from the village of Nikolaevsk, and all of them about to become citizens of the United States.

A special U.S. District Court session in the gymnasium of the Anchor Point School had become a naturalization ceremony for this band of former Russian dissidents, the oldest of whom had embarked more than 50 years earlier on a round-the-world trek in search of a safe, productive and permanent home. Those elders had traveled more than 20,000 miles across three continents; however, their long exodus had had its true beginnings more than 300 years earlier, when the

Old Believers await the naturalization ceremony.

ancestors of these villagers had refused to accept the religious reforms of the Russian Orthodox Church.

Now they were about to swear an oath of allegiance to the United States and receive hearty congratulations from Alaska dignitaries as well as U.S. President Gerald R. Ford.

Three years earlier, in the pages of the September 1972 edition of National Geographic, the founding of the tiny then-four-year-old village of Nikolaevsk was documented by the words of Homer resident Jim Rearden and photographer Charles O’Rear. The photos depicted a rough-hewn rural existence that seemed nearly to be an anachronism and belied the turmoil and travails behind the village’s very existence.

Nikolaevsk sits about nine road miles due east of Anchor Point on the southern Kenai Peninsula and is populated largely by Old Believers, adherents to the path set forth by their dissident ancestors. Currently, its population is about 300, but at its peak it contained about 500 residents. In more recent decades, some of the Old Believers have abandoned village life completely, some have moved to other Old Believer communities in the Lower 48, and some have splintered off into even smaller and more remote southern-peninsula communities of their own—Voznesenka, Razdolna and Kachemak Selo.

The Trouble Begins

In the 1650s, the Russian Patriarch Nikon attempted to reform the rites of the Russian Orthodox Church to bring them back into line with the Greek Orthodox tradition, from which Russian Christianity had originated nearly 700 years earlier. The Orthodox who refused to conform to Nikon’s edict called themselves the Staroviertsi, or “Old Believers,” but Nikon called them heretics. Peter the Great excommunicated them from the church.

The Old Believers spent generations being persecuted and worshipping in secret, and in 1907 about 40,000 of them moved into the more isolated countryside of southeastern Siberia. They lived in relative peace, working on homesteads and farms, until the rise of the communism in 1917 forced the concept of collectivism upon them and drove them into further isolation.

Some of the group settled in China’s undeveloped frontier in Manchuria, where Pimen Yakunin, one of the early residents of Nikolaevsk, captured or killed Manchurian tigers in order to eke out a living. In the 1972 National Geographic article, Rearden records one of Yakunin’s exploits: “’There were wild boars, deer, bears, and tigers,’ he said, rolling up his sleeve to show me vivid scars left by the claws of a young tiger he captured. ‘My dogs cornered it, and I was clawed while pinning its head down with a big forked stick. After the capture I sold the animal to a zoo. I caught or killed about 40 tigers, altogether. Once a tiger stalked me; I turned and shot him just as he leaped at me.’” Yakunin sold the parts of dead tigers as ingredients in Chinese medicine, and he did the same with other animal body parts, such as antlers.

Image of a woman cutting hay near her home in Nikolaevsk--from
the 1972 National Geographic article.

It was not an easy life, but the Old Believers prospered for nearly a quarter-century until the communist takeover of China. Over the next decade or so, about 2,000 Old Believers moved to Hong Kong with aid from intergovernmental agencies and the World Council of Churches. From there, in 1958, the Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration helped them settle in Brazil, where the World Council of Churches provided 6,000 acres of land at Curitiba, about 200 miles southwest of Sao Paulo.

But life in Brazil—although relatively free of persecution—suited the Old Believers poorly. The soil was difficult, many crops failed, and some of the Old Believers worried that the political tide in Brazil was on the verge of turning against them. With the help of the Tolstoy Foundation—established by Alexandra Tolstoy, daughter of the famous Russian novelist, for the preservation of Russian culture in America and the broadening of cultural awareness among Russian youth—many of the Old Believers settled next in the Woodburn area of Oregon, about 30 miles south of Portland.

Again, however, the cultural fit was poor.

Old Believers do not smoke, shave, drink hard liquor, use birth control, or drink tea and coffee. They also have dietary restrictions, and they live with numerous cultural practices that are far different than those of the “outside” world. In Oregon, surrounded by modern American temptations, they “found their cherished convictions under assault,” according to Rearden. And so, once again, they began to look elsewhere. One small group, consisting mainly of a few large families, decided to explore Alaska for a new and more remote area in which to resume their “old way” of life.

Rearden picks up the story here: “In 1967 four full-bearded Russian expatriates arrived on the Kenai, seeking land for their people and information on Alaska living. They [were] looking for a way to escape the temptations and distractions of modern America…. The four inspected and bought a square mile of wilderness from the state. ‘They walked every foot of that section,’ a farmer who accompanied them told me. ‘They found the springs, the best places to build, and located the best timber.’ The first four houses were built in 1968—lonely, raw cabins in a vast spruce forest. Electricity was brought in by the local cooperative, and more families arrived.”



Icon image of St. Nikolas from the Russian Orthodox Church in Kenai.

They paid $14,000 for the land, and they dubbed their new community Nikolaevsk after St. Nikolas, the patron saint of their church.

At the end of the his article, Rearden quoted 83-year-old Grigory Martushev, who posited a final comment on the achievement of the Old Believers finally finding a permanent home: “I have been running for 40 years,” he said. “At Nikolaevsk I stop.”

With a Little Help from Their Friends

In the gym that day, the 59 Old Believers and most of the rest of the village residents wore their finest and brightest garments, their “Easter clothes,” according to a Betzi Woodman story in the Anchorage Daily Times. The style of dress was largely reminiscent of life in Russia 300 years earlier, back when their troubles and their hope for a safe new home began.

The fulfillment of that hope culminated in the Anchor Point gym, but first they required the assistance of Kenai Peninsula Community College, some dedicated advisors, and a retired military man.

In 1974, Ilarion Polushkin, the mayor of Nikolaevsk, wrote to Clayton Brockel, the director of the college, and requested assistance in obtaining adult education classes in the village, with the goal of teaching willing villagers the requirements of citizenship via the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. Since the college had dedicated itself since its inception to providing adult education wherever it was needed on the Kenai Peninsula, Polushkin’s letter led to classes, which met two evenings each week, beginning in January 1975 and concluding in April. Classes were taught by Bob Moore, who later became the principal of the Nikolaevsk school, and by Joy Strunk (now McMahill).

Bob Moore (standing) works with Old Believers studying for their citizenship exam. (University of Alaska Anchorage image)

According to The Kenai Peninsula College History, by Lance Petersen, the educational efforts were also assisted by Joe Lowrie, district director of the Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization in Anchorage. Lowrie, who facilitated the whole project through the college, made sure that Moore and Strunk had sound advice, plus access to textbooks and films in both English and Russian versions.

At first, about 40 Old Believers, including 10 women, were enrolled in the classes, but at times there were as many of 60 present. Although only a few spoke any English in the beginning, most could by the time of the ceremony, according to the Times story.

After all the decades of running, the years of building a new home, and the months of preparation for citizenship, the Hon. James A. von der Heydt presided over the naturalization ceremony, which included messages of welcome and congratulations from the president, U.S Rep. Don Young, and senators Mike Gravel and Ted Stevens.

Pres. Ford’s message began, “There are certain unforgettable moments in everyone’s life—moments that we treasure as long as we live. I hope that for you this is one of them. It is my pleasure to welcome you most warmly to citizenship in the United States of America.”

Later he added, “The American experiment goes on. You are now a vital part of it.”

Stevens likened the Russians’ struggles to those of early American colonists: “You, like the pilgrims of 1620, have traveled far in your search for religious freedom. I am hopeful that you have at last come to the end of your journey and am confident you will flourish here in Alaska.”

Retired Brigadier General Benjamin B. Talley, a North Fork Road neighbor who became the Old Believers’ closest friend and most trusted counselor, began helping the residents of the fledgling Nikolaevsk from the moment they began carving their home out of the wilderness. At the naturalization ceremony, Talley narrated the story of the Russians’ struggles to build their new home, and after the ceremony, at a celebration back in the village, Nikolaevsk residents raised a toast of braga and singled out Talley for special recognition.

In addition to Talley’s narrative, those assembled heard from Mrs. Milo Fritz, who presented welcome cards and the flag code from the Daughters of the American Revolution, and from representatives of the Homer Elks Lodge who presented each new citizen with an American flag.

James Demetri Sourant of the Anchorage Bar Association, whose parents had been born and educated in Russia, told the Nikolaevsk residents that they shared a common bond since his parents had also immigrated to the United States. He then gave the official welcoming address to the Old Believers in both Russian and English.

Further, according to the Times story, Sourant reminded the Old Believers of the moral obligation to be responsible citizens and charged them to be informed and intelligent voters. He said their self-reliance was necessary “as a personal example to keep the spirit of America alive.”

And Kiril Martushev, according to an article in the Cheechako News, “responded in halting but expressive English” to Sourant’s address: “It is a long time that we have been looking for a place like this in the world where we can live our own life and be free in our belief in God. We have found such a place in the United States and especially in the state of Alaska.”

School children comprised part of the Old Believer contingent
at the Anchor Point naturalization ceremony.

At the conclusion of the ceremony, a group of Old Believers sang three old Russian songs, and a group of about 15 school children led the audience in the Pledge of Allegiance.

Then guests were invited back to the village for a feast to celebrate the accomplishments of citizenship, and the toasting and storytelling—less than 700 miles from the part of Russia where the Old Believers’ trek had begun—stretched well into the night.