Showdown In Chicken

My Uncle, John Logan (left) and Slim Williams, lost and starving, stumbled into Chicken, Alaska in July 1939.  This photo was taken after their first real breakfast in a month.  "Too stuffed to move,"  John wrote on the back of the photograph. They thought Chicken was paradise. Compared to starving to death in the wilderness, it was.

Chicken looks more like an industrial  dump now. I was stuck in Chicken for 5 days this spring. It felt like a month.

 Yesterday, my good friend Bill Freeman pointed out that Chicken,  (pop. 17) was raided. The Feds charged in to inspect federal land for pollution.  The miners screamed bloody murder. We picture the gold miners as guys with beards bent over a stream with a pan in their hands.

 

 

 

 That was a hundred years ago. 70 years ago, this machine helped make Chicken the dirt pile it is today.  (There's a lot of this junk lying around Chicken.)  This 3 story barge lumbered down the riverbed and chewed it all up.  All of it. Modern gold mining equipment is smaller and equally destructive.

The backside of the barge. (click pic to enlarge)

Picture these buckets, bolted to the conveyer belt sticking out of the front of the barge above,  20 wheelbarrows a scoop, whirling through a river, turning everything from fish and birds nests to reeds and rocks into a muddy stone soup with a wee pile of gold on the side.  Gold mining ranks right up there alongside fracking for trashing a landscape. This particular dredge was owned by a company owned by the Guggenhiems of New York City.  Go gettem, Feds, I say.

What Alaskans Won't Tell you

  

 



Alaskans will tell you that Alaska is beautiful. And it is.  Drive down almost any road and mountains rise up before you with lakes shimmering at their feet.  

What Alaskans won't tell you is that an impressive number of Alaskans are deeply religious.

 



 

Yes, many Alaskans worship Detritus, God of Junk.  Yard after yard proudly displays rusting dishwashers, delaminating campers, burial mounds of tires, cadavers that were once cars, junker pickups, fractured toilets and mushroom farms of upholstery.

And if your Alaskan neighbor has more junk in his yard than you have in yours, no problem. Go down to your local friendly neighborhood junk store and buy more junk.

My First Accident

 

I killed my stepstool. 

 

I was in a hurry, backing up and you can't see out the back with the camper on the truck. I was just going for a trial run. I didn't get ten feet, backing up in my driveway when I heard "crunch."

 

I still have 6,500 miles to go to Alaska and back.  This could be a long trip.

Airborne over the Yukon

Retracing Uncle John's motorcycle trek from Fairbanks to Seattle should be easy. GPS, fleece, nylon, thinsulate, smartphone, hemi Dodge Ram Big Horn; I've got a lot of stuff he didn't.

But every time I add something to the pile of stuff I want to take with me to Alaska, I have to add even more stuff.  Which in turn, requires more stuff.

So if I want to put a camper on the back of my truck, I have to add air springs.  These little air-baggies "pump up sagging trucks to carry up to two thousand extra pounds!"  The instructions promised two hours to install but didn't allow for putting the brackets in upside down the first time, trips to the hardware store for stuff to install the stuff.  $237 for the Air Lift springs plus another $67 for drill bits and stuff.

If you add air springs you'll want to bolt a big anti-sway bar on the back axle so the truck won't "handle like the Queen Mary" and try to roll over on the hump back side roads of the Yukon. $232. 

If you do the anti sway bar you will want tie downs for your camper, like Tork-lift's heavy steel flanges you bolt to the frame of the truck to  keep the camper from sliding off the back or flipping over the side. $239.  Plus anchors you bolt into the rear truck bumper for the same reason.  $59.  The truck could use a new heavy duty (and very heavy) battery; $139. New hoses, belts brake pads, ball joints etc. etc. $1,305. 

This stuff adds up and it's only truck stuff. My stuff  (a fork?  two forks?  Power toothbrush or manual? 2,000 watt generator?) will be extra.

While I weigh the cost and weight of a memory foam gel mattress, a sweet deal on a Club Le Med down alternative comforter filled with "down like polyester fibers" on Groupon, and whether or not I should add a pry bar to my tool bag, I can hear my Uncle cackling.

He and Slim Williams made the trip with almost nothing but a motorcycle, an axe and a tarp.  They didn't even have a road.

I Bought the Wrong Truck

            I bought the wrong truck. 

           Yeah, yeah, it looks tough with that big chrome grill and high off the ground, high lift, tough guy, "my truck is bigger than your truck" attitude.  It’s the big bright white one with the 5.7 liter hemi, 4 wheel drive and a crew cab for all those red neck heavily armed NFL linemen that hang with me. Stand back. It’s a 2007 Dodge 1500 Ram Big Horn, with Big Wheels and a suspension lift kit so you got to stretch to reach the handle to haul yourself up into the cab way high off the ground. Later, after I buy it, I find out it’s about as tough as a marshmallow.   

          The Ram looks like don’t worry about the safe, this mother can haul the bank.  Truth is, it can’t haul the safe.  If I’d have done the math, I’d have known that. Actually they do the math for you. The plate inside the door says “seating capacity 6.”  OK, me and the NY Giants defensive line.  The plate goes on to say that “combined weight of occupants and cargo never to exceed 1232 lbs.” 

           Never?  Say the average weight of the New York Giants defensive lineman is 300 lbs.  I know it’s more than that and you’ve probably guessed that the Giants defensive line is not hanging with me in Montana.  Never mind.  So the total weight of us big hard men in the crew cab is 1725.  I weigh 225 and if I get out of the truck it won’t be enough.  Two of those linemen have to get out and walk before I can put a toothpick in the bed of this pickup truck. 

           We are in the baroque age of trucks.  Your average American pickup now looks like a chrome barn on wheels, way bigger, higher off the road that it needs to be.  One day some truck maker with more imagination and a smaller piece of the market than Ford, Chevy or Dodge, will risk a lighter, lower, smaller truck with way better aerodynamics that will get much better mileage, haul more and haul ass.  But until then, this puffed up mask of American Male Macho whines, “don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me.  Don’t put that big ol’ camper on my back or my wheels will fall off.” 

          You mean a half ton truck will only carry a half ton?  Who knew?

          In 1939 my Uncle John Logan (pic on the right) rode, pushed, carried, floated and hauled a little BSA 250 cc motorcycle from Fairbanks Alaska before there was a road.  His partner from the trip was a 57 year old Alaska Sourdough named Slim Williams.  Given an hour, an axe and a 8x10 foot square of canvas he could build a boat with that axe, shaping saplings into a boat frame and small trees into oars.  And the boat would float him and the motorcycle across a two mile wide river.  Uncle John shot 16 mm. color film of Slim doing just that in nowhere Yukon.

         The film and motorcycle are safe inside the museum of Alaska in Anchorage. But I have the big prize. I have Uncle John’s diary, the story of his great adventure written in pencil night by night by the campfire.  It’s a great story but it needs some local color, a little more detail the publisher says.  So I am going to retrace John’s route, and the marshmallow is my weapon of choice. 

           Plus of course, a camper.  I know, if I were a real hard ass, I’d do it by motorcycle.  But at an age where most men with any remaining sense are creeping into rest homes and learning how to cheat at poker, I am not going to endure unnecessary hardship.  Logan did that trip when he was 25.  His partner Slim Williams, was 57 with forty years of living in the wild Alaska territory, running a 300 mile trapline in the artic winter, and driving a dogsled a thousand miles north to live with the Eskimos. In 1933 Slim drove his dog team all the way from Alaska to Seattle, put model T Ford wheels on his sled and drove his part-wolf dogs and sled on to Chicago for the World’s Fair.  Where Eleanor Roosevelt invited him to the White House.  So he drove his team to the White House where he made the case for a road to Alaska to President Roosevelt.

           I’ve got to go to Alaska to research this story and I am going to take more than a canvas and an axe.  I don’t care what the plate says.  The marshmallow is going to carry a camper on its back. 

Slim Williams builds a boat with an axe and a tarp

       
    In 1939 my Uncle, John T. Logan rode, pushed, carried, and pulled, a motorcycle from Fairbanks Alaska to Seattle, Washington to show a road was not only possible, but also, the best route for a road that would connect the lower 48 to the remote northern territory. 

If you look closely you can see the motorcycle his partner, Slim Williams, is loading into a small boat that Slim built in two hours from scratch with an axe and a tarp.

           His partner was an old Alaska Sourddough, Slim Williams.  Slim had done the trip before in the Winter of 1933 by dog sled.  When Slim got to Seattle he took the wheels off a Model T Ford put them on his sled and kept on mushing all  the way to the Chicago World's Fair.
  

Eleanor Roosevelt said Slim and his dogs were her favorite exhibit and invited Slim to the White House.  “The driver has the kind of blue eyes that look away off to distant horizons,” said Mrs. Roosevelt.  “I loved his dogs.  They were grand.  I was careful of them and polite to them and asked if I might pat them.  There were two, only half wolf, that it was alright to pat.” Slim and his dogs went to the White House several times.

 

 Sometimes Slim built bridges with his axe.  It was getting dark and Slim and John were cold and tired and so they waited until morning to cross  the creek on their new bridge

A great cracking sound woke them up in the morning.  The creek was a fast running river and their bridge was gone.

Slim and John crossed over a hundred rivers.  Some of them by a raft they'd build on the spot from trees along the river bank and a tarp they used for a ground sheet or tent depending on the weather. John took photos, and 16 mm movies.  Click on this next link and you can see Slim, building the raft (click on "Access this Item" at the top of the link's page)  to cross the Klappan River, his only tool was an axe, in this remarkable archive film at the University of Alaska's Museum of Alaska.