The Final Frontiersman Read online

  Praise for The Final Frontiersman

  “A fascinating account.”

  —The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

  “This is a magical book in many ways; it tells of a land that most of us will never see and can’t imagine… . Korth may be the last of the true frontiersman, but Campbell has made certain that he won’t be forgotten.”

  —Library Journal

  “Campbell interweaves a compelling character study and adventure narrative with wider issues that affect the Korths… . He limns the alien beauty of the landscape as sharply as he captures the lives of this equally unusual family, conveying both the ‘melancholy and exultation’ of life in such an extreme place.”

  —Jackson Hole News and Guide

  “[A] tale as wild and rich as the Alaskan wilderness.”

  —Summit Daily News

  “The book flows as rapidly as the flooding streams during ice melt.”

  —Billings Gazette

  “Campbell writes beautifully and tells the story without romanticizing the Korths’ way of life.”

  —The Isthmus

  “The Final Frontiersman is an important book… . Campbell’s ability to synthesize the large and the small makes [it] both a timely and timeless achievement.”

  —Lincoln Star Journal

  “James Campbell guides us back into Krakauer country, but takes us deeper than Krakauer ever did. In fact, The Final Frontiersman makes all like books seem tame in comparison. In glittering, crisp prose, Campbell invites us into the life of Heimo Korth, a life at turns exhilarating and tragic, but always compelling. Sure to be a classic of the genre.”

  —David Gessner, author of Return of the Osprey

  ATRIABOOKS

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Copyright © 2004 by James Campbell

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  For information address Atria Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-9121-4

  ISBN-10: 1-4165-9121-4

  ATRIABOOKS is a trademark of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Map by Paul J. Pugliese

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  http://www.SimonSays.com

  To My Mother and Father, Who Have Always Believed

  and to the Memory of Coleen Ann Korth

  Acknowledgments

  First on my list of people to thank are the Korths, for taking me in, feeding me, courageously revealing their lives to me. I have tried to honor their lives with this book.

  Next is Elizabeth, my wife, love of my life, fellow adventurer, the woman who faithfully sticks by me, and first reader of all my work, who challenged me, always, to make this book better. And to my daughters, Aidan and Rachel, who each day make me grateful.

  Thanks to David McCormick, my agent, who believed in this book’s potential from the very beginning and then helped to make it a reality. Thanks also to Leslie Falk, who endured the ignorance of a first-time book writer, and to David Sobel, my occasional publishing advisor.

  Writers write, and editors edit, or so a writer-friend once told me. The truth is he was wrong. The humbling fact is that writing is ultimately a collaborative act. At the top of the list of people who helped me to shape this story is Luke Dempsey, my editor, who aside from being a master craftsman is also a helluva guy—friendly, patient, always supportive, unflappable.

  Thanks to my old Boulder, Colorado, buddies: Burns Ellison, astute reader, lover of Alaska, traveling companion, a second brother to me; and to dear friend, fellow writer, and now fellow father, too, David Gessner, who took time away from his own book to read early drafts of this book. I am indebted to writer-friends Dean King and Carolyn Kremers, whose close reads and incisive comments made this book so much better; to trail bum Tim Malzhan; to wilderness man Stu Pechek; to the big-hearted Lucia Berlin for encouraging me when I was young, raw, and dreamy-eyed; and to the incomparable Reg Saner, poet and essayist, who took a group of us writers in, reminding us always that we must offer the reader the sweat from our brows.

  Many thanks to a host of Alaskans who shared their stories and helped to make this book possible: Steve Ulvi and Lynette Roberts for their generosity of spirit, the camaraderie, the drink, and the discourse; to Dave Musgrave for his friendship and hospitality; to Dan O’Neill and Sarah Campbell for the thoughtful conversation, the moose stew, and the occasional dram of whiskey; Alex and Nancy Tarnai, too, for the Sunday breakfasts and their generosity; pilot-philosopher Kirk Sweetsir; Roger Kaye with his poet’s heart; Bill Schneider for his willingness, always, to help, and to Sid and Willa Schneider, too; Paul and Dawn Jagow, Randy and Karen Kallen-Brown, Dean Wilson, Harry Bader, Alonzo Kelly, Don Ross, Fran Mauer, Joe Dart, Ron Long, John Peterson, Ron Bennett, David Schlesinger, Lou Swenson, Scott Fischer, Randy Zarnke, Keith Koontz, Pete Buist, Rick Schikora, Gene Hume, Dick Bishop, Percy Dyke, Simon Francis, Paul Herbert, Sarah James, Katherine Peter, Fred Thomas, Bill Pfisterer, Joe Matesi, and the Alaska Native Language Center.

  Thanks, also, to Bert and Janie Gildart for showing me Alaska and to the always-informed, indefatigable Allen Smith.

  Thanks to Heimo’s sister Lisa for making my reunion with Heimo possible, and for her assistance and candor, to Heimo’s sister Angie for her willingness to talk with me, and to Heimo’s childhood friends, Jim Kryzmarcik, Roland Pruno, and Steve Laabs.

  I am grateful to my brother and sidekick, Jeffrey, who missed this adventure, but was there for so many of the others; to my sisters, Jill and Jennifer, whose unfailing support means the world to me; and to my parents-in-law and faithful supporters, Daggett and Ellie Harvey.

  Thanks to the librarians at the Woman’s Club Public Library in town and to Marsha Monaco-Bletsch, my travel agent.

  And finally, a world of thanks to those writers who came before me whose thoughts inform this book.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Introduction

  1. Winter

  2. Growing Up Wild

  3. The Final Frontier

  4. The Big Woods

  5. On the Coleen

  6. Spring

  7. Back-to-Nature Boys

  8. Hunting the Ice Whale

  9. A Family of His Own

  10. Summer

  11. Closing of the Frontier

  12. Fall

  13. A Way of Life

  Selected Bibliography

  “It is not on any map. True places never are.”

  —Herman Melville, Moby Dick

  “I wanted movement and not a calm course of existence. I wanted excitement and danger and the chance to sacrifice myself for my love.”

  —Leo Tolstoy, Family Happiness

  Prologue

  He had a backpack, a sleeping bag, a space blanket, a sheet of plastic, his shotgun, a can of tuna, and six pieces of bread. Not much food to sustain him on an eighty-mile hike, but he was counting on hunting along the way.

  “You’re going to be okay?” the bush pilot asked.

  “Sure,” he answered. “I’ll be okay.”

  “See ya then,” the bush pilot said.

  He’d only been walking for a mile when he came upon a grizzly. The grizzly had rolled in a caribou kill, and even at forty yards, he could smell the bear. The raw stench almost made him retch. The grizzly hadn’t caught his scent though, and instead of pressing his luck, he stayed downwind. The bear never even knew he was there.

  The first night he came upon a no-name creek roiling with spring runoff. He knew he had to wait. If the water went down overnight, he would try to cross in the morning. If not, he would hike up to the headwaters. It
meant ten extra miles, but that was better than drowning. Besides, he was in new territory, and he liked the look of it—the 6,000foot mountains, the occasional Dall sheep sure-footing its way over the scree, the tall white spruce lining the river, and lots of wolf sign.

  He built a lean-to, covered it with the sheet of plastic, and grabbed his gun. Walking for eighteen hours across a waterlogged landscape of forest, tundra, and tussock had taken its toll. He had planned to shoot some ducks, but he was past being picky now. He would settle for anything, even a ground squirrel or two.

  When he spotted a small flock of ducks swimming lazily in a mountain lake, he hoped his luck was about to change. It would have to. He had to cover another sixty miles and he was already out of food. He put in five shells of No. 4 birdshot and ground-swatted them, splattering BBs across the water. He squeezed off three shots before the ducks flushed and fled, and he shot one last time as they flew away. Then he waded out into the lake to retrieve his dinner—two drake bluebills. He had meat.

  Introduction

  Alaska. The United States practically stole it from the Russians in 1867 for $7.2 million, the equivalent of about two cents an acre. For years it was widely regarded as a laughably errant land buy. “Seward’s Folly,” the purchase was called, after President Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of State, William Henry Seward, who negotiated the deal for the frozen wasteland. However, by the time I attended grade school, students were taught to think of the acquisition of Alaska as the visionary achievement of a man who understood before anyone else did that Alaska was our nation’s destiny.

  Ala-aska, the Aleut Indians called it—“the great land.” It is a word that carries mythic overtones, that totes on its back all of our hopeful notions about Americans being a frontier people. Despite our soft suburban ways, Alaska and its 375 million acres, covering an area one-fifth as large as the total area of the lower forty-eight states, is there, way up there, a shining symbol that we are the capable offspring of courageous explorers and pioneers.

  Heimo Korth has lived in the Alaskan bush for nearly three decades. His story is the exception in Alaska, one that is vastly outnumbered by the stories of those who left in a hurry after their first encounter with winter, by those who never intended to stay. People have always come to Alaska: for gold; for fast cash on the pipeline; to get rich quick and get out; to live out a romantic dream; to patch incomplete and unfulfilling lives; to outrun the law; for the sheer adventure of it; because they don’t fit in anywhere else. Most of them resettled in Alaska’s coastal or Interior towns and cities, or in the bush villages. Some became “sourdoughs,” people, as the Alaskan joke goes, who have “soured on the country and ain’t got the dough to get out.” But only a few made it farther into the woods than the state’s negligible road system allows. The handful who made it deep into the country, and stayed, learned the truth of the old maxim: “If you live in Alaska two years, your feet will be frozen in.”

  Heimo Korth never intended to do anything else but stay. When he came from Wisconsin to Alaska, he knew it would be forever, and he adapted to its harsh conditions out of a mixture of heartfelt ideology and brute necessity.

  The Alaska that he inhabits, however, is not Anchorage or Fairbanks, Juneau, the North Slope boomtown of Barrow, or even the bush villages. He calls the far northeastern Interior of Alaska home, 150 miles above the Arctic Circle, in the southern foothills of the Brooks Range.

  Northeast Alaska is one of the world’s last great, intact ecosystems. The narrow and embattled coastal plain of the far north is the ancient calving grounds for the 126,000 porcupine caribou herd. Moving south, the coastal plain gives way to foothills, which, in turn, abut the Brooks Range, a dramatic, wind-beaten, 700-mile-long mountain chain lying entirely above the Arctic Circle, where treeless slopes rise abruptly to 9,000 feet. Immediately to the south of the mountains, glaciers and talus wander into Alaska’s Interior, an expansive area of high, rounded hills, tundra, and tussock as large as New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana combined, bounded by the Brooks Range to the north and the Alaska Range to the south. The vast Interior is strung together by snow-frosted forests of spruce, birch, willow, alder, tamarack, trembling aspen, and balsam poplar, and wild, limpid rivers, some so cold that only the super-adapted grayling can survive them.

  The Interior is the hottest and coldest place in all of Alaska. Winter temperatures can lock in at 50 below and not budge for weeks at a time, and windchill can cause them to plunge to minus 90. In summer, on the other hand, when the sun refuses to set, temperatures can soar into the high 80s. The Interior is one of America’s last repositories of wildness, so large and its winter weather so brutal that it is terra incognita, unknowable, except to a select few wilderness people who have chosen to make their lives here.

  Heimo Korth lives more remotely than any other person in Alaska, more than one hundred miles from anything resembling civilization. In 1882, a United States Census Bureau geographer classified the frontier as a place containing fewer than two people per square mile, but the definition is absurd here. Heimo and his family are the only settlers for more than 500 square miles. The nearest road is the Steese Highway, 250 miles away, on the southside of the White Mountains. The nearest hospital is in Fairbanks, 300 miles away.

  Heimo Korth is one of only seven hunter-trappers with a cabin permit in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which at 19.5 million acres is almost as large as the state of South Carolina. For Heimo the refuge is a permanent home. The others reside elsewhere, visiting their cabins for months, or only weeks, at a time. Fittingly, Heimo has become something of a legend in Alaska. Alaskans have always been proud of their latter-day mountain men—modern incarnations of past American heroes such as John Colter, Jim Bridger, Hugh Glass, Jedediah Smith, men who wandered the untamed wilds of the Shining Mountains (the Rockies) in search of fur and adventure—and they accord them a special kind of respect.

  Heimo Korth is part of what Judith Kleinfeld, director of the University of Alaska Fairbanks Northern Studies Program, calls a “unique generational moment”—a movement of daring and idealistic young men who set out in the sixties and seventies for the Alaskan bush in search of raw reality, to recreate the kind of life that hadn’t been lived since the early days of the fur trade in the American West. In a book by the same name, John McPhee called this occurrence “Coming into the Country.” Up and down the mighty Yukon River, this wilderness generation took to the woods; they hunted, trapped, fished, and lived by their wits in one of the world’s harshest climates. Most of these men are gone now, disillusioned, burntout, threatened with trespass and chased off by the U.S. government, married and living in cities across the United States. The ones who remember the bush experience with some fondness left simply because it was time to go, like Henry David Thoreau, because they had “several more lives to live.” Heimo Korth is married now, too, with a wife and family of his own, yet he remains. He is one of the last of Alaska’s hunter-trappers, making a living almost entirely off the land, the keeper of an American tradition of self-sufficiency.

  I first approached Heimo Korth to write about him in 1994. In the letter I sent him, I called him a noble adventurer, a free spirit, a visionary rebel, a fugitive from civilization, and finally a frontiersman, and tried to convince him that I was the writer to tell his life story. He sent back a letter saying he wasn’t interested. It was more of a note, terse and impersonal, which given the fact that I am his cousin might surprise some. But we were never close.

  Heimo grew up wild. His “old man,” as he always called his father, wanted him to follow in his footsteps, to take up a trade, to get a steady union job with good benefits. But Heimo had seen what that life had done for his father, and early on he vowed that he’d take a different path. His father resented his rebellion and was more inclined to use the belt than gentle persuasion. And the more Heimo resisted, the more his volatile father beat him. The story I heard was that one day Heimo had enough of his father’s anger and the threa
ts, his disapproval, the stifling boredom of a life he regarded as a dead end. The story was short on details, but I got the gist of it—Heimo took off for Alaska to be a wilderness man, a woodsman and a trapper. Though I was only twelve, I was inspired by his example. I, too, I told myself, would one day go to Canada’s Yukon Territory or Alaska to homestead. I never made it, which may account for why I was unwilling to let Heimo go.

  CHAPTER 1

  Winter

  I arrive at Heimo Korth’s cabin on the Old Crow drainage in the far northeastern corner of Alaska in early January 2002 after a three-hour, 300-mile flight from Fairbanks. Although I expected stomach-churning air currents, the flight was a smooth one, and the two-seater 1954 Cessna 170B skids to an easy stop in a tundra field two feet deep in snow. In the Alaskan bush, the plane functions as a time machine, and only thirty minutes outside of Fairbanks, Rick, the bush pilot, and I had left behind civilization. Even the seismic lines, slashed across the countryside during decades of oil exploration, disappeared. For the next two and a half hours, there was not even a building to mar the harsh beauty of the Alaskan winter, and I had the feeling that I was being transported straight back into the nineteenth century.

  “Heimo and his family are the only subsistence family I know,” Rick said as we crossed Stranglewoman Creek. “ ‘Subsistence’ gets a lot of lip service in Alaska, but the Korths live almost strictly off the land. You got to respect them for that. Hell, their closest neighbor is a hundred miles downriver on the Porcupine.”

  Looking out the window at the endless sweep of land, at the trees bent double under the weight of snow, and the cow moose bedded down in the frozen creek bed, I tried to imagine it: New York City to Philadelphia; Chicago to Milwaukee; Los Angeles to San Diego—not a soul in between.