Most of us spent some time in our younger years dreaming of heading off into the wilderness to build a cabin, run a trap line and prospect for gold. It’s the ultimate dream – making a living doing something you love, surviving off the land and being outdoors in an adventure-filled world. Who could ask for more? Then reality sets in and we realize that it isn’t all roses. Only a few are cut out for such a life, and fewer still succeeded in doing so.
A century ago, the wilderness of Alaska and northern Canada was full of adventurers looking to fulfill the dream. It helped that prices for animal furs were sky high, and rumors of gold and other mineral finds were proven true in many areas. Many thought they would get rich. In reality, the vast majority didn’t cut it, and those who did weren’t rich, but they earned the freedom to live a comfortable lifestyle outside of most trappings of society. If one could be content with that, life in the north was great.
Though the north lands were scattered with trappers and prospectors in the early part of the last century, they weren’t full of writers. Few of the woodsmen were able to put their thoughts on paper, and even fewer were eloquent enough to write books we’d be reading intently almost a century later. Erik Munsterhjelm was one of those few.
A native of Finland, Munsterhjelm immigrated to North America as a young man in the mid 1920’s, but tired of monotonous labor after two years working on a railroad in the California desert. He had the urge to head north, and soon made his way to Edmonton, Alberta, Canada to look for work. There he met a fellow immigrant, a Swede named Karl, and they decided to try their hand at trapping in far northern Saskatchewan. It was the beginning of a long series of adventures in the north for Erik.
The two young trappers were not alone in their quest to make a living in the wilderness. Competition abounded, but they took things slowly, starting by hunting and trapping muskrats in an abandoned cabin on the Athabasca River near McMurray. By the time spring breakup arrived, the young men had learned much from their neighbors about the opportunities for trapping in the north. They put together an outfit, loaded up the canoe they’d built and headed down the river, across Lake Athabasca and eventually to the village of Stony Rapids, hundreds of miles from civilization.
He didn’t know it at the time, but Stony Rapids, with its population of about a hundred people, would be the closest Erik would get to civilization for years. That fall he and Karl headed to a remote area up the Porcupine River to spend the winter trapping. The territory was all theirs – hundreds of square miles. The Indians, Chipewyans who lived in this part of the north country, believed the area had bad medicine and didn’t dare enter. It was also brutally tough to get to. The men spent long days portaging hundreds of pounds of gear around countless rapids and falls to make it to their destination.
Erik and Karl built their cabin and spent the winter running long traplines through the wilderness that surrounded. They survived on fish and caribou, and caught wolves, foxes, mink and other animals in their traps. They ran their traplines on dogsled with their mongrel team, or on foot, and slept in makeshift shelters or under the stars beside a campfire when too far from the cabin. It was a real tough living, but also a very satisfying one for Munsterhjelm. It’s clear in his writing that he thoroughly enjoyed the wilderness and the beauty that surrounded him.
Erik liked the north country so much that after selling his furs and unwinding for a few short weeks that summer, he made plans to go back to the bush. This time he went on his own, to another remote wilderness territory and build a cabin on the shore of a large lake. Another winter passed, and so went several years in the north for Erik. He loved it. The experiences he had during these early years are recorded in the book “The Wind and the Caribou: Hunting and trapping in northern Canada”.
Several years later, a major gold rush hit the area around Munsterhjelm’s trapping grounds and he caught gold fever along with everyone else. His love for adventure, the north country and its people, and living off the land made him a great prospector. Erik spent about five years prospecting for gold, staking and selling claims, and almost striking it rich during these exciting times. His book “Fool’s Gold: A narrative of prospecting and trapping in northern Canada” tells tales of these northland adventures better than any other I’ve read.
Little is known about Erik Munsterhjelm outside of the accounts he left in “The Wind and the Caribou” and “Fool’s Gold”. He also wrote a short book “A Dog Named Wolf”, a fictional account of a dog’s life in the north, and wrote eight books in Swedish and Finnish, which were never translated to English. He died in Brantford, Ontario in 1992.
You can experience life in the northern wilderness nearly a century ago – or at least get close – by reading Erik Munsterhjelm’s books. Not only was he a tough bugger who loved adventure and feared little, he was also a great writer, who gave firsthand accounts of northern trapping and prospecting like no professional writer of the time could. You can still find his three English-written books in libraries and at online bookstores for a reasonable price.