Imagine an entire economy based on wild fur. A community where the primary breadwinners are wilderness trappers who spend the majority of the year out in the bush, living off the land in remote cabins and harvesting furbearers, fish and game to survive. As far away as that may sound, just a couple of generations ago that’s the way it was in remote villages of interior Alaska and northern Canada.
Masten Beaver moved to Fort Yukon, an isolated Yukon River community near the mouth of the Porcupine, to work as a trader for the Northern Commercial Company in 1943. It was war time, and young men were being drafted from all over. One of the men who worked at the post had been sent to war, leaving a job opening for a trader. After being wounded during the war and spending a year in a hospital overseas, Beaver had been discharged from the army and was longing for a different adventure. He’d read everything he could get his hands on about Alaska and the trader job seemed like a perfect fit.
The Northern Commercial, or N.C., had taken over trading in Fort Yukon after the Hudson’s Bay Company left in the 1800’s, and remained a true trading post in every sense of the word. For the fur trappers scattered throughout the Yukon Flats, it was one of the only places to purchase much needed supplies for their survival and success.
When Masten and his new wife Helen arrived in Fort Yukon for the first time it was late winter, and the area was virtually a ghost town. Local business owners, their employees, government officials, and those too old to live in the bush made up the majority of occupants. Most of the town’s cabins were empty – they served as temporary dwellings used by the mostly Gwich’in Athabascan Indians in between trapping seasons. As Beaver’s boss Jack Ferguson told him, they had a lot of work to do in the store in preparation for trade, as the place was set to come alive after spring break-up.
As soon as the ice let go in the rivers, small bands of Indians and white trappers began to trickle into town, and their first stop was the trading post. In addition to the N.C., the village boasted two other stores: Horton & Moore and James Carroll’s place. With their large catches of fur, they visited the posts and negotiated prices with the traders. It was during this time that Ferguson spent long, tedious hours counting and grading furs and purchasing them from the trappers, while Beaver manned the store, selling goods and trying to understand the locals and their unique language and mannerisms.
After receiving an offer they considered acceptable for their hard-earned furs, most trappers – the responsible ones, at least – would begin to purchase their outfit for the next winter. Supplies included clothing, ammunition, traps, axes and knives, cooking gear and various canned foods and sacks of flour and grains. Outfits were put together in the store and set aside for the trapper’s planned date of departure back to the lines.
For those who lived in truly remote country, the trip to Fort Yukon could be a long and arduous journey, and the stay in town would be short. Some would arrive in June and be ready to return to their trapline territory sometime in July. A journey of 200 or so miles upriver with a year’s outfit could take two months in a dry year when the rivers were low. For those who trapped closer to town, they might spend most of their summer in and around the village, many using that time to fish for salmon to feed their dogs through the winter or work odd jobs to earn cash.
To supply the area with goods required a massive amount of inventory, and the N.C. received most of this on just an annual basis, when the steamboats made their way up the Yukon during high water. An entire year’s worth of goods had to be unloaded from the boat and stored away in the company’s warehouses. Able men were recruited from throughout the village to help carry in supplies that represented life necessities for people living throughout the surrounding area.
In addition to being a much needed supplier of food, tools and other goods, the trading post provided for the community in other ways. Kids traded muskrat pelts for candy, marveled at the toys they couldn’t afford, and dreamed. Women brought in beadwork, mittens and other handmade crafts to consign. Old men sat by the stove on cold nights and told stories of the old days, or talked about their trapping season and what might lie ahead. And when a new trader like Masten arrived, practically the entire town flocked to the store to give him a look.
Three years in, just when he felt like he’d settled into the trading business and Fort Yukon, it was all about to end for Beaver. He learned that the draftee he’d replaced had been discharged and was returning to work at the trading post. He would have to leave the wilderness he’d grown to love and take a transfer to the barren, windswept village of Nome. But instead, he quit. It had always been a dream of his to own a trading post, and Beaver got the chance when he took a scouting trip to the village of Chalkyitsik, about 45 miles northeast of Fort Yukon. After getting to know the people and the area, Masten and Helen took out a loan and set themselves on building a trading post there and getting together an outfit of goods. Beaver got his trading post, and operated it for a few years, but I’m not sure what happened to him after that.
The N.C. still operates in Fort Yukon today, under the name “Alaska Commercial Company”. It no longer barters or buys fur, and resembles a modern day grocery store more than the old trading post. The village is no longer a collection of seasonal cabins used between trapping seasons. The cabins are now permanent residences and trappers are hard to find. But it’s neat to think that the entire community was once supported by the fur trade and the adventurous lifestyle it entailed.
Fort Yukon Trader was published in 1955. The original is hard to find, but it was reprinted in recent years, and the ebook version is available to read for free at Archive.org. It’s a quick and enjoyable read.
In Jeremiah’s new book, “More than Wolverine: An Alaska Wilderness Trapline” he spends time in the old trapping village of Fort Yukon and talks more about area history.
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