STORIES OF COURAGE & BRAVERY IN ALASKA'S RUGGED COPPER RIVER VALLEY

What's Inside This Site About Alaska Life, Courage & Rescue

Copper River People Extreme Rescues Looking Back The Copper River Way
Showing posts with label The Copper River Way. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Copper River Way. Show all posts

Copper Valley Alaska EMT's. If You Didn't Help, Who Would?

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EMT's In The Copper River Valley: Above & Beyond The Call Of Duty

Copper River EMT's in 2014, including Bill Bowler (left) who was an EMT
back in 1991, too. 


 In a place like the Copper River Valley, helping people was a way of life. The obligation of stepping up to the plate was taken very seriously.

Take for example, emergency medical assistance. In 1991, Dozens of volunteers took courses spanning weeks in order to learn how to help their own famlies and their neighbors. 

A May, 1991 list was printed in the Copper River Country Journal, and revealed the extent to which locals were willing to put themselves on the line. 

Copper Center: Pinky Becker, Tom Carew, Bob Olson, Margie Steigerwald, Chuck Thomas.
Gakona: Danese Devenport, Suzanne McCarthy, Fran McMahan.
Glennallen: Cherie Ansell, Rocky Ansell, Bill Bowler, Terry Cunitz, Dan Hoadley, Patty Hutchings, Milt Peters, Sarah Rush, Larry Scribner, Win Stieffel, Tom Symmes, Mike Thomas, Darlene Windsor.
Kenny Lake: Rick Ackerman, Janelle Eklund, Jim Fant, Mollie Flack, Craig Gardner, Terry Gilmore, Mike Huntley,  Jim Jordan, Curt Lain, Sharon Lain, Janet Luce, Earl McClanahan, Crystal Pwoning, Daryl Schierholt.
Chitina: Catherine Fletcher, John Gilbert, Art Koeninger, Darlene Wright.
Nelchina: 
Cheryl Holland, Jim Manning, Elaine Manning, Jim Odden, Mary Odden, Kahren Rudbeck, Lisa Smayda. Tom Smayda, Joe Virgin, Peg Virgin.
Paxson: Gary Alcott, Stan Brown, Wanda Brown, Nate Callis, Wndy Callis, Larry Gondek, Hannah Hays, Bob Hays, Kris Howk, Murray Howk.
Slana: John Beeter, Marilee Bibeau, Jim Hummel, Mary Hummel.

This list may not mean much to you, the reader -- but, to residents of the region, it was a list of their neighbors. Men and women. Ordinary people: ordinary neighbors; teachers, grocers, gardeners, store owners, nurses....over 60 people, who intuitively understood it was important for them to be available in every portion of a far-flung community, to be at the ready. 

These were people who would never be "recognized" for their willingness to take time from their home-building, their families and their work.  There was no pay. No honor. No status. No financial reimbursement. But, each of them -- just to be trained as EMT's -- had to leave their homes on evenings and weekends,. They had to contemplate the possible problems they and their family might find themselves faced with -- such as drownings, frostbite, fire, car accidents, heart attacks, and exactly what they had to learn what they, personally, would have to do in each circumstance.

Then, after they successfully passed training tests, they basically offered themselves up on the front lines. When anything happened, they had to be ready to drive dozens of miles, to a neighbor's burning home. Or rush to a mangled car crash 30 miles from Glennallen. Or arrive at the site of a grizzly suicide -- of somebody they knew --  in a cabin up the road. Not every local EMT had what is known as the "first responder personality" -- that confident, efficient air that self-selected paid professionals have. A paid emergency fireman or ambulance drivers  in a large city somewhere, is drawn from a pool of millions -- and, if the work doesn't suit him (or her) they can move on to something else.

But in an all-volunteer corps of Copper River people, where one out of every 50 people (and that's counting men, women and children) were volunteers and underwent the arduous training as an EMT, there was no EMT personality  These people's personalities were a mixed bag -- with many ordinary moms mixed in -- women who lived out along the roads who were motivated by a desire to be able to keep their children alive, on their own, if necessary.

Their job -- if this could be considered a job -- was to arrive at their neighbors' homes  or car crashes, or at personal tragedies -- well before the Troopers showed up. 

It was a  commitment that involved a full understanding of the precariousness of life in general -- and Copper River life in particular. 

In the Copper River Valley, there was nobody else. If you didn't do it -- who would? 

 Copyrighted by Copper River Country Journal, 1991-2017. All rights reserved. 

The Ahtna Probably Played A Role In Russia Abandoning Alaska

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How A Small Band Of Ahtna Villagers Beat Back The Russians In Interior Alaska & May Have Helped Pave The Way  


Celebrating 150 Years
Of American Rule

Far from the coast, in Ahtna Country, along the traditional border with the Tanana people, are some very old villages: Slana, Mentasta and Batzelnetus.

This is the historic heart of local Native legend. It’s the place where small cadres of Ahtna warriors played a very important role in America’s history. This is where Native villagers  beat back Russian soldiers who were trying to make inroads into their homeland. 

The Russians saw Alaska’s sea otters and coastal wildlife as raw material. Russians sailed on over, declared their ownership of Alaska lands, and began a wholesale slaughter of animals. They shipped their furs back to Moscow to be made into big fur hats. 

The Russians were brutal in every way. And the Ahtna, though separated from the coast by huge mountain ranges had heard the bad news about these invaders.

When various small groups of Russian soldiers forced their way into the Copper Valley, on exploratory expeditions, it never turned out well for the Russians. 

One Russian troop marched up the Copper Valley in the 1700’s. Vicious as ever, the Russians took to tying up and whipping the chiefs in every successive little Ahtna village, and stealing local women. Then they got to “Roasted Salmon Place” -- Batzelnetus. And that is where a small band of Ahtna killed them.

By 1848, the Russians had begun fretting about their deadly enemies, the British, who were headed across Canada on their own northern fur-gathering mission. The Russians tried again. They sent another small group of soldiers up into Ahtna Country. 

Once again, Russian soldiers slogged their way north across the wilderness. And they came to Slana, a little settlement very near Batzelnetus. 

Standing up to Russian soldiers; this was the danger that had been bred in the Ahtna people of this region for decades. In the night, as the Russians rushed out of their tents in their nightclothes, the Ahtna attacked. And hacked the Russian soldiers to death. 

Russians were getting the message. If they couldn’t make their way past a dedicated little band of Ahtna warriors, then they probably would have a hard time in the interior. Russia decided to cut their losses in Alaska. Only eleven years later, in 1859, Russia offered to sell Alaska to the United States. But this idea was put on the back burner when the Civil War erupted. After the war ended, William Seward, Secretary of State, bought Alaska for America. This was exactly 150 years ago, in 1867.

It took another 20 years for Americans to successfully breach the Copper Valley. 

The Ahtna people changed the course of American history, by fighting off the Russians with their own Homeland Security forces.  Without Ahtna valor, Russia might have not given up and gone back home. And Alaska would still be “Russian America.”


 Coming Soon: Bearfoot’s book of true Alaska stories… 
Copyright, 2017. Northcountry Communications, Inc. 

2017 Marks The 40th Anniversary Of The First Oil Running Through The Trans-Alaska Pipeline

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The Trans-Alaska Pipeline 
Passes Through The Copper Valley


 This summer marks the 40th anniversary of the construction of the Trans Alaska Pipeline. The pipe, which passes through Glennallen, on its way south from Prudhoe Bay to Valdez, was built in the 1970's. The time surrounding the construction of the Pipeline was, in many ways, chaotic. It was similar to the Gold Rush boom times of the 1890's. 

 Both the Gold Rush and the construction of the pipe were  eras of enormous change,

The adventurers who came in the 1800's -- and there were thousands of them -- were no more prepared for the harsh realities of Copper River Country than the thousands of midwesterners, suburban kids and would-be homesteaders who arrived 8 decades later, as the construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline catapulted this part of Alaska onto the national stage.

On the most basic level, living in the Copper Valley has always been something like being hurtled into a Boy Scout camp. But at 35 below zero. It's a world in which your new and unfamiliar life includes hauling water, chopping wood, and turning raw logs into homes…In both the Gold Rush and the Pipeline construction, challenges remained the same. There was nowhere to live.  Each time, you had to go it alone. In the 1970's,  people lived in mobile homes and trailers they had dragged to their lots near the road. They lived in buses and trucks And, like their 1890's predecessors, they lived in shacks and sheds, and half built cabins, with leaky roofs and uninsulated floors. Things hadn't changed. There were too many people, and too few homes -- just as there had been during the old Gold Rush of the 1890's. Same place. Same problems. And lots and lots of people.

Many of the newcomers who came to the Copper Valley during the 1970's were in search of work on the Pipeline. Any kind of work: "Bull cook" (meaning maid), or driving a truck, or cleaning up.,, It really didn't matter, because the pay was so good. The rush of would-be Pipeline workers was enormous, and men, women and children began pouring into the countryside, by the hundreds, and then by the thousands.  The pipeline company made camps for them -- "Man Camps."  When wives and kids tagged along, the incoming children filled up the schools.

Although lots of Pipeline workers were trained professionals, who had lived and worked in "The Oil Patch" -- in Texas and the Middle East -- a very large number who entered the Copper Valley were ordinary people,  with no particular education or experience -- but a strong desire to tap into the Pipeline and make money. 

The construction of the Pipeline was a difficult time. Medical services and ambulances -- operated by missionaries and volunteers -- were stretched to the limit. Overcrowded schools required trailer add-ons. Prices were high. The accidental death rate topped the nation. And, as is usual during boom times, prostitution and vice made its way into an otherwise sleepy little community. 

In the 1890's, when the Great Alaska Gold Rush swept through the Copper Valley, it was as if a cargo ship sank in the region. Early gold miners had brought with them tons of gear, which they left behind. That gear was picked up after they left, by the Ahtna people, who began using discarded hats, vests, American flags, boots, pots, pans, and tools. 

It was the same in the 1970's. Discarded gear worked its way into local culture, as Pipeline workers ditched brand new boots, saws, drills and other things, dumping valuable objects into Department of Transportation trash barrels along the roads. Locals found it worthwhile to scan the roadsides, trash barrels and dumps for something useful. The Pipeline provided lunches, including canned sardines. One local teacher retrieved an entire cupboard full of sardine cans for emergency use.  Local dumps filled up with the handy, sturdy wooden boxes that transported pipe. In Gakona, a BLM worker drove to the dump every night, picked up discarded 4 by 4's, took them home in his truck -- and then built himself a stacked log house from the beams. The large wooden boxes were used for garages and homes by locals. Even more valuable was the excess super high-density, high R-value, curved pipe insulation that was discarded and snapped up to insulate roofs. 

When the first oil moved through the Pipe in 1977, 40 years ago, the boom was over. But some Pipeline workers stayed. They finished building homes, raised families, joined the emergency medical service, formed businesses -- and made a life for themselves in this wild and elemental place. A place where they had intended to make a buck and then leave -- but which they found had kept them here. By taking hold of their hearts. 

Being "Copper River"

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The Copper Valley Hammers You Into Becoming A New & Different Person

  Northcountry Communications. All Rights Reserved.

All creatures are changed and rebuilt by their environment. No matter how different they seem when they start out.
 
If you live in the ocean you need fins. So birds (like penguins), mammals (like otters and whales), and fish all developed fins. 

Buck Brown of Gakona. A Transplanted Mainer.
If you're going to live in the air, you need to fly. It doesn't matter if you're an insect, a bat, a flying squirrel, or a bird -- a set of some sort of wings is necessary if you're intending to inhabit the world of open air.

The Copper Valley was a lot like the ocean or the air. It changed people.  In an intuitive, relatively unscientific, rapid, Lamarckian (yes, definitely not Darwinian) manner. 

To live in the Copper Valley required persistence, self-reliance, planning, resilience, and an ability to rely on, and help, those around you. It didn't matter if you were a contact-era Ahtna Native who had grown up in the boreal forest and had never seen a soldier before, or if you were a newly arrived 1972 homesteader from Ohio.

The place itself, if you stayed long enough, shaped you into a new and different person. A Copper River person. 

  Northcountry Communications. All Rights Reserved.

The Copper Valley Is Like A Space Station. And Local People Are Like Russian Cosmonauts

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Fixing Your World With Duct Tape 

  Northcountry Communications. All Rights Reserved


There's a big difference between American astronauts and Russian cosmonauts. On the Russian space station, Mir, controversy erupted over how the astronauts from the two different countries approached practical problems in outer space. 

When something happened on the delicate and far-away space station, the Russians would rush to fix it. They'd look around, scramble up some available spare parts and improvise -- using ordinary hand tools and duct tape. They pounded nails into jammed oxygen canisters. They used wrenches and screwdrivers to prod delicate instruments back into shape. Again and again, the Russians pieced together improvised solutions, using only the limited palette of materials they had on hand.

A crashed ultralight or other homemade plane at the end of the Gulkana runway, held together by duct tape.  (2011)

This drove visiting American astronauts crazy. The protocol for Americans in space has always been to call Mission Control for advice when there was a problem -- with the idea that "experts" back on Earth could figure it out far better than some crazed Russian wielding a screw driver and some duct tape.

Yet, you had to hand it to the Russians. It worked. And, you've got to hand it to the people of the Copper Valley. Compared to the rest of America, the people of the Copper Valley were the Russian cosmonauts of America. They operated in a pragmatic get-it-done manner that was very similar to the way Russians on the space station did their work.

There were so many parallels. The space station had no supply lines.  The physical environment of Siberia itself, and Russia in general, is very much like the typical rural Alaskan's environment. Empty. Cold. At the ends of the earth.

The vast tundra and taiga that crosses so much of Russia spills over into the Copper River region. And, the typical rural Alaskan, in many ways, had much more in common with a typical rural Russian. And very little in common with people in places like Sacramento, or Detroit, or Florida -- or New York City.

Duct tape holds onto a crashed Copper River plane long after the plane is gone.

If you wanted something in the Copper Valley, you did it yourself, too.  You did it the "Russian way." Though, of course, in the era during and after the collapse of the Soviet Union, a patriotic  Copper Valley resident would never allow himself to be compared to a Russian. 

  Northcountry Communications. All Rights Reserved.

When The Flu Came To The Copper Valley in 1918

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Fear Of Epidemics In Alaska Is Nothing New. Ebola, Hantavirus, Diphtheria, Flu, TB, Measles...

  Northcountry Communications. All Rights Reserved.

 


News about the flu in the Chitina Leader of 1918.
Epidemics have a long and terrible history in Alaska. Even before westerners entered the territory, their germs went before them -- spreading diseases that had never been seen before. They don't sound like much today: "flu" and "measles," for example. But they were deadly. During the early 1900's, diphtheria threatened Nome -- leading to the great Nome serum run, in which dog mushers who had been mail carriers saved the children of the coastal city. The 1918 flu epidemic was bad enough to stop the trains between Chitina and Kennicott. You can see newspaper stories from the Chitina Leader about the flu epidemic at the Copper Center Museum, and read actual telegrams there that were sent back and forth from local telegraph offices, trying to handle the quarantine, and to get needed medicines to the right people. In November, 1918, someone in Juneau wrote to a Kennicott man: "You may be held at Cordova indefinitely. Influenza... use your own judgement. Travel to Kennicott discontinued." Someone else telegraphed back: "Mail is not fumigated to Cordova..." Someone in Kennicott wrote to a Cordova physician, on December 21st, 1918: "Can you spare us some serum sufficient for 100 people. We will purchase outright or will return same upon arrival Northwestern about 27th." In many ways, the great flu epidemic of 1918 was as terrible as the current Ebola epidemic in Africa. But it was truly worldwide, touching even the remote parts of Alaska. In 1995 (like today) people worried that something -- like the terrible flu -- would come back again. Here's a story from that summer. It's about something called the "hantavirus," which that year had spread to the Yukon Territories, across the border from Alaska. Like the current Ebola virus, it had a huge potential death rate: 60% of the people who got it wound up dead.

From: July 13th, 1995 Copper River Country Journal

ALASKA - A deadly virus that struck an Indian community in the Southwest is very unlikely to be a threat in Alaska -- even though there are reports of the virus existing in deer mice in the Yukon.
 
Dr. John Middaugh, of the State Section of Epidemiology, told the Journal that discovery of the hantavirus in the Yukon "is no big deal." A July 7th Associated Press story said that the virus, which is carried by airborne  particles of deer mice excretions, such as urine, droppings, or saliva, has been found in the Canadian province. Around 60% of the people who come down with the flu-like illness, die.

But Alaska's epidemiologists say the problem is "totally overblown." Dr. Middaugh told the Journal that deer mice exist "all over North America." He said the epidemic on an Indian reservation in the southwest was due to specific overpopulation in that area. Although the virus is now understood to affect around 20 to 30 people a year, the conditions that existed in the May, 1993 epidemic were unusual. A huge overpopulation of deer mice arose there because there was a large flood. The flood killed snakes and scorpions -- deer mice's natural enemies -- leaving them to grow, unchecked into extremely high numbers. The number of deer mice grew even more when the floods were followed by good weather, which led to a great abundance of the types of food the mice liked to eat.  

Finally, when the population was huge, due to the lack of predators and the abundance of food, the deer mice began crowding into people's homes. And they followed the classic cycle of overpopulation; they grew sick with the hantavirus. The virus then passed on to the human population.

At this point, Middaugh told the Journal, "There are no documented human illnesses from the hantavirus anywhere in Alaska, the Yukon Territory and Canada." He acted as if there wasn't much possibility that there would be any chance of an epidemic here. Of 569 mice tested in Southeast Alaska for the virus, all were negative.

  Northcountry Communications. All Rights Reserved.

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