I spent three years living in the Alaskan interior when I was a soldier. It was the prettiest place in the world…for about three months in the summer. The coldest it got while I was stationed there was 62 degrees below zero F. Because of the rugged inhospitable nature of the place not a whole lot of folks actually live there, relative to the rest of the country.
Alaska is crawling with tourists during the summer. Tourism is one of the greatest sources of revenue for the state. However, in the winter the Alaskans pretty much have the place to themselves. Back when we called Alaska home there didn’t seem to be a great many old people living permanently in the interior, either. To thrive in the arctic one has to be hearty. The remote and desolate nature of the land tends to attract some fascinating personalities.
Nobody to this day really knows who Albert Johnson really was. It was estimated that he was born between 1890 and 1900 and lived under a pseudonym. In the summer of 1931 Johnson arrived in Fort McPherson, Canada, after making his way down the Peel River. RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) constable Edgar Millen had reason to question the man and later reported that he had a Scandinavian accent. He subsequently described Johnson as clean-shaven, stand-offish, and well-funded.
Johnson plied the Mackenzie River Delta aboard a homebuilt raft before building himself a tiny 8×10-foot cabin on the bank of the Rat River. At the time anyone wishing to trap animals for their fur was required to obtain a trapper’s license from the government. Johnson neglected to do so. A great many outsiders had come to these remote spaces fleeing the destitution of the Great Depression. Native trappers frequently resented their presence in a land they had obviously long considered their own.
In December of 1931 local native trappers reported Johnson to the RCMP alleging that he was deactivating their traps and interfering with their livelihoods. A subsequent investigation determined that these allegations were unsubstantiated. When the natives had called on him in his cabin Johnson had run them off at the point of a gun. The guy apparently just really wanted to be left alone.
The day after Christmas a pair of RCMP constables named Alfred King and Joseph Bernard trekked sixty miles to Johnson’s remote cabin to investigate the allegations. For his part Johnson ignored the lawmen, going so far as to hang a sack across the cabin window so they couldn’t see inside. The two policemen eventually returned home in frustration to obtain a search warrant.
Five days later the two Mounties returned with a warrant along with two other men for backup. Johnson still refused to speak to the cops, so Constable King tried to force his way into the cabin. Johnson shot him through the wooden door for his trouble. The Mountie team successfully evacuated Constable King to Aklavik where he ultimately recovered.
Albert Johnson had by now kicked over an anthill. Like governments everywhere, the one thing they cannot tolerate is insubordination. The Mounties therefore returned again, this time with a nine-man posse, forty-two dogs, and twenty pounds of dynamite. However, Albert Johnson had made good use of the intervening time.
The Mounties surrounded the little cabin and demanded that Johnson come out. When he failed to do so they deployed their explosives. It was so cold the Mounties had to keep the dynamite in their coats to thaw it out.
They threw the dynamite onto the roof of the cabin in an effort at flushing Johnson out. One report held that the roof was slightly damaged. Another claimed that the cabin was pretty much pulverized. Regardless, Johnson now opened fire from within a five-foot dugout he had excavated in the floor of his tiny dwelling.
Johnson and the posse exchanged fire for some fifteen hours, during which, miraculously, no one was hurt. However, it was really cold out. At -40 degrees F the cops were growing weary of this exchange. They retreated once again to Aklavik to regroup. By now word of this tidy little war had filtered out to the World via radio.
On January 14, fully nineteen days after their first quasi-amicable encounter, the Mounties returned yet again only to find that Johnson was gone. Considering they had blown his tiny cabin to hell this really should have come as no surprise. Now with ample resources and manpower the Mounties struck out after the fugitive recluse. Roughly two weeks later on January 30, they caught up to him.
The cops surrounded Johnson in a thicket, and a firefight ensued. Johnson shot Constable Edgar Millen, the officer who had first interviewed him some weeks before, through the heart and killed him. The Mounties present at the time reported that Johnson laughed heartily when he realized he had connected with the law officer. In the resulting chaos the cops retreated and Johnson escaped yet again.
By now things were clearly getting out of hand. The Mounties enlisted the assistance of local trackers as well as the services of Wilfrid “Wop” May, a post-war aviator of some renown. May arrived with his ski-equipped Bellanca airplane to help coordinate the search from the air. The Mounties blocked the only two passes through the Richardson Mountains only to have Johnson scale a peak and escape.
The airplane turned out to be Albert Johnson’s undoing. Johnson was a skilled woodsman who would trek along caribou trails to conceal his footprints. This allowed him to move on the compacted snow quickly without snowshoes. Wop May could see that Johnson only left the track to make camp in the evenings. He coordinated with the ground team via radio and directed them along a river to Johnson’s position. By February 17 the Mounties had their man.
The posse encountered Johnson at a range of roughly two hundred yards. Johnson attempted to run, but he wasn’t wearing his snowshoes and got bogged down. In the resulting exchange of fire one Mountie was badly wounded. The law enforcement officers quickly narrowed the distance and killed Johnson at close range.
One round struck the fugitive in the left side of his pelvis, severing a significant artery. Johnson bled out in short order. Subsequent forensic analysis of his corpse showed him to have a fairly severe case of scoliosis as well as asymmetrical feet, one being markedly larger than the other. Over the course of 33 days, this gimpy little man had trekked 85 miles through the arctic wastes. Throughout the exchange, the only sound the officers had heard Johnson make was when he laughed after shooting Constable Millen.
When officers searched Johnson’s body they discovered $2,000 in American and Canadian currency (about $43,000 in today’s money), a small compass, some gold, a knife, a razor, a few nails, some fish hooks, a dead bird, a dead squirrel, and a few human teeth with gold fillings that they suspected were his own. He also had an ample supply of Beecham’s Pills, a type of laxative commercially available at the time. Despite widely circulating photos of the dead man no one ever determined his identity.
The Guns
Albert Johnson had three firearms on him when he died. They included a cut-down Winchester bolt action .22, a Savage lever-action Model 99F in .30-30, and a sawed-off 16-gauge Iver Johnson shotgun. Though his identity was never definitively established, Johnson was clearly adept at running a gun.
Johnson’s Winchester .22 was likely a Model 04 single shot with the buttstock cut into a pistol grip. Winchester offered a variety of these simple single-shot starter rifles over the first several decades of the 20th century. They would have made solid survival arms for securing small game.
The Savage Model 99F was a radically advanced sporting rifle for its day. Available in sixteen different chamberings, the 99F was a hammerless lever-action design that fed from a six-round rotary magazine. This made the 99F one of the world’s first lever-action rifles that could safely feed spitzer (pointed) bullets. Most rifles sporting tubular magazines can be dangerous if filled with pointed bullets that could inadvertently precipitate an unintentional discharge.
Johnson’s single-shot 16-gauge shotgun was mercilessly pruned into a tiny little handgun. Even in a modest 16-gauge chassis, this thing would have sported some impressive recoil. At under-the-table ranges, however, it would have reliably done the deed.
Ruminations
Why the heck couldn’t they have just left this poor guy alone? He lived in a cabin about the size of a large dinner table some sixty miles from civilization. He clearly just wanted to be by himself. Yet the Canadian government just couldn’t stand it. They had to hunt the man, blow his hand-built cabin to pieces, and eventually shoot him down like a dog. It’s a safe bet that no law enforcement officers would have been harmed had they just given the man some space.
This is a ubiquitous government disease. The US government killed Randy Weaver’s wife and teenaged son over the length of a shotgun barrel. They gave him a $3 million settlement afterward, but that pile of money is likely pretty poor company on a cold winter’s night.
In a representative democracy such as ours, the only reason stuff like this ever happens is if we allow it to. We are never more than one headline away from such a tragedy even today. I love my country, but I distrust my government. Live responsibly, love your neighbors, pay your taxes, and practice responsible citizenship. However, never tolerate government overreach or abuse. The line demarcating freedom and tyranny is indeed fine. If my opinion counts for anything, sometimes I think we may already have a few too many rules.
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It must be nice to be that rich!
It’s really tough to visualize what those great old guys went through securing our freedom during World War II.
My son and I once visited with a man named Mr. Powell. At the time, he was 89 years old. His rural home was meticulously maintained and sported a spotless American flag snapping on a pole set in concrete in his front yard.
Mr. Powell hit Omaha Beach at around 1430 hours on D-Day. By that time, he said most of the German infantry was obliterated, but the pillboxes were still active. Powell explained that everybody who stopped on the beach died, while most of those that ran across and pushed inland lived. It took him five days to reach St. Lô, at which point General Patton took over. Powell revered Patton and spent the rest of the war with his Third Army.
Powell trained as a paratrooper and made his five jumps. For those who have done time at Fort Benning, he was there when they erected the jump towers. I hadn’t realized they were that old. He broke his collarbone and was subsequently assigned to a leg infantry unit. As a soldier, he made $21 a month, which he claimed twice as much money for half as much work compared to what he made before in south Mississippi.
During the Depression, he lived off of hickory nuts and opossums. He said opossum didn’t taste very good, but “You’d be surprised what you’ll eat when you’re hungry.”
Needless to say, Powell was a bad man in his prime. He was a Godly man, but Hitler started it, and Powell said he was determined to finish it.
Powell had one good buddy who always went out with him when the need arose. He quietly explained that “Them kraut sentries never stood a chance against the two of us.” And that they were very comfortable operating just the two of them alone in the dark with a knife. Apparently, they got fairly good at it.
Powell didn’t have much use for the Schutzstaffel (SS). He called them “Those Gestapo men.” I got the impression SS troops had a bit of a challenge successfully surrendering to Powell and his guys. He got tearful when discussing his wife’s stroke. By contrast, he loved talking about killing Germans.
Mr. Powell saw horrible things in Europe during the war.
Those experiences shaped his worldview.
At one point, his squad was assigned to secure Orly airport in Paris. After a brief firefight, the Germans surrendered. Powell said that the Germans were bad to leave a couple of guys back to shoot the GIs when they were processing prisoners. He and his patrolling buddy laid low and, sure enough, soon spotted a pair of Germans creeping through the grass, trying to get the drop on his GIs. The two Americans lined them up and cut them down. Powell cleaned up the German helmet in question and shipped it back home. It hung on a nail in his barn, a .30 caliber hole running all the way through.
During the Battle of the Bulge, Powell took a small combat patrol out to find the forward thrust of the German armor. He found it. He and his guys were out on their own behind enemy lines for 4 days. When they were making their way back, they encountered a U.S. antitank unit and were “captured.” Otto Skorzeny’s SS men in GI uniforms had done their job well, and nobody trusted anybody.
The trigger-happy AT guys asked them who had won the World Series at gunpoint. Powell said he was a country boy from southern Mississippi. When they were watching the World Series, he was out chasing opossums to feed his family. He told them he had no time for baseball, and they let him pass.
He saw the death camps with the living scarecrows. He captured a “baby factory” in Frankfurt filled with little blonde-haired boys sired by SS men with willing frauleins. He said he didn’t know what happened to the little girls.
Mr. Powell had little use for the Waffen-SS. He called them, “Those Gestapo men.”
Powell relayed dozens of stories, and it was evident he had some strong opinions about a lot of things. He vigorously opposed females in the military. He said real war was too horrible for women. I’ve not lived what he lived. I lack the credibility to question him.
He had great respect for artillery, though he didn’t care much for the .30 carbine — not enough spunk downrange. He never saw a Thompson submachine gun in an infantry unit. Each squad had a BAR, and he respected it. He loved the Garand. He said they were a good bit more efficient with their ammo back then. He said, “I’ll kill way more people with that M1 than these boys will today with them fast-firing guns.” I believed him.
Despite only having a sixth-grade education. Powell successfully completed a military career as a master sergeant, raised a whole bevy of productive children, spent a lifetime paying taxes and making the world a better place. Looking around his outbuildings with a dozen restored tractors and piles of beautifully resurrected old engines speaks to his mechanical proclivities.
We talked for three hours, and I took five pages of notes. The experience of sitting with my son and listening to a man describe what Omaha Beach smelled like was quite literally priceless. Mr. Powell may be gone now, but today, we stand on the shoulders of giants.
