ANJULI GRANTHAM grew up beach seining in Uganik Bay on the west side of Kodiak Island. As an Alaskan historian, writer, curator, and instigator of arts and humanities projects related to fishing, she still derives her living from the sea, even though she is no longer a commercial fisherman. Her project, West Side Stories, documents the history and culture of the west side of Kodiak through oral history, photography, and radio producing. You can listen to West Side Stories at www.kmxt.org. While you are there, listen to Way Back in Kodiak, Anjuli's radio program about Kodiak history that includes the history of Karluk, Larsen Bay, early halibut fishermen, and more.
Anjuli's blog, Salt and Gale, focuses on the arts, history, and way of life within Alaska's fishing towns. Please visit Salt and Gale at www.anjuligrantham.com.
Anjuli's blog, Salt and Gale, focuses on the arts, history, and way of life within Alaska's fishing towns. Please visit Salt and Gale at www.anjuligrantham.com.
WRITINGS
Charting Packers Spit
Sixteen years passed since I had last slept in Uganik Bay, on the west side of Kodiak Island, Alaska. Yet there is something about the summers of childhood that stretch on and on. They persist in dreams. Perhaps they are the soil in which our character takes root. No, we are fishermen, not farmers; they are the redd in which the roe is spawned.
This I knew: on the chart, Packers Spit swooshes out like a reverse comma into the East Arm of Uganik Bay. But would I remember its three-dimensional form as we made our approach? I was sitting in an aluminum skiff, and in my lap were my stepdad’s ashes. It was summer solstice and, coincidentally, it was Father’s Day. The day before I spent conducting oral histories with fishermen, but today I wasn’t the historian. I was the daughter of Shutup Joe, Pam and Clifford, and I was returning to the fish camp where I spent summers as a kid, the place where my parents go after they die.
When the float plane that delivers mail twice a week dropped me off on the beach, Clifford’s ashes weighed more than the produce that I carried as my food contribution for the remote fish camps that were to host me. I was flippantly eschewing the line between the personal and professional as I set out to document the bay through oral history and, for myself, convert places on the chart to places that I’ve stood. There was no practiced disinterest, no professional distance here. In August of 1982, my father was fishing in the bay when he received a message delivered via FM radio: “Come to town to meet your new girlfriend.” The girlfriend was me. When I was planning this project, I went to the home of Floyd, one retired Uganik fisherman, and saw a framed portrait of my stepfather’s father hanging on the wall. I learned it was my grandfather who had taught him and many others in Uganik Bay to setnet for salmon- a type of fishing in which one end of the net is affixed to land and the other juts into the sea like a hook.
Floyd and other Uganik old timers took out their charts to show me fish camps, and I tried to imagine the landscape but I couldn’t clearly grasp in my mind. I became familiar with their index fingers as they pointed out capes and crannies of coast line. Their fingers jumped from small islands to miniscule outcroppings that were an eighth of the size of their fingernail yet managed to hold a lifetime of their summers. Like tracing constellations across the sky, these fingers indicated fish camps instead of stars, old canneries instead of planets. Miners Point, Trap 6, Daylight Harbor, Gull Light, Packers Spit- the utterance of names over lips as they pointed at each place reminded me of the devout performing a daily rosary, with familiarity and with respect.
I opened my own atlas of Alaska and ran my finger countless times along that comma of land that constitutes Packers Spit, rubbing to conjure memories. Many times I’ve flown over it, heading to another destination but sneaking a glimpse of the rotting hull of my father’s last salmon seiner, a speck high and dry in the lagoon. In archival collections for the Alaska Packers Association, the company from which Packers Spit derives its name, I encountered plats on which buildings like “China House” are noted. The salty marsh that never had a name when I was a kid was marked as Mathew’s Lagoon. It was known as Uganik Fishing Station then, according to the 1893 land commissioner’s report. I tried to recall where the nubby pilings protruded from the sand and correlate them to the cannery building hand-drawn on the old survey. But the sad truth was that after so many years, Packers Spit was more familiar to me as a birds-eye landform than an actual landscape.
Even though I couldn’t remember it before that moment, it was a startlingly familiar site as we neared Packers Spit’s sandy beach on Father’s Day. The crewman jumped over the bow and walked the anchor up shore. I followed him and looked up to see the cabin that my family slept in barely visible behind the towering beach grass. There was no path to it, so I made big steps and hoped to not squish any voles underfoot in the process. The cabin was standing but rotten; all windows were broken and gray sky was visible through a large hole in the roof. It was insulated with old salmon can boxes, but mostly the cardboard had drooped to the floor. I looked out the window from which I used to watch Clifford plunging from the seine skiff, making bubbles to scare salmon deeper into the net. But the grass was so high that I couldn’t even see the beach. I picked up a key to an outboard motor and slipped it into my pocket. The cabin might last another few winters, or not.
More skiffs arrived filled with fishermen who were friends with Cliff. A salmon seiner anchored off the spit, close to shore, and the husband and wife walked to the bow. I opened the bottle of my stepdad’s drink of choice, Bacardi, took a swig, and passed it to the fisherman sporting orange rain gear to my right. I opened the plastic box in which Clifford’s ashes were packed, tore the plastic, and held the bag by its bottom. Light particles floated in the wind, heavy chunks of bone thumped in the sand. I wondered if what looked like smooth, white shells were actually the weathered bits of my mother and of my father, whose ashes my siblings and I had scattered in that very spot years before. The captain of the seine boat rang a bell. We sipped the bottle of rum until it was empty and I put Clifford’s photo and a handful of ash within it. I screwed on the lid and threw it into Uganik Bay.
We jumped back into the skiffs and powered away from Packers Spit. I looked back across the wake to see Packers Spit moving further away. Then I saw: it isn’t a comma. It rolls out like a green and slate-grey carpet from a wall of mountains. It is outspoken flat land in a bay made of peaks and cliffs. Its appearance was again fixed in my mind, relieving the burden of faded memory. But if it was closure that I was seeking, it was not something that I found. And if it means leaving Uganik Bay behind for another 16 years, it’s something I don’t want, either.
___________________
My West
I'm taking you to the wild west
the wild wild bearded west
where we buck tides
instead of stallions
and we wrangle salmon,
not steak.
Where instead of wagon trains
bearing whiskey, brides and kin,
float planes glide them in.
Where beach rye
stretches as high as cacti.
Squalls rise from the sea
like dust clouds under hooves
of an approaching enemy.
The cannery watchman was killed
The brothers were slain
the old drunk disappeared
in this Tombstone with rain
The wild west side, it was.
Wild lives amidst wildlife.
___________________
The Baptism at Smith Beach
Mission Beach
“Just a seine full of dollys,” my dad said disappointedly, shaking his red beard as he assessed the results of our illicit beach seining trip to Mission Beach in Uganik Bay. I picked up a humpy and hugged it to my slimy chest, pitching it over the gunwale of the wooden skiff that stood about as high as me. I was relatively certain that Dolly Vardens were named in honor of Dolly Parton, and I doubted that the country music star would be pleased to know that my dad thought her namesake fish were wormy, or that he cursed as we weeded through them in order to pick out the few humpies that we’d hauled to the beach. I didn’t understand why we couldn’t deliver them to the tender, who would come around Packers Spit later that evening. They looked close enough to salmon, to me.
“They don’t want them, Anjulooni,” Dad explained as he kicked a dolly from the beach back into the water. My brother Gus struggled to save our unfortunate by-catch by dousing their gills with water. He thought Dolly Parton had nice legs. I wondered if the tender’s affront to the rainbow-hued fish would impact my brother’s tenderhearted affection for the big-busted star.
We were fishing behind the markers. That my dad had brought his 5 year old and 3 year old children as crew that day doesn’t mean he lacked complicit partners in this fishing expedition, since there were plenty of misfits who fished on the Spit who disregarded the law. It is more likely he doubted we’d make a big haul and he didn’t need the muscle.
It was a typical summer day for my family in Uganik Bay, since my dad rarely caught lots of fish and he was prone to illegality in many of his dealings. The only thing that makes it remarkable is that it is my earliest memory of Mission Beach.
Gus’s earliest memories come from that same summer: first, pulling in a beach seine. Second: being convinced he was drowning. It was at Mission Beach that Gus was baptized.
Forgetting and Changing Names
“Why it’s called Smith's Beach, I don't know,” Deedie Pearson spoke with a dry throat. “When there were a lot of people on the Spit they started calling it Mission Beach. I'm trying to get it converted back to Smith's Beach.”
Deedie and I were talking in her house on Alder Street, overlooking the boat harbor. My memory of breaking fishing laws on Mission Beach as a child took place around 30 years ago. Deedie’s tenure in the bay stretches back 70 years, to 1947, when her parents purchased a house and saltry in Mush Bay. Each day in June, she would skiff by Mission/Smith Beach, which is located on the west side of Mush Bay. She would pass it as she brought back to her family’s saltry the reds that she and her siblings had caught in their setnet. If Mission Beach is actually Smith Beach, she would know.
“Why do you think they call it Mission Beach, then?” I asked.
“Why Mission Beach? Well, because Reverend Smith. But it was Smith Beach long before he knew about this place,” Deedie clarified. She was speaking of the Reverend Smith who circumnavigated the archipelago aboard the Evangel. Supposedly, Reverend Smith would anchor the Evangel in front of Smith Beach. From Smith Beach, it became Mission Beach, seemingly renamed in honor of the Smith who tried to evangelize the wilds of Kodiak.
But Deedie didn’t know for which Smith the beach was originally named. In the catalog cards of my brain, the name was definitely classified as pertaining to the history of Kodiak’s seafood industry, but I couldn’t quite articulate the connection. Since our conversation, I uncovered that it was named for Oliver Smith, the founder of the first cannery on Kodiak. He beach seined at Smith Beach and sold his salmon to the cannery that was then located at Packers Spit.
“My brother was baptized there, at Smith Beach,” I said acknowledging the precedence of Deedie’s preferred name in the hopes that it would improve the reception of the next bit of information: “Coyote Bowers dunked him in the water during a party.”
Iron Born
This summer, I skiffed passed Smith Beach on my way to Mush Bay. I recognized it immediately, but before it was within sight, all I could pick up were memory-pulses.
Pulse: beachseining with my dad and Gus.
Pulse: Taking a skiff over to Mission/Smith Beach for a party during a fishing closure.
Pulse: My mom running into the water to extract her frantic toddler.
Pulse: seiners coming in close to the beach and Coyote shouting after them, “See you down the trail!” as they pulled away.
I remember much more clearly the retelling of the story of when Gus unceremoniously was submitted to the first sacrament, a story that has become part of the Grantham-Trueman family canon. But I don’t recall the answer to a question that pervades my adult sensibilities now: why? What possessed Coyote to toss a terrified toddler into the sea and not fish him out?
Gus isn’t too concerned about it. “I remember he asked if I was baptized, picking me up and walking out to his waste into the water. He said, ‘I baptize you in the name of the father, and of the son, and of the Holy Spirit,’ and he flung me into the sea,” Gus told me over the phone. He remembers trying to swim, sinking below the water, and looking upward to see our mother’s hands, yanking him back out.
“Why do you think he did it?”
“I don’t know, sister. We told the story many times together, but I don’t think I ever asked him why.”
“Iron born,” Gus now claims. “I tell my friends that I was iron born, like in the Game of Thrones. I survived drowning to become a warrior,” he chuckles.
1988
I could as easily ask the beach’s namesake, Oliver Smith, about his history within Uganik as I can ask Coyote of his motives for tossing a toddler into the sea, or my parents about their memories from that day, since all are dead. So, I sought another avenue of familial information: the Grantham-Trueman family photo box. Photos from the day of Gus’s baptism are slipped in the pages of a mini-album that contains one roll of developed images. Examining them, I see the details that my memory did not hold on to- the supersized lifejacket that I sported that summer that tied around my chest and reached down to my knees, for example.
But the presence of my little sister, Carrie, is the most surprising bit of information, since I don’t remember her being there that day. But there she is, less than a year old, holding a fishing pole, reaching for her dad’s can of Rainier, being snuggled by our Uncle Ronny. Suddenly, what were just pulses of memory have a fact to affix themselves to- the existence of my sister.
Gus was baptized during the summer of 1988, then. It was the same year that we lived in the cabin that had three sets of triple bunks within its ten by fifteen foot tar-papered walls. Richard would sit on a middle bunk and play his electric guitar. He strummed without an amp, because the only power on the Spit came from batteries. Still, he would play just loud enough so that I could hear the notes of “You are My Sunshine,” as we sang together. He was called the Pup because his father was Coyote. He had stringy hair, big glasses that matched his big teeth, and a poor complexion like other teenaged boys.
That summer, my baby sister fell from the top bunk in the middle of the night, right into the pit in which the barrel stove was rooted. But the fire had gone out and she was wrapped in blankets so she didn’t even wake during the fall. I recall that my dad was frantic, even though my sister was not his daughter. She was the daughter of Cliff, my stepfather. But we all lived in the cabin that summer, my mom, dad, stepdad, Gus, Carrie, Richard, Danny Bowers. Others too, who I can’t remember.
It was 1988. The best price ever paid for reds in the state of Alaska. It was 1988. The summer that the Nickerson brothers were killed up the bay at their Noisy Island set net site. A man named Cue Ball found their bodies. I remember their surname being repeated, over and over again: The Nickersons. The Nickersons. The Nickersons. The Nickersons. Could they have been there, at the party, the Nickersons and their crewmember who killed them both? It’s more likely that they had already gone missing. Perhaps their bodies had already been found in a ravine.
I wonder if Coyote was feeling his own mortality during the party at Mission/ Smith Beach. Maybe in that summer of disappearances, he considered the eternal soul of those around him. He considered the unbaptized being of my brother, and for good measure, determined to dunk him.
Consider
Sometimes I wonder if places have memories. Think: words are flung from the mouth, each accompanied by a particle of saliva that drops to the ground. The spit becomes absorbed and a part of the environment, still bearing the energy and bits of the tetrahedral architecture of the speaker. We disturb a rock on the beach and a strange thought enters our mind, a bit of unexpected wisdom, a dream of people we’ve never met. Of course memories are suddenly excavated when reinserted into places one hasn’t been for years. Could it be that these memories are shared between both the human and the place, like a conversation with a long-held friend as you work together to remember an event from your mutual past?
Maybe names, stories, and hunches stick like static to places that they are naturally connected to. Just as elements arrange themselves to create compounds, so too do spoken bits of heart, guts, and will travel to cling to where they most make sense. Like beaches that attract the same shells, or eddies in which a similar assortment of marine debris conglomerates- once told stories circulate until they find their way back to a familiar home. There is identity inscribed on landscape that goes beyond what has been or can be recorded. There are sticky remnants of history that are magnetically attracted to place and picked up by the sensitive observer, to the intuitive listener.
Perhaps the day that my dad, brother and I hauled in a net full of Dolly Vardens, my dad smelled the lingering sweat of the beach’s namesake, Oliver Smith, as we pulled in the seine. Perhaps he heard an echo of Smith’s voice rustling in the beach rye. After all, that day we were mimicking what Oliver Smith did in the previous century: beach seining at Smith Beach and delivering to Packers Spit.
Maybe the day of the baptism, Coyote caught a note of a hymn, sung by Reverend Smith and it was this Christian association that inspired him to fling a toddler into the sea. Coyote, filled more with spirit water than the Holy Spirit, reenacted what he imagined the Reverend Smith did on that very beach. Drunk and rowdy, maybe upset over the disappearance of his fellow Uganik fishermen, he thought he’d continue the evangelizing legacy of Mission Beach.
Whatever the case, it seems we persist in keeping history and ritual, both known and forgotten, alive.
SIDEBAR
The Tale of Captain Oliver Smith, Canner, Miner, Kodiak West Sider and Namesake of Smith Beach
After speaking with Deedie I hankered to uncover the Smith for which the beach was named. Perhaps finding more about this Smith fellow would help me to make sense of my own memories of Uganik Bay? After consulting Bureau of Fisheries records, old surveys, and newspaper accounts, I am nearly certain the beach was named for Captain Oliver Smith, the man who founded the first cannery on Kodiak Island in 1882.
Smith was not a newcomer to Kodiak when he constructed that first cannery at Karluk. According to his obituary, he first arrived to Alaska in 1868, having enlisted in the Army and being sent north quickly following the US purchase of what had just recently been known as Russian America. His first trip to Kodiak would have been quite brief, since he returned to Fort Vancouver in Washington Territory that same year and received an honorable discharge from the Army. While in Kodiak, he must have made contact with Frederick Sloane Sargent, who Hutchison, Kohl, and Co. sent to Kodiak in order to inventory the goods and buildings that the enterprise had just purchased from the Russian-American Company. Soon, Hutchison, Kohl and Co. became the Alaska Commercial Company (AC). Perhaps Sargent connected him with AC’s office in San Francisco, for it was AC that sent Smith north again, where he was “one of the Company’s first store keepers in Alaska remaining in the business about 12 years,”(so claims his obituary).
Very little information has come to light that traces Smith’s specific experiences in the Kodiak region during these first dozen years. Through a few bits of correspondence from the manager of AC’s trading post in Kodiak, we learn that Smith is the Assistant Agent of the Kodiak District. As the assistant agent, he was the right hand man to Charles Hirsch, who was the big boss- the General Agent of the Kodiak District. Hirsch was the most powerful person in a region that included the Kodiak archipelago, Alaska Peninsula, Cook Inlet and Prince William Sound.
Smith’s tasks would have included working at the company store; keeping inventory and meticulous records of all goods sold and to whom; accepting pelts, “curios” and local goods as trade for store goods; and organizing and outfitting hunting parties. His time in Kodiak made him “a master of the Russian language and he spoke the dialects of the Aleutian tribes fluently.” This is to say that he spoke Sugcestun (Alutiiq) and quite possibly Unangan. Smith became a Kodiakan, known by most and knowledgeable about the regions resources and prospects. He also suffered from asthma.
But Smith was more than an asthmatic storekeeper and underling. He was a ship’s captain and he was a fish businessman. It is pertaining to ships and fishing that his name most frequently appears in historic newspapers. Watercraft meant everything to Kodiak. Everything came by sea, barring whatever few goods or bits of information arrived at Saint Paul via the network of island trails. Mail, goods, people, news of the outside world- it was carried over water. Moreover, it wasn’t just pelts that were being shipped to San Francisco- barrels of salted salmon were, too.
By 1879, Smith and Hirsch were no longer primarily employed by AC. Smith was the captain of the Calistoga, the twenty-nine ton schooner. That year, her value was placed at $2500 and “[b]esides the master she carries four men, one of whom is a Swede and the other three are Russian Creoles,” as stated in an early Bureau of Fisheries report. That year, Smith and Hirsch operated a salting operation at Karluk and used the Calistoga to transport goods, workers, and “600 barrels of salmon which were shipped to San Francisco, fetching $6 a barrel,” continues the same report.
This isn’t the first commercial fishing operation to take place at Karluk. Since the US Purchase, prominent Creoles like Ilarion Archimandritov (best known for sinking the Russian-American Company’s Kadyak off Spruce Island) had brought Karluk salt salmon down to San Francisco to sell. Moreover, Karluk Alutiit put up astronomical amounts of dried fish each year, selling some to AC and other traders. But Smith & Hirsch’s operation was noteworthy, and it was growing.
They used two beach seines and built a saltery for $500 on the Spit. They employed 6 eighteen foot dories and 25 men- “one Swede, one Irishman, and 23 natives.” In the summer of 1880, they caught over 400,000 pounds of sockeye for salting, packing them into 849 barrels. The fishermen caught an additional 300,000 pounds of reds, which were turned into 17,500 pounds of dried salmon. At the season’s end, they sailed it to San Francisco.
Smith and Hirsch were lucky for two reasons: first in their timing, and second due to their position. Timing: in 1878, the first two canneries opened in Alaska. Position: they had spent the last decade working for some of the wealthiest men in California, and thus had easy access to investors.
In 1882, Smith married Miss Augusta Ely in St. Helena, California. It was a very busy spring, for he and Hirsch were making preparations to make history: that summer they built the first cannery to operate in the Kodiak archipelago. Smith & Hirsch relied on their AC bosses and friends to finance part of the construction of a cannery on the Spit. They shipped up the 10 Chinese tinsmiths who knew how to make tin cans by hand and the material required to do so. They had two gangs of Alutiiq fishermen who caught the fish in beach seines. Smith was now not only a married sea captain, he was a canner.
In 1884, the growing concern became known as the Karluk Packing Company. Competition moved in, enough to warrant consolidation in 1893. The Karluk Packing Co. became a part of the Alaska Packers Association. According to an 1898 report, Smith & Hirsch’s cannery had packed more salmon than any other in Alaska up to that point in time.
But by then, Smith was on to different things. He likely started spending winters in California following his marriage. In Saint Helena, he had a general merchandise store and a vineyard. Alaska remained his main focus, though. He was a very early instigator of fox farming in the region according to his obituary, having in 1892 “leased the Uyak Island from the United States Government…[who] gave him ten foxes and he purchased twenty-six more. He continued with the industry for six years.” (Which is Uyak Island?) At the same time, he operated a saltry at Red River and opened the Eagle Harbor Packing Company.
He owned several schooners and a steamship, as well, which he used in another industry: mining. In 1895, an article in the San Francisco Call writes that he was departing for Kodiak Island “in a little cockle shell of a steamer known as the Kodiak… she is only about fifty feet long, but she is built like a tug and is considered quite safe.” He reportedly intended to placer mine near Alitak, since the poor price of salmon didn’t warrant fishing that year. “The party will be gone six or seven months,” the article concluded. In 1896, another article in the San Francisco Call called him “an old Alaskan miner,” stating Smith was preparing to sail his three-masted schooner the Sophia Sutherland from San Francisco to Alaska, knowing “some of the best mining districts on Cooks Inlet.”
The thing about newspaper accounts, federal reports, and passing mentions in other people’s correspondence is that we can glean good information, but understand very little of a person’s spirit. But in this case, Smith’s obituary helps: “Deceased was a very kind and generous man. He had traveled all over the world and was the most entertaining conversationalist… He was considered the one of the best posted men on all topics pertaining to Alaska, the Bering sea or Aleutian Islands. Captain Smith made and lost several fortunes and at one time was very wealthy. He never became discouraged at misfortunes but was always optimistic and of a cheerful disposition. When he had money he was always ready to share it with his friends or with the needy, and it is said of him that he had many times loaned money to friends to put them on their feet and few ever appealed to him in vain. He was generous to a fault, faithfully served his adopted country when she was in need, was a devoted husband and father and a good man.”
I like him.
What about Uganik, though?
Well, in an 1897 report: “[Uganik] bay is also seined by the Alaska Packers’ Association and by Capt. Oliver Smith, who sells fish to the packing companies.” And the next year: “For several years a saltery was operated by Mr. Oliver Smith in a bight on the southern shore of the east arm, a mile within the entrance. This was sold to the [Alaska Packers] Association in 1897 and is now closed.” At that bight, he beach seined, he put up salt fish, and he likely sold salmon right across the East Arm at the APA’s cannery at Packers Spit. The land was sold to APA, becoming one of just a smattering of pieces of patented land within Uganik Bay. It is a part of the Kodiak National Wildlife Refuge.
Sixteen years passed since I had last slept in Uganik Bay, on the west side of Kodiak Island, Alaska. Yet there is something about the summers of childhood that stretch on and on. They persist in dreams. Perhaps they are the soil in which our character takes root. No, we are fishermen, not farmers; they are the redd in which the roe is spawned.
This I knew: on the chart, Packers Spit swooshes out like a reverse comma into the East Arm of Uganik Bay. But would I remember its three-dimensional form as we made our approach? I was sitting in an aluminum skiff, and in my lap were my stepdad’s ashes. It was summer solstice and, coincidentally, it was Father’s Day. The day before I spent conducting oral histories with fishermen, but today I wasn’t the historian. I was the daughter of Shutup Joe, Pam and Clifford, and I was returning to the fish camp where I spent summers as a kid, the place where my parents go after they die.
When the float plane that delivers mail twice a week dropped me off on the beach, Clifford’s ashes weighed more than the produce that I carried as my food contribution for the remote fish camps that were to host me. I was flippantly eschewing the line between the personal and professional as I set out to document the bay through oral history and, for myself, convert places on the chart to places that I’ve stood. There was no practiced disinterest, no professional distance here. In August of 1982, my father was fishing in the bay when he received a message delivered via FM radio: “Come to town to meet your new girlfriend.” The girlfriend was me. When I was planning this project, I went to the home of Floyd, one retired Uganik fisherman, and saw a framed portrait of my stepfather’s father hanging on the wall. I learned it was my grandfather who had taught him and many others in Uganik Bay to setnet for salmon- a type of fishing in which one end of the net is affixed to land and the other juts into the sea like a hook.
Floyd and other Uganik old timers took out their charts to show me fish camps, and I tried to imagine the landscape but I couldn’t clearly grasp in my mind. I became familiar with their index fingers as they pointed out capes and crannies of coast line. Their fingers jumped from small islands to miniscule outcroppings that were an eighth of the size of their fingernail yet managed to hold a lifetime of their summers. Like tracing constellations across the sky, these fingers indicated fish camps instead of stars, old canneries instead of planets. Miners Point, Trap 6, Daylight Harbor, Gull Light, Packers Spit- the utterance of names over lips as they pointed at each place reminded me of the devout performing a daily rosary, with familiarity and with respect.
I opened my own atlas of Alaska and ran my finger countless times along that comma of land that constitutes Packers Spit, rubbing to conjure memories. Many times I’ve flown over it, heading to another destination but sneaking a glimpse of the rotting hull of my father’s last salmon seiner, a speck high and dry in the lagoon. In archival collections for the Alaska Packers Association, the company from which Packers Spit derives its name, I encountered plats on which buildings like “China House” are noted. The salty marsh that never had a name when I was a kid was marked as Mathew’s Lagoon. It was known as Uganik Fishing Station then, according to the 1893 land commissioner’s report. I tried to recall where the nubby pilings protruded from the sand and correlate them to the cannery building hand-drawn on the old survey. But the sad truth was that after so many years, Packers Spit was more familiar to me as a birds-eye landform than an actual landscape.
Even though I couldn’t remember it before that moment, it was a startlingly familiar site as we neared Packers Spit’s sandy beach on Father’s Day. The crewman jumped over the bow and walked the anchor up shore. I followed him and looked up to see the cabin that my family slept in barely visible behind the towering beach grass. There was no path to it, so I made big steps and hoped to not squish any voles underfoot in the process. The cabin was standing but rotten; all windows were broken and gray sky was visible through a large hole in the roof. It was insulated with old salmon can boxes, but mostly the cardboard had drooped to the floor. I looked out the window from which I used to watch Clifford plunging from the seine skiff, making bubbles to scare salmon deeper into the net. But the grass was so high that I couldn’t even see the beach. I picked up a key to an outboard motor and slipped it into my pocket. The cabin might last another few winters, or not.
More skiffs arrived filled with fishermen who were friends with Cliff. A salmon seiner anchored off the spit, close to shore, and the husband and wife walked to the bow. I opened the bottle of my stepdad’s drink of choice, Bacardi, took a swig, and passed it to the fisherman sporting orange rain gear to my right. I opened the plastic box in which Clifford’s ashes were packed, tore the plastic, and held the bag by its bottom. Light particles floated in the wind, heavy chunks of bone thumped in the sand. I wondered if what looked like smooth, white shells were actually the weathered bits of my mother and of my father, whose ashes my siblings and I had scattered in that very spot years before. The captain of the seine boat rang a bell. We sipped the bottle of rum until it was empty and I put Clifford’s photo and a handful of ash within it. I screwed on the lid and threw it into Uganik Bay.
We jumped back into the skiffs and powered away from Packers Spit. I looked back across the wake to see Packers Spit moving further away. Then I saw: it isn’t a comma. It rolls out like a green and slate-grey carpet from a wall of mountains. It is outspoken flat land in a bay made of peaks and cliffs. Its appearance was again fixed in my mind, relieving the burden of faded memory. But if it was closure that I was seeking, it was not something that I found. And if it means leaving Uganik Bay behind for another 16 years, it’s something I don’t want, either.
___________________
My West
I'm taking you to the wild west
the wild wild bearded west
where we buck tides
instead of stallions
and we wrangle salmon,
not steak.
Where instead of wagon trains
bearing whiskey, brides and kin,
float planes glide them in.
Where beach rye
stretches as high as cacti.
Squalls rise from the sea
like dust clouds under hooves
of an approaching enemy.
The cannery watchman was killed
The brothers were slain
the old drunk disappeared
in this Tombstone with rain
The wild west side, it was.
Wild lives amidst wildlife.
___________________
The Baptism at Smith Beach
Mission Beach
“Just a seine full of dollys,” my dad said disappointedly, shaking his red beard as he assessed the results of our illicit beach seining trip to Mission Beach in Uganik Bay. I picked up a humpy and hugged it to my slimy chest, pitching it over the gunwale of the wooden skiff that stood about as high as me. I was relatively certain that Dolly Vardens were named in honor of Dolly Parton, and I doubted that the country music star would be pleased to know that my dad thought her namesake fish were wormy, or that he cursed as we weeded through them in order to pick out the few humpies that we’d hauled to the beach. I didn’t understand why we couldn’t deliver them to the tender, who would come around Packers Spit later that evening. They looked close enough to salmon, to me.
“They don’t want them, Anjulooni,” Dad explained as he kicked a dolly from the beach back into the water. My brother Gus struggled to save our unfortunate by-catch by dousing their gills with water. He thought Dolly Parton had nice legs. I wondered if the tender’s affront to the rainbow-hued fish would impact my brother’s tenderhearted affection for the big-busted star.
We were fishing behind the markers. That my dad had brought his 5 year old and 3 year old children as crew that day doesn’t mean he lacked complicit partners in this fishing expedition, since there were plenty of misfits who fished on the Spit who disregarded the law. It is more likely he doubted we’d make a big haul and he didn’t need the muscle.
It was a typical summer day for my family in Uganik Bay, since my dad rarely caught lots of fish and he was prone to illegality in many of his dealings. The only thing that makes it remarkable is that it is my earliest memory of Mission Beach.
Gus’s earliest memories come from that same summer: first, pulling in a beach seine. Second: being convinced he was drowning. It was at Mission Beach that Gus was baptized.
Forgetting and Changing Names
“Why it’s called Smith's Beach, I don't know,” Deedie Pearson spoke with a dry throat. “When there were a lot of people on the Spit they started calling it Mission Beach. I'm trying to get it converted back to Smith's Beach.”
Deedie and I were talking in her house on Alder Street, overlooking the boat harbor. My memory of breaking fishing laws on Mission Beach as a child took place around 30 years ago. Deedie’s tenure in the bay stretches back 70 years, to 1947, when her parents purchased a house and saltry in Mush Bay. Each day in June, she would skiff by Mission/Smith Beach, which is located on the west side of Mush Bay. She would pass it as she brought back to her family’s saltry the reds that she and her siblings had caught in their setnet. If Mission Beach is actually Smith Beach, she would know.
“Why do you think they call it Mission Beach, then?” I asked.
“Why Mission Beach? Well, because Reverend Smith. But it was Smith Beach long before he knew about this place,” Deedie clarified. She was speaking of the Reverend Smith who circumnavigated the archipelago aboard the Evangel. Supposedly, Reverend Smith would anchor the Evangel in front of Smith Beach. From Smith Beach, it became Mission Beach, seemingly renamed in honor of the Smith who tried to evangelize the wilds of Kodiak.
But Deedie didn’t know for which Smith the beach was originally named. In the catalog cards of my brain, the name was definitely classified as pertaining to the history of Kodiak’s seafood industry, but I couldn’t quite articulate the connection. Since our conversation, I uncovered that it was named for Oliver Smith, the founder of the first cannery on Kodiak. He beach seined at Smith Beach and sold his salmon to the cannery that was then located at Packers Spit.
“My brother was baptized there, at Smith Beach,” I said acknowledging the precedence of Deedie’s preferred name in the hopes that it would improve the reception of the next bit of information: “Coyote Bowers dunked him in the water during a party.”
Iron Born
This summer, I skiffed passed Smith Beach on my way to Mush Bay. I recognized it immediately, but before it was within sight, all I could pick up were memory-pulses.
Pulse: beachseining with my dad and Gus.
Pulse: Taking a skiff over to Mission/Smith Beach for a party during a fishing closure.
Pulse: My mom running into the water to extract her frantic toddler.
Pulse: seiners coming in close to the beach and Coyote shouting after them, “See you down the trail!” as they pulled away.
I remember much more clearly the retelling of the story of when Gus unceremoniously was submitted to the first sacrament, a story that has become part of the Grantham-Trueman family canon. But I don’t recall the answer to a question that pervades my adult sensibilities now: why? What possessed Coyote to toss a terrified toddler into the sea and not fish him out?
Gus isn’t too concerned about it. “I remember he asked if I was baptized, picking me up and walking out to his waste into the water. He said, ‘I baptize you in the name of the father, and of the son, and of the Holy Spirit,’ and he flung me into the sea,” Gus told me over the phone. He remembers trying to swim, sinking below the water, and looking upward to see our mother’s hands, yanking him back out.
“Why do you think he did it?”
“I don’t know, sister. We told the story many times together, but I don’t think I ever asked him why.”
“Iron born,” Gus now claims. “I tell my friends that I was iron born, like in the Game of Thrones. I survived drowning to become a warrior,” he chuckles.
1988
I could as easily ask the beach’s namesake, Oliver Smith, about his history within Uganik as I can ask Coyote of his motives for tossing a toddler into the sea, or my parents about their memories from that day, since all are dead. So, I sought another avenue of familial information: the Grantham-Trueman family photo box. Photos from the day of Gus’s baptism are slipped in the pages of a mini-album that contains one roll of developed images. Examining them, I see the details that my memory did not hold on to- the supersized lifejacket that I sported that summer that tied around my chest and reached down to my knees, for example.
But the presence of my little sister, Carrie, is the most surprising bit of information, since I don’t remember her being there that day. But there she is, less than a year old, holding a fishing pole, reaching for her dad’s can of Rainier, being snuggled by our Uncle Ronny. Suddenly, what were just pulses of memory have a fact to affix themselves to- the existence of my sister.
Gus was baptized during the summer of 1988, then. It was the same year that we lived in the cabin that had three sets of triple bunks within its ten by fifteen foot tar-papered walls. Richard would sit on a middle bunk and play his electric guitar. He strummed without an amp, because the only power on the Spit came from batteries. Still, he would play just loud enough so that I could hear the notes of “You are My Sunshine,” as we sang together. He was called the Pup because his father was Coyote. He had stringy hair, big glasses that matched his big teeth, and a poor complexion like other teenaged boys.
That summer, my baby sister fell from the top bunk in the middle of the night, right into the pit in which the barrel stove was rooted. But the fire had gone out and she was wrapped in blankets so she didn’t even wake during the fall. I recall that my dad was frantic, even though my sister was not his daughter. She was the daughter of Cliff, my stepfather. But we all lived in the cabin that summer, my mom, dad, stepdad, Gus, Carrie, Richard, Danny Bowers. Others too, who I can’t remember.
It was 1988. The best price ever paid for reds in the state of Alaska. It was 1988. The summer that the Nickerson brothers were killed up the bay at their Noisy Island set net site. A man named Cue Ball found their bodies. I remember their surname being repeated, over and over again: The Nickersons. The Nickersons. The Nickersons. The Nickersons. Could they have been there, at the party, the Nickersons and their crewmember who killed them both? It’s more likely that they had already gone missing. Perhaps their bodies had already been found in a ravine.
I wonder if Coyote was feeling his own mortality during the party at Mission/ Smith Beach. Maybe in that summer of disappearances, he considered the eternal soul of those around him. He considered the unbaptized being of my brother, and for good measure, determined to dunk him.
Consider
Sometimes I wonder if places have memories. Think: words are flung from the mouth, each accompanied by a particle of saliva that drops to the ground. The spit becomes absorbed and a part of the environment, still bearing the energy and bits of the tetrahedral architecture of the speaker. We disturb a rock on the beach and a strange thought enters our mind, a bit of unexpected wisdom, a dream of people we’ve never met. Of course memories are suddenly excavated when reinserted into places one hasn’t been for years. Could it be that these memories are shared between both the human and the place, like a conversation with a long-held friend as you work together to remember an event from your mutual past?
Maybe names, stories, and hunches stick like static to places that they are naturally connected to. Just as elements arrange themselves to create compounds, so too do spoken bits of heart, guts, and will travel to cling to where they most make sense. Like beaches that attract the same shells, or eddies in which a similar assortment of marine debris conglomerates- once told stories circulate until they find their way back to a familiar home. There is identity inscribed on landscape that goes beyond what has been or can be recorded. There are sticky remnants of history that are magnetically attracted to place and picked up by the sensitive observer, to the intuitive listener.
Perhaps the day that my dad, brother and I hauled in a net full of Dolly Vardens, my dad smelled the lingering sweat of the beach’s namesake, Oliver Smith, as we pulled in the seine. Perhaps he heard an echo of Smith’s voice rustling in the beach rye. After all, that day we were mimicking what Oliver Smith did in the previous century: beach seining at Smith Beach and delivering to Packers Spit.
Maybe the day of the baptism, Coyote caught a note of a hymn, sung by Reverend Smith and it was this Christian association that inspired him to fling a toddler into the sea. Coyote, filled more with spirit water than the Holy Spirit, reenacted what he imagined the Reverend Smith did on that very beach. Drunk and rowdy, maybe upset over the disappearance of his fellow Uganik fishermen, he thought he’d continue the evangelizing legacy of Mission Beach.
Whatever the case, it seems we persist in keeping history and ritual, both known and forgotten, alive.
SIDEBAR
The Tale of Captain Oliver Smith, Canner, Miner, Kodiak West Sider and Namesake of Smith Beach
After speaking with Deedie I hankered to uncover the Smith for which the beach was named. Perhaps finding more about this Smith fellow would help me to make sense of my own memories of Uganik Bay? After consulting Bureau of Fisheries records, old surveys, and newspaper accounts, I am nearly certain the beach was named for Captain Oliver Smith, the man who founded the first cannery on Kodiak Island in 1882.
Smith was not a newcomer to Kodiak when he constructed that first cannery at Karluk. According to his obituary, he first arrived to Alaska in 1868, having enlisted in the Army and being sent north quickly following the US purchase of what had just recently been known as Russian America. His first trip to Kodiak would have been quite brief, since he returned to Fort Vancouver in Washington Territory that same year and received an honorable discharge from the Army. While in Kodiak, he must have made contact with Frederick Sloane Sargent, who Hutchison, Kohl, and Co. sent to Kodiak in order to inventory the goods and buildings that the enterprise had just purchased from the Russian-American Company. Soon, Hutchison, Kohl and Co. became the Alaska Commercial Company (AC). Perhaps Sargent connected him with AC’s office in San Francisco, for it was AC that sent Smith north again, where he was “one of the Company’s first store keepers in Alaska remaining in the business about 12 years,”(so claims his obituary).
Very little information has come to light that traces Smith’s specific experiences in the Kodiak region during these first dozen years. Through a few bits of correspondence from the manager of AC’s trading post in Kodiak, we learn that Smith is the Assistant Agent of the Kodiak District. As the assistant agent, he was the right hand man to Charles Hirsch, who was the big boss- the General Agent of the Kodiak District. Hirsch was the most powerful person in a region that included the Kodiak archipelago, Alaska Peninsula, Cook Inlet and Prince William Sound.
Smith’s tasks would have included working at the company store; keeping inventory and meticulous records of all goods sold and to whom; accepting pelts, “curios” and local goods as trade for store goods; and organizing and outfitting hunting parties. His time in Kodiak made him “a master of the Russian language and he spoke the dialects of the Aleutian tribes fluently.” This is to say that he spoke Sugcestun (Alutiiq) and quite possibly Unangan. Smith became a Kodiakan, known by most and knowledgeable about the regions resources and prospects. He also suffered from asthma.
But Smith was more than an asthmatic storekeeper and underling. He was a ship’s captain and he was a fish businessman. It is pertaining to ships and fishing that his name most frequently appears in historic newspapers. Watercraft meant everything to Kodiak. Everything came by sea, barring whatever few goods or bits of information arrived at Saint Paul via the network of island trails. Mail, goods, people, news of the outside world- it was carried over water. Moreover, it wasn’t just pelts that were being shipped to San Francisco- barrels of salted salmon were, too.
By 1879, Smith and Hirsch were no longer primarily employed by AC. Smith was the captain of the Calistoga, the twenty-nine ton schooner. That year, her value was placed at $2500 and “[b]esides the master she carries four men, one of whom is a Swede and the other three are Russian Creoles,” as stated in an early Bureau of Fisheries report. That year, Smith and Hirsch operated a salting operation at Karluk and used the Calistoga to transport goods, workers, and “600 barrels of salmon which were shipped to San Francisco, fetching $6 a barrel,” continues the same report.
This isn’t the first commercial fishing operation to take place at Karluk. Since the US Purchase, prominent Creoles like Ilarion Archimandritov (best known for sinking the Russian-American Company’s Kadyak off Spruce Island) had brought Karluk salt salmon down to San Francisco to sell. Moreover, Karluk Alutiit put up astronomical amounts of dried fish each year, selling some to AC and other traders. But Smith & Hirsch’s operation was noteworthy, and it was growing.
They used two beach seines and built a saltery for $500 on the Spit. They employed 6 eighteen foot dories and 25 men- “one Swede, one Irishman, and 23 natives.” In the summer of 1880, they caught over 400,000 pounds of sockeye for salting, packing them into 849 barrels. The fishermen caught an additional 300,000 pounds of reds, which were turned into 17,500 pounds of dried salmon. At the season’s end, they sailed it to San Francisco.
Smith and Hirsch were lucky for two reasons: first in their timing, and second due to their position. Timing: in 1878, the first two canneries opened in Alaska. Position: they had spent the last decade working for some of the wealthiest men in California, and thus had easy access to investors.
In 1882, Smith married Miss Augusta Ely in St. Helena, California. It was a very busy spring, for he and Hirsch were making preparations to make history: that summer they built the first cannery to operate in the Kodiak archipelago. Smith & Hirsch relied on their AC bosses and friends to finance part of the construction of a cannery on the Spit. They shipped up the 10 Chinese tinsmiths who knew how to make tin cans by hand and the material required to do so. They had two gangs of Alutiiq fishermen who caught the fish in beach seines. Smith was now not only a married sea captain, he was a canner.
In 1884, the growing concern became known as the Karluk Packing Company. Competition moved in, enough to warrant consolidation in 1893. The Karluk Packing Co. became a part of the Alaska Packers Association. According to an 1898 report, Smith & Hirsch’s cannery had packed more salmon than any other in Alaska up to that point in time.
But by then, Smith was on to different things. He likely started spending winters in California following his marriage. In Saint Helena, he had a general merchandise store and a vineyard. Alaska remained his main focus, though. He was a very early instigator of fox farming in the region according to his obituary, having in 1892 “leased the Uyak Island from the United States Government…[who] gave him ten foxes and he purchased twenty-six more. He continued with the industry for six years.” (Which is Uyak Island?) At the same time, he operated a saltry at Red River and opened the Eagle Harbor Packing Company.
He owned several schooners and a steamship, as well, which he used in another industry: mining. In 1895, an article in the San Francisco Call writes that he was departing for Kodiak Island “in a little cockle shell of a steamer known as the Kodiak… she is only about fifty feet long, but she is built like a tug and is considered quite safe.” He reportedly intended to placer mine near Alitak, since the poor price of salmon didn’t warrant fishing that year. “The party will be gone six or seven months,” the article concluded. In 1896, another article in the San Francisco Call called him “an old Alaskan miner,” stating Smith was preparing to sail his three-masted schooner the Sophia Sutherland from San Francisco to Alaska, knowing “some of the best mining districts on Cooks Inlet.”
The thing about newspaper accounts, federal reports, and passing mentions in other people’s correspondence is that we can glean good information, but understand very little of a person’s spirit. But in this case, Smith’s obituary helps: “Deceased was a very kind and generous man. He had traveled all over the world and was the most entertaining conversationalist… He was considered the one of the best posted men on all topics pertaining to Alaska, the Bering sea or Aleutian Islands. Captain Smith made and lost several fortunes and at one time was very wealthy. He never became discouraged at misfortunes but was always optimistic and of a cheerful disposition. When he had money he was always ready to share it with his friends or with the needy, and it is said of him that he had many times loaned money to friends to put them on their feet and few ever appealed to him in vain. He was generous to a fault, faithfully served his adopted country when she was in need, was a devoted husband and father and a good man.”
I like him.
What about Uganik, though?
Well, in an 1897 report: “[Uganik] bay is also seined by the Alaska Packers’ Association and by Capt. Oliver Smith, who sells fish to the packing companies.” And the next year: “For several years a saltery was operated by Mr. Oliver Smith in a bight on the southern shore of the east arm, a mile within the entrance. This was sold to the [Alaska Packers] Association in 1897 and is now closed.” At that bight, he beach seined, he put up salt fish, and he likely sold salmon right across the East Arm at the APA’s cannery at Packers Spit. The land was sold to APA, becoming one of just a smattering of pieces of patented land within Uganik Bay. It is a part of the Kodiak National Wildlife Refuge.