modeled the Louie L’ Amour attitude of the Ol’ Wild West.
Feb 13th Was awful cold last night 10* at 5:30AM. School stove froze up, ink froze, drinking water froze, so school was late starting. Sandy then drained the filter of the stove oil. Must have been some water in the fuel oil. Did some more wiring in the ceiling for our light fixtures.
Feb. 25th First day with electric lights. There is a new attitude among the kids in school since the addition of the lights. In the evening we heard, on our radio, an advertisement about TV remote controls saying "Do you have to get out of your chair to tune in a new station on your television set?" It was the first we’d ever heard of that. We jokingly said--" It must really be tough living back home in civilization with their troubles!!" What’s TV?
Feb.27th The Coast Guard ship, CLOVER came in at 6:45 tonight and picked up Katie Holmberg. It was an emergency evacuation. Took them 8 hours to come the last 44 miles in a strong SW gale. It came from Cape Scherioff. We'd been sending school work home for her since November and she’d been getting worse ever since. Think she has rheumatic fever.
During the November trip of the Garland, the Department of Education sent us all brand new school books with specific directions to destroy all the old ones. That seemed a waste to us. Why couldn't we just hand them out to the kids who were starved for reading material? But we did as we were instructed. We had a book burning. I'm sure that the same thing happened to one of the former teachers, creating that legend of "the crazy teacher burning all the books."
Emil verified another legend, when he told of the explosion that happened three years before on his fishing boat. It was caused by a gasoline leak in the engine room of his boat while he was ashore. It completely destroyed the boat, killing the crew-member right there in Pauloff Harbor just before the fishing season started. That crew man was that year’s Sanak school teacher.
Marina, Emil's wife, was the midwife for the birth of a baby for last year's teacher who was pregnant when she arrived in the fall. They were semi-prepared for the event, even though they had hoped to get to a hospital by June 1st in Anchorage. But the time came earlier than expected and the native women here were very experienced in home births, so things went well. (One more legend explained)
Old Chris Halverson cleared up another legend, the story of the lady that disappeared while searching for wild flowers. He said she may have been a mental case. It is true that her body was never found but folks around the village said she had been acting very strange for weeks before that. They were suspicious about the situation because the husband didn't seem terribly upset by her disappearance and didn't press for any investigation into the matter. He just left the island soon after and that was the last anyone ever heard of the episode.
I have since learned that my handling of the murder-suicide episode had become another of the Sanak teacher legends.
One foggy day I felt I'd also become a mental case when I thought I saw a lone horse in the misty distance near the village. I reluctantly mentioned it to one of the older boys and he told me, I wasn't crazy after all and told me the history behind it.
Years before someone planned to bring cattle to the island to start an island ranch. There were no predators, no need for fences, and good range grass. That was even better than the open range of the real wild west! However the deal fell through after he got one horse and two cows shipped up. The costs of shipping cattle up to the island was just too high. The horse went wild and no one had been able to ever catch or tame him. He became "a ghost stallion" that showed up usually on foggy days but always a distance away, making Sanak “The Wild Horse Island.” He clearly became the king of a lonely domain.
After the war, cattle were brought onto neighboring Caton Island that also went wild, so that any beef butchering was more like a running buffalo hunt than a round-up into a corral. We were given a portion of a kill one day in midwinter when our island friends went over for fresh meat. The pot roast was welcome but very coarse and tough. So Caton became “The Wild Cattle Island.” Nikolski, an island further westward had a sheep ranch so was nicknamed “The Woolly Island.”
Feb 29th Good day and calm so we called off school told the kids to go home and pack a lunch, we planned an educational field trip to Company Harbor. 10 kids showed up so we left at 10 AM and arrived there at 11:45. There was an old empty school building, still in fairly good condition, an old graveyard and a few fallen down buildings. We were invited to Old Nellie Carlson's house for coffee and smoked salmon. Nellie ,Old Man Carlson and Albert Carlson were the only people there. Albert is kinda strange. We only saw him when peeking around the corner at us. Sandy found an old WW II helmet, cartridge belt and canteen, out in the Tundra on the way back. Wonder what was the history of that? There were no recorded battles here during WWII. All the kids were tired after the 14 mile trip. This field trip gave all the kids a common adventure, to write about, draw pictures and talk about in their "show and tell." They needed something different from the regular routine.
There was clearly a devil-may-care attitude prevalent on the island. It may have stemmed from the island's early history. There was never any firm restricting laws even from Sanak's early beginning. While visiting our school agents home, Chris Gunderson told of an ancient battle way back in the 1600's between rival Aleut chiefs just offshore on the south side of Sanak at a small island. It is locally called Bone Island, because of the crumbling human bone fragments and weapon parts that used to be found there. I had to check it out, but found no artifacts.
During the time of Peter the Great, in the 1700's, Russia sent fur traders to harvest the fur pelts of the Aleutian area and Sanak was one of the many islands that Russians forced Aleuts to hunt down the sea otter, take their skins in trade for a fraction of their value. If the hunters resisted, they were killed. Superior weaponry over the bone spears of Sanak hunters caused them to be treated as slaves.
In 1807 there was a shipwreck on the northern reef of Sanak. The Aleuts living on the island at that time performed an act of compassion that was described by one surviving seaman in his journal. The Sanak Islanders rescued the crew and helped them navigate their repaired lifeboat all the way to Kodiak.
By the 1920's, there was a thriving cod fish industry located on the west end, inside a semi-protected bay, called Company Harbor. Without getting any official permission, those people just walked in and set up business on the island. There were no rules to restrict an enterprise from taking the sea resources for profit in those times. They set up the salting station and hired dory fishermen to catch the cod with hook and line, no questions asked. One season in the 1930's the cod suddenly changed their migrating route and not one showed up. The company folded and just left their buildings never to return.
During World War II, (1944) the US Army occupied both Sanak and Caton Island as a supply bases for the fighting westward along the Aleutians. They built a road across the island from Company Harbor to Pauloff Harbor, where they put in a dock and several buildings. There were no Japanese attacks against the island, even though it was in the war zone.
There was a giant tidal wave in 1946 that wiped out the 60 foot Scotch Cape light house, on nearby Unimak Island. The tsunami kept rolling eastward from Japan, where it originated, and hit the Sanak reef, destroying the buildings of Company Harbor where people had been living freely in trespass among the old Company buildings. The survivors, mostly fisherman and free spirited gypsy types, moved to the more protected Pauloff Harbor and inhabited what was left of the deserted Army buildings.
When we arrived in 1951, there was no village council, no established law enforcement nor any religious order, only a postal clerk. A certain camaraderie existed among these freedom seeking souls. The common bond that seemed to unite them was the common battle against nature.
Sanak people seemed to take pride in the unique reputation they’d earned, knowing that they were the talk of the town among the more conforming mainlanders. They didn't strive to acquire social graces nor to live up to any standards set by others. Every man created an independent self-styled life without society’s restraints while each woman, who had teamed up with him, went along with it.