newsminer.com

Photo by John Wagner

Courtesy of Michael Carey

Courtesy of Michael Carey

Courtesy of Michael Carey

Courtesy of Michael Carey

Courtesy of Michael Carey

Ida Martin had been dead for decades when I met her. I met her through through my dad, Fabian Carey, in the pages of a memoir left unfinished when he died in 1975. An anecdote about her captured my imagination.

In June 1937, 20-year-old Fabian left Minneapolis for Fairbanks. He was a big, strong kid whose wilderness skills had been sharpened by several winters in the Civilian Conservation Corps camps of northern Minnesota. But he was a greenhorn and after hitchhiking to Fairbanks from Valdez, where a Seattle steamer left him, he discovered — like most greenhorns — fulfilling his dreams would be more difficult than he imagined.

Fabian wanted to trap and had saved his money to buy a trap line. But as summer began fading into fall, he found trappers he met had no interest in selling their lines. They also suggested a cheechako who began cutting his own trails in the Bush was a fool. If he wanted to trap, Fabian concluded, he had no choice but to make himself an apprentice to a veteran. He did so after a hasty discussion on Second Avenue with Carl Hult, who called the Kantishna River region southwest of Fairbanks home.

Hult, 38, grew up in Denver, the son of Swedish immigrants, and drifted north as a young man. Sturdily built with piercing eyes, he was bright, affable and despite his scruffy appearance, a charmer who enjoyed great success with the ladies. In August 1937, he was a gambler down on his luck, cleaned out in the card rooms of Nenana and Fairbanks. From Hult’s perspective, Fabian was a godsend — a bank to finance a joint venture of winter trapping marten, mink, fox, and other furbearers.

Fabian and Carl used Fabian’s money to fill Carl’s 32-foot riverboat to the gunnels with a winter “outfit”: Several tons of food and supplies, plus the quarrelsome members of Carl’s dog team and 400 pounds of dry salmon to feed them.

On Aug. 20, 1937, the partners motored down the Chena River into the Tanana River, passing Nenana, finally reaching the Tolovana roadhouse of Harry and Ida Martin, 40 miles above Manley Hot Springs.

Rain had fallen throughout the day, and the trappers arrived at Tolovana wet and dispirited. As darkness fell, they secured their boat at the landing and hurried up the bank to the Martins’ warm kitchen, where coffee and conversation awaited.

Harry and Ida Martin were well known throughout the Interior. Both had been in Fairbanks since before 1910, although not as a married couple, and Harry, 58, had been in Skagway as early as 1899. In Fairbanks, he was a teamster who carried passengers and mail along the Valdez Trail, his trips frequently chronicled in the local papers. Photographs from the ‘30s show the couple kept their 88-foot-long roadhouse and surrounding grounds (including a large garden) neat and inviting — a surprise to travelers familiar with take-it-or-leave-it slovenliness often encountered in the pioneer Bush.

As Carl and Harry swapped stories, Ida, a dark-haired, chunky woman of medium height, took Fabian aside.  “Kid, don’t waste your time trapping,” she warned. “There is nothing in it for a man. Look at the shiftless bunch of white men around here who call themselves trappers.

“Every fall it’s the same old story. They come in here looking for credit, with big tales about all the fox tracks they see on the sandbars, up and down the river. The Big Year has finally arrived. All they need is a hundred or two on credit for an outfit and they are dead cinched to make their stake in one winter.

“If you haven’t heard the story before, you will probably go along with them and extend the credit. Next time you see them it will be probably late in the winter, if ever, and if you catch up with them you are sure to hear some whopper of a hard luck story. ‘The foxes all died off or moved away.’ Or ‘I come down with the rheumatism or stomach trouble or got hurt somehow and laid up for months.’

“You will hear any old damn lie you can imagine, but you won’t hear what you have been waiting to hear: ‘I been hopin’ to run into you so I could pay you in full.’”

This is a memorable anecdote — the voice of experience speaking to a young man bluntly, sincerely, and futilely. Historians long for voices so vivid.

In his memoir, Fabian said that while he appreciated Mrs. Martin’s concern, he didn’t listen to her: He was determined to trap the Alaska wilderness and did so for four decades. While he always paid his bills, he learned the economics of trapping could be grim — and some trappers behaved exactly as Ida Martin warned, including Carl, who stiffed him at the end of the winter. (The two had a fierce, if brief, war of words that ended in later reconciliation and a friendship that lasted the rest of their lives.)

Who was Ida Martin? What became of her? After digging through census data, newspapers, and other historical records, I am prepared to tell you Ida probably delivered her commentary on trapping with a pronounced Swedish accent. She was born in Sweden in 1875 and immigrated to the United States in 1895.

I looked at dozens of women named Ida in the 1900 U.S. census who were born in Sweden — there are more than 1,400 in Minnesota alone — but was unable to find her until the 1910 census when she was Ida L’Heureux, married to 36-year-old miner Arthur L’Heureux, a Canadian. They were living in Fairbanks, and were also were together in Ruby in 1917 when Arthur, a teamster, registered for the draft, and also in Hogotza, north of Huslia, in the 1920 census, when she was cooking in a mining camp. One reason I am convinced this Ida and the Ida who married Harry Martin are the same woman is the Hogotza reference. When lecturing my Dad in 1937, she specifically suggested he mine the rich Hog River region instead of trapping with Carl.

Arthur L’Heureux and Ida must have divorced, because he lived until 1953. They probably divorced by 1925. A water-damaged photo shows her presiding at Tolovana by the mid-1920s, presumably married to Harry. Arthur’s probate file indicates he was worth perhaps $20,000 when he died — far more than many of his peers, miners from the early days, who died impoverished.

Ida Martin died at Fairbanks’ St. Joseph’s Hospital in September 1938, little more than a year after my dad met her. She was 63, suffering from a heart ailment, the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner reported. The local Presbyterian minister conducted the last rites. Her pall bearers included a Nerland and a Nordale, members of two of the most prominent families in early Fairbanks. She’s buried in Fairbanks’ old Clay Street Cemetery.

I recently brought lilies to Ida Martin’s grave. The flowers were in appreciation of a woman who had the courage to leave her home as a youngster, like my Dad, and travel thousands of miles to a new home. They also expressed my admiration for her willingness to speak her mind.

After I delivered the lilies, I wondered what Ida would say to me if she could. She was a practical woman, so I think she would chide me for my sentimentality while expressing a mixture of gratitude and amazement that anybody would visit her.