Chapter 10: Abercrombie Rapids Landing, pt 2 |
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Until the railroad came, access to the coast was out of the question. The Copper River, where it flowed south just past Taral proved too treacherous for most travel because of a series of very steep, deep canyons, impassable rapids and glaciers intruding into the river which combined to make access by way of the Copper River to the coast practically impossible most of the year. The most notorious obstacle of all of these was Abercrombie Rapids. The rapids flowed through the relatively narrow canyon which ended at Miles Lake. From Miles Lake the river entered the slow-moving, wide Copper River delta before emptying into the Gulf of Alaska. A few of our hardiest people, including Nicolai, made the trip once a year every March when solid ice on the Copper River allowed them to make their way downriver to Alaganik. This was the Chugach trading post where the Eyak middlemen would take our tsedi--the kind that could be pounded into jewelry-- and swap it for goods our people wanted from the Russians or the Tlingits. The Ahtnas were trading partners with the Eyaks at Alaganik during the entire Russian occupation of the coastline.
Even before the Russians took over the coast about a century ago our Ahtna people were trading our tsedi with the Eyaks, who were distant cousins of the the Aleuts. These Aleuts were related to the Yupik Eskimos. Our tsedi ended up in the hands of the Tlingits who used the copper for jewelry, decorations, tools and weapons. I don’t know what we were trading before the Russians came, but in the 1800s, our tsedi brought back western goods ranging from guns to kettles, rope, canvas, cloth, tobacco, sugar and tea. Then the railroad came along and changed all that. We arrived at Abercrombie with the greatest of ease and with more comfort than any of us ordinarily enjoyed in our daily lives. The landing was the southern-most point where the Chittyna, the Nizina and the Tonsina river boats once docked. These railroad construction-era shallow-draft boats traveled to Chitina and beyond to Bonanza Landing carrying men and materiel. The rapids flowed through a five-mile long canyon that once represented a nearly impossible hurdle for travel by foot or boat. The railroad bed was blasted into the side of those steep cliffs on the west side of the river, making what was once a nearly impossible trip into an almost routine event. My brother Charlie and I, after briefly visiting Dad, set up camp downstream from Rapids Landing so Mom could spend her time alone with Dad. He had been there to survey the canyon in 1909. The tracks were pushed through the canyon the following year. The surveyors returned five years later because the company recognized a need to build new snowsheds to enable nearly uninterrupted winter railroad operation.
Dad began surveying for Mike Heney’s Copper River Railroad Company in 1908. Shortly thereafter Katalla Construction took over the work. Once the project was completed, the CRNW ran its own surveying crews. After this final job for the CRNW at Abercrombie, Dad was returning to Kennecott to work in the carpentry department where he had been since the railroad arrived there in 1911. He took the summer surveying job because the railroad requested him for it and he missed the work. He told me that the original tracks the company laid were practically dropped into place because the company was in such a rush to reach the Bonanza mill site back in 1910 and 1911 that the builders dropped those first rails over just about anything that resembled a railbed. The company spent the next several years upgrading the beds to a much-higher engineering standard. As a part of the process of making the system more permanent and capable of full winter operation without constant shutdowns, five snowsheds were to be built in Abercrombie Canyon. It had proved almost impossible to run the trains in the winters during those early years because of the temporary nature of the line, but copper production requirements would soon demand year-round operation on the railroad. The narrow canyon area filled up with snow every year because it was subject to such massive and continuing avalanches that only the heavy wooden tunnels could correct the problem. Even the fleet of rotary snowplows could not keep up with it.
Charlie and I camped in view of the long trestle approach on the north end of the canyon where the CRNW was building the first three of the new snow sheds. We tented across the tracks from the river bank in an area protected from the winds. The bank led to a good dip netting spot. The reds and kings were running thick through those rapids when we arrived to make dip netting an assured way of catching a meal. Because the river was so dangerous, I had to tie myself off to the bank. This meant running a long rope to the rails where Charlie would be ready to pull me back in if I slipped. I caught my thloo-ka in the first few passes of the modern white man net Mom bought from the Cash Store. We built a fire near the tracks in front of our tent for our cooking and warming needs using discarded railroad ties we picked up from the original construction. The railroad wood scrap burned much better than the water-saturated native wood. This was a heavy-rainfall area. Even in mid-summer, it was chilly in the canyon at night and not much better in the daytime because the coast was so close and also due to near-constant winds which blew down the Copper River on some days and up it on others. The fire warmed us while we waited for the last train of the evening. Dad had told us a work train would be coming in that night. We would wait for it before turning in for the evening. |
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