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STAN BISHOP—A TRUE SOURDOUGH 

FREIGHTING ON THE UNUK

Stan: When I was developing the Ooligan, ‘course I was doing other things at the same time...

Louise: That’s what I was thinking...you were trapping and freighting...

Stan: When I first started freighting on the Unuk River with my big 30-foot river boat, I had an outboard which we thought was a big deal.

Don: Did that [boat] have the house forward? 60-footer, maybe?

Stan: Yes. We went over to Stewart and I bought two horses from … the old packer over there who had horses, he had around 20 horses, and he told me he’d give me two horses that were best suited for me. He said, “They’re not young, they’re old horses but they’ll probably know more about packing than you’ll ever learn.”

Don: And did it work out that way?
Stan: Just exactly. These horses knew more about it than I did. To give you an illustration of it, after we built the trail we had logs across a lot of the little creek beds that we’d hewed the top down to maybe a 12-14-inch top. And one of these was a pretty high drop-off, if you fell off the log. And I decided my first trip up that I would cut a trail down for the horses and ford the creek and then come up the other side, instead of walking across this little log. So I left the horses standing up at the top and I went down and brushed out a trail, nice neat trail into the creek bed, and I heard something thumping up above. And I looked up and here old Mike was starting across this log, one foot ahead of the other, very carefully, and he couldn’t put two feet together, he had to swing his legs out to come around his feet. And then old Dutch followed him and they made it perfect and here I was working myself to death to...(Lots of laughter) But that’s a good example of it, ‘cause a lot of times they would go places that I didn’t think was proper for them.

I brought the horses out to Hyder and loaded ‘em at Hyder. I walked ‘em down the pedestrian float and put a couple boards up and they walked ‘em on to the side of the boat, put one on each side of the gurry house, instead of having an open hold, he had kind of a little raised deck there and I put a horse on each side. And those old horses stood there as calm and collected as could be on that trip all the way down the Portland Canal and up...I took them off here at Ketchikan and walked them off of the boat and onto the float and down the float and up the pedestrian ramp at the machine shop there. That was a new slip there at the time and I figured it was perfectly safe.

And another thing the horses did, they didn’t shake anything when they walked on it. They didn’t have any cadence at all, they just put their foot out and would tamp it up and down a couple times and they’d move ahead a little bit, that’s how they got by with so much that a normal horse would ruin, you know. You get a horse that has a cadence to their gait and they start to walk across something like that and before you know it the whole thing is shaking itself to pieces.

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Related Alaskan Stories:

"Stan and the Milk Run"

"Tales of Yes Bay, Alaska"