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STAN BISHOP—A TRUE SOURDOUGH 

THE UNUK RIVER

Louise: So that first winter at Yes Bay, did you all live in a cabin there?

Stan: Well, we stayed in this cabin and then the next spring I went up and visited the Unuk River. I bought an outboard, but it failed on me on the very first trip. I had a 17-foot dory and I rowed it from Yes Bay to the Unuk River.

Don: How did you like to row, standing up?
Stan: Standing up, it’s the only way you can row for a heavy boat. It’s the only way you can put full force on your oars. Especially a dory. It’s got high sides on it and you can’t sit in a dory, you can hardly reach the water with the oars if you’re sitting on the seats. But by standing up your oars are sharper, down the sides; then you can put your legs into it, too. It’s not coming all in your midsection.

Don: It’s in your shoulders.
Stan: Yeah. So that’s the only way to row a long distance and you can do that all day long. Sometimes your feet will get tired, but it’s the only way to row a long distance. Some days I wouldn’t make hardly any mileage at all and other days I could sail a little bit of the time. So it took me four days to get up there. And that winter Harvey Matney had moved into the Unuk, so he’d just started out, too. And he had quite an outfit. He moved all his floats and his donkey engine in there. He’d been logging down in back of Spacious Bay. But he was going to start a farm up there. He had everything figured out.

Stan: And he persuaded me to come back up and stay with him that next winter. Which we did. I went back and we got the boat loaded with groceries and meanwhile I’d bought a little double-ender power boat from a guy in Seattle. And that was our sole means of transportation, besides my dory; ‘course that dory was big enough I could load the whole family’s belongings in it and tow it behind. It was a regular old-fashioned codfish dory. So we spent the next winter on the Unuk and I spent most of my time cutting wood.

Louise: Were you right there by Matney’s place?
Stan: Up towards the rock there. Big whirlpool. You know I’ve seen ice come down there and pile up ten feet thick. Come down and hit the rocks there and slide up and fall back on top of itself, layer after layer of it, until it got eight- or ten-feet thick and then it would come over in a big crash and the whole thing would splinter up. And when there’s a high water--which we went through two of ‘em while we were there--the amount of action from the river against that bluff is just something you can’t describe. Whole trees come down there and hit that bluff where the turn is, a whole tree with the roots might stand straight up and down and then fall over. We had 28 inches of water on our island which is farther up the slough there.

In fact the water was so swift I couldn’t take a chance on going out to our barn because I was afraid of getting swept off my feet. We lost a lot of equipment because we didn’t have it up high enough. I had a farm tractor...the water covered part of the farm tractor.

Louise: I don’t know how you survived a winter up there...
Stan: Well, from day to day, one day at a time. Like I say, I cut wood continuously with a crosscut saw. Everyday I cut at least two or three blocks and by late in the winter, the freezing weather, it was about a two-inch thick rind around every log. It was just like bone; you couldn’t saw it, you had to chop it off. I’d chop a ring around, and then saw the rest of it with a crosscut saw. Then you burn about three times the amount; in fact, you had to burn one wood box full to dry out enough to burn one stove full. And we had wood in the oven all the time, trying to dry it out.

Don: Much wind, Stan?
Stan: Oh, just screams out of there. Coming down the river. It’d be out of the question to go, even if you could get out of there, it still would be out of the question. All you have to do is be down at Grant Creek and see it, where the wind is so hard, there’s no waves; it just picks the water up and it’s smooth, but the wind is blowing snow and spume level with the water. And whirlpools, just constant whirlpools. I never had any measurement for the wind, but I would guess it was blowing a steady 50 to 70 miles an hour all the time out in Burroughs Bay there.

Louise: But that winter you had your family there...that must have been difficult?
Stan: Yeah, my brother and sister and my mother, and we were constantly fighting off the winter. You’d go to sleep at night and in the morning you’d wake up with your bedclothes frozen to the wall. This little float house that Matney gave us to stay in wasn’t built for that kind of weather at all. It had no insulation in it and the wind came right through the walls, through all the cracks. And wherever it found a crack your body heat would create condensation there and quite often your bedclothes would freeze solid to the wall. You’d have to get up and carefully pull them loose, so as not to tear the fabric. But all in all, it was quite an exasperating winter.

Louise: Well, you made it through that first winter on the river, what did you do then?
Stan: Then we took up the island, our island as a homestead.

Louise: Now, your father stayed in California?
Stan: He wasn’t interested in Alaska at that time.

Louise: He DID come up, though...
Stan: Yes, we sent for him to come up. Mother told him she wasn’t going back down there to California so he came up here.

Don: When you said you were farming, what were you farming, Stan?
Stan: Oh, we grew almost all the hardy vegetables. And when I took up my own place on the Ooligan,[Eulachon River] I had quite an extensive operation in there. I grew vegetables and brought ‘em to town during the war. [World War II]

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Related Alaskan stories:

"Stan and the Milk Run"

"Tales of Yes Bay, Alaska"