A Family Man In The Arctic Circle

Some men dream about building a cabin in the northwoods, hunting and fishing, and living a rough and tumble life close to the land.  A Wisconsin native Heimo Korth accomplished this dream.  In 1975, the twenty year old Heimo Korth lit out for  Alaska, built a fourteen by fourteen foot cabin, and married a native woman.  The story is recounted by Korth’s cousin James Campbell in the book “The Final Frontiersman: Heimo Korth and his Family Alone in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge Wilderness.”  Korth lives with his wife and two daughters 130 miles above the Arctic Circle, the only settlers for more than 500 miles. Nick Vander Puy from the Superior Broadcast Network talks with James Campbell about the Korth’s adventures in the bush. To listen to this story as a "live stream" broadcast, click here

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Far North To Alaska, The Final Frontiersman And His Family

 

 

Author James Campbell admires his Appleton cousin Heimo Korth because Heimo struck out for the Alaskan bush to live and trap in the wilderness.

 

Some men dream about building a cabin in the northwoods, hunting and fishing, living a rough and tumble life close to the land.  A Wisconsin native Heimo Korth accomplished this dream.  In 1975,  the twenty year old Heimo Korth lit out for  Alaska, built a fourteen by fourteen foot cabin, and married a native woman.  The story is recounted by Korth’s cousin James Campbell in the book “The Final Frontiersman: Heimo Korth and his Family Alone in Alaska’s Arctic Wilderness.”  Nick Vander Puy from the Superior Broadcast Network talks with James Campbell about the Korth’s adventures in the bush.

 

The Korth family hunts and traps in Alaska. They  move between three small cabins,  semi-nomadically, following the animals.

 

Heimo Korth and his wife Edna,  and their daughters Krin and Rhonda live about a hundred fifty miles north of Fort Yukon, in northeastern Alaska near the Canadian border,  in the foothills of the Brooks Range.

 

They are  the only year around residents in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.  It’s an area the size of South Carolina without even a footpath.

 

 

Heimo Korth left Appleton almost thirty years ago, fed up with a drunk father and encroaching suburbia.  Author and cousin James Campbell.

 

“I do remember very distinctly in 1975 when he left for Alaska.  I remember being filled with pride and admiration, and vowing then and their that when I turned eighteen I was going to do the same thing.  But when I turned eighteen I went to college outeast and no self respecting pioneer ever goes east, reversing three hundred years of American history.  So I never did it.  I took a conventional job and did something more conventional and uh by writing this book I got to live out a portion of my own dream so it was a real labor of love.”

 

When Heimo Korth arrived in Alaska he was a twenty year old.  He had an itchy trigger finger.  He lived alone.

 

By his own account he went “loony.”  In a piece of rustic poetry he wrote “No man is a wolverine,  a wolverine is a strict loner, but a man needs people.”

 

During the spring he visited St. Lawrence Island, which is an island stranded in the Bering Sea, off western Alaska, about forty miles from Siberia. Heimo Korth stayed in Suvunga, a small Siberian Yupik Eskimo community, about two hundred fifty people. 

 

At first the people wondered who this crazy white guy was.  But they were eventually disarmed by his enthusiasm and desire to learn their ways.

 

“And he hunted polar bear and walrus, and seal there, and also was one of the only non-natives to participate in the bowhead whale hunt.  But he learned there by a man named Herman is his adopted Christian name,

how to shoot with precision, and to this day it’s a skill Heimo carries with him. He doesn’t waste a bullet.  And that’s what Herman taught him.  Of course when shooting a walrus, because it’s so full of blubber,

you have to shoot a walrus in exactly the right place, to kill it.  And that’s what Heimo learned from him.”

 

To hunt in the Arctic you’ve gotta learn the ice.

 

“Ha, ha, he learned he was a sluggish, heavy footed chechako, you know, a greenhorn, he tried to skip with the Yupik Eskimos, and he realized that they were considerably swifter and more agile, but after six years he got to where he could read the ice, by looking at the sky, he picked up a lot of the tricks, fortunately he was mentored by this hunter, but he picked up a lot of the tricks the Yupik Eskimos know, and they are probably some of the greatest hunting peoples that human history has ever seen, he got better at skipping along the ice floes.”

 

Drinking tea in the cabin one day with Herman, the old man suggested Heimo marry his daughter.  She’d lost her husband.  She had two children.

 

“And Heimo married a Siberian Yupik Eskimo woman named Edna, or miete dahwa, her native name, she agreed to accompany him, out into the bush, an act of courage ressembling Heimo’s departure from Appleton, and if it weren’t for her he would not be out there now.”

 

The Alaskan interior is littered with stories about young idealistic, unprepared  men, some would say “woods hippies,” who went into the bush, left after a few months, were  either mauled by a bear or starved to death.

 

But being with a native woman Edna, Miti Dowin, helped Heimo survive.

 

“Heimo would not be out there today if not for Edna.”

 

“But she still laughs as knowledgeable as Heimo was when they met

she’s the one who taught him his flowers.  And they live right at treeline

And in summer because of the twentyfour hour sun the flowers are blooming frantically, just magically,”

 

“And she also taught him how to harvest Indian potatoe, which grows along the river, which they harvest with a pick, which is like a carrot.

Sometimes they eat it raw, sometimes they boil it. And wild onion and also how pick and can berries.”

 

“But she also gives him a sense of family.  You know he went up and there’s a profound sense of alienation, when you’re alone, and a profound sense of isolation, and its undone almost everybody who’s attempted to go it alone, and Edna gave Heimo a family, and she also came equipped with bush skills, having grown up in a small Eskimo community.”

 

Doing research for the book, when Campbell would depart the cabin in a bush plane Edna would give him number two picture hanging wire. 

 

That way, if the plane went down, he could snare some rabbits.

 

To Purchase The Final Frontiersman, click here.

 

Photos contributed by Author James Campbell      

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