by Peter Twitchell
Kids like me grew up in Bethel Alaska – a quiet little town. Throughout the 1950’s we observed many local activities going on around our community. We knew nothing about television or radio as kids growing up back in those days.
We saw many things around town including people hauling in boatloads of salmon in the summer. Yupiaq families worked together to process to fish they caught, smoke it, and put away for winter feed.
We saw the master boat craftsman making their wooden skiffs watertight and leakproof each spring, filling in the cracks between the floorboards of the boat with the long strands of cotton and putting on another fresh coat of boat paint.
There was also two or three trucks stuck up to their axels in the muddy stretch of Bethel. Trucks were often left for several days stuck in the mud until the rains stopped. I imagine there was no rush to get the manpower to pull a truck out of the road because it wasn’t going to go anywhere and no one was going to use that road until it dried up.
It was commonplace within the city limits to see people carrying a shotgun from their boat to their homes. We the people of Alaska are hunters from an early age ‘til we’re unable to walk or carry a shotgun or rifle to put food on our tables.
Since time immemorial we’ve considered the tundra, the river, the lake and slough sacred because it was where our natural and nature food was and no one can take that away from us.
So when I saw a man who was known as “Windy” who was walking across the tundra with a shotgun over his shoulder, it looked natural and proper.
Little did I know that was City fathers of Bethel had provided Windy with a box of shotgun shells and 25 bucks to go around the community of Bethel in the 50s to reduce the population of loose animals. I noticed dogs were roaming the streets of Bethel in packs in the 60s and it wasn’t till later the City’s fathers employed a dog catcher.
Often dog mushers who owned dogs had all that they could handle and feed. It brings me back when I watch television and a commercial comes on and we see neglected and abused dogs and household animals and they are asking for donations of money to care for someone else’s animals. Then I look and remember the elders in Bethel area back in the 1950s.
