On an Alaskan island known more for its fishing namesake bruins, a handful of stalwart ranchers trade in a tenuous balance of man and nature.
By Mike Coppock
Kathy Burton is frying some eggs
and beef bacon for my breakfast as her
husband, Bill, places a filter over my cup
and pours hot water through the coffee
grounds so I can have a cup of joe to down
the meal with.
Suddenly, something grabs Bill’s
attention and there’s a rat-a-tat-tat of
boot heels scurrying over floor planks as he heads for the
front door of the ranch house. For a moment it looks as if
he’s going to grab one of the three rifles he keeps by the
doorway, but his arm reaches briefly in their direction
then pulls back as he steps outside onto
the porch.
He squints at a few head of bison grazing
around an old, weathered barn. His eyes
follow the fence line upward into the nearby
hills. “What I like about these bison is if
there is a bear anywhere around, they
bunch up—usually by the barn—and try
taking turns goring him,” Burton explains.
He’s not talking about just any bear. Here
on Alaska’s Kodiak Island there is only one
type of bear. Standing ten feet tall and weighing as much as
1,500 pounds, the Kodiak brown bear is the world’s largest,
and has acquired a well-deserved reputation for its size, cunning,
and voracious appetite. The bears can (and will) quickly eat the entrails of a steer upon making a
kill, and return for the rest of the putrid
meat after it has baked in the sun.
The struggle between the bears and
cattlemen on Kodiak has been ongoing
since the Russians introduced cattle
here in 1795. The United States purchased
Alaska from Russia in 1867, and
Kodiak became an important supply
point and fishing hub. The government
pushed to establish American cattle
ranches on Kodiak following World War
II in an effort to create a source of locally
produced beef. Drawn by the promise
of abundant land and adventure, ranchers
from the Lower 48 came north to see
if they had what it took to homestead a
cattle spread on the nation’s second
largest island.
At 3,588 square miles, Kodiak
is a 100-mile-long island that rises from
the Gulf of Alaska about 30 miles south
of mainland Alaska. A snow-capped and
glaciated mountain range separates the
forested northern side from the rest of
the island, which is made up of broad
valleys of well-watered grasslands. Some
fourteen ranches averaging roughly
22,000 acres each once covered the grasslands
to the south of the town of Kodiak.
Today, just a few ranches remain.
Most of the early homesteaders found
both the bears’ assaults and the severe
extremes in weather to be too much and
packed it in. A handful, including
Burton, persevered. Like the cattle
ranchers of the Old West, they’ve
thrived by adapting to the unique realities
of their surroundings, and by
employing a few unconventional techniques
that are sometimes required to
survive against unforgiving odds.
As Burton hoists himself into the saddle
to make his rounds, it’s obvious that
the steely 70-year-old doesn’t plan on
leaving the plains of Pasagashak Bay anytime
soon. Wearing a weathered cowboy
hat and work boots, with a square jaw,
piercing eyes, and matter-of-fact clipped
speech, Burton cuts the image of a classic
Westerner of more than a century ago.
Burton was majoring in animal husbandry
at the University of Florida in
1960 when he was first bitten by the bug
to see Alaska. He came up during the
summer, and soon signed on as a ranch
hand with an outfit that had started up
on Kodiak in 1950. Burton and his brother
Jim later took over the ranch with
some 22,000 acres of state leased lands
and another 160 acres deeded in 1967.
The Burtons’ goal, like their ranching
neighbors, was to supply high-quality
beef to the town of Kodiak, villages on
the island, and to mainland towns such
as Homer. Distance and isolation, however,
took their toll on supplies and getting
their beef to market.
The region didn’t get electricity
until 1986. Prior to that, Kodiak
ranchers had to use either Coleman
lanterns (as the majority did) or fire up
John Deere generators.
Nature can be brutal on Kodiak with
heavy snows and strong winds. Burton
once lost twenty head of cattle when they
bunched up and fell through lake ice in
spite of his desperate efforts to save
them. He was also losing ten to twelve
percent of his stock each year to bears. It
was an old story with no ready solution.
Despite the problems the Russians
encountered involving cattle on Kodiak,
the Bureau of Land Management
encouraged the establishment of cattle
ranches on federal lands both on Kodiak
and on the Aleutian Islands. Grazing
rights for 200,000 acres were set aside
for cattlemen on Kodiak. Many ranchers
sunk their last dime into what would
become the adventure of a lifetime, and
they were not going to just sit by and
watch the bruins wipe them out.
The ranchers heard the stories
of how the bears had wiped out the dairy
at Bell’s Flats just south of town. They
could hear their own cattle bellowing in
terror at night in a far off valley and
found signs of slaughter the next day.
Rancher Ron Hurst reportedly lost
400 head to the bears over the life span of his ranch.
“He liked to claim that for every head
he lost, he went out and shot a Kodiak,”
Burton says.
Something had to be done.
Legendary Kodiak rancher Joe
Zentner made a clandestine trip to
Kansas in 1952, where he bought a Piper
Cub airplane in order to spot Kodiak
bears from the air and then kill them.
The line between making it or surrendering
to the bears had been drawn.
Zenter paid $3,800 for the plane. Upon
its arrival on Kodiak Island, a high wind
severely damaged the wing, tail section,
and some of the plane’s fabric. Zenter
took it to the workshop at the Kodiak
Baptist Mission for $2,500 in repairs.
Kodiak: Space Portal
On the Narrow Cape of Kodiak Island,
between herds of grazing buffalo and
scattered fishing villages, is the Alaskan
Aerospace Development Corporation’s
Kodiak Island Complex. Situated away
from populated areas, the complex
poses fewer risks to the public, and
because there is less atmospheric drag
from this location, the rockets can
carry heavier payloads for less cost. The
corporation is owned by the state of
Alaska, and was created by the state legislature
in the early 1990s to stimulate
economic growth through the aerospace
industry. This year marks the 10th
anniversary of Alaskan Aerospace
Corporation’s first commercial launch
from the complex, but there’s no time
to stop for a celebration.
“The next launch is hours away as I
write this,” Sal Cuccarese, the chief of
staff and director of lands and environment
at the complex, says via e-mail.
In 1998 the complex sent up its first
commercial launch with the U.S. Air
Force’s ait-1. The 12 launches since then
have seen such entities as Lockheed
Martin, the Missile Defense Agency, and
the U.S. Air Force putting satellites into
orbit and conducting tests. Business is
good, and the profitable complex is
planning an expansion.
“KLC’s future is bright and we are in
the design phase of our third pad complex
to meet anticipated demands,”
Cuccarese says.
The location marks a unique confluence
of modern science and wild
Alaska, although so far the two have
coexisted peacefully. Onlookers report
seeing herds of indifferent buffalo
chomping on cud while nearby a fiery
rocket lifts off into outer space.
—Joanna Nasar
Incredibly, Zentner still did not know
how to actually fly a plane. He had paid
$1,200 to have it flown from Kansas to
Kodiak—substantial money in the
1950s. His first official flying lesson
came from fellow rancher Dave Henley.
Henley took Zentner up numerous
times and showed him how to handle
the controls. But, when Henley was late
for Zentner’s solo flight, Zentner read
the manual and then took off by himself.
From that day in 1952 on, Zentner flew
without a pilot’s license nor did he finish
his flying lessons. A Kodiak sheet metalist
volunteered his time in constructing
a prefabricated hanger. Another friend
did the finishing work to the outside
after Zentner selected a flat meadow for
the hanger.
Guiding hunters to a bear from the air
was a legal gray area, especially in territorial
days, but both Zentner and Henley
did it. The tactic did not slow the bears
down. In 1958, Zentner lost ten head to
bears, Ron Hurst lost six, Joe Beatty
four, Ned Roberts two, and Henley one.
The federal government was not
unsympathetic. In 1960, it sent six-footsix-
inch tall Ivan Marks and a dozen
bloodhounds to Kodiak to hunt bears.
Marks had already won fame having
hunted Big Foot in California. If he
could chase Big Foot away from logging
camps, the Feds reasoned, maybe he
could do the same with the Kodiaks.
Marks’ hunts proved failures. The
bears got most of his dogs.
The Kodiak Cattle Barons decided to
take matters into their own hands. With
quiet consent from newly-elected Gov.
Bill Egan, Zentner and Henley armed
their planes. Zentner mounted a M-1
semiautomatic rifle above his cockpit
with a Nydar sight taped to the windshield
for aiming. The gun fired four
inches above the propeller.
A stock growers’ meeting was held in
Tom Feldon’s cabin to discuss the most
effective way for Zentner to use his plane
and gun against the bears. In an atmosphere
resembling a tent revival, the
ranchers began handing Zentner checks
for fuel and whatever else he needed to
shoot the bruins down from the air.
Besides Zentner and Henley flying
voluntary bear patrols, the ranchers
hired Ovid McKinley as a protection
agent who also piloted one of the armed
aircraft. They brought down thirteen
Kodiaks in short order. Meanwhile,
Governor Egan sent agents from the
Alaska Department of Fish and Game to
do a “bear-cattle study.”
In 1963, ADF&G killed 35 Kodiaks
from both the air and the ground. From
1964 to 1968, ADF&G agents killed as
many bruins as they could along the
Kodiak road system.
If the Kodiaks hid in the brush, firecrackers
were dropped to flush them out
for a kill shot from the planes. Henley
once accidentally set a valley ablaze near Anton Larsen Bay while trying to drop
firecrackers on Kodiaks from the air.
The general public was not aware of
the air assaults, or Gov. Egan’s involvement
with them, until one Sunday
morning in the fall of 1963. Henley had
made strafing runs on four Kodiaks.
Running low on fuel and still wanting to
rack up a few more kills, Henley landed
the plane at Kodiak’s municipal airport,
where the public saw the armed aircraft
for the first time.
By Monday, cries of bear slaughter
taking place on Kodiak reached Egan’s
office. He immediately ordered the
ranchers to dismantle the gun. The
stock growers association ignored the
first message, but the language in Egan’s
second message left no doubt they had
crossed a line.
Zentner though continued “spotting”
from the sky for some time. This was
even more remarkable due to his being
featured in the August 1964 edition of
Outdoor Life in an article titled “The
Kodiak Bear War.” Today on display in
the Kodiak National Wildlife Refuge’s
visitor center in Kodiak, the magazine’s
cover features a drawing of Zentner and
his plane screaming down from the skies
blazing away at a Kodiak as it rears up in
defiance. The Piper Cub was destroyed
in a violent windstorm in 1972.
It may have been rancher
Ron Hurst who first proposed bisecting
the island with a bear-proof fence similar
to the State Barrier Fence of Western
Australia. Hurst, at his ranch at Salty
Cove, had set in place a woven wire
fence running for eleven miles in an
effort to protect his herd. He found that
the bears followed the fence, and thus
the fence could be used to direct the
bears away from his cattle. He had
already loss 61 steers valued at $250 a
head, a total loss of $15,250.
“Nobody enjoys watching an old
brownie fish a salmon stream more than
I do,” Hurst told local author Wanda
Fields. “But, I lose a darn sight more beef
to bears than I market. Civilization is
moving north, and the bear is going to
have to give way.”
The president of the Alaska Stock
Growers Association, John Grounds, and
the director of the Alaska Department of
Fish and Game, James Brooks, also were
in favor of a bear fence along the Kodiak
Wildlife Refuge boundary.
It did not seem so absurd when one
realizes the value placed on both the
Kodiak bears and the nearby cattle was
$100,000 in 1963, while the cost of running
a 16-mile fence ranged from
$200,000 to $750,000. Something was
needed now that the makeshift air force
had been shot down by the governor.
But, Zentner warned, if such a fence
did become reality, it did not mean public
outcry would die down. After all, for
the fence to work, all the Kodiaks living
on the ranching side of the fence would
have to be exterminated.
Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona,
about to announce his presidential bid,
was willing to introduce an appropriations
bill for $750,000. Steel posts ranging
from six- to eight-feet tall were
secured through federal monies and
warehoused at nearby Bells Flats. What
killed the plan was a number of ranchers
took Hurst’s original logic and reversed
it. Instead of the fence leading bears away
from cattle, Tom Feldon pointed out,
suppose it lead bears to cattle? The
reverse logic took hold in the minds of the
ranchers and the project was scuttled.
Forty years later I am driving by
the corrals and pole barns that make up
the Kodiak State Fairgrounds near Bells
Flats. The Kodiak Rodeo, held every
August, is an echo from the days of
Zentner, Henley, and the others. At the
height of the ranch operations on Kodiak,
cattle were an incremental part of the
local economy. Today they are more of an
oddity. But, the surviving ranchers have
not given up. They have put plans into
place not only to ensure their survival,
but hopefully a return of ranching as an
important Kodiak industry.
Rounding a bend, I pull over to watch
two trout fishermen try their luck on the
American River. A lonely brush road
leaves the highway here, following the
river until it disappears to the south. It
leads to the 45,000 acre Hurst ranch.
Charlie Dorman has the spread now.
Hurst finally gave up, moving out of
Alaska before his death. Zentner,
Henley, Fields, and the others fell victim
to heart attacks, strokes, and time. The
Feds erected a bronze plaque where
Zentner’s ranch house stood in honor of
the ranching pioneer.
When Dorman took over
the Hurst ranch 30 years ago, it had 400
head of cattle. Now the 73-year-old runs
all buffalo, some 250 t0 300 head. He
began making the shift in 1999. Dorman
is holding buffalo hunts for income, and
soon plans to retail their meat.
“They don’t need winter feed and the
bears tend to leave them alone,”
Dorman says.
Bison is an important part of the plan
for today’s survival and growth of the
Kodiak ranches. In the shaggy beasts,
the new Cattle Kings of Kodiak believe
they have found a meat producer that
can hold their own against the bears.
For Dorman, it wasn’t just the passing
of the old-time ranchers that resulted in
the dwindling number of ranches on
Kodiak. Even after the state assumed
control of the lease lands from BLM,
there was growth. In the late 1970s and
early 1980s, Alaska under bush-pilotturned-
governor Jay Hammond backed agriculture to the hilt in an attempt to
lessen Alaska’s dependence on the federal
government.
“It all changed after Hammond,”
Dorman says with a disgusted tone.
“They (the State of Alaska) don’t want
agriculture here. To them, there is more
money to grow bear on the land. They
bring in the big bucks from hunters and
tourists, but how does that help the people
here in the state?”
Dorman may sound negative, but like
Burton, he and fellow rancher Nathan
Mudd have not quit. The two have
received a USDA grant for the construction
of a portable slaughterhouse that’s
designed to be both hauled as a trailer to
the outlying ranches, as well as placed
on a landing craft for the ranches on
islands off of Kodiak’s coast.
Only 23 years old, Nathan, from
Eastern Oregon, is the new face in
Kodiak ranching.
“Things so far have been very difficult,”
Mudd says. “We’ve been working hard to
turn it into a business to sell cattle.”
He had been bringing his cattle to
the Kodiak market by landing them on
the beach after crossing the straits
from his island by boat. He started listening
to Dorman’s idea of a mobile
slaughterhouse after one crossing
made him seasick.
“It has not been easy to find equipment,”
Mudd admits. The total cost for
the slaughterhouse has been $380,000;
half again as much as the costs covered
by a USDA grant. Still, Mudd has confidence
it will help the marketing of his
winter slaughter cattle (not to mention
reduce his sea sickness).
Burton holds buffalo hunts as well,
charging up to $4,000 a hunt. Burton
brought the first bison to the ranchlands
in 1980, which he purchased in Montana.
He also derives income from subleasing
portions of his ranch. Five acres are
leased to the Narrow Cape Lodge where
his son Buck is in charge of maintenance,
as well as being his father’s ranch hand.
Burton also has new neighbors.
State funded Alaska Aerospace
Corporation constructed its Kodiak
Launch Complex on lease lands within
the Burton ranch. Having no connection
with the federal government, the facility
launches satellites into polar orbit for
private firms, the U.S. military, and
Third World countries.
“Anybody who puts down the money,”
says CEO Dale Nash.
The Burton ranch was the finalist out
of 28 Alaskan sites considered, as well as
one of two other sites on the island. The
Burton sight met the screening criteria
of having available support services (the
city of Kodiak is only 50 miles away),
year-round logistic services, good
weather, and food and lodging for customers
wishing to watch their satellites
go into orbit. And, more importantly,
unrestricted down range launch corridors
away from human habitation and
sea shipping lanes.
Since the first launch in November
1998, the complex has grown to include a
launch pad, booster rocket storage facilities,
mission control, and maintenance
shops. With a Space Age backdrop,
Burton rides one of his 30 horses around
the structures as he moves cattle. Bison
often graze near the launch pad.
“They work with us. Kathy worked for
them for seven years as a general secretary,”
Burton says.
Alaska Aerospace spokesperson Sal
Cuccarese says they want to be a good
neighbor. Cuccarese says they have
pulled Burton’s vehicles out of the mud
at times, reported to him sick and
injured livestock, and graded the Burton
ranch road in winter.
“Once a herd of 70 buffalo moved close
to the bluff so we sent a helicopter to herd
the animals away,” Cuccarese says.
Burton sells those bison whole and
dressed down to Kodiak residents.
Kodiak hairstylist Terri Miller and her
family purchases two whole bison from
the Burtons each year.
“The meat is simply excellent,” Miller
says.
Local civic groups such as the Lions
have used Burton bison as prizes in various
community fundraisers.
Today, besides battling Kodiaks and
losing anywhere from ten to fifteen head
to them each year, Burton also deals
with erosion caused by unrestricted
four-wheeler use, and with poachers.
His ranch has 350 bison, 50 cattle, 20
yaks, and 60 elk. He plans to leave his
spread to his son Buck and his newborn
grandson, James.
Currently he is dealing with a ruling
that says that any bison that strays from
lease lands will be considered feral by
state officials.
“We fought that and have been able to
get a two year moratorium on the decision
so that I can have time to get more
fencing up,” Burton says. “It means I am
going to have to put up fencing in some
very rugged areas. You’d be surprised
how bison can negotiate their way over
and through about anything.”
Talk to anyone in Kodiak, Bells Flats,
Port Lions, and the other Kodiak communities,
and they all seem to know Burton,
and they’ve all eaten his beef.
Burton seems to know this. It might
be why you can find him on horseback
battling 40-mile-per-hour winds in horizontal
rain tracking down a bunch of
strays. Or unslinging his rifle as he
comes upon the deep imprints of Kodiak
tracks in the sand.
Maybe he does it because first and
foremost he is a cowboy.
