MILDRED 'TINY' BUZBY I made my way forward, and I came face to face with a wolf. He was in the middle of the dogs, and here I was just reaching out to grab him.
I was born in 1915 in Orphena, Idaho. We moved to Alaska when I was 15 years old. It was June 21, 1931, when my father and mother, four kids, and my great uncle and a friend of my brother's arrived in Fairbanks. We came up on the boat and rode the train on a three-day trip from Seward. I didn't want to come north. To go off to a wilderness like Alaska, I thought it was the end of the earth.
My brother had met Bob Buzby in California, and they corresponded. Bob was there to meet us, and we went two miles to the Buzby ranch and camped in a tent for most of the summer. We later found a house in Fairbanks to live in.
The ranch was on the Chena River between the muddy Richardson Highway and the river. Bob's father, Harry, had come up to Nome for the Gold Rush in 1898, then eventually to Fairbanks, where he homesteaded.
In those days, we'd occasionally travel to Chatanika. The gold dredges were working out on the creeks. Sometimes we'd go to Livengood. That was a two-day trip, but the fishing was wonderful along the way.
I graduated at 16 in 1932 from the high school in Fairbanks, and in 1933 Bob and I got married, and I moved out to the ranch with him.
One day in August of 1935, Will Rogers and Wiley Post landed on the Chena River and tied up at our dock. We were interested in their airplane, and they were interested in Alaska. They had dinner at the ranch and were really nice fellows, totally down-to-earth, common-day people. We didn't have any idea they were landing there. They flew into Harding Lake, then took off the next day for Barrow. They crashed there. We were some of the last people to see them alive.
TRAPLINE LIFE
Bob had sled dogs all his life. He raised his own kennel of malamutes, and he raced his dogs against many good teams. He won the Signal Corps Trophy Race three years in a row -- 1934, '35 and '36 -- and the Livengood-to-Olnes race.
The dogs were used on our traplines for over 50 years. During our trapping times we had four children. While we were gone out on the trapline, we had people who took care of them in town.
We ran our trapline out of Fairbanks to Wood River in the Alaska Range, where we trapped for mink, marten, lynx, fox, beaver, wolf and wolverine. Wolverines are the only animal I ever saw that could run with all four feet in the air. They are amazing! I'd hate to encounter one. We had six or eight cabins stretched along the trapline. Most of the cabins were 12 by 14 feet with a Yukon stove, and you cooked and heated with it.
I enjoyed being outside and dog mushing. Sometimes when we were out at night, when the moon was full, you could hear the wolves howl.
We could take the dogs out if it wasn't colder than 40 below, but we had temperatures at 50, 60 and 70 below. During cold weather, after you holed up in a cabin for a week, you had to do something. Even the dogs wanted to get up and move.
One time during Christmas, Bob got sick. My oldest boy, Bill, who was 14 at the time, went out with me to check the trapline. It was a four-day trip to run the whole line. I was on skis in the front, and Bill was on the sled brake. I knew there was something in the set, and around the corner the dogs came and landed on whatever was in there.
I made my way forward, and I came face to face with a wolf. He was in the middle of the dogs, and here I was just reaching out to grab him. I started going back the same way I came. I told Bill to bring the .22, and we shot it.
GUIDING ADVENTURES
It was about 1940 when the government took over the Buzby ranch and built Ladd Airfield, today known as Fort Wainwright. They paid us eventually, but it took them a long time.
We moved down to Palmer in the late '40s and did a little farming out Farm Loop Road, then moved back up to Fairbanks in 1956. We settled out at 46 Mile, along the Richardson Highway by Harding Lake.
Bob was a big-game master guide, while I cooked on the hunts. He also learned to fly. Most of our guiding was out of 46 Mile and into the Alaska Range foothills.
In the late '30s, we went on a sheep hunting trip up the Wood River valley with three dog teams, six sleds and six people in early December near the Japan Hills.
The river wasn't frozen over yet but had some ice hanging on the banks. There was about 8 inches of snow on the ground. The river was too wide, deep and swift to ford. Bob went downstream a little bit and decided he could jump it in one spot. He made the jump with a rope and landed on the other side. We threw him an ax to cut down a tree, which fell down on the ice. He tied the rope on the end of the tree and threw it back to us to pull the tree across. It took us all day to get everything to the other side.
One time, Bob met a grizzly at Glory Creek. The bear was coming at him, standing and pawing in the air. Bob had gotten up to the ridge to look at sheep about the time the grizzly was also looking at sheep. Bob was between the bear and the sheep and figured the only thing he could do was to throw his pack at the bear. He had no time to get the gun.
The bear pounced on the pack. Being only a couple of feet apart, it wasn't something you'd forget. To the day he died, he told that story to people and got real shaky and emotional. It must have really scared him.
Bob died two weeks before our 70th wedding anniversary. That was quite a lot of years together.
In those days we had to do a lot of different things to make a living. We lived richly. We did not want for anything. I think people are tougher than they think they are. It's a matter of where you lived, when you lived it, what you do, because you do what you have to do to survive, and we've done that for generations and generations.
Ron Wendt was born in the Alaska Territory and has written many articles and more than 20 books relating to Alaska. More information can be found at the Goldstream Publications Web site, home. gci.net/~goldstreamalaska.
