Reading the news stories about the Russian tanker Renda and USCG ice breaker Healy in the ice surrounding Alaska on their way to bring fuel to Nome brings to mind a story about a cameraman nearly ninety-nine years ago on another ship and the brutal Alaskan weather.
From 1908 to 1913, Will Hudson worked as the first still photographer on the staff of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer until he got his hands on a motion picture camera and started to look for a reason to resign from the P-I and switch to newsreels full-time instead of working as a stringer on the side for Universal.
In early 1913, Hudson got his chance to resign finally when he was invited to become the official cinematographer for Capt. Louis Lane’s expedition into the Arctic with his ship the Polar Bear. Hudson naturally jumped at the chance and tendered a letter to the P-I saying goodbye.
The Polar Bear was basically chartered for a hunting trip by a group of college graduates who wanted to go to Alaska to go hunting. The cost of the trip was sponsored by the Harvard, who sent along two naturalists to provide some sort of a scientific purpose to the trip.
The Polar Bear departed Seattle on the morning of April 13, 1913 and headed north to Alaska. After various ports of call along the Alaskan and Russian coasts, Captain Lane charted course for the Polar Bear to the Arctic Ocean. By early September, she was icebound near Humphrey Point. The crew aboard the Polar Bear departed the schooner and setup a camp on the beach. Due to the food situation, it was decided that some of the members were going to leave the camp and hike overland to Fort Yukon while the others waited out the winter and for the ice to melt to return to Seattle. Hudson, Captain Lane and two of the college boys (Dunbar Lockwood and Eben Draper) were the members of the party that was going to leave Humphrey Point.
On October 22, 1913, the four men departed the camp in -10°F weather with enough equipment and food for what they though would be a sixteen day hike to Fort Yukon. Instead it took them twenty-nine days to walk to Fort Yukon with Hudson and Lane doing most of the work on the trail since the two college boys had never seen hard work in their lives.
The two college boys, Dunbar Lockwood and Eben Draper were tender feet when it came to trail work. They have never been on such an ‘overnight hike’ before and let the skipper and I do the work. I broke every foot of trail on that terrible trek for 29 days from the Arctic Ocean to Fort Yukon. In addition, I cut every stick of wood for camp purposes once we got into timber country beyond the mountains.
For a newspaper photographer and newsreel man, I obviously had to change in occupation if we were to survive. For now I worried about the food, the dogs, frost bite, mucklucks and how best to survive the ordeal at hand. It was surely Ice Hell with the lid off to travel all day in the stinging cold, then make camp in the snow and ice with the thermometer showing more than 50 degrees below zero.
They arrived in Fort Yukon on November 19, hiked from there to Circle and then rode a stagecoach to Fairbanks, train to Anchorage and then home to Seattle in time for Christmas. It wasn’t until 1916 when Hudson finally found full-time employment as a staff newsreel cameraman for Pathe News in the Seattle region.
A couple decades later, Hudson wrote about his experiences on that trip in a book titled “Icy Hell: Experiences of a News Reel Cameraman in the Aleutian islands, Eastern Siberia and the Arctic Fringe of Alaska.” Its a rare book, but for my readers in Seattle and Anchorage, the public libraries in both cities own copies according to their online catalogs.
Below is a rough map of the hike Hudson, Lane, Lockwood and Draper made in early winter over the bitterly cold tundra and mountains of Alaska.
View Hudson’s Overland Hike in a larger map