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were aware of the fact, the rugged out- 

 back they were entering lacked even 

 the minimal support systems the 

 Klondike settlers had enjoyed fifty 

 years earlier. Mail delivery had ceased; 

 steamers no longer ran; and the bank- 

 side trails were overgrown. 



In his weeks on the river, O'Neill 

 passed through the same territory 

 McPhee had written about, but most of 

 the back-to-the-landers of the 1970s 

 had gone. Indeed, except for a few 

 people with seasonal cabins along the 

 river, the land today is arguably emptier 

 than it was before the gold rush. 

 O'Neill's journal records all that is left 

 of the Yukon subsistence lifestyle: a 

 few burnt-out ruins, a few moldering 

 homesites, and a few re- 

 maining hunters and trap- 

 pers who tell fireside stories 

 of colorful characters from 

 the homesteading days. 



They may recall Dick 

 Cook, a prickly trapper 

 who lived down by the 

 mouth of the Tatonduk, 

 and who perennially tan- 

 gled with the government 

 about supposed incursions 

 on his independent lifestyle. 

 Or Jan and Seymour Able, 

 who lived for two years un- 

 der a parachute in the 

 woods near Glenn Creek. 

 Or Richard Smith, who 

 survived a bad mauling by a 

 bear, and whose cabin near 

 Eureka Creek was carried 

 away one spring by ice floes, 

 only to be redeposited, sev- 

 eral days later, just a few feet from where 

 it had originally stood. 



Although it is a journal of des- 

 olation and fading memory, 

 O'Neill's book is not about the pass- 

 ing of an obsolete lifestyle. To hear him 

 tell it, there are still hundreds of people 

 who would like to eke out a living fish- 

 ing, trapping, and running dogs along 

 this wild waterway. But apparently, the 

 federal government doesn't see that as 

 a legitimate wilderness activity. In 

 1980, partly as a result of the same en- 



vironmental sensitivity that motivated 

 McPhee's homesteaders, much of the 

 area was put under federal control as 

 the Yukon— Charley Rivers National 

 Preserve. Although the legislation rec- 

 ognized "subsistence lifestyle" as a 

 "cultural value," and permitted limited 

 homesteading in the new park, the 

 Park Service has generally been unac- 

 commodating to trappers and fisher- 

 men. As old residents drift away in frus- 

 tration, new ones have been discour- 

 aged from moving in. Old, neglected 

 cabins have fallen into disrepair. 



"It didn't work out as McPhee had 

 hoped," writes O'Neill. "The way the 

 law was implemented, the way the reg- 

 ulations were drafted, subsistence is re- 



Ogilvie Mountains, Yukon Territory, Canada 



garded less as a value than as a nui- 

 sance." Journeying with him through 

 the remnants of a once-vital back- 

 woods society, one comes to under- 

 stand that a wilderness should be a 

 home to people as well as to salmon, 

 moose, and bear. 



Laurence A. Marschall, author of The 

 Supernova Story, is W.K. T. Sahm Professor 

 of Physics at Gettysburg College in Pennsylva- 

 nia, and director of Project CLEA, which pro- 

 duces widely used simulation software for edu- 

 cation in astronomy. 



58 



NATURAL HISTORY September 2006 



