Finding Mister Nutter — Part 4

AUTHOR’S NOTE: After more than two decades serving in the military and teaching in various classrooms, Warren Melville Nutter came to the Kenai Peninsula. There, he became known primarily as a preeminent bounty trapper of coyotes, a hard-working longshoreman, and a reliable carrier of the U.S. mail.

LATE SEPTEMBER 1935, AT HIDDEN LAKE: Warren Melville Nutter was clomping along in a new $7.50 pair of hip boots when he came into an open spot along the lake. There, he spied an agitated black bear sow urging her cub into a nearby tree. Nutter, a Seward-based bounty trapper, sensed imminent danger. He dropped his axe and shed his backpack, on top of which he had lashed three dead coyotes he had been planning to skin out, and then quickly began to climb a large nearby spruce tree.

He was about 10 feet off the ground when the sow was suddenly below him, scampering upward like a squirrel. She bit into one of his boots, and he felt her teeth sink into his ankle. But the bear could not maintain her mouth hold, and she began to bat at his feet with her forepaws. Nutter kicked at her and hollered.

She briefly halted her assault to check on her cub, then came at him again. This time, she managed to bite one of his boots near the bend of his knee, and Nutter became alarmed.

The sow once again dropped to the ground and bounded away to check on her cub. When she appeared ready to launch a third attack, Nutter drew his automatic pistol and killed her with a single shot to the head. Her terrified cub dropped from its perch and raced into the brush.

Nutter had two trap-line cabins, one far down the shore of Hidden Lake and the other back on Skilak Lake near the mouth of Hidden Creek. The cabin at the creek was closer and contained rudimentary medical supplies. He hobbled back in that direction and tended to his wounds.

The next morning, he returned to the scene of the attack and skinned out the bear carcass. He then hiked to his Hidden Lake cabin. When he arrived, he encountered two strangers whom he referred to as “prospectors.” They noted his injury, and he told them the story.

The other two men returned to Seward before Nutter did and related the story to a newspaper editor there who published a report about the incident. The following June, Nutter’s own version of the story, written to provide a few corrections, appeared in The Alaska Sportsman Magazine. A five-panel cartoon of the event accompanied Nutter’s narrative, which he wrote in the vernacular of a stereotypical, semi-literate sourdough.

By the time Nutter’s tale went to press in the magazine, his reputation as a trapper par excellence was already growing. Six months earlier, reported the Seward Gateway, Nutter had already trapped 25 coyotes, netting him $20 apiece for the bounty, plus a market price for each pelt. The newspaper reported that the coyote population was “being thinned out by (Nutter’s) persistent trapping.”

The Gateway referred to coyotes as “varmints,” which was actually one of the gentler descriptors being applied to these animals. In various publications, they were also called “pests” and “menaces” and “marauding beasts (with) gluttonous appetites,” among numerous other appellations.

The desire to wipe out coyotes was part of a general trend in wildlife management at the time, when bounties were placed on any animal deemed a threat to any species particularly favored by humans (mostly moose and salmon, in Alaska). Thus, over the years, there were also bounties on wolves and bald eagles, seals and sea lions and even Dolly Varden.

After his successful 1935-36 trapping campaign, Nutter went on to have a banner year in the winter of 1936-37. In early February 1937, the Wrangell Sentinel reported that he had killed 50-60 coyotes. By that spring, his two-season total was 93 coyotes — in addition to the wolves and other fur-bearing animals he had trapped during this time.

So successful was he, in fact, that he won acclaim from the U.S. Biological Survey and was recruited the next fall to spend the winter in the Kotzebue area, helping to train Native reindeer herders how to trap wolves.

Ultimately, he cancelled his plans to spend the winter in western Alaska. He worried about how long the job would last, said the Sentinel, adding that Nutter “felt he could not afford making the venture under all circumstances.” Despite his earlier intention to surrender his Skilak-area trap-line that winter, he returned to his usual winter regime.

On May 10, 1938, the Anchorage Daily Times ran a page-five article entitled “Sees End of Coyote in the Near Future.” Nutter told the newspaper that, conservatively, he and other trappers in the Hope, Cooper Landing, Skilak and Moose Pass areas had trapped 200 coyotes. During the 1937-38 season alone, Nutter had trapped 43 — including 22 of the animals in one five-week stretch — along with two six-foot-long wolves.

“The coyote is doomed,” Nutter told the paper.

Yet the coyote survived the trappers’ efforts. Nutter was after them again in the winter of 1938-39 and again in 1939-40.

On March 31, 1940, the Alaska Daily Empire (Juneau) ran an Alaska Game Commission photograph on page 4 that showed Nutter (misidentified as “William”) standing in front of a cabin, along the front of which hung more than 40 pelts, mostly coyotes.

According to the caption beneath the photo, the Territory of Alaska was paying a bounty of $20 apiece on wolves and coyotes. At market, the pelts were worth an additional $5, making Nutter’s total haul that winter, for coyotes only, at least a thousand dollars — roughly the equivalent of $22,400 in purchasing power today.

After that financial windfall, it appears that Warren Nutter left the trapping business behind. He was already running weekly mail routes between Seward and Hope and between Moose Pass and Henton’s Lodge near Cooper Landing. And in December 1939, he had remarried and moved to Hope. Likely, he simply realized that he was in a good position to simply step away.

TO BE CONTINUED….