The Buzby Family -- An Alaska Pioneer Family
Bob and Tiny Buzby Interview
September 27, 2001
BB: Bob Buzby
TB: Tiny Buzby
KP: Kathy Price (Interviewer)
BB: OK, I'll have to go back. My father came to Alaska to Nome in 1900. After that he went to Skagway and then helped build the railroad from Skagway to Whitehorse. He ended up coming down to Fairbanks and he homesteaded in Fairbanks in 1905, and I was born in 1911 in Fairbanks. I was the youngest of the family.
After a trip to California, then Tillamook OR, and then my dad rounded up a bunch of dairy cattle and brought em to Fairbanks. So we had a 1926 - early 30s we had a dairy in Fairbanks and my job was raising hay & delivering door to door the old-fashioned way. And once upon a time I thought I knew everyone in Fairbanks. Now it's a rare occasion to meet anyone I know. Anyway, this homestead he took in 1905 was where I grew up after a while and . . . eventually the military bought our place, my dad's place, we had another place by that time . . . it became Ladd Field, and Ladd Field now is Wainwright.
I was the youngest of four boys and two girls. I had two sisters, my oldest sister had a daughter who's fifteen months younger 'n I was. My older sister died in a car wreck going from Los Angeles to San Diego. And all my brothers have done their thing in their own way. I'm the only one who's still living of the family, the original family. And I married Tiny 68 years ago.
This growing up in Alaska, I became an Alaskan, and I've stayed that way. They call them pioneers now, in the . . . when I started school, I had dogs. We were two miles from town, and I used a coupla dogs to . . . things at school when I was 7 yrs old. I gravitated into dog mushing.
And then you gotta jump way ahead to in the 30s. I won the major dog race in Fairbanks 3 years in a row. It was known as the Signal Corps trophy. The Signal Corps was the military of the country at the time that we had the first phones and they were the ones that took care of all the long distance calls and things of that kind. They were military and they took the little deal out of the people that worked for them to pay for that trophy, and it was a beautiful thing. My daughter Alice, who's here now, it's in her possession. In winning that three times in a row, I retired the trophy.
One of the interesting episodes of dog mushing, I won the third time with seven dogs against teams with twelve. The famous man whose picture's everywhere around the country, Leonard Seppala, he had a team, he had a twelve-dog team. There was a man in Fairbanks who had a dog that Seppala had in his team. The man that drove his team, was not a friend, but anyway, Seppala's team, they thought that they would hurt me because we lived on the trail out of Fairbanks to Valdez, 2 miles out, and they run that 80 miles [of the race] by going past my home. They thought that would be a little problem for me.
It didn't work out that way. Cause my dogs were trained on a trap line and they knew what it was like to do what I had to do. Seppala's dogs was all trained in town and the road was to our place two miles. We kept the road, the Valdez trail, open that far, I'm just talking about dog mushing; we went to Salcha and back, Salchaket they called it in that day.
My father-in-law, Tiny's dad, had a place in town, he had a shop, where he did blacksmithing and that sort of stuff and we fixed up [in] his shop a place for my dogs and they had straw to lay on and they, when they come in they relaxed, and it was a good thing.
Well naturally when I come by my home two miles out of town, my dogs knew the one in town was where we was going to end up, and they never even hesitated. But Seppala's team saw broken road then and they thought they were home and they quit at my place. And this man that was driving 'em, you know, instead of using some brains, he started licking 'em and then that's no way to treat a dog. They ended up sending a truck out and hauling 'em in those last two miles. You don't see that picture among his collection down there in Knik.
KP: Can I ask you a little bit about the road, the Fairbanks-Valdez trail, did it run right through your property then?
BB: Yes. Paralleling the bank of the Chena River through there. Our home was between the trail and the river. So it was more or less dependent on the road for everything except the river, and it may be of interest to some people, that the river was the place where the early planes with floats landed.
Pacific international airways, (?) was the first. They had 4 airplanes, they had the first mail contracts out of Fairbanks down the Yukon, and as it happened, I worked for them taking mail, weigh mail with the dogs, and that was an interesting year or two; that was in 1931. I don't know if that had anything to do with it but I ended up becoming a pilot myself and flew 15 years. I had a trap line all my life and I guided big game hunters for 55 years. I did some flying for myself, and I flew for Shell Oil the first year they came to AK on the west side of Cook Inlet.