The Buzby Family -- An Alaska Pioneer Family
Bob and Tiny Buzby Interview - page 3
BB: Being on the river, we always had boats, and I built a few boats. And my brother was a good boat builder, and we had one of the first, for a while the only boat with a . . . tunnel boat. The tunnel comes from the bow back to the motor and then to the stern to the rudder and so on, and this would allow you to go in the shallowest of water, because it didn't draw any more water running than it did sitting. And that was, my brother built the boat, about thirty feet long, thirty two feet long, and I had enough money, I had bought a…The NC Company was agents for Chrysler and I bought a Chrysler marine engine for that, which was a wonderful boat.
There was another coupla boats built similar to that, but they didn't know what we knew, to build that boat proper. It had to be airtight, the tunnel. People didn't know that, and when you leave it set overnight, that water was still up in the tunnel in the morning, and people didn't know that, and one of the first ones copied our boat went down the river and then they had to be towed back up cause they didn't know that they could keep it running.
Our riverboats was designed originally back East, and they were about twenty-four foot for an average in length, and eventually they were, what do you call them, poling boats, but eventually we got outboard motors. But they were kinda slow to take over, and because . . . I have to jump over the fence a little bit, now. The sawmill at the edge of town got the timber up the Chena River and drove the logs down the river, and they don't permit that anymore because it might be something in the, hurt the water. But anyway, Fairbanks was built by logs that I helped cut a lot of 'em, and I drove, I probably drove more logs than any one person down there, to the mill.
KP: Question about homesteads and demand for wood, did homesteaders cut for mills, did others come out, was it cooperative thing?
TB: Wood was your heat. In the winter you had to have wood. And that's what a lot of people did. A lot of people worked when they could in the summer at whatever was open, like road commission, things like that. And then in the winter, they went and got wood and hauled it in, because they could, because of the snow, for the people to use for the year.
BB: I can show you houses today in Fairbanks that we, . . . lumber, that we supplied.
KP: Was that from your homestead property or just from places on up the river?
BB: Up and down the river. Anywhere the timber would grow. A bend in the river, would be full of timber. And then there might be a straight stretch, and another bend in the river, there' d be more timber. So, in our logging, we stacked the logs on the bank of the river, and then in the spring after the ice went out, we'd drive it to the mill. Eventually I logged for the first military district engineers bought the mill. I logged for them, then.
KP: Questions re first year or two of Ladd construction, any recollections
BB: This contract that I had with them, I logged with some of the old-timers and used horses for skidding. The military used the first chain saws, and trucks and cats and thirty men and at the end of that contract I supplied a million and a half feet of timber to the mill the old way using the has-beens, while they had all the young good workingmen working for them. Well, I did a million and a half feet for them. While I did that, with all their equipment they got six hundred thousand feet.
Fairbanks was built on the material that we supplied before the military came.
KP: Question about time on property right before Ladd Field came in, how heard about it coming
TB: Well, they sent people up to look, you know, and of course you knew . . . we heard about of course all the unrest in Europe and war and all that kind of stuff and so what we were doing was just exactly what everybody did: we worked in the summers when there were jobs for cash and then we, whatever else we could do we did to keep on living; like we trapped and we logged and we did things like that and then we could sell that in the spring or whenever, and that's how we lived.
People didn't really have much of any money until after Ladd Field came and established a payroll, because there was just the FE Company, the NC Company and two or three little grocery stores and things like that and that's all… oh, the ACS . . . that had an income. The rest of us were lived there because we liked to live there. We sent our kids to school, and they walked and didn't mind and now they do. They like to have a bus! I don't know, as I think back on it, why I don't know, because there really wasn't much of anything to do. We had to make our own amusement and we had to enjoy what was there and that's what it was. But it was then a beautiful place and it's still a beautiful place, in spite of their best efforts!
BB: In the early days, the river was the prime condition for everybody to travel. I've known a couple that lived sixty miles up the river that whip sawed lumber and built their own boat to travel with, and this was a normal thing. Poling boats is exactly what they were. You poled your way up the river; of course you could always paddle down.
BB: We had a ball game, Fourth of July.
The Fourth of July was a day when the miners had a day off. Us kids helped clear the brush for Weeks Field. Weeks Field became first airport in Fairbanks. In fact, I learned to fly at Weeks Field. It was made for a ball game, where they could play baseball. Maybe they'd have a gunny sack race for the kids, or something, you know.
My brother joined WWI in Portland. He didn't want to do it in Alaska, because in Alaska they didn't send em anyplace, except down the river, Tanana, someplace, you know. He went to Portland at his own expense, or my dad's own expense. He walked to Valdez, but he had his duffel bag on the . . . . (mentions a book, loaned out) The Ed Orr was a man who had several teams of horses, traveling from Valdez to Fairbanks. In this book, he advertised Valdez to Fairbanks in eight days!
When I was going to school, my dad was a hunter, a hunter for the markets. Usually to prospectors, to the miners. He had my two brothers with him, and the principal of the school was going to have him arrested for having the kids out of school, so they sent me to school to take up the slack. (Laughs.) That's when I started school, and the reason for it. But I was taught at home, and the result was that I was ahead of the kids in school. Because I was seven years old, first grade was just kind of forgotten and I was put into second grade and my brother who was older than me, when he did come back and go to school, they put him in the third so we wouldn't be both in the same grade.
We went outside in 1921, my brother and I, with our parents. And the railroad wasn't finished. We went from Healy to Curry by dog team. That cost my dad three hundred bucks for use of a dog team.
Before the railroad was built, we got everything by boat in the summer. Horses from Valdez in the Valdez winter. The way our cattle come, when the railroad was built was our cows come in by boat to Valdez [Seward?] and then when they got em off the cars there in Fairbanks, just drove em through town and on out.
KP: Wrapping up, would anyone like to add anything
TB: Yes, I would. Cause this has been about him and that's right, because I came pretty late in life, but we have four children, 19 grandchildren, 16 great-grandchildren, and one great-great-grandson. So we're keeping Alaska well populated.
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