Trefon Fish Cache
The Wassillie Trefon Dena’ina Fish Cache is located on exhibit about 30 meters (100’) from the Lake Clark National Park and Preserve Visitor Center at Port Alsworth, Alaska. The cache is exhibited in an opening surrounded on three sides by a grove of birch, cottonwood and willow trees. It was donated to the park in 2004 by Mr.and Mrs. Bill Trefon, Sr. whose father Wassillie Trefon (1898-1958) built the cache. There is an interpretative sign near the cache to inform park visitors of its cultural and historic significance. Ethnographer Cornelius Osgood quoted a nineteenth century born Dena’ina informant as saying; “In the Clark Lake area … ‘fish caches were neatly built of hewn logs and planks.’” [Cornelius Osgood, The Ethnography of the Tanaina, Human Relations Area Files Press, New Haven, 1966, 66] The Trefon Cache is the quintessential Dena’ina fish cache in existence.
The cache is part of a troika of exhibits near the Visitor Center directly relating to the red salmon, of which the perpetuation of the Bristol Bay salmon spawning grounds is one of the founding principles of the enabling legislation for Lake Clark National Park and Preserve. The other two exhibits are a Bristol Bay double-ender wooden salmon fishing boat and a stream engine and boiler that was used in a Bristol Bay cannery and brought to Lake Clark in the mid-1930s to power one of the region’s first sawmills.
According to noted linguist, Dr. James Kari, the Lake Clark Dena’ina might have used very old Dena’ina words dehi or chu or “one that is covered” to describe caches like the Trefon Cache. [James Kari, Dena’ina Topical Dictionary, Alaska Native Language Center, University of Alaska, Fairbanks, 2007, 227] The Trefon Fish Cache is a small log food storage structure sitting on top of four posts that are 1 meter 42 centimeter (4’ 8’’) off the ground. The wall logs have been hewed flat with an axe and adze and are held together with dovetail notches. The posts have been especially formed to prevent small animals such as mice and dogs and larger animals such as bears and wolverines from climbing into the cache to plunder the foodstuffs stowed inside. The gable roof is covered with sod. Access is by a notched log ladder 1 meter 70 centimeters ( 5’ 6’’) high, leaning against the front platform providing entry through a small plank hatch 57 centimeters wide by 78 centimeters high (22’’ by 30 ½’’). The small front platform is a continuation of the cache floor extending past the door and made of 8 centimeter (3’’) diameter white spruce poles notched into the sill logs. The platform is as wide as the interior of the cache and extends out 54 centimeters (21’’) and aids one entering and exiting the interior of the cache.
The Trefon Cache is made of white spruce, Picea glauca. The Dena’ina word for the tree is ch’vala or tree, indicating the high regard the Dena’ina had for white spruce.[Priscilla Russell Kari, Tanaina Plantlore, National Park Service: Anchorage, 1987, 28-30] The cache’s exterior measurements are 2 meters 83 centimeters long (9’ 2’’) by 2 meters 67 centimeters wide (8’ 8’’). The interior walls are 80 centimeters ( 31 ½ ‘’) from the eve log to the floor while the gable ends measure 1 meter 39 centimeters from the ridge pole to the floor (55’’). The floor is made of hewn white spruce poles approximately 10-12 centimeters (4-5 inches) in diameter notched into the sill logs. Overall the Trefon Fish Cache is approximately 56 square feet.
The cache was built about 1920 on Lake Clark at the Trefon family fall-winter hunting and trapping camp at Nan Qelah or “mossy place,” now known as Miller Creek. The site was 3 miles east of historic Kijik village. It was a trailhead for the Telaquana Trail, a 50 mile long trail connecting historic Kijik village with Telaquana village. Mr. Trefon believes his father was aided in the construction of the cache by his father, Trefon Balluta (1858-1925?) and his older brother Gabriel Trefon (1897-1963). The Trefon brothers were known as expert practitioners of Dena’ina woodcraft and building techniques. [Mary Alsworth, coversations, 1992] The cache was used primarily to store dried salmon for human consumption and for sled dog food, however, occasionally dried moose meat was stored in the cache. On one occasion a brown bear smelled the dried moose meat and chewed and clawed a lower wall log in an attempt to gain access to the meat. The scared and weathered logs offer mute testimony of the bear’s power in his futile efforts to breach the stoutly built cache.
The Trefon’s originally built their fish cache without the use of nails or spikes. By the early 1940s Wassillie Trefon had stopped trapping along the Telaquana Trail and with the gradual creation of the new village of present-day Nondalton he re-oriented his life more toward Nondalton, where the family moved in 1944-1945 from Old Nondalton. In the early 1940s the Trefon family moved their cache from their Miller Creek hunting and trapping camp to Horseshoe Bend on the upper Newhalen River. Thus in the early 1940s the Trefon Cache under went the first of three moves. It is not known for certain what if any changes occurred to the appearance of the Trefon Cache after this initial move from Miller Creek. Wassillie Trefon dismantled the cache and hauled its pieces by boat to Horseshoe Bend where it was rebuilt and used in conjunction with the all-important summer red salmon fishing season to annually store 2,000 dried salmon. Mr. Trefon recalls stacking thousands of dried red salmon in the cache during his boyhood years in the 1940s and 1950s. The fact the Trefons moved their fish cache two times attests to the reality that fish were plentiful in several locations in the Lake Clark drainage and could be caught and dried and securely stored in multiple locations, and fish caches were easily disassembled and moved to other locations around the lake and rebuilt.
Colonel A.J. Macnab and Frederick K. Vreeland of New York City were at Lake Clark on a big game hunt the summer of 1921. They began hiking up the Telaquana Trail from Miller Creek on August 29, 1921 and Macnab wrote: “We find … the old trail at the mouth of the creek where there is an old cabin and two well-built caches—empty.” On August 31 Colonel Macnab again mentions the cache: “We reach the mouth of the creek [Miller Creek] … store our surplus stuff in a well-built cache on stilts back of the cabin …” [Macnab, Travel Diary, 40] It would seem likely that one of the caches described by Colonel Macnab was the Trefon Fish Cache because the Trefon family began using Miller Creek as a hunting camp and as jumping off place for their fall hunting and winter trapping on the Telaquana Trail after prospector W.H. Miller died about 1910.
In the early 1950s all the Nondalton families who had fish camps around Horseshoe Bend moved upriver to the present location of the Nondalton Fish Camp at the head of the Newhalen River. It was at this time that the Trefon Cache was moved for a second time to Wasili Trefon’s new fish camp. Changes were made to the cache door and to the roof, however, it is not known with which move, the early 1940s or the early 1950s, the changes occurred.
With one of the moves the cache was re-roofed with sawed one inch boards and a new full sized 2×4 ridge pole. The cache originally had four rafters. The lumber had been recently sawed on Charlie Denison’s steam powered sawmill located on Lake Clark near Tanalian Point, know known as Port Alsworth. The roof was covered with tin shingles that were originally flattened 5 gallon fuel cans which became ubiquitous in the 1930s around southwestern Alaska with the widespread use of aircraft. Like many other Nondalton people Wasili Trefon worked with Charlie Denison sawing lumber on the sawmill and that is how he obtained boards from Denison for the roof and door. The last cache door was made of plywood and not well fitted, when it was put on the cache is not recalled.
Helen Beeman Denison, the wife of Charlie Denison, kept journals while living in on Lake Clark from 1948 to 1952. She made frequent mention of Wassillie Trefon working with Denison on the sawmill.
9-22-1950 “Hauled up 120 logs for Macy, Wass T. & H. Balluta”
9-24-1950 “Started on Wass T. ‘s logs.”
9-25-1950 “ Sawed for Wass T. all day.”
9-26-1950 “Finished Wass T.’s logs. Sawed wood.”
9-27-1950 “ Planned lumber for Wass T. & H. Balluta.”
Mr. Trefon is certain that his father obtained the sawed lumber for cache roof and for the ridge pole from the Denison saw mill.
In 1958 Wassillie Trefon was drowned while commercial fishing in Kvichak Bay, however, his family continued to reside in Nondalton and to use the fish cache at their summer fish camp. In the mid-1960s the gas can shingle roof began to leak so Henry Trefon, Wassillie and Mary Trefon oldest son, covered the older roof with sheet aluminum, thus assuring its continued viability, even though the cache now spanned five decades of existence and normally would have been rotten at that age. [Bill Trefon, conversation, August 18, 2010]
The many moves of the Trefon Fish Cache were not out of the ordinary, but rather was a traditional pattern from at least the early American period for the Lake Clark Dena’ina Athabascan people. After the measles-influenza pandemic hit historic Kijik Village on Lake Clark in 1902 the surviving Dena’ina moved 25 miles southwest to establish Old Nondalton Village on Sixmile Lake by 1909. When the surviving “families moved, they dismantled the logs from most of their dwellings and floated them to the new village.” [Ellanna-Balluta, The People of Nondalton, 64]
Wassillie Trefon’s father and mother, Trefon Balluta and Mary Ann Trefon, began their married life at Telaquana Village, fifty miles north of Lake Clark, in the late 1890s. But as many of the more far-flung Dena’ina villages were abandoned in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Dena’ina people concentrated their populations at Old Iliamna, historic Kijik and Old Nondalton, and Stony River and the Trefon Balluta family was part of that dynamic.
The Trefon-Ballutas were living at historic Kijik in 1900. In 1910 they were living at Old Iliamna and in 1920 they were living at Tanalian Point. After Wassillie and Mary Trefon were married in the mid-1930s they dismantled their log house at Tanalian Point and transported the logs to Old Nondalton and rebuilt it. By the 1940s the Trefon family had largely left Tanalian Point, except for fall fishing, with many of them living in Nondalton. [Linda J. Ellanna, Lake Clark Sociocultural Study, Phase I, U.S. National Park Service, Lake Clark National Park: Anchorage, 1986.4-43] In 1944-1945 Wasili Trefon moved his family three miles west on Sixmile Lake to present-day Nondalton, as did most all the residents of Old Nondalton. Old Nondalton was a difficult place to live because when the lake level dropped in the fall, boats could only be accessed by walking through mud and present-day Nondalton had a superior beach on which to leave skiffs.
Therefore, it not unusual for the Trefon family to move their residences and their structures, such as their log houses and caches, depending on the circumstances in their lives in a time of significant change facing themselves and the fellow Dena’ina. The twentieth century Dena’ina people were highly mobile and the Trefon family epitomized that fact. With the growth of physical amenities in the 1960s and 1970s more people got part time electrical power from personal generators and eventually full time power from the Iliamna, Newhalen Nondalton Electric Cooperative by 1983. With full time electric power came the widespread of use of freezers in Nondalton and the diminishment of the importance of traditional hewn log fish caches. Instead of storing dried salmon in the fish cache Nondalton people froze the dry fish in their freezers or stored them in their windbreaks since they were now dealing with hundreds rather than thousands in the sled dog days.
In addition, by the late 1970s the fact that like most of the people in Nondalton the Trefon family no longer kept a dog team meant they annually dried far fewer salmon than they previously had during the dog sled era. So although the freezer was far smaller than the Trefon Fish Cache they no longer needed the cache to store their year’s supply of dried salmon for dog food. Thus in 2004 Mr. Trefon approached the National Park Service about donating the cache to be preserved and exhibited at the Visitor Center at Port Alsworth. In fact the Trefon cache was the last most intact Dena’ina fish cache extant in and around Nondalton and its fish village. The cache might be the last of the traditional log fish caches in the entire Bristol Bay region, a region formerly known for its ubiquitous log caches.
Park personnel and Nondalton villagers moved the cache from its position of sitting on four 55 gallon drums to a one ton truck. The truck was driven onto a small barge and transported from the Trefon Fish Camp to Port Alsworth in August 2004. The truck was driven to an open shed near the park Visitor Center and the cache was unloaded and stowed under the shed roof.
In 2005 historic architect Grant Crosby from the Alaska Support Office in Anchorage and surveyed the Trefon Fish Cache and wrote a detailed restoration plan. In 2006 Steve Hobson, Jr. was hired to restore the Trefon Cache. Mr. Hobson is considered the foremost traditional Dena’ina wood worker from Nondalton and his sister is married to Mr.Trefon.
Mr. Hobson restored the cache after consulting Mr. Trefon about its original appearance and subsequent changes it underwent at Horseshoe Bend and Nondalton Fish Village. In addition, he was guided by Mr. Crosby’s work plan. The basic idea was to restore the cache to what it looked like when it was built by Wassillie Trefon at Miller Creek circa 1920.
First Mr. Hobson deconstructed the cache from the roof to the sill logs, since there were no nails or spikes below the roof, it was not a difficult task. The aluminum roofing was removed, next the square tin gas can shingles were removed and finally the boards were taken off. The boards were mostly decayed and would not have supported a sod roof like the original covering. The roof boards had been the only nailed items in the cache, having been nailed to the top of the eve logs and the ridgepole. The intact tin shingles were saved for interpretive purposes.
The logs comprising the two gable ends were attached together in an ingenious way by having a 2’’ slot cut out from just below the ridge pole to the top of the front and rear log eve logs. The slot was very narrow at its bottom and wider toward the surface. A hewed stick, narrow at the bottom and wider at the surface was hammered into the slot and it held the entire gable end rigid and no nails or spikes were required. Mr. Hobson removed one of the hewed sticks and inadvertently broke it and the other was fragile so he replaced them with two of his own construction that are very similar to the originals. The original sticks were retained for educational purposes.
The wall logs were all sound except the two sill logs which had rot on each end and they were replaced with new hand hewn sills by Mr. Hobson so as to be sure to carry the additional weight produced by the heavier roof. The gable ends both consisted of 3 short hewn logs. The walls from the eves to the sills both had five logs per side. The total number of logs in the cache walls was 26 of which only the sills were new, all others, 24 of them are original. The original sill logs were saved as prime examples of superior woodworking with an axe.
Mr. Hobson made four traditional log posts for the cache to rest on. The posts were cut in a special way to make it difficult if not impossible for small animals to climb up to reach the protected foodstuffs. The posts stand 1 meter 42 centimeters above the ground. About 86 centimeters (34’’) above the ground the post is reduced in diameter from approximately 31 centimeters (12’’) to about 15 centimeters (6’’) in diameter and then it abruptly reverts to its natural diameter for the last 46 centimeters (18’’) of its height. The abrupt junction of the reduced diameter and the natural diameter creates an impediment that discourages mice and other small animals from climbing.
In his book Shelters, Shacks and Shanties, and How to Build Them, by Daniel C. Beard, “Father of the American Boy Scout movement,” described the “Susitna” cache which looks very much like the Trefon Cache except it is much higher. He also documented a “Fred Vreeland” cache that employed posts similar to the Trefon Cache. Vreeland was Colonel Macnab’s traveling partner to Lake Clark in 1921 and along with Belmore Browne and Herschel Parker had first hand experience observing Dena’ina architecture at Lake Clark and Cook Inlet and likely were Beard’s sources of information. [Daniel C. Beard, Shelters, Shacks and Shanties and How to Build Them, The Lyons Press: Guilford, Connecticut, 1999, 79-82, 191-194].
The door was based on documentation from Cornelius Osgood’s book The Ethnography of the Tanaina. “A small entrance is cut in the front wall of the [cache]. This may be closed by a plank door held in place by a cross bar.” [p 66] Since the door on the Trefon Cache in 2004 was made of plywood and was hinged with two mismatched steel hinges it was obvious it was not original. A new door was constructed as Mr. Hobson had seen other Nondalton elders build when he was a youngster in the 1940s and 1950. The door was held in place with a spruce pole bar. In the dog sled era large numbers of dogs were staked out around the Fish Camp and they acted as a deterrent to bears and wolverines and enabled people to build their fish caches at the convenient height of four (1 meter 22 centimeters) to five feet (1 meter 52 centimeters) off the ground.
When the Trefon Fish Cache was removed from Nondalton Fish Camp to Port Alsworth it was sitting on four 55 gallon steel drums therefore it was necessary to build a ladder for access. After consultation with elder Andrew Balluta, who like Mr. Trefon was born at the Miller Creek in the 1930s, but in 1930, recommended the cache be about 4 feet (1 meter 42 centimeters) off the ground. Mr. Hobson constructed a traditional Dena’ina notched log ladder.
The historic architect recommended mounting 8 steel stabilizers on the interior corners, top and bottom, to tighten up the structure and they were put in place. The roof support system was entirely new and consisted of a spruce log ridgepole and three pole rafters on each side of the ridge. The rafters were sheeted with rough sawed white spruce 1’’ boards and covered with two courses of tarpaper and topped with a solid rubberized covering. The roof was then covered with local sod squares in keeping with Mr. Trefon’s recollection of stories told to him by elders of the original cache appearance at Miller Creek.
State the significance of property and justify criteria.
The Wassillie Trefon Fish Cache is the last best example of the traditional Dena’ina Athabascan fish cache in the Lake Clark-Iliamna area. While this kind of log fish cache formerly was ubiquitous in Dena’ina villages, hunting and trapping camps and summer fish villages they have now largely disappeared from the scene.
Moreover, any historic photographs from western Alaska taken in the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries of Alutiiq, Yup’ik or Athabascan settlements always showed raised log caches. [Ann Fienup-Riordan, The Way We Genuinely Live, University of Washington Press: Seattle, 2007, 186, 272] Traditionally crafted log caches are no longer seen in contemporary villages because people got rid of their dog teams when they acquired snow machines in the late 1970s. Village wide electricity has also enabled people to run freezers to store dried and smoked salmon for human consumption rather than store them in a traditional log fish cache. In recent conversations with a number of people in various Bristol Bay villages it appears there are no longer any viable log caches extant.
Susan W. Fair wrote an article “Story, Storage, and Symbol: Functional Cache Architecture, Cache Narratives, and Roadside Attractions” about the likely background and likely origins of Alaska Native caches.
“Elevated cache types include log or plank cache, open racks, platform caches, and tree caches. The high cabin-on-post cache was probably not an indigenous form among either Eskimos or Athabascans… Cabin-on-post caches are thought to have appeared in the 1870s, but the date may have been earlier, especially on the Kenai Peninsula, … at Fort Yukon, and on the seward Peninsula, all of which were frequented by traders from various nations. In the subarctic, high caches may not have been constructed until the arrival of the Western Union Telegraph Expedition in the mid-1860s, after which the structure were first portrayed in carved ivory, particularly on pipes made for sale. … The cabin-on-post form may thus have been introduced by early traders, miners, or missionaries, who would have brought with them memories of the domestic and storage structures constructed in their homelands.” [Susan W. Fair, “Story,” 167, 169-170]
The Trefon Cache is a unique resource as it is a largely intact example of a well crafted traditional piece of Dena’ina vernacular architecture with a documented builder and concise history of its use since about 1920.
The Lake Clark Dena’ina are an important band of the Dena’ina Indians of south central and southwestern Alaska. The Dena’ina bands apparently entered the Cook Inlet Basin and the Lake Clark region more than 1,000 years ago from the interior of Alaska. When Captain James Cook encountered the Dena’ina on Cook Inlet in 1778 they also occupied the Susitna River drainage, the Kenai Peninsula, the northeastern part of Iliamna Lake, Lake Clark, the upper Mulchatna River, Whitefish and Telaquana Lakes, and the Stony River country. This was a huge land mass under Dena’ina hegemony from Cook Inlet on the east, to the Bristol Bay uplands to the southwest and the headwaters of the Kuskokwim River to the north.
The Dena’ina were known to have developed the bark lined underground fish caches in the pre-historic times, but once the Russians and Kamchedal from the Kamchatka Peninsula introduced them to steel axes, adzes and saws and dovetail notches they began to build above ground log caches such as the Trefon Cache in the early historic period say 1790 to 1820, but probably more so after 1820 when the Dena’ina-Russian warfare abatted and the fur trade was in full force. Ivan Petroff mentioned the kind of log work the Dena’ina built in his 1884 book about Alaska, in conjunction with the tenth Federal Census. [Ivan Petroff, Alaska, Its Population, Industries, and Resources, Department of the Interior, U.S. Census Office: Washington, 1884]
Some Dena’ina fish caches were larger than the Trefon cache and were supported by six posts instead of four to hold the extra weight. During the period 1880 to 1920 when many prospectors were traveling through Dena’ina country searching for gold by dog sled they purchased large numbers of dried red salmon for dog food. The Dena’ina made bundles of 40 dried salmon and stored them in their caches and perhaps that was the reason the large six-leg cache was developed. In such cases, a Dena’ina family might put up 2,500 to 3,000 dried red salmon in a large cache. Or an individual might build two caches close together as Pete “Fedja” Delkittie did on the Newhalen River in the 1920s or 1930s.
In 1966 Dr. JamesW. VanStone excavated a Dena’ina fish cache at the Kijik Fish Camp, which was abandoned between 1902 and 1909. The cache was probably built in the late nineteenth century as only one cache leg was still standing when it was documented. Its similarities with the Trefon cache are many and it is worth quoting Dr. VanStone’s description as a means of comparison with the Trefon cache.
“In its manner of construction, this cache, which was 2.75 m. square and rested on four posts, one of which was still standing at a height of 1.40 m. above the ground, appears to resemble almost exactly the type described by Osgood. One notable feature, somewhat more elaborate than Osgood’s description, is the construction of the posts on which the cache stood. They have an overhang about half way up, presumably to prevent small animals from climbing into the structure and getting at the materials stored there. At the top of these posts is a concave notch into which were fitted the four poles which formed the square floor and on which the superstructure of the cache rested. The floor itself appears to have been constructed of narrow poles with the bark removed placed at internals to allow for ventilation. Since many pieces of cut birch bark were found lying directly on these poles, it may be that the bark were found lying directly on these poles, it may be that the floor was covered with this material. On the other hand, the birch bark may have fallen in from the roof which was almost certainly covered with it.”
“The four walls of the cache were constructed of wide, hewn log planks, notched at the end. … the side walls were simply halved logs, some as much as 35 cm. wide, with the flat side facing in and the ends carefully notched. The end planks had been skillfully hewn and those at the front of the structure were as much as 42 cm. in width. The gabled sections at each end were grooved for vertical supports which may have run from the floor of the cache to the roof.”
“The structure almost certainly had an inverted V-shaped roof with a single ridge pole and short poles, like those used for the floor, running from the top wall log to the ridge. … As we have noted, the roof of the cache was almost certainly covered with birch bark and perhaps also sod. … The predominant impressions created by the remains of this cache are of solidarity, weight, and permanence.” [James W. VanStone and Joan B. Townsend, Kijik: An Historic Tanaina Indian Settlement, 200-201]
Other caches were also higher, especially if they were located in a remote area only visited in the winter for trapping and in that case they could be 9 or 10 feet off the ground. In one such example, a cache attributed to Ben Trefon, Sr., Wassillie Trefon’s nephew, on the middle Mulchatna River downstream from the Chilikadrotna River, spikes were driven diagonally down the four cache legs and sticking out to deter climbing wolverines or black bears from reaching the raised cache.
The white spruce was a very fine building material as it was relatively light and easily worked, yet quite strong. White spruce made excellent resilent and stout log caches, strong enough to deter brown bears and secure enough to keep mice and dogs from wasting the dried fish. White spruce protected from moisture will last at least 100 years, if exposed to moisture it will rot in less than 25 years. [Babe Alsworth, 1973-1992].
To prevent dry salmon from becoming moldy while stored in a cache its walls and floor had spaces between the logs and poles to allow for the free flow of air. In addition, spruce boughs were also laid on the cache floor so the bundles of fish would be cushioned and have an air flow under them.
The tools used to construct the cache were the axe and adze to hew the logs flat and a hand saw to cut the dove tail notches. Axes would have been the most prized trade good a late eighteenth or early nineteenth century Dena’ina could own. When the Lake Clark Dena’ina obtained axes and saws is not known for certain, but they probably had their first contact with Russian fur hunters, the promyshlenniki, in the 1790s. But by the mid-nineteenth century both tools would have become available to the Lake Clark Dena’ina as a result of the fur trade. Both the Russian America Company and its successor the Alaska Commercial Company were trading furs for manufactured goods, such as axes, with Dena’ina at Kenai, Iliamna, Tyonek, Katmai Bay and Nushagak all during the life of Trefon-Balluta. A Russian trade axe head was discovered by Brown Carlson, Wassillie Trefon’s brother-in-law, in his garden at Portage Creek village on Lake Clark five miles east of Miller Creek sometime between 1905 and 1960. [Craig Coray, 1976]. The axe appears very similar to a style from the early nineteenth century Russian post at Sitka, although it is possible to be of American or British origin. [Carl P. Russell, Firearms, Traps, &Tools of the Mountain Men, University of New Mexico Press, 1977, 294-296.]
The origin of the above ground log fish cache is thought to be derived from the Russian influence as they had such structures apparently were common in Siberia. Once the Dena’ina obtained steel wood working tools they very quickly learned how to skillfully ply them to enhance their way of life. One of the leading scholars of Dena’ina ethnography, Alan Boraas of Kenai Peninsula College provides some context to the fish cache. “The various dovetail notches were certainly introduced by Russians [and Russian Finns]. An interesting connection is that the 1787 Russian post of Redoubt St. George at the mouth of the Kasilof [River] had about 40 employees of whom about half were identified as Kamchedal, probably famous for their above ground caches and the culture was otherwise very similar to the Dena’ina (Raven mythology, clans, primary reliance of salmon) so the initial stimulus may have come from them as well as Russians.” [Alan Boraas, e-mail message, 8-20-10]
If in fact Wassillie Trefon was assisted in building the log cache by his father and brother then they could have completed the cache in a week. The Trefon cache will be a model for a younger generation of Dena’ina builders and scholars who want to examine traditional Dena’ina woodcraft and architecture and replicate it for educational and practical reasons.
Bibliography
Babe Alsworth, conversations, 1973-1992.
Mary Alsworth, conversations, 1974-1992.
Alan Boraas, e-mail message, 8-20-10.
Helen Beeman Denison, Diaries, 1948-1952.
Grant Crosby, “Dena’ina Cache Condition Assessment,” 2007.
Linda J. Ellanna and Andrew Balluta, The People of Nondalton, Smithsonian Institution Press: Washington, D.C., 1992
Linda J. Ellanna, Lake Clark Sociocultural Study, Phase I, U.S. National Park Service, Lake Clark National Park and Preserve: Anchorage, Alaska 1986.
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Molly Lee and Gregory A. Reinhardt, Eskimo Architecture: Dwelling and Structure In The Early Historic Period, University of Alaska Press and University of Alaska Museum, Fairbanks, 2003, 106.
A.J. Macnab, “Diary of an Alaskan Sheep Hunt.” Lake Clark-Iliamna, Alaska 1921: The Travel Diary of Colonel A.J. Macnab, Alaska Natural History Association: Anchorage, 1996.
Ann Fienup-Riordan, The Way We Genuinely Live: Masterworks of Yup’ik Science And Survival, University of Washington Press: Seattle, 2007, 186, 272.
James Kari, e-mail message, 8-20-10.
Cornelius Osgood, The Ethnography Of The Tanaina, Human Relations Area Files Press: New Haven, 1966.
Petroff, Ivan. Alaska; Its Population, Industries, and Resources, The Tenth Census of the United States, 1880. Department of the Interior, U.S. Census Office: Washington, 1884.
Carl P. Russell, Firearms, Traps, & Tools of the Mountain Men, University of New Mexico Press: Albuquerque, 1977.
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James W. VanStone and Joan B. Townsend. Kijik: An Historic Tanaina Indian Settlement, Fieldiana: Anthropology Vol. 59, Field Museum of Natural History, 1970.