Finding Mister Nutter — Part 6

Although Warren Melville Nutter was a resident of Seward for most of the 1930s, the latter 1940s and the early 1950s — working as a trapper, a mail carrier and a longshoreman — Mary J. Barry, in her three-volume history of Seward, dedicated to him only two small paragraphs in Volume III.

For her primary source material, Barry had turned unfortunately to a memoirist who, although he did know Nutter, got many details about him either wrong or only partly correct.

But chasing down the facts about Warren Nutter was never going to be simple. His history — from his birth in rural West Virginia in 1887 to his death in Hope in 1962 — lay in scattered fragments, difficult to gather, equally difficult to reassemble.

Despite three stints in the military, parts of two decades at the head of various high school and college classrooms, years of acclaim for his trapping prowess on the central Kenai Peninsula, being noted as one of the founders of and trustees for Local I-82 of the Internal Longshoremen’s and Warehouseman’s Union in Seward — and so forth — most his public splashes faded quickly.

Legacy

Historians of the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge were drawn to the story of Warren Nutter because of the two trap-line cabins he built in the 1930s on what later became refuge land and because of his astonishing success as a bounty hunter/trapper there during a time that the public and the federal government endorsed the eradication of predators that competed with humans for moose and salmon and other prized species.

His trapping efforts and his shelters also had historical significance. Although his pronouncements that the ever-resilient and -resourceful coyote was “doomed” on the Kenai were erroneous, Nutter did excel at killing them.

In doing so, he was performing a function promoted by game managers and politicians. He received praise from Southeast to Western Alaska, as well as the Kenai itself. And he left the trapping business before policies changed and bounty hunting was deemed cruel or unnecessary or even detrimental to the prey species it purported to protect.

Nutter’s cabins, too, were emblematic of a time in Alaska’s history when the rules were different, when federal lands were wide open, and individuals with the requisite energy and determination could carve out an existence for themselves as miners, trappers, hunting guides, fox farmers, recreationalists.

After the 2-million-acre Kenai National Moose Range was established in 1941, however, those opportunities diminished. Nutter’s cabins were, like many others, considered in trespass. Some structures were left standing and converted to public-use shelters. Others were dismantled or burned or simply allowed to disintegrate into the ground.

Often, the history that these structures represented was lost.

Before Alaska Warren Nutter had also made his mark in the military — in an Indiana militia, in the light infantry with the U.S. Army during World War I, and in the Marine Corps during its engagement in Nicaragua. Before and between his times in military service, he had taught school in West Virginia, Indiana, Texas and Tennessee.

He was highly educated, having completed public school, teacher training and at least two advanced degrees in college. When he taught high school in Tennessee, newspapers called him Professor Nutter.

In addition to his work as a mail carrier in Alaska, he became a land owner. He and his wife owned a home on 5 acres in town. He remodeled and expanded that home. Later, he built a new and much larger home for his family. He also built a restaurant and an immense chicken pen for a poultry operation.

Years later, Nutter applied for and received patent to a 23.69-acre homesite in the heart of Hope.

Mister Nutter

In 1939, more than a decade after his first marriage had ended in divorce, Warren Nutter had married Muriel Witt, a divorcee with four children, two of whom had muscular dystrophy. In 1943, the Nutters welcomed a new child to the clan — a son they named David Warren Nutter.

Warren and Muriel were divorced by 1946, when she remarried to an electrical lineman named Frank Gwartney. In 1948, the Gwartneys, who lived near Nutter, produced a son they named Frank after his father.

The elder Frank was friends with Warren Nutter, and the younger Frank grew up having both men around. Actually, Warren Nutter was probably in Hope more often than Frank Sr., who worked many long-term jobs in remote locations. “Looking back,” said the younger Frank, “it was like having two fathers.”

Despite the kinship he clearly felt with Nutter, Gwartney referred to him then — and still does to this day — as simply “Mister Nutter.”

What may seem more surprising is the fact that Nutter’s biological son, David, also referred to his father that way. After his parents’ divorce and his mother’s remarriage, David actually spent more time with the elder Frank Gwartney than with his own dad. The Gwartneys moved to Sitka and later split time between Anchorage and Hope, so father and son spent significant time apart.

Despite that separation, David, like his father, loved Alaska. Also like his father, he served in the U.S. Marine Corps, where he won several commendations as a helicopter pilot during the Vietnam War.

David’s widow, Thea Nutter —who lives in California — also refers to Warren as “Mister Nutter.” By the time she married David in 1970, Warren had been dead for eight years. She began calling her father-in-law what David and his half-brother Frank called him.

Conversely, Warren Nutter’s ex-wife, Muriel (also known in Hope as Peggy) lived until 1981, and to this day Thea refers to her as either “Mom” or “Peg.” After her husband Frank had died of a heart attack in 1960, Muriel married for a fourth and final time — to Harry Leflar, who had been a friend to both of her two previous spouses.

Sometime after Warren Nutter’s death in 1962, portions of his Hope property were split three ways: the State of Alaska took approximately 5 acres as a right of way where the new Hope Highway came through town. The remaining 18 acres were divided between David and the younger Frank Gwartney.

David and Thea moved out of state in 1982 and sold their acreage to a Moose Pass resident. In 2000, those 9 acres were purchased by Frank Gwartney, who now splits his time between Hope and Anchorage, and still has a home on a piece of Mister Nutter’s land.

In 1954, David Nutter (right) and his younger half-brother Frank Gwartney were ready for their first day of school in Sitka. (Photo courtesy of the Nutter Family Collection)