AUTHOR’S NOTE: Keith McCullagh and Nellie Dee Crabb had married in June 1915 in the fledgling city of Anchorage and made their home there. Nellie continued to be a successful educator. Following his own success as forest ranger and a commercial fisherman, Keith hit it big in the fox-farming business. And then the wheels fell off their journey together.
As Keith McCullagh sailed home from Europe in the spring of 1926, he may have believed himself on top of the world. He was president of the Alaska Western Fox Corporation. He had recently been the personal escort of 42 silver foxes, valued at $75,000, to Sweden to help kick-start a fox-farming industry there. And a few months earlier, he had established in the Seattle area what he referred to as a “clearinghouse” for foxes raised as breeders.
His smiles of triumph faded quickly, however.
Details are sketchy, but somehow McCullagh completely lost his financial interest in and his connection to fox farming, including his three-island, fox-farming operation in Kachemak Bay. Soon, a lawsuit was initiated against him by “Charles Sharp, et al,” and the fate of his “estate” was being handled by a Seldovia-based trustee named Jack Tansy.
In January 1930, in the earliest stages of the Great Depression, a brief legal posting appeared in the Anchorage Daily Times indicating that McCullagh was bankrupt. The notice contained a reference to Jan. 25, 1926, which may have been when the lawsuit was initiated. If so, the legal action likely began while McCullagh was in Europe.
So far, no information has been found to indicate what flipped McCullagh’s fortune to misfortune — be it fraud or mismanagement, profligate spending or theft, or just bad luck.
To make matters worse, McCullagh’s marriage had fallen apart. In Washington in August 1927, his wife, Nellie, had filed for divorce on the grounds of cruelty.
The McCullaghs had departed Alaska for new opportunities in Seattle in 1925. Nellie would return to Alaska in 1929. She would remarry in 1936 and live in Alaska until the mid-1950s. Keith, on the other hand, would not set foot inside Alaska again for 18 years — and then only to visit their daughter, June, and her family in Anchorage.
In 1927 and 1928 — no longer in the fox-farming business — Keith worked as a promoter for an Oregon daredevil named Al Faussett, who specialized in piloting a 4-by-12-foot canvas-and-rubber raft over large waterfalls.
Throughout much of the early 1930s, McCullagh lived in Tacoma, Washington, but by at least 1935 he had relocated to Palm Springs, California, where he lived out the remainder of his life as the owner/manager of a bicycle-rental business.
In the service of the forests
On Feb. 11, 1914, during a forest survey of the central Kenai Peninsula, forest ranger Keith McCullagh sent his partner, Alf Williams, back to Swan Lake to pick up and move the rest of their equipment from a remote cabin they had been occupying to a new camp a number of miles away. In Williams’ absence, McCullagh explored, took compass bearings, noted the destruction caused by recent forest fires, and wrote up official descriptions to match his observations.
He had expected his partner, traveling with one of their dog teams, to take about three days to collect the equipment, but it wasn’t until darkness fell on Feb. 14 that he saw Williams again. In his ranger’s diary, McCullagh explained Williams’ late arrival:
“He had been delayed several hours by a bull moose (that) attacked the dogs and finally ran Williams away from the sled and up a tree. The dogs, being in harness, were helpless but managed to attract the bull’s attention long enough for Williams to get out of the tree and start back to the cabin for a gun. There was a gun in the load (on the sled), but the animal would neither allow him to get to it or permit him to cut the tow line to save the dogs.
“After being gone two hours, he returned and found Mr. Moose still in charge, pawing and bellowing almost among the dogs. The moose had to be shot. It is fortunate that no dogs were killed.”
McCullagh didn’t add, “All in a day’s work out here,” but he might as well have. The isolation and the sparse population of the Kenai, combined with the capriciousness of winter weather, meant survival sometimes depended on difficult decisions and risky actions.
Of course, the serious nature of the risks didn’t negate the possibility for some occasional fun. Returning with Williams to the scene of the moose confrontation, McCullagh photographed the dead animal and Williams. He then, according to his own field notes, “induced Williams to climb the same tree he had the day before, which he did with some reluctance, in order to lend color to the (otherwise black-and-white) picture.”
Mostly, the ranger business was not so frivolous.
In 1915, McCullagh was in charge of a crew of men battling near Ship Creek to keep forest fires away from the growing tent city of Anchorage.
On July 17, 1916, he sailed along the northern tip of the Kenai Peninsula and stopped by Chief Jimmy Nicholai’s village at Point Possession. Most of the inhabitants there were suffering from tuberculosis. He wrote that he found the chief and seven of his children “all in one room badly gone with consumption.”
McCullagh did what he could: “As they had no food, we sent some ashore from the boat, and about the same time the cannery sent a large supply of staples. This village is in urgent need of medical attention.”
Chief Nicholai died four days later.
In Kenai back in 1913, McCullagh had arranged for timber sales to brothers Andrew and Emil Berg. He had battled with local officials over the illegal occupancy of the abandoned Agricultural Experiment Station. On the move south, he had arranged for more timber sales, checked on the legality of trapper’s cabins, performed more forest surveys and mapping, and handled a variety of paperwork responsibilities.
Much of the federal land in Southcentral Alaska had never been mapped in detail prior to the establishment of the national forest. Part of McCullagh’s job over the years was helping to determine what resources the government owned and how they could best be used.
Pressure on the Kenai’s forests could be intense. Trees were needed for cabin logs, lumber, railroad ties, fish-trap pilings, bridges, docks and fuel. Making sure that forest resources were controlled and allocated properly was the responsibility of U.S. Forest Service officials.
McCullagh reported to his superiors when new equipment was needed, when violators were cited, when he had wages and expenses to collect. If he needed gear from, say, the Brown & Hawkins store in Seward, he would have to travel all the way there to place the order. If he needed frozen salmon to feed the dogs in the winter, he had to arrange to buy what he needed and carry it on one of the sleds.
When he resigned from the Forest Service in May 1917, the Anchorage Daily Times and Cook Inlet Pioneer said he had been in charge of the Ship Creek Station for the previous three years, was “recognized as one of the most efficient men in this branch of the government service in Alaska, and his handling of the situation here has been all that could be desired.”
In the 1910s, as a forest ranger for the Chugach National Forest (founded in 1907 by proclamation of Pres. Theodore Roosevelt), Keith McCullagh had had the opportunity to view much of a roadless Kenai Peninsula up close and personal. Stationed initially out of Sunrise, near Hope, he soon relocated to Ship Creek and moved around wherever he was needed — even to Cordova, where he had met Nellie.
But after 1927, with his fur-farming enterprise and his relationship with Nellie in the rearview mirror, the tenor of Keith McCullagh’s life became decidedly different.
Photo courtesy of the Peggy Arness Collection Pauline Burgin (left) and June McCullagh in a pen with fox pups on the McCullagh family’s fox farm in Kachemak Bay.
U.S. Forestry Department photo by John “Jack” Brown Keith McCullagh is photographed poling a raft down the Kenai River in 1911 during a forest survey.
