The Mad Trapper of Rat River or the Demented trapper

That you encounter some mystery when doing genealogy is nothing new. Either it can be a father who is unknown or it is something else that is elusive. It is part of genealogy itself that a small mystery emerges that usually takes a little longer to solve than anything else.

For those of you who are a little more sensitive, this post may not be the best and this is just a little warning sign so you should know that there are things in the text and pictures that can be a little sensitive for some.

Aklavik

Map of Canada with Aklavik highlighted.

We are now going back to the summer of 1931 and to the Northwest Territory in Canada when a man appeared out of nowhere on the river Peel and the small village of Aklavik. The village is located in the middle of the wilderness in the northwestern part of the territory. He would shop for necessities and seemed to have plenty of money.

Edgar Millen who belonged to RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police), who used to keep track of people in the area, especially newcomers, met the man and started asking questions about his activities there but got very few answers from the man who somehow got (a little wrong ) the name Albert Johnson and that name stuck after that. Johnson was clean-shaven, had light blue eyes and Millen thought Johnson seemed to have a Scandinavian accent. Because there was very little information from Johnson, Millen said that he thought Johnson should get a hunting license to catch animals. Albert Johnson stayed for a few days in Aklavik (may have been up to two weeks as the information varies). While he was there, he kept to himself and did not talk to anyone. Johnson ventured out on the waterways of the Mackenzie River Delta and ended up on a beach on the Rat River where he built a small 2.4 x 3 meter cabin. Johnson had not obtained a license that Millen had advised him to, which was a bit odd for someone who lived out in the bush. During this time, many of these areas were invaded by outsiders who had gone there due to the Great Depression because they wanted to try to survive in some way.

Rat River

Albert Johnsons destoyed cabin.

In December 1931, local First Nations Trappers complained to the Mounted Police that Johnson had tampered with their snares and, among other things, hung the snares on trees. This led to Constable Alfred King and Special Constable Joe Bernard walking the 97 kilometers from Aklavik to Johnson's cabin on the Rat River on December 26 to talk to him about the allegations. Both constables had extensive experience of the wilderness. As they approached the cottage they saw smoke coming from the chimney so they went to it to talk but Johnson refused, and did not even seem to notice them. King looked in through the window of the cottage and then Johnson covered it with a sack. In the end, the two constables decided to return to Aklavik to obtain a house search order.

King and Bernard returned five days later with two other men. Johnson still refused to speak and in the end King decided to try to open the door by force. As soon as he started, Johnson shot him through the wooden door. A short firefight broke out and the team managed to get King back to Aklavik where he finally recovered from the gunshot wound he had received. Johnson had thus gone from being suspected of destroying snares for other hunters to attempted murder.

A posse was formed consisting of 9 men, 42 dogs and 9.1 kilos of dynamite which they would use to blow up Johnson's cabin if necessary. After surrounding the cottage, they started lighting the dynamite sticks but it didn't really work because it was too cold. They then started to try to thaw the dynamite inside the coats and in the end they threw all the dynamite that ended up on the cottage roof, which caused the cottage to collapse from the bang. After the bang, they started rushing towards the cottage. Johnson then opened fire from a 1.5 meter hole he had dug under the cottage. No one was hit by the shots from Johnson and after a 15 hour standoff (at 4 o'clock in the morning) in minus 40 degrees Celcius, the posse decided to retreat to Aklavik to get further assistance. The report from the RCMP contradicts a bit that the cottage would have collapsed after the dynamite but it would hardly have been damaged and that it was later that it was deliberately destroyed to prevent Johnson from returning.

Some of the cops involved in chasing "The Mad Trapper". From left to right: Constable A.W. King (wounded), Mr Hutchinson, Corporal Hall, unknown, Mr Mellville, Corporal R. S. Wild, Constable E. "Newt" Millen (killed), unknown.

The hunt

Supplies are loaded into "Wop" May's aircraft in Aklavik.

By this time the news had reached the rest of the world via radio and the newspapers began to call him the Mad Trapper of Rat River. After being delayed due to a snowstorm, the reinforced posse returned to Johnson's cabin on January 14 only to find that Johnson had left. The posse set out to try to find him, and 16 days later, on January 30, they caught up with him and managed to surround Johnson, who was hiding in a grove of trees. During the firefight that broke out, Johnson managed to shoot Constable Edgar Millen through the heart. Here they heard a laugh from Johnson who otherwise hadn't said anything during the meetings he had with the pursuers. Millen was the only one who had spoken to Johnson during their first meeting in Aklavik six months earlier. Millen would have a tributary of the Rat River named after him, called Millen Creek. A memorial is located in that area. Once again, the posse withdrew even though they thought they had him, but Johnson managed to climb an almost vertical cliff under cover of darkness. The posse continued to grow with local Inuit and Gwich'ins who were better suited to move in the lands as they were. It was clear that Johnson would leave Yokon but the RCMP had blocked both passes at the Richardson Mountains, but this did not stop Johnson who climbed up a 2100 meter mountain peak and disappeared again.

Wilfrid "Wop" May.

In sheer desperation, the RCMP hired a pilot named Wilfrid "Wop" May from Canadian Airways. "Wop" May had been a pilot during the First World War and the last to be chased by the Red Baron before he was shot down. "Wop" arrived in the new ski-equipped Bellanca monoplane on February 5th. The prolonged hunt for Johnson made the supplies ran short all the time and they needed a pair of eagle eyes from the air that could assist them. "Wop" May discovered that Johnson had crossed the Richardson chain and saw footprints on the other side of the mountain range. Nine days later, on February 14, he came up with the tactics that Johnson used. He discovered footprints running from the center of the frozen ice on the Eagle River toward the riverbank. Johnson had followed the tracks of reindeer in the middle of the river where the reindeer had a better view to detect predators and the like. Walking in their hoof tracks had hidden his own and allowed him to walk faster in the already trampled snow without having to use snowshoes. It was only when he was going to rest for the night that he went to the river bank for protection and it was these tracks that "Wop" discovered. May used the radio to announce the discovery to the RCMP and they resumed the hunt. For the next two days, "Wop" May had to stay on the ground due to fog. On February 17, they had come on the right tracj and caught up with Johnson. When they came out of a bend in the river, they discovered Johnson in the middle of the ice of the river just a few hundred meters in front of them. Johnson tried to run to the river bank but did not wear his snowshoes and could not cope in the deep snow.

One last firefight

Aerial view of RCMP and Albert Johnson hunting, Northwest Territories. Johnson, "The Mad Trapper," is on the ice in the middle while his pursuers are on the beach near the trees on the right.

Now that it had found Johnson again, another firefight began. Because Johnson could not run to the river bank, he threw himself into the snow and hid behind his backpack and started firing. Eames who led the 11 men, including Gardlund, Sittichinli, Riddell and Hersey, came in from the right on the Eagle River and Johnson himself was in the middle of the ice. Eames shouted at Johnson to give up but Johnson ignored this and managed to shoot Hersey but it was not a fatal shot. Via signals from "Wop" May, the posse spread out and caught Johnson in a crossfire. Johnson was shot several times. The bullet that was fatal to Johnson is believed to be one that went through the pelvis and cut off the spine so that Johnson collapsed. Once they realized that Johnson was dead and began to reflect on the hunt for him, 53 days had passed from the first visit to the cottage until Johnson was shot and he had walked about 140 km from his little cottage by Rat River and it had been 33 days since they discovered he had left the cottage.

Posthumous reputation and the identity

"Albert Johnson, The Mad Trapper" as they examined and took pictures of his body.

After Johnson's body had been taken back to Aklavik, they began to examine the body to find out who the man really was. There was nothing that could identify him at all and they had not found anything in his cabin either. With him, in addition to the clothes he wore on his body, Johnson had 2410 Canadian dollars and 10 in US dollars, five pearls of low value and a small amount of gold including dental teeth. They also found a pocket compass, a razor, a knife, fish hooks, nails, a dead squirrel, a dead bird, a large amount of Beecham's pills. The weapons he had were a .22 Winchester rifle, a .30-30 Savage Model 99F and a sawn-off 16-gauge Iver Johnson Champion shotgun. They also took his fingerprints, but neither the Canadian nor the American police had any files that matched Johnson's. His true identity was thus a mystery in itself. Seventy-five years later, in 2007, forensic teams found that his tailbone was not symmetrical, causing his spine to swing left and right slightly. In addition, one foot was longer than the other.

A phantom image of "Johnson" from the search for his identity.

Albert Johnson as he was called was an alias that was realized and after a while the number of people had been reduced to four suspects.

The first person of the suspects was an obscure man named Arthur Nelson. This man had traveled from Dease Lake in British Columbia and up to the Yukon sometime between 1927 and 1931. He had similar weapons to Albert Johnson. The elderly in Kaska Dena and others remembered him under his alias "Mickey Nelson" when he hunted in the Ross River region.

The author Dick North's book "Trackdown" from 1989 developed a theory that Albert Johnson, Arthur Nelson and the criminal John Johnson were one and the same person. John Johnson had been imprisoned several times, including in San Quentin and Folsom Prison and his physical attributes are well documented and similar to those of the "Mad Trapper". North had followed John Johnson's identity back to Norway. "Johnny Johnson" was born as Johan Konrad Jonsen (1898) in Bardu in northern Norway (north of the Arctic Circle). In any case, the "Mad Trappers"'s expensive teeth probably did not belong to the criminal Johnson. DNA tests on John Johnson's nephew Ole Getz also proved that John and the "Mad Trapper" were not the same person.

The Johnston family from Pictou in Nova Scotia long believed that Albert Johnson would have been Owen Albert Johnston, a relative of theirs, who had left Pictou at the beginning of the Great Depression to try to find work in the United States. A final letter from him was published from Revelstoke, British Columbia, in early 1931, but they never heard from him again. According to the radio interview, a relative arranged a DNA test.

The earlier theories were challenged with the release of Mark Fremmelid's book "What became of Sigvald anyway?". He suggested that there were too many circumstances that had been ignored and that it could be Sigvard Pedersen Haaskjold from Norway who was Albert Johnson. Sigvard was known as a self-sufficient man of high class and was 32 in 1927, ie 4½ years before the hunt and shooting of Albert Johnson, which was thought to be between 35 and 40 years. Sigvald had become obsessed with believing that the authorities were still looking for him. This author points to evidence of circumstance in this case.

New technology and DNA

During the excavation of Johnson's grave.

In 2007, a group decided to re-examine the "Mad Trapper", Albert Johnson and his identity. It had thus been 75 years and no one had managed to crack the mystery of Johnson's true identity or where he came from. A forensic team gathered and they dug up the remains near the cemetery in Aklavik and everything was documented in the documentary "The Hunt for the Mad trapper".

Among the things the team found was from isotopic analysis that he may have grown up in Scandinavia but most likely in the American Midwest. He had scoliosis which must have led to chronic back pain, he was about 35 years old, he had been shot several times in the last firefight including his legs, chest and a weakening shot from behind through the pelvis. A spiral fracture on his femur supports the anecdote that a bullet had hit and exploded an ammunition bag on his hip. His dental work was of a very high quality at the time, which indicates that he could afford expensive state-of-the-art work in any major city such as Chicago or New York. DNA samples were also taken for comparison work.

After the examination, his remains were taken back and buried with complete religious rites by both the local priest and the native elders, something he had not received at his original funeral.

While many people had offered convincing clues and anecdotal evidence that they were related to him, the DNA analysis excluded all candidates and his identity is, despite all investigations, still a mystery.

In 2017, it was decided to do a familial DNA test, but technical problems with DNA avoided analysis until an adequate sequence was developed by Othram Inc. in 2021. Further tests of Othram have identified some of his ancestors who lived in the Swedish cities of Hånger, Kävsjö and Kulltorp. and includes Gustaf Magnusson (1776–1853) and Britta Svensdotter (1781–1846). Additional DNA samples and family history are currently being sought from possible descendants to take the investigation further and this is where we are right now.

90 years without a real identity

A sign in Aklavik.

It has thus been 90 years since "Albert Johnson" appeared in Aklavik in northwestern Canada and his identity is still unknown, even though they may be on close. What you can reflect on is that he could hardly have been crazy or anything like that as he was smart enough to escape both the police and trackers for over 40 days. He cunningly survives in arctic climates with about 40 degrees below zero during the day and with temporary self-made shelters and even colder nights. Being able to hunt to get food without using weapons to reduce attention and cook it without fire or smoke bringing the trackers closer and burning around 42 MJ (10,000 kcal) a day was also an achievement in itself. Imagine that you have back pain, how difficult it is for you to perform many everyday tasks. Now imagine what it was like for Johnson when he with his chronic back pain and feet that were different lengths. Getting through difficult terrain in the middle of winter in snow and cold over mountains and with the packing he had to take with him, it could not have been particularly easy. The newspapers in both Canada and the USA wrote about the hunt for him and for some he became a bit of a hero in the wake of the depression as it was after all.

Songs have also been written about him and films based on his story have been released, including Death Hunt from 1981 with Charles Bronson. The facts in these songs and movies may not be quite clear but there is a lot of fiction in them.

That I started to get interested in "the Mad Trapper" is because I read a bit quickly in a newspaper (as usual) and saw that the solution to the mystery had come a little closer plus the fact that I myself have some old relatives in the areas where Johnson's ancestors came from and those things usually trigger an old genealogist's imagination. As it looks at the moment, there is no family connection between me and Johnson but you never know, one day something may appear that allows you to enroll him in the family tree as well. Everyone deserves an identity, right!?

// Daniel