Kasilof

In Kasilof life has always been about the river. For thousands of years people have lived along its banks and harvested its salmon. Countless generations inhabited the uplands, building their homes and food storage cellars securely into the ground. The remains are mere depressions in the earth now but are commonly found wherever modern development's bulldozers have not intruded.

The Dena'ina Athabaskan people were here when the Russian fur traders built Fort St. George near the mouth of the Kasilof River in 1786. The traders needed the river as a harbor for their boats. When the United States purchased Alaska from Russia the Dena'ina had been decimated by European diseases; only two small villages remained near the Kasilof River, one on the coast to the north and one to the south.

Cook Inlet's first salmon cannery was built on the Kasilof in 1882 by a San Francisco-based company. For over forty years the cannery would be the center of the community supplying residents, seasonal work, transportation, groceries, building materials and sporadic medical care.

Most of the early Euro-American settlers in Kasilof were Scandinavian immigrants who came up with the cannery and then stayed. The river provided them with food, a work place in the summer and access to rich trapping and hunting grounds upstream and around Tustumena Lake. The first big game hunting in mainland Alaska started right here in 1897. The business of hunting provided valuable seasonal jobs for local men from then on.

Around 1920 the fox farming industry arrived in Kasilof. Fashion and economic prosperity had created a great demand for fox fur and eight farms were built along the river. The river provided fish to feed the fox and transportation. During the dozen years of the fox farming boom the local families and bachelor farmers persuaded the Territorial government to help them build seven miles of road connecting their farms with the cannery. To go anywhere else required a boat ride in the warmer half of the year and a dogsled ride or long snowshoe hike in the winter.

Fox farming fizzled during the depression. Commercial salmon fishing sustained the residents' cash flow enough to cover their annual grocery and supply order that came by ship from Seattle. Garden veggies, wild berries, salmon and moose filled the larders. Mail came by boat once a week in the summer, twice a week by dogsled or airplane in the winter. Until airplanes became common in the late 1930s, a winter trip to the doctor required a three-day dogsled ride to Moose Pass to catch the train to Anchorage.

After World War II the Sterling Highway finally connected Kasilof with the rest of the peninsula and beyond. Most of the homesteaders who flooded in for their free land were expecting to support themselves by farming. They discovered that there was no market for their agricultural products and many of them turned to the old standby of commercial salmon fishing for work.

Commercial and sport fishing businesses today continue to support many Kasilof residents; the rest just like to play here. And so it flows.