CONCORD - When Bill Allman was born in Mecklenburg County 77 years ago, it was "roamin' blood" that flowed through his veins, he says.
With that blood still coursing freely, today Allman flies from Charlotte's Douglas Municipal Airport to go back to his cabin home on Alaska's Yukon River to the life of independence and danger he has known there for the past 53 years.
"That Alaska wind off the Bering Sea 'll cut the blood right out of your face," he explained last week while sitting in the lobby of the Hotel Concord. "But you got freedom up there. And liberty. There's plenty of huntin' and not many people. It's a hard life, but there's always somethin' to do, something' to it you can't get away from."
Allman wouldn't be back in the lower 48 states except for brain surgery he had back in 1957.
Allman says he thinks the kick in the head a horse gave him back in his youthful cowboy days helped cause the brain tumor that had to be removed. Since the operation, he's spent several winter months each year in the Concord area where living isn't so tough and where he can visit relatives and friends.
Aliman began his adventurous life as a farm boy in Mecklenburg County in 1900, moved with his family to Cabarrus County about 1916 to a new home near Concord and quit school in the seventh grade to go to work.
In 1918, Allman, then 18, left home and traveled west to sail on Scandinavian whaling ships, work in mines 3,500 feet deep in Montana, be a lumberjack in Washington State's big fir timber, work as an Arizona cowboy, shoot coyotes for bounty on the prairies, sail on halibut - and salmon - fishing boats, work on railroads and barnstorm in old WWI planes after he learned to fly.
"I heered about Alaska on those whaling boats," Allman recalled. He visited the territory in 1921, went back for good in 1923, camping with two old-time trappers who taught him the fundamentals of Alaskan survival.
"I learnt the rest the hard way," he grinned, "like, after fallin' through the ice, 1 learnt to carry a big stick to test it..."
He bought this first husky pups, built a cabin, filed his claims, and spent the next 50-odd years prospecting for gold. He found some, but spent a lot of time hunting, fishing, going on rescue missions and building 16 survival cabins along his 75-mile-long claim. He traded here and there, hunted wolf, fox, mink, bear, moose, wolverine and mountain sheep for meat, hides and trophies. He lead hunting parties across America's biggest state, seldom leaving it.
"If there's anything in Alaska I haven't saw, I don't know it," he
declared, waving his cigar in the air. Sitting in the Hotel Concord lobby, he keeps the elderly residents rapt with his tales of the frozen north.
Cold here this winter? "I didn't even put my heavy undershirt on,"
he said, smiling.
Allman admitted to some homesickness for "my mansion," that 16-by-18-foot sod-roofed cabin on the Yukon Riber near Marshall, in southwestern Alaska. "It has a
plank floor and two windows and a kerosene lamp - and a roulette table (left over from his gambling days)."
"When I get back, I'm gonna thaw some of my bread and put a 2-foot moose steak on my wood stove. Then I'm going to bed," he grinned. His bed is an iron cot
with eiderdown sleeping bag.
Thus Bill Allman will resume the life he chose 53 years ago, and which, for him, has changed little, despite encroaching civilization and increasing restrictions following Alaska's statehood.
"You can't stake claims no more, and you can't prospect no more...," Allman said. Snowmobiles and airplanes have replaced the huskies and there's a village
telephone in Marshall.
But Bill Allman will keep to his old ways - prospecting, hunting,
mending, trapping, cooking, trading, listening to the thunder of ice breaking up on the Yukon at his front door.
He quit guiding three years ago and his pilot's license just expired. "But I've had a good life up there," he said.
