Copper River Courage: How The Ahtna Kicked The Ever-Brutal Russians Out Of Alaska's Copper Valley

COPPER RIVER COUNTRY JOURNAL 

Russian postage stamp, 2025, celebrating its warrior ethos. (Wikipedia)

DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY 

Russians 'Owned' Alaska & Dominated The Coasts. They Fought Native People, Forcing Them Into Submission...

Katie John. (Photo, Country Journal) 

Here In The Interior, Though, The Ahtna People Fought Back. And They Won 

As we watch in horror, Russians are bullying their way into Ukraine. 

But the same thing happened, long ago, right here in Copper River Country. The story was preserved in oral history by the Upper Ahtna people. It was retold by Katie & Fred John to Jim Kari, who translated it in the book, "Headwaters People's Country."

The tale of Russians invading the Copper Valley is not widely known outside the Native community. But it has ties to the present. Russia's recurring wish to build itself an empire – by invading other nearby people's lands – is creating a world-wide crisis.

Russians In Alaska 

Alaska is so close to Russia that in 1648, when the first Russians arrived on the coast of Alaska by accident, there was speculation that Alaska was already attached to Russia. In 1741, Vitus Bering went to find out. His ship crashed into Bering Island at the start of winter, where he died. At that time, Russia was already a superpower, with courts and armies. 

Land Of Furs

One thing that Bering's crew brought home to Russia from this other nearby land were sea otter pelts. This was better than discovering gold, for a cold place like Russia. Living in a place as frosty as Alaska itself, Russians had a keen appreciation for good fur; the fabric that they needed to combat their subzero temperatures, in that time before fleece and synthetics. 

It wasn't long before Russian claimed Alaska. Russian traders and soldiers took over the coast of Alaska in the 1700s and began killing all the fur-bearing sea animals that had sustained the Eskimo people and the Aleuts for millennia.

Brutality: The Russian Trademark

As we unfortunately still see in Ukraine, brutality was their trademark. On the treeless Aleutian chain of islands that sweeps out into the Pacific, and in Attu and Kodiak, Russian soldiers went completely out of control. They enslaved the locals and amused themselves by killing people. Many brutal incidents were recorded – and bragged about – by the Russians, as they attempted to control the Alaskans. 

By the late 1700s and early 1800s, Russian trading posts and Russian Orthodox missions were being set up around the Copper Valley's edges and Russian explorers were trying to get past the mountains and into the Copper Valley.

Russian expeditionary leaders set out to control the land of the Ahtna time and time again, but were rebuffed by the combined power of the forbidding terrain, the distance from their ship supply lines on the coasts – and by the Ahtna themselves. 

Katie John Tells Her Mother's Story 

Until very recently, education in the Ahtna culture included committing large tracts of historical record to memory. 

In many ways, this was just like the Greeks, who passed on their history and stories (such as Homer's Odyssey) from one generation to another before the time of writing and printed books.

Oral history gives places like Greece, Ukraine and Ahtna Country very long memories. Ukraine was once the most powerful place in Europe, and Ukrainians remember their days of glory.

The Copper Valley, with its black spruce forests and meager infrastructure, is nothing like Ukraine of course. But it has a memory, too. In Alaska,  the last of the Ahtna-speaking people were the region's official historians: the guardians of the flame. 

In the late 1980s, Katie John, who was living in her modest home in the small Ahtna village of Mentasta, gave her first interview to the Country Journal.  Katie had a plump, cheerful face. Her father had been Sanford Charley, one of the last of the great Ahtna chiefs. Her mother was named Neiggodi. 

Katie John had lived a life that began when the Ahtna people still traveled with pack dogs, wore beautifully crafted skin coats, and roamed the wilderness – hunting and gathering berries. She had lived through phenomenal change; long enough to see television, jets, cell phones, and family trips to Vegas.

Like all older Ahtna people, she was a historian. A hundred years after Lt. Henry T. Allen came up the trail in 1885 – past Chitina, past Gakona Village and near Mentasta – Katie John could flawlessly tell the tale of the young American lieutenant's visit. She had heard it from her mother, who had been a first-hand witness to Allen's arrival. 

Two hundred years after the fact, Katie and the people of Mentasta also knew the entire tale of how Russian incursion into the Copper Valley was beaten back by the Ahtna people.

The ability to accurately recall history was just part of daily life for Katie, who was born in 1915 and had lived in cabins throughout the Upper Ahtna Region all her life. Katie John didn't seem like a historian. She had a warm, lively, interested personality – and that saucy name, "Katie." It was an English name that had found its way into the Copper Valley during the 1898 Gold Rush, and that described the spunky little girl from the northern Ahtna border country to a "T." 

A photograph from the National Archives shows 4-year old Katie in 1919: a chunky little thing. She's the smallest person in a lineup of family members at a fishing place called Batzelnetus. She's in a white, fur-rimmed caribou skin parka, and her round face is alert as she gazes, inquisitively, straight into the camera.

Katie John bore 14 children of her own, and she and Fred raised a total of 23 children. Katie willingly took on the burden of ad hoc "adoptive parent" in this place with so few resources. Not because she was told to, but because if she didn't help all those little children, who would. "A lot of kids didn't have a home," she said. 

Katie had a slew of children, and grandchildren, and even more great-grandchildren and even more great-great-grandchildren. She had so many actual descendants that the village school in Mentasta was named "Katie John School" in her honor. When there was an unofficial count in May, 2011, the number of her blood descendants came to over 200.

Katie & Fred John Tell Jim Kari How The Ahtna Fought The Russians

The Ahtna people's history of the battles with the Russians wouldn't have survived – even thanks to Katie, Fred and other Ahtna elders with their ironclad grasp of the subject matter – if the history hadn't been written down and translated. 

This was done by a wiry, intensely focused, compulsive intellectual.  Dr. Jim Kari has an abiding interest in preserving Native languages. Kari is a linguist who worked at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, and who learned to speak Ahtna well enough so that, as the language waned, he remained one of the few people in the world who could still understand and speak it with Katie John. Among his many projects, Jim Kari wrote down the stories of the Copper River headwaters people with Katie and other local historians and printed it in a book (in the original Ahtna and in an English translation) that was published in limited edition in 1986.

What Katie and Fred John knew wasn't pretty. The Ahtna fought the Russians just as heroically as Ukrainians do today. But they used clubs and spears instead of lit bottles of gasoline and, eventually, drones. 

Stories of a culture are often tales of loss, victory, death and triumph. Just because you're a sweet, grandmotherly woman doesn't mean you can't tell a tale of gore and vengeance. 

First Russian Attempt To Take Over The Copper Valley

Around 1794, only two decades after the Declaration of Independence, a group of Russian soldiers entered the Copper Valley. The story of their defeat is one of the great tales of the Ahtna people – kept alive by more than two centuries of oral tradition.

The Book of Katie: "The Headwaters People" 

Beyond her serene personality and a physical beauty as striking as that of the painting of "The Dream" by Picasso, Katie John was an example of the means by which oral history was kept alive by the Ahtna. She could tell the convoluted and historic stories of her people as surely as if she had been a living tape recorder, or was reading from the pages of a book. 

The accounts were real and specific – and not coming from her, but from the past. Katie, and all those who came before her, were just the mechanism by which they were delivered. 

As if watching them on a rolling computer screen inside their heads, Katie and her husband, Fred John, told their people's history, in the language of the Upper Ahtna, with ironic humor, simplicity, and the direct brutality of a modern-day Homer recounting the old and bloody tales of Greek battles. 

Katie told the stories to her children, and her grandchildren. She told them to Jim Kari. 

The plot was simple and direct. Just like the Ukrainians today, the Ahtna people were having none of it, and they fought back. Amazingly, the Ahtna won.

In 2012, now almost a hundred years old, Katie John, still vibrant and engaged, sat on a midsummer day in her little house near Mentasta Lake, on her soft sofa, and talked about the gradual transfer of oral history into written history. She was losing her hearing. 

Her fellow historian and helpmate – her husband, Fred – lay several hundreds of yards away from her couch, in the colorful Mentasta Village cemetery, on a berry-covered knoll under a little white-roofed Spirit House, which was surrounded by a cherry red and white picket fence. A handful of little girls (most likely Katie's relatives) played next door to the gravesite, out on the swing set at Mentasta School. You could hear them laughing and running. 

In her house, Katie John spoke of her respect for Jim Kari, to whom she had passed her task of helping preserve history. She had turned the story over to new technology: writing. It wasn't the best, but it was something.

"I don't talk well for how many years," she told the Journal. "Now I get too old. I used to talk to Jim Kari. He learned each different language. He talked like us." It was the greatest of compliments.

Whipping The Chiefs

And what did the beautiful Katie John tell Jim Kari – 200 years after the fact – when she talked about 1794 and the heinous Russians' foray into the Copper Valley?

When she spoke with Jim Kari in the mid-1980s, Katie John told how the Cossacks moved up the valley, from village to village, finding the Ahtna chiefs, tying them to stumps, and whipping and publicly humiliating them.

Said Katie: "The ones called Russians first were coming from down the Copper River. As they came up the Copper River they came for Ahtna people..."

The story didn't go well. The Russians marched up the valley to near Katie's modern home village of Mentasta. They arrived at a place called Batzelnetus: "Roasted Salmon Place." This was the spot where sprightly little Katie John had her photograph taken in 1919, when she was 4 years old. 

The Russians whipped the chief there, too. At Batzelnetus they drove the Ahtna men out into the subzero cold without adequate clothing, and stole their women. 

The Suslota Department Of Homeland Security 

Nearby, was another Ahtna village up the trail – Suslota. The men of Batzelnetus sought help there. Warmed by the fires and assistance of their neighbors, the Ahtna men steeled themselves, and trained for war against the Russians. 

In Suslota, the banished men trained themselves for battle. They became warriors, wearing armor made of wood coated with sand and gravel. They honed their spears, bows and arrows, copper daggers and horn clubs. They prepared themselves to kill by eating raw meat. They painted their faces red. And when they returned, fortified, the Ahtna men of Suslota and Batzelnetus were formidable foes and ready to slaughter their Russian enemies. 

Katie's husband grimly told the tale of what happened next in "The Headwaters People's Country". 

"Here they trained and they trained thinking that they would kill the Russians. 

Then they were well trained. 

They came back downriver to them.

Ho-ho.

...The fight started at night." 

The battle was brutal. And, like the battles being waged by the Ukrainians, it was on home turf. Helped by the Russians' turncoat Tanana translator who deliberately misled the invaders – and by captive Ahtna women who jammed the Russians' guns with sticks – the Ahtna won.

Fairy Tale Ending

There was a fairy tale ending to this story, and as we all know, fairy tales can be bloody. Katie John's husband, Fred, poetically noted, with satisfaction (and for the record) in the "Headwaters People's Country" book, that the Russians were slaughtered by the small band of Ahtna in a shower of "spears like frost crystals." 

The defeat of the Russians at Batzelnetus wove a tale of courage and resistance as strong as any recounting of the American Revolutionary War, which took place at around the same time. 

It was a story for the record that all Ahtna carried around in their heads. And it gave rise to a new historic burial site that the Ahtna called "By The Stumps." As Katie John noted, in her written account: 

"The Ahtna left from where they killed the Russians.

Only the corpses were left there.

The Ahtna cremated them.

They chopped spruce for them and they built a fire in the middle of the area and burned them.

That is why this place is now called 'By The Stumps.' 

Stumps are where the Russians are cremated..." 

Round Two 

The Russians returned in 1848. It was 50 years later, but every Ahtna could recall the entire story of what had happened before. (Just as Katie knew it, 150 years into the future.) 

The Russians arrived in Slana. And the story replayed itself.  This time, men from Mentasta came to the rescue. Once again, the men of the Upper Ahtna rid themselves of a wave of Russians. The Ahtna hacked these Russian soldiers to death with axes.

The Russians kept journals, and this time one of them escaped, taking the journal back – and the story they told dovetailed neatly with Katie & Fred Johns' telling. 

Russians began to get the message. If they couldn't make their way past a dedicated little band of Ahtna warriors, then they probably would have a hard time taking over the Interior. 

Russia decided to cut its losses in Alaska.

Only 11 years later, in 1859, Russia offered to sell Alaska to the United States. The sale was put on the back burner when the Civil War erupted. After the war ended, William Seward, Secretary of State, bought Alaska for America, in 1867.

Today, in Ukraine

It's not easy to watch what's happening today on our TVs. But, as in the old days of the Ahtna, the citizenry is fighting back. 

It's worth listening to the wisdom of the Ahtna elders, no matter who you are. As Fred John said, in another section of "Headwaters People's Country": 

"Now you are not thinking about tomorrow.

You have not started thinking about next month.

We are not alive just today.

The future is approaching."