Site Logo
This photo of Warren Melville Nutter, holding a dead juvenile bald eagle that he shot for the bounty, appeared in the May 1938 edition of The Alaska Sportsman Magazine. The photo was probably taken near the mouth of Hidden Creek on Skilak Lake.

Community

Finding Mister Nutter — Part 4

AUTHOR’S NOTE: After more than two decades serving in the military and teaching in various classrooms, Warren Melville…

This is a display of some of the hunting items that Warren Melville Nutter carried when he moved to Alaska in the summer of 1930. (Photo courtesy of the Nutter Family Collection)

Community

Finding Mister Nutter — Part 3

AUTHOR’S NOTE: On the Kenai Peninsula, Warren Melville Nutter would become known primarily as a premiere bounty trapper…

Public photo from ancestry.com Gilbert Witt, pictured here in about 1930, was the troubled first husband of Muriel Grunert, who later married Warren Melville Nutter.

Community

Finding Mister Nutter — Part 2

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Warren Melville Nutter — known by many residents of the Kenai Peninsula as “William” or “Bill”…

Warren Melville Nutter, seen here holding a black bear cub in an undated photo likely taken in Hope, lived nearly half of his life on the Kenai Peninsula. (Photo courtesy of the Nutter Family Collection)

Community

Finding Mister Nutter — Part 1

AUTHOR’S NOTE: My search for Warren Melville Nutter began as part of a book project with former backcountry…

Photo courtesy of the John Secora Collection Joseph Secora was one of few individuals to live year-round on Tustumena Lake. He placer mined for gold on Indian Creek and completed three cabins in the area.

Community

Cosmopolitan Tustumena — Part 2

In 1880, before anyone was recorded as a resident on Tustumena Lake, the U.S. Census noted the general…

Photo from a U.S. Application for Seaman’s Protection Certificate Vera Liebel, pictured here, and Mary Douglas Barnsley, friends and both former nurses in the Kenai area, were two of the only women known to have had a cabin on Tustumena Lake in the early to mid-1900s.

Community

Cosmopolitan Tustumena — Part 1

Few people these days would associate the word “cosmopolitan” with Tustumena Lake, and for good reason. The lake…

A lone hooligan fisherman heads upstream on the lower Kenai River to try his luck from Cunningham Memorial Park. (Clark Fair photo)

Community

States of Mind: The death of Ethen Cunningham — Part 6

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Sometimes it seems as though the resolution of a criminal investigation, the resulting hearings or trials,…

Pictured in an online public portrait is Anthony J. Dimond, the Anchorage judge who presided over the sentencing hearing of William Franke, who pleaded guilty to the second-degree murder of Ethen Cunningham in January 1948.

Community

States of Mind: The death of Ethen Cunningham — Part 5

AUTHOR’S NOTE: During the evening of Jan. 19, 1948, in Kenai, William Franke shot dead Ethen Cunningham near…

This excerpt from a survey dating back more than a century shows a large meander at about Mile 6 of the Kenai River. Along the outside of this river bend in 1948 were the homestead properties of Ethen Cunningham, William Franke and Charles “Windy” Wagner.

Community

States of Mind: The death of Ethen Cunningham — Part 4

One early December morning in the old cabin, the Frankes were having breakfast when Cunningham stormed over.

Photo courtesy of the Knackstedt Collection Charles “Windy” Wagner, pictured here in about the year in which Ethen Cunningham was murdered, was a neighbor to both the victim and the accused, William Franke.

Community

States of Mind: The death of Ethen Cunningham — Part 3

AUTHOR’S NOTE: During the evening of Jan. 19, 1948, in Kenai, William Franke shot dead Ethen Cunningham near…

William Henry Franke signed this draft-registration card in August 1942 in Massachusetts. At the time, he was serving with the U.S. Merchant Marine. Four years later, he would move to the Kenai Peninsula. In January 1948, he would kill Ethen Cunningham.

Community

States of Mind: The death of Ethen Cunningham — Part 2

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Ethen Cunningham came to the Kenai Peninsula in about 1940. He homesteaded along the lower Kenai…

Former Kenai resident and businessman Hal Thornton first arrived in Kenai on the evening that Ethen Cunningham was murdered. He described his experience with this event in the Kenai chapter of this memoir.

Community

States of Mind: The death of Ethen Cunningham — Part 1

AUTHOR’S NOTE: At the outset, I want to acknowledge invaluable contributions to this story from these three primary…

On its last legs. When the Peninsula Clarion’s Ashlyn O’Hara captured this image of Good Time Charlies in 2022, the old bar and strip club was about to be demolished to make room for a highway-safety project.

Community

A violent season — Part 7

AUTHOR’S NOTE: The aftermath of the 1967 shoot-out at the Hilltop Bar and Café, near Soldotna, began to…