AUTHOR’S NOTE: King David Thurman left his Cooper Landing-area home in late July 1914 for another season of mining. He failed to return, and friends and acquaintances grew increasingly convinced that he was no longer alive.
By January 1915, King David Thurman was still missing and was presumed dead. No one had seen the resident of Bean Creek, near Cooper Landing, since he had closed the door to his home cabin on July 23, 1914, and ambled off with his dog toward Rat Creek (which drains Trout Lake on today’s Resurrection Pass Trail) and his summer mining prospects.
The dog, sans master, had returned home on Aug. 20. Search parties had formed and had fanned out into the countryside. Five more months had crept by without learning Thurman’s fate. Even Thurman’s friends and acquaintances doubted he could still be alive. On Jan. 28, 1915, a probate court met in Seward to determine what to do with Thurman’s personal property.
The U.S. commissioner appointed James Forrest Kalles — one of Thurman’s friends and also a local resident — to be guardian of the Thurman estate, such as it was.
A miner and trapper, Thurman owned his Bean Creek cabin, at least one boat, numerous trapping and mining supplies, and a series of mining and trapping shelters.
The commissioner ordered Kalles to “collect all the personal property of the said King D. Thurman and to dispose of the same to the best advantage; to cash checks … and from the proceeds of the sale of said personal property to pay all legitimate debts … rendering a full account of his guardianship to this Court at the earliest opportunity.”
Furthermore, the commissioner instructed the Seward postmaster — Cooper Landing had no post office at this time — to direct to Kalles all mail meant for Thurman, “with a view of locating and ascertaining the whereabouts of the relatives, etc., of the said King D. Thurman.”
The Search Concludes
On Feb. 27, 1915 — seven months after Thurman had last been seen alive — Jack Rowell, accompanied by Duncan Little, discovered a heretofore unknown cabin on the Chickaloon River flats and decided to investigate. The two men had been trapping and hunting in the area, and the cabin, which showed no signs of recent activity, appeared to be a good candidate for an overnight shelter.
Upon entering the structure, Rowell found the frozen, “gruesome” remains of King Thurman lying on the structure’s single bed. They recognized Thurman but decided not to touch the body or disturb the scene in any way. They closed up the cabin and headed out to report to the authorities.
Although the details are fuzzy, it appears that a second pair of men stumbled upon the same cabin on March 4, just five days later. Those men, William Austin and John Wik, both of Kenai, also decided to report to authorities what they found inside, but, unlike Rowell and Little, they did not leave the scene untouched.
Austin took with him the final note ever written by Thurman — scrawled at the bottom of a page containing a handwritten message about his cabin and property. (Austin may also have taken pages of Thurman’s diary.)
Thurman’s final note — barely legible in places — contained enough clues to allow authorities to solve the mystery of his demise. Later, that note would become a source for sometimes wild exaggerations of the facts.
In Seward on the day before Austin and Wik “rediscovered” Thurman’s remains, the U.S. commissioner, acting on Rowell’s report, determined that a coroner’s inquest of Thurman’s body was unnecessary. Such an inquest required a coroner’s jury and would be expensive because all members of the jury would be compelled to visit the remote cabin.
At this time, the government provided no funds for burying individuals who had died in remote locations. Although the sum of $70 had recently come to Thurman through the mail and had been collected by Kalles, that money had been set aside for an expected burial.
Two men, Rowell and George Ament, were assigned to accompany Kalles to the cabin, to make a full accounting of what they found and then to bury Thurman’s remains.
On March 12, a letter containing this report was sent by Kalles (witnessed and signed by Rowell and Ament) to the Hon. M.J. Convey, U.S. commissioner for Seward and the Kenai River. The letter read: “Having just returned from the Chickaloon River where with the assistance of John F. Rowell and George R. Ament, I cremated the remains of King Thurman, who was found dead in his cabin by Rowell a few weeks ago….
“Thurman, as his clothing and marks on the body showed, had been attacked by a brown bear a short distance from his cabin and was unarmed at the time,” the report continued. “There were teeth and claw marks in the left thigh, the right calf, right shoulders and the back, and a bullet hole in the left temple. His Colt revolver [almost certainly his .45-caliber Peacemaker] lay on his breast and the position of the body and condition of the right shoulders showed plainly that he fired the [fatal] shot with his left hand.
“It is quite evident that finding his condition hopeless, he killed himself rather than suffer, and his cabin being situated in an isolated spot thirty miles from the nearest camp and unknown to any of the prospectors or trappers hereabout, he knew that to get help was out of the question. His rifle stood in a corner of the cabin, the magazine was full and the Colt found on the deceased’s breast contained five cartridges and one empty shell under the hammer.
“His water pail was missing and not to be found, so that it may be that he was after water when attacked. The body was badly decomposed and although we cut the clothing from [it, we] could find no papers or any description. In cremating the remains, we filled the cabin with dry wood and set fire to it. After it burned for about three hours we went back and knocked down the walls and burned the whole thing to the ground.
“On our arrival at the Thurman cabin, we found fresh tracks in the snow which showed that someone had been there a day or so before and we could not tell if anything had been taken, but Rowell claimed that some of the things on the table had been moved about.”
Public photo from ancestry.com James Forrest Kalles (shown here with his daughters, Margaret and Emma) became the guardian of King David Thurman’s estate in early 1915 after Thurman went missing in 1914 and was presumed dead.
