My favourite part of being in the Boy Scouts was all the camping trips we got to go on. We would go camping once a month, including during the winter. One January we went to a mountain in New Hampshire that was also the home of the week long summer camp we attended, which meant that there were various facilities available instead of it just being a barren, desolate mountaintop. When we arrived there at about midnight on Friday, we all grabbed cots in one of the cabins.
It had been a long drive after a long day of school, and we were all far too tired for anything else.
But the next morning, my friend Matt and I decided that sleeping in a cabin was stupid. We were supposed to be camping, not sleeping in a heated building. Nobody had brought tents since our troop had reserved the cabin, so we spent the rest of the morning building what we referred to as an igloo. It was actually just a giant, hollowed out mound of snow, but that was where we intended to spend the night sleeping.
I’m kind of surprised that the adults involved were okay with this plan, but the structure turned out to be really sturdy.
We had finished building our snow fort by around noon, and the sun came out just enough that it melted the snow a little bit before completely icing over, giving it some really solid structural integrity. It was even big enough that a third person decided to sleep inside as well, so that night we piled into our makeshift igloo and used the rather impractical circular sled I had brought as a door to keep the wind out.
That night, the windchill put the temperature at about -17 degrees (-27 in numbers that Simon will understand), but we were sweating our asses off inside. It was a really fun experience, and somewhere there is a photo of the three of us standing on top of the igloo from the following morning.
As cool an experience as that was, it was only for a single night. There was also a warm cabin about 100 yards away that we could have retreated to if things went completely sideways. It would have been a lot less fun if we had to keep that up for two months in even colder temperatures, especially if we were also running from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police who were trying to bring us in for murdering one of their colleagues.
But that is exactly the situation that one man found himself in, the man who became known as the Mad Trapper of Rat River. When we talk about serial killers from the U.S., they’re often referred to as being the target of the largest manhunt in history to that point, with the task force for each subsequent killer outdoing the previous one. However, despite taking place all the way back in 1932, the Mad Trapper incident is often still referred to as both the largest and longest manhunt in Canadian history. And it all could have been avoided for about five bucks.
Meet Albert Johnson
On July 9, 1931, a man floated down the Peel River headed towards Fort McPherson in Canada’s Northwest Territories. The man identified himself as Albert Johnson, and he began buying gear and trapping supplies. He was sparing no expense, and this awkward newcomer quickly caught the attention of the RCMP.
Not because he was doing anything wrong, of course. Fort McPherson was an extremely small community, and even today the population is less than one thousand. This area in the Northwest Territories was mostly home to First Nations peoples, so a white man unexpectedly floating into town on a log raft was enough to at least warrant a friendly chat with the police. Of course this is Canada so I mean an actual friendly chat, not what 1930s American police would refer to as a “friendly chat”.
Although the nearest police headquarters was in Aklavik (Soft A, klavik is pronounced like clavicle) nearly 55 miles away, in the summer months they would have officers stationed at Fort McPherson just in case. Constable Edgar Millen was sent to go investigate this stranger and see what business he had in the area, though it was difficult to get much information out of him.
Pretty much everyone that met Albert described him as being extremely quiet with a rather surly demeanor. The only person that he seemed to talk to at all was the owner of the local trading post, which was mostly out of necessity.
Constable Millen had his little chat with Albert, and nothing seemed too out of the ordinary, beyond his manner of arrival. Millen described him as being about 35-40 years old, 5’9”, and about 175 pounds. This is the same physical description given by everyone in Fort McPherson that met him, give or take an inch and about five pounds. What Millen left out of his initial report but he and others would later note is that Albert had very broad shoulders and that 175 or so pounds was pure muscle.
Then again, at the time he had no reason to note what an impressive physical specimen Albert was. All he cared about was what this stranger was doing in the area. Albert said he planned to travel to the upper Rat River to trap animals, and that answer was reasonable enough. Millen did warn him that if he was going to trap within the Northwest Territories that he’d need to purchase a trapping permit, but Albert claimed he wasn’t so that was the end of it.
And that was the first time that this entire ordeal could have been easily avoided.
A couple weeks after he had arrived in Fort McPherson, Albert departed for the Rat River near the border of the Yukon Territory. He built a log cabin near the river and prepared to make his way as a trapper. I’m sure he would have been great at it too; I can’t help but imagine that the sort of person that can build a house with their bare fucking hands would have no problem hunting for rabbits and squirrels. But of course, there had to be a problem.
As it turns out, sometimes you really can judge a book by its cover. Albert had been described by people as looking like a bit of a surly douchebag, and he absolutely was. When December rolled around, the First Nations peoples reported to the RCMP that a strange white man was interfering with their trap lines. He had been setting off their traps and hanging them in the trees, and when they went to his cabin to confront him about it the man just pulled a gun on them.
The reason Albert had needed a permit in order to trap in the Northwest Territories was that the land by the Rat River was strictly the trapping territory of the First Nations people. But he didn’t care about any of that. As far as he was concerned this was his land now, and he told the indigenous people to leave the country because he was taking over. I should mention at this point that he was reported as having a Scandinavian accent, since you’re probably just assuming now that he’s British.
It was decided that a couple men would be sent up to pay Albert a visit for another friendly chat. But it was December, which meant that the RCMP were all back at Aklavik instead of in Fort McPherson. It was going to be an 80 mile or so trek to Albert’s cabin which was a giant pain in the ass, so Constable Millen decided that they would wait until December 26th at which point he would send Constable Alfred King along with a First Nations guide who knew exactly where the cabin was.
When King arrived at the cabin with his guide, he knew that Albert was home because there was smoke coming from the chimney. King tried knocking on the door and calling out, but Albert opted for the “la la la, I can’t hear you” defense, completely ignoring the constable. King tried to look in through the window, but Albert covered the opening with a sack to block the view.
Luckily, King didn’t have the authority to enter the premises yet so they returned to Aklavik to get a warrant and some backup. However, there was something a bit unfortunate about the cabin that King had noticed.
I already mentioned that all of the events that will follow could have been avoided if Albert had just bought a Goddamn trapping permit. But he had made one other mistake as well. I don’t know whether or not there are any now, but back in the day there weren’t any markers to indicate the boundaries between the territories. As it turns out, Albert had built his log cabin just 200 yards away from the Yukon Territory border.
If his cabin had been just slightly further away he would have been inside the Yukon where no permit was required for trapping, and there would have been no Mad Trapper.
At least there might not have been. Albert was still a dick, so I’m not going to rule out the possibility that he might have either killed or gotten himself killed by the First Nations people. Trapping without a permit may have been legal in the Yukon, but murder unsurprisingly was not so he may still have died in infamy.
Anyway, five days later King returned to the cabin with Special Constable Joe Bernard and two other men to execute the search warrant. They tried to speak with Albert, but he again ignored them. King knocked on the door twice, announcing who he was and that they had a warrant to search the premise. But before King could even attempt to open it, Albert began firing his rifle blindly through the closed door. The first shot hit King in the chest, knocking him to the ground.
As King crawled towards Bernard for help, the other officers returned fire. They saw Albert fleeing to the woods, though they opted not to give chase. It was 80 miles back to the hospital in Aklavik, so if they had any hope for King surviving they were going to need to load him onto the dogsled and get moving immediately.
Fortunately for King, the bullet had pierced his lower chest while managing to avoid any vital organs. He would go on to make a full recovery, though there was still one fatality from this journey. They had traveled all the way to Albert’s cabin and back in the same day with basically no break, and one of the sled dogs was dead on the line by the time they made it back to Aklavik.
But now things were heating up, and they realized they were dealing with an extremely dangerous and possibly unhinged individual. After all, why the Hell would he have opened fire on police over a trapping violation? If they had determined that he was the one responsible for screwing with the First Nations trap lines, all they were going to do was issue him the standard fine that he could easily afford. I mean, in the brief time he had spent in Fort McPherson that summer, he had dropped about $1,400 in 1930s Great Depression money.
For the next attempt, which would occur on January 9, 1932, RCMP Inspector Alexander Eames decided that he was going to personally lead a posse of officers to the cabin to take the dangerous fugitive into custody. He wanted to be sure they were prepared, so there were nine total officers, including Millen and Bernard from before, as well as Charlie Rat, their First Nations guide. They had also decided to bring along about 20 pounds of dynamite so they could blow the fuck out of Albert’s cabin and force him into the open.
But things didn’t go according to plan. Albert’s cabin was originally of fairly shoddy construction, but he had reinforced it since his last encounter with the police. When the police arrived and Inspector Eames ordered Albert to surrender, he declined by opening fire with his rifle. The dynamite was thrown onto his roof, though it’s unclear whether or not it had any effect.
While the story generally goes that the police blew up Albert’s cabin, the RCMP’s official report said that the dynamite barely had any effect and they just destroyed his cabin by hand later so that he wouldn’t return. I know it sounds like a lot, but 20 pounds of dynamite isn’t that much. It’s the equivalent of an explosive vest; it can cause a lot of damage in the right place, but if it’s haphazardly thrown onto a roof it probably won’t yield the desired results.
What it did result in was a 15 hour shootout between Albert and the police. Armed with a .30-30 rifle, a revolver, and a sawn-off shotgun, he was able to fend the nine RCMP officers off by himself thanks to a very strange design decision with his cabin. Rather than just building his log cabin on the ground as I would think makes sense, Albert had dug down about three feet and built his cabin around the hole. This dugout helped protect him from oncoming fire, allowing him to hold his own for the extended firefight.
As time went on, the RCMP realized they were going to need to retreat. It was entirely too cold, and they had planned on quickly being in and out with Albert in custody. Running low on food for themselves as well as the dogs, their only choice was to go back for supplies. Millen and another officer would return to the cabin five days later, and this is allegedly when they would have destroyed the cabin.
However, there was no trace of Albert. He had been given five days to make a run for it, and his tracks were completely covered up by recent snowfall.
News of the shootout broke, and the media dubbed Albert the Mad Trapper of Rat River. And at this point, the public were almost entirely on his side. It probably didn’t help that the police who were chasing him, even King who he had shot, all seemed to show a great deal of respect for the man.
Following Albert receiving the “Mad Trapper” moniker, Inspector Eames said that he was not a “demented trapper” but “a shrewd and resolute man…a tough and desperate character.” The officers spoke about what an accomplished woodsman and traveler he was, and what a tough individual he had to be to survive on his own in the arctic wilderness. Even years later, after the eventual murder, the tone of everybody involved remained unchanged in interviews.
The only difference was that instead of just calling him a skilled woodsman and traveler, they would add in what an excellent shot he was. I don’t think I could ever say such nice things about a person that killed my friend and coworker, but then again I’m not Canadian.
On January 14, another posse was formed to meet Millen and the other officer at the cabin, again containing nine members of the RCMP as well as 11 First Nations trackers. As I said the fresh snowfall had eliminated Albert’s tracks, but they had a good idea that he was headed towards the Richardson Mountains. They assumed that he would travel through the Yukon, over the mountains, and head towards Alaska where he could easily disappear from them forever.
There was no communications network in Alaska or in the Yukon, so if Albert could cross the border he would be home free. Canada and the United States didn’t have a formal extradition treaty until 1971, though the first fugitive to be extradited from the United States to Canada was back in 1886 so that absolutely would have been on the table. The only problem was that with no radio or telegraph communication, the Alaskan authorities wouldn’t have been waiting to apprehend Albert at the border. He could have entered the United States, leaving the RCMP’s jurisdiction, and made his way to a coastal town to board a boat to God knows where before the Alaskan police knew what was going on.
But a more pressing issue than the lack of communications networks in the area was the fact there was about 100 square miles between the destroyed cabin and the Alaskan border, and finding Albert without any tracks to follow was going to be no simple task. They embarked on their journey, but after a week supplies were running low. Most of the posse had to return to Aklavik to get more supplies, with Inspector Eames leaving behind Millen and three other constables to continue the manhunt.
It was going to be a long time before the remainder of the posse would return with supplies, but there would be a major break in the search for Albert before then. A First Nations hunter had heard a gunshot coming from the Bear River. He believed that this must have been Albert hunting small game to eat, so he led Millen and the remaining officers to the area.
On January 30th, the four officers finally caught up with Albert at a small campsite he had constructed for himself. He had constructed what Constable Riddell described as a snow fort, using a large spruce tree as part of his shelter. However, he had constructed his camp with its back to a nearly vertical cliff. This would make it harder for the RCMP to sneak up on him, but now that they had found him it meant he was cornered.
But Albert was a desperate individual. It seemed insane to a let a trapping dispute get this far out of hand, but it was clear that Albert had decided he was not going to be taken alive. Millen called out for him to surrender, but instead the Mad Trapper fired a single shot from his rifle. The bullet pierced Millen’s heart, killing him instantly, and the other three officers retreated.
Riddell would explain that it had been dark out at the time, and they were out in the open while Albert had cover. He also said that they were all just regular policemen, none of them was even a Special Constable, so it simply wasn’t safe to continue the fight at that time. That’s not unreasonable, but at the same time it was always going to be dark. It was the dead of winter in northern Canada, so they were working with about three hours of daylight each day.
Regardless, they retreated 4 or 5 miles to a nearby First Peoples’ camp, then Riddell traveled to Aklavik to informed Inspector Eames of Millen’s death. They had already been taking Albert seriously, but with one of their own having been killed in cold blood Eames was determined to bring Albert in no matter what.
The Ballad of the Mad Trapper
Bringing in Albert was already proving to be no easy task. The remaining RCMP officers as well as trackers kept watch, circled around his camp. They waited to see him leave so they could stay on his trail, but after a few days they finally realized he had slipped out without them noticing. Had he just crept out under cover of darkness? No, that would be too easy. Instead, he had scaled down the nearly vertical cliff behind his camp to escape.
The Mad Trapper proved exceedingly difficult to track. They were all traversing snow that was 2-3 feet deep, and Albert was at a severe disadvantage. Despite dropping mad coin on supplies in Fort McPherson, it apparently had never occurred to him to buy a pair of snowshoes. Instead, he had constructed his own back when he was still in his cabin.
They were described as being crude, but still a pretty good job for an amateur that didn’t really know what he was doing. The main disadvantage was that they were much heavier than normal snowshoes, leaving him needlessly encumbered.
Despite this, he was quite adept at hiding his tracks. He would create a path, then double back before heading in a different direction to create false leads. He also would follow caribou tracks that disguised his own tracks remarkably well. One of the biggest questions was how the Hell he managed to stay alive this entire time. By the time Albert killed Millen, he had already been on the run for a month with virtually no supplies.
The average temperature in the area that winter was about 40 degrees below, and between the cold and the intense physical exertion it’s estimated that he would have been burning about 10,000 calories per day. That caloric demand is absolutely staggering, twice that of your average professional athlete and pretty much only matched by Olympic swimmers and people in serious contention for the title of World’s Strongest Man.
Eventually Albert would have to rely entirely on whatever squirrels and rabbits he could hunt, cooking them on small, concealed fires, if at all, so as to avoid detection. But before it got that far, he actually had an ingenious plan. Albert had created several secret caches of game meat he had hunted hidden throughout the wilderness, miles from his cabin. This gave him a steady supply of food, at least in the beginning.
I’ll let you decide whether he was a criminal genius or just a paranoid nut job, but in hindsight he certainly seems to have been well prepared for just such a pursuit.
Albert was pulling out all the stops to avoid capture, but back in Aklavik Inspector Eames was going to do the same. This whole routine of briefly searching for Albert before running back for supplies was horrifically inefficient, so something needed to be done. Eames decided that, for the first time in Canadian history, the RCMP was going to enlist air support for a fugitive manhunt. Albert was making his way towards Alaska, but with the death of Millen there was no way that Eames was going to let him escape.
Eames was going to do everything in his power to bring the Mad Trapper in, and there was only one pilot that was suitable for the task: World War I Canadian flying ace Wilfrid “Wop” May, the man responsible for the death of Manfred von Richthofen. But you may know Manfred better as the ace-of-aces, the most feared fighter pilot of World War I, or more simply as The Red Baron.
Of course, May was only responsible for the Red Baron’s death in a manner of speaking. Although he went on to become Canada’s leading ace pilot, his encounter with the Red Baron was only his second time in aerial combat. He had been instructed to circle overhead and simply keep lookout rather than engage in the fighting, but May saw an opportunity to strike at a German plane and he had to take it.
His target wasn’t the Red Baron, of course; that would’ve been suicide. Instead his target was an equally inexperienced German pilot flying in the same lookout pattern that he was. May immediately gave chase and opened fire on the German rookie, completely unaware that he had just targeted the Red Baron’s little cousin. Before he knew it, another plane was in hot pursuit, firing upon him. May later said that if he realized who was actually chasing him, he likely would’ve just passed out.
May began spinning his plane and dodging, flying around frantically to the best of his limited abilities. Just like your annoying friend who only knows how to play Tekken by mashing the controller wildly, May was basically operating on the theory, “If even I don’t know what the Hell I’m about to do, there’s no way my opponent is going to figure it out.” This strategy worked, and May was able to keep the Red Baron distracted with his erratic flailing long enough for somebody else to shoot him down.
It’s a wild story, but that was early in May’s flying career. By this point he was a legitimate ace pilot, famous for being able to land on or take off from just about anything. That was going to be extremely important, since it’s not like there were any runways for him to land on out in the frozen wasteland. Not only was May going to help provide a set of eyes in the sky, he would also be able to fly back and forth to town to keep the posse supplied with food so they could remain in pursuit of Albert.
It was February 5th when the RCMP enlisted the help of the famed pilot, though by this point Albert had nearly made his way to the Richardson Mountains. Albert was getting ever closer to Alaska and his freedom, but the RCMP had him cornered again. There were only two passes through the mountain range, and the police had men stationed at both passes to block his path. It seemed like the hunt was finally going to come to an end, and the use of a plane was proving invaluable.
The police had wasted a lot of time following the fake trails of tracks Albert left, leading them to dead ends and forcing them to double back and try again. From the air, May and the officer onboard his plane were able to easily eliminate any of the fake trails and radio back to land to tell them which way to go. Unfortunately, this wouldn’t work as they approached the mountain range.
From the plane they were trying to identify human footprints in the snow, which meant they needed a clear view of the ground. According to the officer that rode with May during reconnaissance, they needed to keep an altitude of about 3,000 feet. From that height the officer claimed that he could see a mouse running along the snow, but such a low altitude wasn’t possible near the mountain range. Not only would they need to fly much higher than that if they wanted to avoid dying in a fiery crash, the rocky terrain would have made tracks nearly impossible to spot compared to the flat land.
The search for Albert continued for four days, but they never caught a glimpse of him. It turned out that the airplane was a bit of a double-edged sword. Sure it was a lot easier to follow his tracks and they were doing a better job keeping up, but he could also hear the plane coming. Albert would always have more than enough time to hide, making pinpointing his location nearly impossible.
He had already proven adept at hiding his tracks, so the disappearance of a trail didn’t necessarily mean that Albert was hiding mere feet from that location rather than having traveled another mile without detection.
A blizzard hit the area on February 9th, grounding the plane. May and the RCMP spent three days waiting either for the weather to break or for Albert to approach one of the mountain passes, when they suddenly received shocking news. The First Nations people, particularly the Inuvialuit and Gwich’in, had been taking an increasingly active role in the manhunt as they were much more accustomed to traversing the harsh terrain than the officers of the RCMP were.
On February 12th, word came in to the posse from trackers that they had found Albert’s trail on the other side of the mountain. Needless to say they were shocked. With no supplies, this fugitive had just scaled a 7,000 foot icy peak in temperatures averaging -40 degrees at sea level, so God only knows how cold it was high up on the mountain. As far as the officers knew nobody had ever scaled that peak before, let alone somebody who hadn’t come prepared.
Even though Albert hadn’t been in the area before, he seemed to understand the lay of the land. The ravines in that area all traveled in the same direction, a topological feature that would make it easy for him to keep his bearings and head towards Alaska. Once it was discovered that the he had made his way across the mountain pass, the RCMP decided to take the shortest path towards Alaska to regroup.
The five dogsled teams had already gone ahead, with May taking the other officers by plane. They all met at a remote trading post known as The Pier House, confident that they were once again ahead of Albert. The Pier House was on the Bell River, and on February 14th May spotted Albert’s tracks at the point where the Bell River and Eagle River met. He had again been using caribou tracks to hide his trail, but May managed to see a set of tracks break off towards the river junction.
Although fog grounded the plane for two days after that, they knew that Albert was going to be traveling up the Eagle River rather than the Bell to avoid detection. He would have been able to see signs of civilization up the Bell River, even if it was an extremely small community, so it was best to avoid any people that stood between him and Alaska.
The Final Confrontation
On February 17th, the RCMP’s posse set out down the Eagle River in search of Albert. They decided to give the dog teams a two hour head start before sending May in his plane, so that the sound of the plane’s engine wouldn’t spook the fugitive. Sergeant Earl Hersey was able to find Albert’s tracks, which were about 24 hours old based on the amount of snow that had covered them. Based on that, they couldn’t have imagined that Albert was only about a quarter of a mile away, having made camp on the banks of the Eagle River.
Hersey had originally been flown to the Pier House by May, so he was traveling on foot in his snowshoes rather than on one of the dogsleds. I’m unclear if it was a rank thing or if being on foot was somehow faster than being on one of the sleds, though that doesn’t make sense, but however it happened it was Hersey that was leading the charge on his own with the five sled teams following behind him.
As he reached a bend in the river, Hersey saw Albert come into view. He immediately grabbed his rifle, then dropped down into a firing position with his left elbow on his left knee. Hersey had been an army marksman in the war, and at only 270 yards he was able to place a bullet anywhere that he wanted. Of course he wasn’t trying to actually kill Albert, he just wanted to wound him badly enough that the fight would be over but that Albert would also survive to be brought into custody.
The bank of the Eagle river was about 20 or 30 feet high, and Albert wasn’t prepared to give up his position. As he started climbing the bank, still wearing the pack with all of his worldly possessions in it, Hersey fired directly at the pack. He could hear the clang of his bullet striking tin pots and the like, and the impact sent Albert tumbling back down the bank. He started up the bank again, and again Hersey fired directly into his pack.
This happened three or four times in total before Albert no longer found it amusing.
In an interview, Hersey explained exactly what he was thinking at that point. He described what should be required for Albert to take a proper shot, describing the optimal stance and how much of his body would need to be visible in order for him to take aim. But none of what he expected was what happened. The next time Albert started climbing the river bank he reached back, grabbed his rifle, and the instant the rifle hit his shoulder Albert pulled the trigger firing a single bullet directly through Hersey’s knee, elbow, and into the center of his chest.
Hersey fell on his back, paralyzed from the waist down as he saw Albert again taking aim. Out of options, Hersey began flinging snow around both to obscure the view and to dig himself into the multiple feet of snow to conceal his location. It worked and Albert’s next shot missed, but by this point the rest the dogsleds arrived with May flying overhead, completely surrounding Albert.
Realizing he was outnumbered, Albert tried to retreat across the river to put enough distance between him and the rest of the RCMP officers so that they couldn’t hit him. This wasn’t going to be possible, however. The snow on top of the riverbank was much harder and more densely packed than the snow Albert was trying to cross in his crude, homemade snowshoes, so there was no way he could move as fast as the police were.
Inspector Eames called out for Albert to surrender or else they’d open fire, but he had no interest in surrendering. Instead, he dug himself into the snow and began opening fire on the RCMP. Albert was hit by one of the bullets from the police, then another. And another. And it just kept on going like that with the Mad Trapper futilely returning fire but failing to hit his mark.
At the end of the ordeal, one of the officers described Albert’s body as being “well shot up”. The fugitive had continued to return fire despite his wounds until the 17th bullet that hit him cut his spine, killing him instantly. After everything it had taken to track and finally kill the Mad Trapper, it’s no wonder that the officers involved seemed to speak about him with such respect and admiration for his abilities and strength. If he had only wounded the two officers instead of killing Millen, I suspect at least some members of the posse would have secretly hoped he was able to escape to Alaska successfully.
Hersey was loaded into the plane with a couple other officers, and May flew them back to Aklavik. He was able to make a full recovery, with whatever paralysis he experienced after being shot only being temporary rather than the result of a serious spinal injury. With Albert now dead, all that was left was to inspect the body and figure out who the Hell he really was.
The RCMP had engaged in three firefights with Albert, one of them lasting for 15 hours. But in all of that time, despite them calling for his surrender, they never once heard him speak a word. Not even the stereotypical, “You’ll never take me alive, copper!” The only police officer that had ever heard Albert’s voice was the one he had killed.
They knew almost nothing about him from the ten days he had spent in town, so who was this man that had managed to evade capture for 53 days across 150 miles of arctic wasteland, falling only about 60 miles short of the Alaskan border?
The Identity of Albert Johnson
When Albert first floated into Fort McPherson on his raft, it became apparent rather quickly that he was pretty well off. He dropped a lot more money in ten days than the average traveler would have been expected to have, even before the Great Depression hit. But it turns out that the $1,400 he spent in town wasn’t even the half of it.
While he had no form of identification, around Albert’s neck was a Magic Baking Powder can. For the benefit of our listeners who can’t see the capitalization in that sentence, Magic is a Canadian brand of baking powder, not an editorial comment regarding the quality of the baking powder can. Inside the can was $2,410 Canadian dollars, which is roughly $35,000 in today’s American money. There was also $10 in American currency, which is another $200 today.
In addition to the cash, Albert was carrying with him five raw pearls valued at a couple hundred dollars each. He also had some amount of gold on him, though I think this is the subject of a lot of misreporting. The majority of accounts say that he had gold fillings in his teeth. It’s possible that this is true, but I believe this account is essentially the result of a decades long game of telephone where the details were misinterpreted over the time.
I can’t say for certain whether or not Albert’s teeth had gold fillings, but I can tell you for certain that the officer who searched his body found a bottle of gold teeth in Albert’s possession. More specifically, he had a bottle of gold teeth that did not come out of his own mouth. Even more specifically, he had a collection of teeth that had originally belonged to at least five different people.
This raised a lot of questions about the man’s true identity, with some of the officers involved believing Albert may have been from a Chicago gang before coming to Canada. As one of them stated, “He could just fill a door with lead with two revolvers, just having them singing all around. The average trapper is just not able to handle automatic revolvers in that way. He was someone other than the usual trapper that we get in that country.”
Among the other possessions on his body were a lot of the usual things for a trapper like a knife, compass, fish hooks, a dead squirrel, a dead bird, and a razor. But he also had a large quantity of pills with him as well. These are often cited as being either kidney pills or Beecham’s pills, which are a mild laxative that was originally marketed in the 1800s as a cure-all medicine. While I can’t find definitive evidence one way or the other, I’d wager it was likely the Beecham’s pills and that some sources changed it to kidney pills to fit a narrative we’ll get to in a moment.
From everything the RCMP could determine based on Albert’s belongings and behaviour, he was likely a criminal that had moved to the Northwest Territories to evade capture, quite likely for murder. When the police came knocking with the warrant about the trapping dispute, they believe he thought they were actually coming to take him in for more serious crimes which is why he fought back to the extent that he did rather than just paying a small fine.
But a close examination of the body showed a couple key characteristics that would theoretically be helpful in identifying Albert’s true identity. The first is that he was described as having a crooked spine, which would later be identified as scoliosis. More interestingly, one of his feet was noticeably longer than the other. Perhaps this was the real reason he built his own snowshoes rather than just purchasing some, though admittedly I don’t know enough about snowshoes to know if different foot sizes would even matter.
Of course, before conducting a hunt for men with different sized feet or something of that nature, the first order of business was to search for a paper trail. Unsurprisingly, this went nowhere. There was no record of Albert Johnson having ever existed.
Despite having so little to go on, they quickly identified a prime suspect. A man with a similar description to Albert, including the Scandinavian accent, had appeared out of nowhere in Dease Lake, British Columbia a few years earlier. That man’s name was Alfred Nelson, and his story was remarkably similar. He appeared out of nowhere in 1927 to work as a trapper, and became fascinated with local legends of lost gold mines and such.
Then in 1931, shortly before Albert Johnson appeared, Alfred vanished entirely. One of his final purchases before disappearing was six bottles of kidney pills, hence the pills found on Albert often being referred to as kidney pills. Maybe that’s what Beechman’s pills were referred to back in that time, but I can’t find any evidence to that effect.
It’s even speculated that when Albert arrived at Fort McPherson he hadn’t intended to change his name. The first people to encounter him were Edward and William Snowshoes, a pair of Gwich’in trappers. Some people believe that he gave them the name Alfred Nelson, but they misreported it to the town as Albert Johnson and he just kind of rolled with it. It’s not an unbelievable story, and Alfred Nelson is honestly the most likely candidate for Albert’s true identity.
I’d argue that Albert almost certainly was Alfred, and he may have even changed his name on a whim because someone misheard him as well. The only problem with this theory is that we then have a new question to answer: who the Hell was Alfred Nelson? He was another man that appeared out of thin air and vanished just as quickly, and there is no evidence that a person by that name had ever existed either. So even if they are the same person, we’re back to square one.
A number of theories have been put forth over the years using circumstantial evidence to link Albert to other people. Theories range from Albert being an escaped inmate of Folsom Prison in California to a Norwegian World War I draft dodger, but we won’t get into the details because all of these theories regarding specific individuals were conclusively ruled out over 15 years ago.
In 2007, the Discovery Channel paid for a crew to exhume Albert’s body to perform DNA testing for a documentary. Cause I guess you can just do that? Let me know in the comments whose body you want Simon to pay to exhume, and I promise to document the entire thing. My vote is to dig up the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and use DNA to figure out who is actually buried there.
Anyway, the DNA ruled out all of the previous suspects, except of course Alfred Nelson since he proved to be no more of a real person than Albert Johnson was. It did however confirm that Albert was in his 30s, and isotopic analysis of his teeth revealed he grew up with a diet heavy in corn, indicating that he was likely either from Scandinavia or the Midwest United States.
In 2017, once ancestry sites had become much more popular and DNA technology had advanced further, it was decided to give a familial DNA investigation a go. Albert was successfully traced back to his Swedish ancestors Gustaf Magnusson, born 1776, and Britta Svensdotter, born 1781. You’ve probably never heard either of those names before, because nobody has.
Or if Gustaf Magnusson sounds familiar to you, you’re likely confusing Albert’s ancestor with Major General Gustaf Magnusson of the Finnish Air Force who famously shot down five and a half aircraft as a World War II fighter pilot. I could explain how someone can be credited for shooting down half an aircraft, but it’s honestly a boring answer so I hope you’ll be far more entertained by wondering what that ridiculous sounding statistic means.
While those two ancestors of Albert have been identified, the search is still ongoing. His family history is still being traced, and DNA samples from potential living relatives are being sought after to try to identify his identity once and for all.
Wrap Up
This was an absolutely wild story that had a bit of everything. It had murder, a still unsolved mystery, a celebrity cameo (even if Wop May’s name isn’t as famous as it was 60 years ago), and a fugitive whose nickname makes him sound like a Spider-Man villain. Best of all, this entire ordeal could have been easily avoided by buying an inexpensive trapping permit.
The Mad Trapper of Rat River may not be well known anymore, to the extent that I even put “cop-killer” in the title in the hopes that you’d all still click on this, but Albert Johnson was once the stuff of legends. He was a major cultural influence, to the point that one of the officer who chased him said there were about a thousand songs written about the man.
I can’t find the exact number as many of these were unpublished folk songs, but the story definitely inspired at least a dozen songs and multiple highly fictionalized movies. The common thread in the movies is that Albert was always the hero of the story, as popular opinion never really turned against the Mad Trapper. Sure he was being an asshole to the First Nations trappers, killed a police officer and wounded two others, and had possibly murdered other people and stolen their teeth, but he was just so damn impressive.
The last time I took you all to Canada was for Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka, an episode so brutal that many people commented they were unable to even finish it. If you enjoyed this lighter fare as a change of pace, then for your sake I hope this episode doesn’t see a dip in viewership. Otherwise, I’m going to have to go back to traumatizing you all.
Key Takeaways
- Albert Johnson’s 1932 manhunt remains Canada’s largest and longest, sparked by refusing to buy a $5 trapping permit.
- The fugitive survived 53 days in -40° temperatures, evading RCMP and WWI ace pilot Wop May’s aerial pursuit.
- Johnson killed Constable Millen and wounded two officers before dying in a final shootout, 60 miles from Alaska.
- Despite his crimes, public opinion favored the ‘Mad Trapper,’ inspiring songs and films portraying him as hero.
- DNA testing in 2007 ruled out all suspects; his true identity remains unknown, though Swedish ancestry was confirmed.
Dana Ortiz covers prosecutorial mechanics, evidentiary procedure, and how investigations unwind decades after the original case file went cold.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who was the Mad Trapper of Rat River?
The Mad Trapper of Rat River was a man who identified himself as Albert Johnson, a fugitive who engaged in a 53-day manhunt with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in 1932 after shooting Constable Alfred King and later killing Constable Edgar Millen over a trapping dispute in Canada’s Northwest Territories.
How could the entire Mad Trapper incident have been avoided?
The entire ordeal could have been avoided if Albert Johnson had purchased a trapping permit, which would have cost about five dollars. Additionally, if he had built his cabin just 200 yards further away, he would have been inside the Yukon Territory where no permit was required for trapping.
What was unique about Albert Johnson’s cabin construction?
Albert Johnson dug down about three feet and built his cabin around the hole, creating a dugout that helped protect him from oncoming fire during the 15-hour shootout with nine RCMP officers on January 9, 1932.
How did the RCMP use air support in the manhunt, and who was the pilot?
For the first time in Canadian history, the RCMP enlisted air support for a fugitive manhunt. They hired World War I Canadian flying ace Wilfrid ‘Wop’ May, who was famous for his connection to the death of Manfred von Richthofen (the Red Baron). May provided aerial reconnaissance and flew supplies to keep the posse sustained.
How did Albert Johnson manage to survive for so long in the wilderness while evading capture?
Albert Johnson survived by creating several secret caches of game meat hidden throughout the wilderness, hunting small game like squirrels and rabbits, cooking on small concealed fires, and using caribou tracks to hide his own tracks. Despite crude homemade snowshoes and burning an estimated 10,000 calories per day in temperatures around -40 degrees, he evaded capture for 53 days across 150 miles.
What happened during the final confrontation with Albert Johnson?
On February 17, 1932, Sergeant Earl Hersey spotted Albert Johnson near the Eagle River. After Hersey shot at Johnson’s pack multiple times, Johnson fired a single bullet through Hersey’s knee, elbow, and into his chest. Surrounded by RCMP officers and with May flying overhead, Johnson tried to retreat across the river but was shot multiple times. He continued returning fire until the 17th bullet cut his spine, killing him instantly. He fell about 60 miles short of the Alaskan border.
What was discovered about Albert Johnson’s true identity?
No record of Albert Johnson ever existed. He was likely the same person as Alfred Nelson, another man who appeared out of nowhere in Dease Lake, British Columbia in 1927 and vanished in 1931. DNA testing in 2007 ruled out all previous specific suspects, and isotopic analysis indicated he likely grew up in Scandinavia or the Midwest United States. In 2017, familial DNA traced him to Swedish ancestors Gustaf Magnusson (born 1776) and Britta Svensdotter (born 1781), but his exact identity remains unknown.
What suspicious items were found on Albert Johnson’s body?
Around his neck was a Magic Baking Powder can containing $2,410 Canadian dollars and $10 American currency. He also carried five raw pearls, gold teeth that belonged to at least five different people (not from his own mouth), a large quantity of pills, and various trapping supplies including a dead squirrel and bird.
How did the public and police view Albert Johnson during and after the manhunt?
The public was almost entirely on Albert Johnson’s side during the manhunt. Even the police chasing him, including those he shot, showed great respect for him. Inspector Eames described him as ‘a shrewd and resolute man…a tough and desperate character.’ Officers praised his skills as a woodsman, traveler, and excellent shot.
This admiration continued even after he killed Constable Millen. Popular opinion never really turned against him, and he was typically portrayed as the hero in fictionalized movies about the events.
What physical characteristics were noted about Albert Johnson that might help identify him?
Albert Johnson was described as about 35-40 years old, 5’9”, approximately 175 pounds of pure muscle with very broad shoulders. He had a Scandinavian accent, a crooked spine later identified as scoliosis, and one foot was noticeably longer than the other. He was also described as extremely quiet with a surly demeanor.
Sources
- Original Casual Criminalist video: The Mad Trapper of Rat River: A Cop-Killer Manhunt
- Hero image source by IAEA Imagebank / openverse, by.
