Short Stuff: The Mad Trapper of Rat River
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That's right. The mad trapper of Rat River, a.k.a. perhaps, I don't even know about perhaps, almost certainly Canada's most infamous unknown person on the lam and the largest manhunt in Canada's history conducted to try and get this guy.
Yeah, this is, I saw it referred to as like an iconic Canadian story. This guy just tore us up in 1931, made international headlines. And died, it's still to this day, no one knows who he is. And not one of those things where like, we're pretty sure it's this guy. We just can't prove it. They have no idea who this guy is. They're starting to kind of chew around the edges of it. But the fact that he is still unidentified just makes it that much more interesting. But even if you were identified, Chuck, his story is still just totally fascinating on its own.
Yeah, it's not like Somerton, man, because that was the most interesting thing about that was the mystery of who he was. It wouldn't care. It wouldn't matter if this guy was indeed Albert Johnson, who was his alias. It's a remarkable story that started in July 1931 when this guy, Albert Johnson, came and moved there. They think he may have come from Sweden. according to certain people who talked to him here and there. But he was a man of very few words, as we'll see, when he arrived in the vast remote area of the Northwest Territories near Fort McPherson and built a little 8-by-10-foot cabin near the Rat River.
Yeah. And we're talking like the northernmost parts of Canada, like basically along the Arctic Ocean.
In the 30s.
Yeah. He was essentially living where the guys from the Terror and the Erebus that we talked about were trying to get to. When they were like on their march down toward Canada, they had they done this in 1931, they might have run into Albert Johnson. He was that far up. Right. So this is a really, really rugged, wild, dangerous place to live. And like you said, he arrived in July and a few months after that, I think in November or December of 1931. Yeah. OK, December of 1931, a couple of trappers from the First Nations who lived up there got in touch with one of the local police and said, hey, there's this guy. His name's Albert Johnson, and he's messing with our trap lines and he's not supposed to do that.
So can you go tell him to stop doing that? And three days later, a couple of cops just knocked on Johnson's cabin door, assuming that they were just going to talk to him and tell him to stop doing that. And that would be that right.
Yeah, I mean, these are the Mounties. So these guys are not messing around. The story is a little confusing because everywhere you look, it's a little different. But from what I gathered, there were three total visits. One visit when he basically said, get the heck out of here and pointed a gun at them. A second visit when two guys came back. And this time he supposedly refused to talk at all. And when they went to look through his windows, he just covered his windows up and ignored them.
He pulled down the blind and went, masher.
I guess four total because the third one was when those two guys plus two more, I think it was Alfred King and Joe Bernard and two more guys, came back with warrants, forced the door over, and he shot King and a brief firefight ensued. And then finally the fourth visit when they brought a bunch of guys with dynamite and camped out for three days outside his cabin.
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