The Mad Trapper of Rat River: An Arctic Manhunt for a Nameless Man

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On July 9, 1931, a clean-shaven stranger with a Scandinavian accent and plenty of cash arrived at Fort McPherson in the Northwest Territories. He told Constable Edgar Millen almost nothing, built an 8 by 10 foot cabin on the Rat River, and never took out a trapping license. The authorities called him Albert Johnson, almost certainly not his real name. That December, after local Indigenous trappers complained about him, two officers trekked 60 miles to his door. He ignored them. When they came back with a warrant on December 31, he fired through the wood and wounded Constable Alfred King.

This episode follows what came next: a 15-hour siege at 40 below with dynamite thawed inside the officers' coats, a cabin blown apart over a dugout he had carved from the permafrost, and a 33-day, 150-mile pursuit in which the fugitive never spoke a word. It ends on the frozen Eagle River on February 17, 1932, and then picks up decades later, when an exhumation and DNA work began to name the family of a man who died protecting his anonymity.

• During a firefight on January 30 he shot and killed Millen, and the only sound the posse ever heard from him was a laugh.
• With the two known passes blockaded, he crossed the Richardson Mountains by climbing a 7,000-foot peak in a blizzard.
• To hide from pilot Wop May, a First World War flying ace, he took off his snowshoes and walked in caribou tracks on a frozen river. May found him on February 14 by scanning the banks.
• His body carried more than $2,000 in cash, gold, a compass, a dead bird, and a dead squirrel, and he had expensive gold dental work.
• A 2007 exhumation revealed scoliosis and a fractured femur, and in 2021 Othram traced his ancestry to a specific family in Sweden.