Robert Campbell Reeve - Alaska

Alaska

Reeve's move to Alaska came as the result of unrelated incidents. He had met a Klondike prospector, "Swiftwater Bill" Gates, in Chile, who had told him of the Gold Rush thirty years earlier. He had also talked to Eddie Craig, a mining engineer at the Kennicott Copper Mine in Alaska in the early 1900s. These stories, and the idea that there was new country to conquer pulled Reeve north. He returned home to Wisconsin, where he suffered a slight attack of polio which affected one of his legs slightly.

Reeve stowed away on a steamship, arriving in Alaska with $2 in his pocket, and Valdez, Alaska with 20¢. At Valdez airfield, Owen Meals had a wrecked Eaglerock aircraft with a Wright J-5 engine that had been a spare for Sir Hubert Wilkins when he made his flight across the North Pole to Spitsbergen.

Reeve worked for a month at $1 an hour repairing the plane, and then leased the plane from Meals at $10 an hour. Having created a landing strip, Reeve was in business. His first charter was to Middleton Island, where the beach looked fine to land on, but the aircraft sank up to its wheels in the soft sand. An old block and tackle was found and used to rescue the aircraft from the incoming tide. Reeve managed to take off, and attempted to fly back to Valdez, but was forced to land at Seward owing to a storm. When he eventually got back to Valdez his tanks were almost empty, and he hadn't earned a cent. Reeve said this trip was worth $1,000 in experience. Reeve quickly learnt that the bush pilot's biggest worry was paying for gas, which could be 25¢ a gallon in one place, and $1.50 in another.

That winter, Reeve was hired to fly supplies to Chisana at 20¢/lb, his base for this was at Christochina, where a small airstrip had been created with high obstacles each end of the runway. Oil in the aircraft engines had to be drained each night, and warmed up on a stove each morning before being returned to the engine, as it was so cold that the oil would freeze. Reeve made a $2,000 profit on the Chisana route and had heard of a Fairchild 51 for sale in Fairbanks. This was the type of aircraft he had used in the Andes. He bought it for $3,500, with $1,500 down and the balance within two years.