Fifteen Miles From Barrow

by Daniel Person

...Eighty years ago, two men with an unquenchable thirst to see the world circled over the tundra around Barrow, searching for what was then a tiny speck of a whaling outpost and Eskimo village. If famous pilot Wiley Post and his more-famous passenger, Will Rogers, could see anything through the thick layer of fog that had settled down over the Arctic Coast that August day, it wasn’t offering them any clues, just riddles in the form of puddles melted into permafrost. Their flight from Fairbanks, Alaska, to Point Barrow — the northernmost point in the United States — was supposed to take four hours. But six hours after they departed, their growling seaplane would be heard up in the clouds by reindeer ranchers and traders. The whine of the aircraft would pass overhead, disappear, then come whining back. Three or four times it passed, they’d later say.

Rogers and Post were lost.

Reindeer ranchers aside, it would be hard to imagine a stranger place for two cowboys from either side of the Oklahoma-Texas border to be lost in. What were they doing up there, circling around trying to find the end of the world? Rogers and Post had been playing coy with that question throughout their heavily documented air trip around Alaska. With Rogers writing daily dispatches of his voyage for newspapers across the country, and reporters filing national wire stories from nearly every stop the men made in Alaska, little about the jaunt went unsaid, besides its reason for being. The predominant theory, one most reports went with, was that Post wanted to find a new air route to Russia.

However, every time someone asked the two what they were up to, Rogers would have no comment — uncharacteristic, to say the least, for the outspoken columnist.

After hours of circling over the tundra, Post spotted an opening in the clouds and an Eskimo encampment along a bay. He brought the plane down onto the water, and he and Rogers waded over to land and asked a man named Claire Okpeaha for directions to Barrow.

In broken English, Okpeaha told them they were close — just 15 miles away. The men thanked Okpeaha, offered him a cigarette, and returned to the plane. In Rogers’ front breast pocket was his latest column, to be wired to newspapers from Barrow when the duo finally landed. His typewriter — which he’d pound away at while Post flew — was tucked away behind him. 

Post fired up the plane’s engine, taxied around, and then thrust forward, lifting off the water with a mighty roar in a steep ascent. The Eskimos then watched in horror as the plane flipped over and crashed back into the water. 

After the initial shock, Okpeaha took off running, 15 miles to Barrow, to tell the world Will Rogers and Wiley Post were dead.

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