Park Predators - The Rifleman

Episode Date: October 29, 2024

When an experienced naturalist and game warden disappeared into the Alaskan wilderness while on patrol, alarm bells went off. What exactly happened to Hosea Sarber in July 1952 remains a dark mystery, but his descendants reached out to Park Predators to feature his story in the hopes of learning more.View source material and photos for this episode at: parkpredators.com/the-rifleman Park Predators is an audiochuck production. Connect with us on social media:Instagram: @parkpredators | @audiochuckTwitter: @ParkPredators | @audiochuckFacebook: /ParkPredators  | /audiochuckllcTikTok: @audiochuck

Hi, park enthusiasts. I'm your host, Delia D'Ambra. And the story I have for you today is about a passionate outdoorsman who was an extremely skilled rifleman and someone who could hunt, fish, and easily find his way in and out of the woods. But he disappeared under extremely suspicious circumstances. Circumstances that raised so many red flags, his name and life story is now considered by some to be the stuff of legends. There wasn't a lot of easily accessible source material on the internet about Alaskan game warden Hosea Sarber because he disappeared in July 1952. So I had to turn to a handful of super old newspapers that publish articles about him.

And the whole reason I found his story so fitting for this show is because it's technically unsolved. And his descendants reached out to me directly, suggesting I consider his case for a future episode. Well, I took them up on that, and boy am I glad I did. This is Park Predators. Around four o'clock on the afternoon of Monday, July 28, 1952, a man named Doyle Sisney was working as the engineer on an Alaska Fish and Wildlife patrol boat named Black Bear.

When he watched his colleague, 55-year-old Hosea Sarber, zoom off in a small 14-foot boat. According to an article by the Wrangell Sentinel, Hosea was departing the bigger vessel Doyle was on to go patrol a nearby body of water called Rowan Bay. I imagine Hosea and Doyle probably knew one another well by this point because I saw some mentions of both of them in the source material saying that they worked for Alaska's Fish and Wildlife Service

as far back as the mid-1930s. And by 1952, Hosea had earned the title of Chief of Predator Control for that organization. Initially, Doyle didn't think anything of Hosea zipping off in the outboard boat by himself. His colleague going on a solo patrol was nothing new. However, after a few hours went by and Hosea didn't come back to the Black Bear, well, that's when Doyle began to worry. When his concern became too much, he contacted his superiors to notify them that Hosea had failed to return and was technically missing. Not long after that call went out, other regional officers with the Fish and Wildlife Service, which I sometimes saw referred to as the Alaska Game Commission,

gathered to organize a search for Hosea. An FWS pilot and an agent quickly located the small boat Hosea had been operating. According to reporting by the Associated Press and Wrangell Sentinel, the vessel was just drifting near the mouth of Rowan Bay. No one was inside of it. It was bobbing fairly close to the shoreline of a nearby island, and when the two searchers got closer to it, they peered inside and found a pair of binoculars, cameras, and some guns sitting undisturbed. The source material I found states that the items were immediately confirmed to be

Hosea's. Adding to this mysterious discovery was the fact that the boat was in good shape. It didn't look like it had been wrecked or damaged in any way. The only thing missing was Hosea. Upon closer examination, searchers noticed that the lever of the skiff's outboard motor had been left in the start position, which wasn't a great sign. You see, officials knew that if, for example, Hosea had made it to a nearby island and beached the boat, then gotten out, he would have put the motor's lever in the stop position. So even in the event that, say, the boat might have drifted away on its own

after Hosea got out, the lever still should have been set to stop, not start. The fact that it was found in the start position really perplexed the men searching for Hosea. They felt there were only a few explanations as to what could have happened. One, Hosea had perhaps suffered some kind of medical event like a heart attack while trying to restart the engine, and that had caused him to fall overboard. engine, and that had caused him to fall overboard. Two, he may have become unsteady on the vessel while trying to untangle seaweed from the motor's propeller and accidentally plunged into the water. I think what fueled both of these theories was the fact that Hosea was 55 years old, and according to reporting by the Wrangell Sentinel, a doctor had recently warned him

that he might have a quote, weak heart, end quote. The one upside for searchers, though, was that weather in the area had been generally good as of late, and conditions were ideal for launching a larger-scale search in the surrounding bays. However, a few of Jose's colleagues told the press that they were not getting their hopes up he would be found alive. And that's because they felt if he had survived, whatever befell him, he was a skilled enough survivalist to find a way to draw attention to himself.

And because hours had gone by at that point with no sign of him, well, I imagine that's why some folks were growing worried something really serious had happened to him that had made him unable to hell for help. Crews didn't give up, though. They continued to search for the missing officer on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday of that week. They scoured nearby Pillar Bay and all of Rowan Bay.

At one point, there were 20 men involved in the effort and several different aircrafts and boats, many of which were owned by the Fish and Wildlife Service and the United States Coast Guard. Unfortunately, though, no matter how hard they tried, they couldn't find any trace of Hosea. And I want to just pause for a second and give you all a clear idea of the type of landscapes and waterways this all happened in. If you look on a map,

and there's one in the blog post for this episode, you'll see that surrounding what is now Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve and Tongass National Forest in Southeast Alaska, there are a bunch of little islands and bays. And in between those places were tons of inlets, coves, channels, and areas that Hosea could have been. His friends and family in the nearby city of Petersburg, which sits on Mitkoff Island, were growing more and more concerned with each day that passed. It was totally out of character for Hosea to just disappear. He knew the area he was patrolling super well. In fact, before he ever started working as a law enforcement officer in

that landscape, he'd been a hunting guide for decades. An article for the Alaska Daily Empire reported that as early as 1934, Hosea had been leading expeditions for wealthy businessmen and women from places like New York, who visited Alaska with hopes of bagging a bear or other large predator. Sometimes he would travel for weeks on these aristocrats' expensive yachts and take them to areas like Prince of Wales Island, Admiralty Island, Kodiak Island, and Baranoff Island, all in search of wildlife to legally hunt. The Wrangell Sentinel reported that around 1934 or 1935, Hosea officially became a game warden for the Alaska Game Commission. He'd originally

moved to Alaska from where he was born in Indiana. His first station was out of an office based in the city of Dillingham, which is a town in the southwest corner of the state. Today, Dillingham is about an hour-long plane ride west of Anchorage. And something else kind of big happened for Hosea in the mid-1930s too. He'd married a woman named Virginia Tate, who happened to be from Petersburg.

The newlyweds honeymooned for a month in Juneau before eventually setting into their new life together. By mid-October of 1935, the couple welcomed their first child, a son, that they named Frank Earl. A few years after that, they had a second son named Homer. So it was extremely tragic that Hosea, a husband and father of two, had seemingly vanished without a trace while on duty. He was a beloved man with years of experience hunting, fishing, and traversing Alaska's waterways and terrain. According to much of the source material I read, he was widely heralded as one of the

best rifle shooters in Alaska and was known across the country as an expert in firearms. He'd personally written pieces for big hunting and wildlife magazines about subjects related to bears and surviving threats in the outdoors. What's kind of wild, though, is that according to the Idaho State Journal, Hosea was actually blind in his left eye. He'd been injured by a saw as a kid, but that disability hadn't stopped him from becoming one of the most on-point shooters in the country. Almost two weeks after his puzzling disappearance, with still no sign of him,

the Sydney Daily News published an article that claimed he was officially considered dead, a victim of drowning. Though the article didn't go into detail about if his body had been recovered, if he'd in fact been confirmed dead, or what. It literally has no details. But I did find another article by the Dayton Daily News,

which was published in mid-August 1952, that said Hosea was still considered missing at that time. That source didn't mention him drowning or any kind of accidental death. Perk Angwin reported for the Brattleboro Reformer the same thing, that as far as anyone knew, Hosea was just missing and assumed to be dead. It was around that same time and in that news article I mentioned by the Dayton Daily News that the first mention of Hosea possibly being murdered was printed. I imagine one reason some folks thought this was because of the

firearms that had been abandoned in Hosea's drifting boat. Author Ralph Young speculated in his book about Hosea's disappearance, titled My Lost Wilderness, that the game officer not having a firearm on his person, if in fact he had gotten out of his boat on his own, was very odd. What I wonder, though, is if Hose Jose had perhaps encountered a person he knew or thought he could trust, and that's why he hadn't armed himself before getting out of his boat. Another scenario that could also explain why he left his guns in the boat is that he was forced out and maybe didn't have an opportunity to arm himself. Of course, without Jose's body, no one back in 1952

knew for sure what had happened, but they had their suspicions. You see, even though he was well-respected and liked by writers and the naturalist and shooting community, not all hunters and anglers loved Hosea. And that's because almost as soon as he began serving as a game warden, he got to work cracking down on law violators. And when I say cracking down, I mean cracking down. The Daily Alaska Empire reported that Hosea and other wardens would go on patrols, sometimes for weeks, to try and catch illegal hunters operating on islands adjacent to the cities of Wrangell and Petersburg. During these trips, they would arrest and fine poachers for

killing animals out of season or having too many of a species than they were supposed to have. In some instances, violators would have to forfeit their firearms as part of their punishment. Hosea had arrested several hunters suspected of violating wildlife laws. The Alaska Daily Empire reported that in a time span of just four months between 1935 and 1936, for example, Hosea had caught the same guy twice for poisoning foxes in order to harvest their pelts. Yeah, super cruel stuff. Essentially, Hosea had discovered that this man was using strychnine to taint fox bait, and once the animals died in agony, he would scalp them of their fur coats. At one time, this hunter was in possession of 23 illegally obtained fox pelts.

And the way Hosea exposed him was kind of simple. The article I just mentioned explains that one day Hosea just went to this guy's cabin in the woods and found a decent supply of strychnine in the house. When he came back a few months later and investigated a little more, he discovered a few fox carcasses laying outside, none of which had any injuries that indicated they'd been snared in a steel trap. So, for that offense, Hosea fined the hunter $150 for possessing the poison. And when his investigation concluded a few months later, he arrested the guy on an additional charge of possessing and placing poison baits. This particular trapper was sentenced to just over four and a half months in jail and fined $300, a fairly hefty penalty when you think of what that money could equate to in

today's dollars. I plugged that figure into an inflation calculator, and it told me that $300 back in 1936 would be something like $6,700 today. The Wrangell Sentinel reported that on another occasion, Hosea confiscated 500 illegally trapped beaver skins from hunters in Dillingham. Other noteworthy arrests included catching two young men hunting ducks, one of whom didn't have a hunting license, duck stamp, or properly stored firearm. Additional violators Hosea was documented as having nabbed were caught hunting out of season and refusing to hand over their illegally killed animals. There was even one instance where Hosea stopped a boat full of salmon fishermen and found illegal deer meat on board instead of fish. Usually offenders like this were fined, but not all of them served jail time.

A few got lawyers and contested their charges and were free to go back out and potentially re-offend. Of all the violations Hosea seemed to be vigilant about, though, there was one that I found discussed a lot in the source material, and it had to do with game wardens arresting people for illegally killing deer that had been specifically relocated for the purpose of repopulation. Now, I know some of you listening are probably tilting your heads, wondering why that's important. Well, back in Hosea's day, there were many instances where certain animals like deer or rabbits were relocated

for the purpose of stocking an area for hunters. The Daily Alaska Empire reported that it was common practice for game wardens to humanely trap deer in order to stalk a neighboring island. In fact, Hosea had been doing this kind of thing for the Game Commission since the mid-1930s. But state regulators would only declare open season after the relocated species had been given time to reproduce naturally and build up their numbers.

From what I gathered from reading the source material, it appears poachers back in the 30s, 40s, and 50s were not following the proper rules and seemed to be killing relocated deer well before any of them had the chance to mate and reproduce. And for those of you who are curious about how in the world you go about trying to wrangle deer and relocate them,

the practice goes something like this. Hosea and usually a group of a dozen men would use dogs to chase and corral the deer to the shoreline of a nearby body of water. And once the deer got in the water, they would eventually get tired from treading the current. Right before they'd give up, men in boats would scoop them up and load them into crates and transport them to whatever island the Game Commission wanted to repopulate the particular species. According to the source material I found that talked about this, the practice was widely praised as being really successful.

Well, that is, until poachers got in the way. In 1939, a few years into his role as game warden, Hosea was still arresting trappers for killing relocated deer. According to an article by the Wrangell Sentinel, Hosea expressed that because of ongoing issues like this, he felt the people living in and around Dillingham were not as respectful or appreciative of the land they lived on as much as he thought they should have been. For example, he said that despite there often being decent conditions for hunting and fishing,

the people living in and around the area struggled with liquor consumption and were not properly utilizing the natural resources around them. He noted that he felt residents needed government mechanisms and law enforcement officers like himself in order to keep things in check. Less than two years into his role as game warden, Hosea's bosses had transferred him to Petersburg. The entire Sarber family made the move, and overall it was something everyone seemed pretty happy about. And Jose's tough-on-crime attitude continued to precede him, even after the move. His skills as an outdoorsman seemed to have sharpened, too. But there was one

notorious predator many people feared might be responsible for his sudden vanishing, and that was the Alaskan brown bear, which some source material refers to as a subspecies of the grizzly. You see, run-ins with wild bears in the part of Alaska where Hosea disappeared weren't uncommon. In fact, many people knew the animals were out there, so it wasn't that far of a stretch to think that maybe Hosea had just stumbled across the wrong one at the wrong time. An article for the Dayton Daily News reported that there had been documented incidents where wildlife officers or hunters had been attacked, maimed, or even killed by bears. For example, the Wrangell Sentinel in Fairbanks News Minor reported that years earlier in 1936,

a trapper named Ivan Peterson had been hunting for sheep in an area of Alaska known as Mascot Creek when he'd come face to face with a grizzly bear on a trail. The animal had charged at Ivan, and he had to fire eight shots from his rifle to finally kill the animal. According to what he told the newspapers at the time, he said he'd come around the bend of a trail and run right into the bear. He said as soon as he saw the animal, he immediately dropped his bag, ran off the trail, and took cover in some

rocks. Within seconds, the bear was about 30 feet away from him and sniffing around the pack he'd abandoned on the trail. Ivan told reporters that he felt extremely lucky to have had time to load so many shots in his gun before the bear made it to him. And earlier on in Hosea's career, he'd personally gone to Kodiak Island to investigate reports of brown bears coming a little too close to town and attacking and killing herds of cattle. His investigation into that matter spanned for five months, and though the initial reports of concerning numbers of cattle being killed had seemed at least to Hosea to be a bit embellished, he found that the number of cattle on the island totaled around 300, which he believed was still plentiful. According to an article by the Petersburg Press, he surmised that the reason

residents had become so frightened by the presence of bears was because around 60 of those 300 cows usually stayed so close to town. Still, he knew how dangerous the powerful predators could be to humans. He'd personally come face to face with a bear a few years before his disappearance. The Dayton Daily News reported that while investigating reports of hunters illegally killing moose, Hosea had stumbled across a bear feeding on a moose carcass. He and the massive animal had passed within 20 feet of one another, and for his own protection, Hosea ended up shooting and killing the bear. He told the newspaper, quote, When you go in after a big brown bear, you're asking for it. No big game animal is more

uncertain or more dangerous. At times, they will attack unprovoked. End quote. Another apex predator that roamed the landscape Hosea ventured into was wolves. In the winter of 1950, so just two years before he vanished, the Fish and Wildlife Service was having a difficult time curbing the wolf population in the district Hosea oversaw. Deer numbers on many islands and the mainland were plummeting because of the wolves' ravenous appetites, and it was up to predator control agents like Hosea, alongside biologists, to figure out how to remedy the issue. One of the biologists came up with a plan to lace slabs of seal meat with pellets of Strychnine poisoning and drop the hunks of meat onto the shorelines of islands in an

attempt to lure the overpopulated wolves. Local Martin were smart enough not to go near the tainted bait, but the wolves, not so much. From what I read in the source material, it seems by the fall of 1951, the wolf issue was becoming more manageable, but it wasn't totally under control. The Daly-Alaska Empire reported that about nine months before Hosea disappeared, he and two other predator control agents went on an expedition to hunt wolves in the Ketchikan region. During their travels, they set deadly traps for the wolves in hopes of dwindling the species' population. So if anything, these documented issues with wolves and bears prove that Hosea definitely

knew there were mortal threats out there to both native wildlife and humans like himself. But the one thing that never supported the Hosea got killed or eaten by a bear or wolf theory was the fact that his body or remains were never found. I mean, I've talked about this before on this show, but most wildlife experts I've spoken to have told me that even in a situation where a person is mauled to death, there's usually some evidence of an attack. Clothing, blood, bones, areas of

disturbed ground, something. And in this case, no source material states that anything like that was ever found. Around the same time the wolf eradication experiment was going on, which would have been in 1950-ish, 1951, Hosea attended an annual hearing for the Fish and Wildlife Service. During that 10-day meeting in Anchorage, he and dozens of other officers, commission members, and game officials drafted and voted on the 1950-1951 regulations, aka the laws and policies on how to enforce wildlife restrictions. Now, none of the source material explicitly says this, but I think it's reasonable to wonder if perhaps a disgruntled hunter that Hosea had busted in the past might have become upset when they learned he was one of the people tasked with annually crafting and voting on the game regulations. I mean, it's pretty clear from researching Hosea's track record that

he'd made a significant number of arrests in his career leading up to his disappearance. Referring to Hosea's reputation for strictly enforcing the law, a reporter for the Dayton Daily News wrote, quote, Sarber, as a law enforcement officer of the Wildlife Service, made many arrests. It was said he always brought in his man. He had had many dangerous escapes and close calls before his disappearance, end quote. And it just so happened that one of those arrests,

not long before he vanished, had been particularly tense. According to reporting by the Daly-Alaska Empire, in February 1950, so just two years before Hosea disappeared, he and two of his colleagues arrested three men for illegally killing deer out of season. The poachers were a father and two sons who'd butchered deer and stashed the contraband pieces of meat in their cabin. When Jose and his co-workers paid the trio a visit to investigate them for the suspected crime, the men became combative and pulled guns on the predator agents. Somehow, a shootout was avoided, and Jose and his colleagues ended up arresting the poachers. The father, a man named Dan Willis, was fined $100 and given a six-month jail sentence. One of his sons, John, pled guilty

and got a suspended prison sentence, and the other son, Jerry, was jailed for 30 days. The items of evidence seized in the case were a.22 caliber rifle and all the illegally harvested deer meat. Now, the reason I think this story is significant is because what if, for example, Hosea had been alone when he confronted Dan and his boys? Is it possible, likely even, that he could have been overpowered? Who knows? He might have even been killed, and no one would have known about it. I mean, the fact that Hosea had two other game officers with him during this incident might be the only reason why Dan and his sons backed down.

And look, I know I wasn't there, so I don't know for sure, but that seems like one plausible explanation. And we know, based on what's been documented in this case, that Hosea traveled out on his own the day he disappeared in July 1952. He didn't have any backup with him. Something else that might have stirred up dissent leading up to his disappearance was the fact that rumors had been swirling that the 1952 salmon season might open early. But Hosea had put a damper on that rumor real quick. According to an article by the Petersburg Press, in mid-July of that year, so literally days before

Hosea vanished, fish canneries in Petersburg were chomping at the bit to get their operations going. But they couldn't do that until fishermen were permitted to go out and legally catch salmon. He wouldn't do that until fishermen were permitted to go out and legally catch salmon. Now like I just said, many folks believed the salmon season would open a week early, which would have been the last week of July. But technically, the open season for salmon didn't start until early August. And you better believe Hosea was going to hold to the letter of the law. And look, whenever you're the person standing between people making their livelihood or big companies raking in lots of money, that can put a target on your back.

It's understandable to think that because Hosea was a stickler for the rules, he might have frustrated a lot of people who were trying to make as much money as they possibly could. Especially when you think about the fact that Hosea was last seen riding in his small boat in the direction of Pillar Bay Cannery, a business right there in Petersburg that at the time of his disappearance was not able to process or can salmon yet. Smokey Merkley reported for the Idaho State Journal that one prevailing theory about what happened to Hosea is that a group of fishermen illegally operating in the bay most likely ambushed him because they were afraid of getting

busted for violating fishing laws. But unfortunately, there was never any evidence produced that confirmed that. And still to this day, no one knows for sure what really happened to Hosea. Did he die of a heart attack and sink to the bottom of a body of water somewhere, never to be seen again? Was he mauled by a ferocious bear or ravenous wolf pack? Was he murdered because he stood in the way of someone's bottom line? Answers to those questions have eluded everyone for more than 70 years. for more than 70 years. In February 1953, a few months after Hosea vanished,

the Fish and Wildlife Service honored him with a posthumous award for his many contributions to wildlife conservation and dedicated service to the protection of natural resources in Alaska. His wife, Virginia, accepted the honor and was given free lifetime access to all national parks in the country. Around the first anniversary of her husband's disappearance, Virginia and her two sons took a cross-country road trip to visit some of his relatives in Illinois and Indiana. A few months after they returned to Alaska, she remarried and lived out the rest of her days raising her sons and enjoying the beautiful landscape she and Hosea had both loved so much. She eventually died in 1998, never knowing what happened to her first husband,

and if it was the wild frontier of Alaska that took his life, or perhaps a deadly human predator who has never faced justice for their crime. for their crime. Park Predators is an AudioChuck production. You can view a list of all the source material for this episode on our website, parkpredators.com. And you can also follow Park Predators on Instagram,

at Park Predators. So, what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?