A History Mystery: the Mad Trapper of Rat River

In this episode, Sarah and Katie take a crack at one of Canada's strangest mysteries: The Mad Trapper of Rat River. Travel back to 1931, when a man calling himself 'Albert Johnson' led the Canadian police on a 150-mile chase -- all without saying a word.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to you stuff you missed in history class from
how stuff works dot com. You've heard the rumors before,
perhaps and whispers written between the lines of the textbooks. Conspiracies,
paranormal events, all those things that disappear from the official explanations.

(00:23):
Tune in and learn more of this stuff they don't
want you to know in this video podcast from how
stuff works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm fair Daddy, and we have
a history mystery for you today, suggested by a listener

(00:45):
named Barry who emailed us, and it's about the guy
with the coolest nickname. I think I've ever heard Mad
Trapper of Rat River, and the Mad Trapper was the
center of a massive Canadian man hunt in the middle
of a harsh you on winter. But who was he
and what happened? So, whoever he was, he was very

(01:05):
secretive and he used a lot of aliases, which makes
it hard to know much about his early years. So
there are several candidates for the Mad Trapper, Johann Johnson,
Albert Johnson, Arthur Nelson, and Spigbald Peterson hawks Gold I think.

(01:27):
And the crazy thing is is some of these people
could be the same person just aliases, or it could
be different candidates. So we're just starting this off by
trying to confuse you. We want to be upfront, no
one knows who this guy is. We know the story,
but we don't know the man behind the body that
we actually have because despite all this confusion over the name,

(01:50):
there is a body. Um It was actually exhumed recently
as part of the documentary and by analyzing the isotopes
in the skeleton's teeth, sign has found that the Trapper
grew up in the northern United States or northern Scandinavia.
So we know where he's from, we know how he died,
but his name, he made that very confusing for us.

(02:13):
So the Mad Trapper gets his start in the collective
public consciousness on July nine nine when a man calling
himself Albert Johnson wanders into Fort McPherson and buy supplies
from the Northern Traders Store. And because he's so secretive,
I mean, obviously there are a lot of loner types

(02:34):
up here. You don't you don't move to the Canadian
wilderness if you like a lot of company, probably, But
because this guy is so secretive, the Royal Canadian Mounted
Police keep a really close eye on him, and he's
even questioned by one constable at a certain point, just
trying to find out some basic information about where he's
from and where he's going. Who is this person under

(02:55):
midst pretty standard questions, you know, most people wouldn't be
put off by them. But the future mad trapper Johnson
sets off for Rat River about a week after questioning,
and it's a very very isolated place way up in
the Northwest Territories, and he survives by trapping beaver, along
with a lot of other people who were living in
the same area. But by December of ninety one, the

(03:18):
Royal Canadian mount of Police the RCMP received complaints from
other trappers in the Rat River area that somebody is
deliberately springing their traps, which you can imagine would be
pretty infuriating if you're out in the cold trapping beaver
and somebody or somebody stealing yours well, and whoever made
the complaint also said they thought it was him, so

(03:41):
they had a suspect already and the babe loner guy,
you know, the creepy guy, no one knows who he is.
So two men come to talk to him, but he
refuses to answer the door or engage with them in
any way, so they come back two days later with
a search warrant, and when they knock on his door,
Johnson shoots through the door and wounds one of the officers,

(04:05):
Alfred King gets shot in the chest and one of
the others has to take him away and they they
high tail it back there. They're not Johnson's cabin is
built in a very fortified area. It's high above the river,
and they really don't have even though there are two
of them, again's one. They don't they're not in a

(04:27):
position to fight, plus one of them has been shot.
So they come back a few days later and set
up a fifteen hour siege, this time with a lot
of guys, lots of rifles. They brought dynamite to dynamites cabin,
but a blizzard ends up cutting everything short. They got dogs,
men and all this stuff, and he won't surrender at all.
He's just hunkering down in this fortress of a cabin.

(04:50):
I can't I can't imagine how this guy constructed this
apparently impenetrable cabin by himself in the middle of the
Yukon he's quite the survivalist as well, see soon. Because
he escapes during this gigantic blizzard and he heads off
into the wilderness. Search parties are sent out right away.

(05:11):
Obviously the police really want to get this guy. He
shot one of their own, and they've got this gunfight,
and they compose their search party of Aboriginal people and
the Royal Mounties and just some volunteer trappers who are
probably outraged that their beavers have been stolen. And at

(05:33):
one point in January, he's completely surrounded at the bottom
of a cliff and he shoots a constable, Constable Edgar Millen,
and somehow in the night, because they all stay in
their position, he scales the cliff and gets away again.
And we should say too, when he escapes his cabin
in the blizzard, it's not like he's got a big

(05:54):
pack of wilderness supply. He's on foot and he has
no food, he doesn't have any extra clothe those and
it's scaling a cliff, I mean, did he just climb
it bar handed? He's better than bear grills, as we
will see, because he keeps going and at some point
they got airplanes on him as well as dog teams.
And guides. And this is also the first time two

(06:15):
way radios are used in Canadian police work, which is
a fun little historical tidbit. So the pilot of the
airplane What May is useful because he can see the
tracks or see patterns in the tracks, and he's starting
to close in. But another blizzard comes in February nine
of ninety two, which gives Johnson time to cross the
mountains into the Yukon, so even more wild than the

(06:39):
wilderness he's spent in. And what May, by the way,
was a World War one and two flying ace. He
was really well known, so he's getting a celebrity pilot
and on it, not just any guy. And he realized
that Johnson had been walking in Caribou tracks to hide
his own tracks. By February fourteenth, What May spots Johnson's

(06:59):
tracks on the Bell River and starts following them to
where they turned south up the Eagle River, and the
police begin to close in at this point. So on
February sevent he's trapped on a frozen river, but he
still won't surrender and he goes down shooting instead. The
end of our Mad Trapper came when one of the

(07:20):
bullets struck some of the ammunition he had in his pocket,
and it exploded, blew a hole in his hip, and
the shot hit him in the spine, and that's when
he finally died. He was one hundred pounds from this
chase of forty eight days, covering one hundred and fifty
miles in the Northwest territories in a Yukon winter. And
the things found on this body here are real survivalist material.

(07:44):
He's got two rifles, and he also has two thousand
dollars in both Canadian and American money. He's got gold,
a compass, a razor, a knife, some fish hooks and nails,
and Sarah's favorite items, a dead squirrel and a dead bird.
And I guess if he was hundred pounds, maybe he
should have eaten those. I probably should have, because he

(08:05):
was probably planning on it. The crazy thing is that
throughout this entire thing, no one ever heard him talk,
No one knows who he is, and no one even
knows if he did the thing he was accused of.
They never saw evidence of him making fires, they rarely
ever saw his tracks. No one's entirely sure how he
even got away through some of this well and so
the question of was he really mad as his name

(08:28):
implies comes up a lot too. He clearly knew what
he was doing. He certainly wasn't incapacitated in the sense
that he knew how to cover his tracks, he knew
how to survive out there. But what was motivating him
to run away? Why did he hate authority so much?
And some people really admired him for that when they
did exhume his body, and people had requested it before,

(08:51):
but the elders of this village aklavic, I don't know
if I'm pronouncing that correctly, I'm sorry, finally agreed when
a film company, the one in the documentary, told them
that they would do it very respectfully and they would
have ceremony and there would be priests present, and then
they said it was okay. And when DNA ruled out
a lot of the people who thought they had relatives
who might be the mad Trapper, they were really disappointed.

(09:14):
He was this figure that people wanted to be related to.
That's so that's a strange that with several generations worth
of distance between this guy and these want to be relatives.
It's interesting that somebody who goes down in this man hunt.
Maybe committed crimes is just as desirable a relative as

(09:35):
somebody who's illusterous and famous for good reasons. But you
have to admit it's kind of cool when he was
able to do with the little he had, and you
can figure and of the Mad Trapper Rap River, I mean,
I think that's a lot of it. He was the
epitome of the strong and silent type. We still don't
know anything about him other than the fact that he
was in his thirties when he died, and it was

(09:56):
either Scandinavian or North American. But there's a great folk
song that we found written about him, called, of course
the Mad Trapper of Rat River, because why would anyone
deviate from that title? It's too good. It's by Stanley G.
Triggs and it was recorded in the sixties, so not
too long after the Mad Trapper went down here, Yeah,

(10:18):
about thirty years. So let's take a listen journey. But
I really liked the final line of that song. But

(10:41):
give the credit to the Mounties. They always get their
man good. And that ties into a really cool email
we got from a listener named Jonathan and Belgium who
said that we broke his writer's block and sent us
song lyrics to a ballad about the Northwest Passage and
Franklin's Lost Expedition, in which was a podcast we had

(11:01):
done a few months ago and it was really cool.
So we'd like to challenge you to send us song
lyrics to some sort of historical mystery. The mad work
like yes to history podcast at how stuff works dot com.
So hopefully one day we'll find out the true identity
of the mad Trapper. For now, his DNA is still

(11:22):
waiting there in the lab. So I guess if anybody
thinks they have a plausible relationship, maybe contact this scientist.
It's still up for grab. So if you'd like to
read some more survival content with that, how to survive
a shipwreck, how to survive a plane crash, a build
a fire, all sorts of stuff, come to our homepage
at www dot how stuff works dot com for more

(11:46):
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