Almost 100 Years ago a Young Seattle Woman Ventured to the Soviet Arctic, Got Stuck in the Ice and Became a Media Star

As the cold settles in, think of the people in the Arctic. Just 95 years ago, 1929-1930, the Seattle ship Nanuk lay frozen in the ice of the Arctic Ocean for the whole winter.

Built in 1892, the Nanuk is a three-masted schooner with a diesel engine. It is caught in the ice returning from the Kolyma River, which empties into the Arctic. A few years hence, the Kolyma will be a forbidden zone, housing the most dreaded camps of the Soviet Gulag. Alexander Solzhenitsyn will write about it. In 1929, the Nanuk is there on business.

The ship’s captain, Olaf Swenson, is Seattle’s most renowned fur trader. He’s on the Arctic coast of Russia buying pelts to supply the Seattle Fur Exchange, America’s top dealer in white fox, blue fox, red fox, ermine, seal, and reindeer fawn from Siberia. During World War I and a few years after, when Russia is convulsed in revolution and a civil war, Swenson and a partner build up a network of 31 trading stations in the far north.

For several years, Lenin’s regime leaves the far Arctic lands alone, and Swenson is free to buy out his partner and continue the business. But in the mid-1920s the Soviets take over the American trading posts. Swenson petitions the government in Moscow to let him keep trading, and they grant him a five-year concession. He will supply Siberia with American goods in exchange for animal pelts and mammoth ivory.

Four years into the contract, in June 1929, Swenson sets out with his crew from Puget Sound on his annual trip to the North. This time, he brings his daughter Marion, 17, a freshman at Seattle’s Broadway High School.

Swenson has two tasks: to fill the Nanuk with pelts for the Fur Exchange and to take back his motor ship Elsif, which froze in the ice the previous winter. He retrieves the Elsifand buys the pelts, but on October 4, 1929, the ice traps the Nanuk just off Cape Schmidt. Olaf, Marion, and most of the crew are marooned for four months along with six tons of fox and bear pelts.

Marion is thrilled. This is the sort of adventure she’s dreamed of. And she makes use of it. In the media age of the 1920s, she sees an opportunity. Through the ship’s radio, she arranges to write dispatches for the New York Times.

In 17 bylined stories, Marion Swenson tells of her life in the twilight and darkness of Arctic winter. As the temperature falls to 50 degrees below zero, she wakes up in the morning with her hair frozen to the bulkhead. A few miles away, the Russian trading ship Stavropol is also ice-bound. Russians visit the Nanuk, and she takes out a pencil and draws portraits of them. At other times, she plays endless games of solitaire.

Alaskan Airways, a tiny company founded by pilot Carl Ben Eielson (and no relation to Alaska Airlines, which does not exist in 1929) mounts a rescue-and-supply mission. Flying a single-engine Hamilton Metalplane, Eielson reaches the ship. So does another of his pilots. They bring out six crewmen and 1,500 pounds of furs. But on November 9, 1929, when Eielson and his mechanic, Earl Borland, try again, they are lost in a storm. The Nanuk sends out a dog team to search for survivors, and finds nothing.

Marion writes it all for the New York Times. “Ice conditions are the most extreme in years and the visibility is such that very few flights can be made,” she reports. “While we wait and wonder what has happened to Eielson and Borland, we try to amuse ourselves as best we can. We take long walks to keep physically fit and frequently have visitors from the Stavropol… The other day a wolf circled the ship and howled dismally, but the dogs started such a racket that he withdrew. I hate to think of the dogs. They are so pitiful now that the feed is so low.”

 The men shoot two seals to feed the dogs. But the searchers return to the Nanuk luckless and frostbitten. As the weather clears, the search continues by air. Late in January 1930, Alaskan Airlines’ chief pilot, William Crosson, spots a glint of sun on metal. The spot is 90 miles short of the Nanuk. He relays the location to the dog teams, and they locate the wreck. Eielson and Borland were apparently flying blind at full throttle. They hit the ground with a wing tip and cartwheeled. They cannot have survived. Their bodies have been ejected and will not be found for weeks.

At the end of February, Marion Swenson and her father are flown out, leaving the Nanuk to be retrieved in the brief Arctic summer. On her winter diet of reindeer meat, eider duck, and sourdough pancakes, Marion has gained 40 pounds.

She returns to Seattle a celebrity. When reporters follow her on shopping trips to buy frilly dresses and shoes with heels, she tells them she prefers her corduroy pants and mukluks. “Shoes hurt,” she says. She doesn’t like the city. She would rather be on a boat in the Arctic — and with an airplane, she says, so she could fly it. She wants to be a fur trader and a pilot but, she laments, “Daddy says I’ve got to be a lady.”

American fur traders will soon be unwelcome in Josef Stalin’s Communist state. By 1933, Olaf Swenson will wind up his Russian business. He will retire in Seattle surrounded by his furs, ivory, and Native art to write his memoir, Northwest of the World: Forty Years of Trading and Hunting in Northern Siberia. In 1938, at age 55, he will die in his office, apparently shot while cleaning his .405 caliber elephant gun.

Marion Swenson attends Tacoma’s Annie Wright Seminary and, later, Seattle’s Cornish School. She will marry and have a family. She will spend her life in Seattle, not the Arctic. At her death in 1951 at age of 39, the Seattle Times will remember her for her ice-bound adventure off the coast of Siberia.

Sources: “Four Parties Are Scouting Arctic, Seeking Eielson,” Seattle Times, 11-22-1929, p. 14; “Dog Teams Seek Eielson on Shore,” NYT, 1-3-1930, p. 7; “Food Short on Siberian Coast,” NYT, 1-5-1930, p. 3; “Sledges in Peril, Hunting Eielson,” NYT, 1-11-1930, p. 11; “Eielson Plane Found a Wreck in Siberia,” NYT, 1-27-1930, p. 1; “Eielson’s Throttle Found Wide Open; Height Misjudged,” NYT, 1-28-1930, p. 1; “Russians Aid Work at Eielson Wreck,” NYT, 2-2-1930, p. 10; “Millions in Furs, Salmon and Gold Here from North,” Seattle Times, 8-3-1930, p. 23; “Hostage of Arctic Will Go to Young Ladies’ Seminary,” Seattle Times, 3-4-1930, p. 5; “Swenson, Fur Trader, Dies of Shot,” Seattle Times, 8-24-1938, p. 1; “Funeral Services for Mrs. Thomas E. Ferguson,” Seattle Times, 8-8-1951, p. 40.