The year of no summer
I told you about that year summer never came? Two winters joined together. No snow, but there was ice all over, and the winters were joined together. Just about little better than a hundred years now. Young moose born in springtime just froze to the ground. I guess they were wet -- people looked all over in the woods, they say, for that kind. When they found a young moose frozen, they cut it up to eat...
Tutchone elder Rachel Dawson told this story to anthropologist Julie Cruikshank in 1974. Dawson said that conditions were so bad that year that the lakes froze right down to the bottom. Since her relatives could not go fishing, they dug up the lake bottom with a chisel to find fish frozen into the ice.
Cruikshank recounts the story in her book Reading Voices, Oral and Written Interpretations of the Yukon's Past. Rachel Dawson's account dramatically illustrates how the oral tradition can tell us about conditions in the past. The following story about her grandfather brings home the harsh reality of a year when there was no real summer.
I guess he's tired and weak without eating... A lot of people starved in the Yukon that time. He sat there and he heard something running... you could hear it on the ice, ice breaking under it... He got his bow and arrow ready... Just one shot and he got it. He went home to tell his wife. "We have to move," he said. "I can't pack all that meat... So they moved down and made camp right there."
Rachel Dawson grew up around Fort Selkirk on the Yukon River, and Cruikshank says that many people from this area have told stories about a particularly grim summer that occurred in the last century. Cruikshank tried to pin down when this event actually occurred, and explored the possibility that it was tied to a major eruption of the Indonesian volcano Tambora in 1816.
Records from the eastern United States, England and Switzerland show that 1816 was the coldest year for which records exist. "The eruption had a huge atmospheric effect. In Europe there were lakes that never thawed," she says.
Cruikshank also refers to the work of climatologist Ray Bradley who has written extensively on climate change. In past studies he has also referred to the grim weather in 1816, and argued that the period between 1920 and 1960 was singularly free of volcanic eruptions. In other words, we have become accustomed to a pattern of good weather that has not been the norm for the last few thousand years.
Cruikshank also corresponded with a dendochronologist who had studied tree rings in the northern Yukon. He found that in the nineteenth century, the lowest tree ring growth occurred in the years 1845, 1849 and 1850, indicating that these were particularly cold years.
Cruikshank says that while this tree ring information might not hold true for all parts of the Yukon, reports from traders with the Hudson's Bay Company also indicate that the central Yukon had some very harsh winters in the middle of the last century. The fur trader Robert Campbell, who established posts at both Frances Lake and Fort Selkirk, referred to several severe winters in his reports.
Cruikshank says that when First Nations people tell stories about "the year there was no summer," they usually say that the event happened about 100 years ago. As different variations of this story have been recorded over a period of several decades, it is hard to pin down exactly when this frigid summer might have occurred. But Cruikshank says that this case still illustrates how oral and scientific traditions can converge in descriptions of natural phenomenon.
More than anything, these stories give us a glimpse of what it must have been like to live through the year there was no winter. For Rachel Dawson, who died two decades ago, it meant that her relatives coped with conditions we can hardly even imagine today.
Julie Cruikshank is an anthropology professor at the University of British Columbia. Information on the oral tradition in the Yukon is also available from the Heritage Department of the Yukon Territorial Government.
