Trapper’s Den Lodge

Trapper’s Den Lodge was a remote, family-built lodge on a highway outside Anchorage, conceived by Tex John Smith as a hunting and tourist venture. Perry Smith joined the project after military service, and the pair constructed the building themselves. Its opening in 1953 briefly promised a shared future; when customers failed to come, financial strain turned the lodge into the setting of their final separation.

Location and Purpose

Tex John Smith bought land outside Anchorage and planned to establish a hunting lodge there, naming it Trapper’s Den Lodge. In 1952, while Perry Smith was still stationed at Fort Lewis, Washington, Tex John Smith asked him to hurry north and help build the business. The scheme was meant to end Tex John Smith’s travels and, as he imagined it, bring the two men a fortune.

Perry Smith set out for Alaska after his discharge, but a motorcycle skid near Bellingham delayed his arrival by about a year. He spent six months in surgery and hospital care, then recuperated with Joe James and his family. When he could walk again, he resumed the journey to the lodge, where his father had continued preparing the site.

Construction and Opening

Before Perry Smith arrived, Tex John Smith had cleared the ground, logged timber, and gathered wagonloads of native rock. Father and son completed the building together, with occasional help from a local worker. They kept at the work through snow, rain, and strong winds. When the roof was finished, Tex John Smith danced across it in celebration.

The completed lodge could accommodate twenty people. It had a large fireplace in the dining room and a cocktail lounge called the Totem Pole Cocktail Lounge, where Perry Smith was expected to entertain customers by singing. Trapper’s Den Lodge opened for business at the end of 1953, presenting a substantial, hand-built enterprise in a place where the partners hoped hunting and highway travel would sustain it.

A Business Without Customers

The expected hunters never arrived. A small number of tourists passing along the highway stopped to photograph the lodge’s unusually rustic appearance, but few stayed overnight. For a time, Tex John Smith and Perry Smith continued to hope that business would improve. Tex John Smith added a Garden of Memories and a wishing well, and put painted signs along the highway; these efforts brought no meaningful increase in trade.

As the venture’s failure became plain, the men’s savings and provisions dwindled. Tex John Smith blamed Perry Smith for not doing his share, while Perry Smith’s account presents their hardship as a shared predicament rather than either man’s fault. A quarrel over a biscuit became the immediate occasion for their break. The lodge thus shifted from a joint building project to a place marked by hunger, resentment, and an escalating confrontation between father and son.

Departure and Narrative Significance

After the quarrel, Perry Smith walked into the snowy woods. On returning, he found the lodge dark and locked, with his possessions left outside in the snow. He picked up his guitar and set off down the highway with no money; around midnight, a truck driver gave him a ride after Perry Smith said he would go wherever the driver was headed.

The evidence does not establish what later became of the lodge or whether it continued operating. In Perry Smith’s recollection, its importance lies in the contrast between the building’s scale and promise and the failure of the enterprise to provide security: a twenty-person lodge, built through exhausting joint labor, could not bring enough guests to keep its owners from want. Its collapse ends the father-and-son partnership and returns Perry Smith to the unsettled travel that shapes the next stage of his story.