Roy Madsen
West Side Stories
These oral histories chart the personal stories of individuals with a longtime connection to the west side of Kodiak Island, defined for the scope of this project as the area buffeted by the Shelikof Strait that stretches from Kupreanof Strait south to the village of Karluk. The project endeavored to create historical primary source material for a region that lacks substantive documentation and engage west side individuals in the creation of that material.
Roy Madsen was interviewed by Anjuli Grantham in Kodiak, Alaska, on June 11, 2015 as part of the Kodiak Historical Society’s West Side Stories project. Roy was born in 1923 in Alaska in the village of Kanatak on the Shelikof (now abandoned), where his Danish father ran a general store for the oil industry. He describes how his father established the Mush Bay bear camp on the west side of the island in 1929, as well as the other residents and canneries in operation then. He recounts the camp’s visitors, what camp work he and his siblings did, the fishing in the area, and the operations of the San Juan cannery and its tender. He describes how he also started guiding and fishing when he returned to the area after WWII, before going to law school for a career more compatible with family life. He touches on the impact of the Refuge establishment, his father’s promotion of Kodiak as a tourist destination, and his family’s native and ethnic backgrounds.
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