Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: The Mad Trapper of Rat River

Episode Date: January 8, 2025

Join us today to learn the story of The Mad Trapper of Rat River, Canada's largest and most intense manhunt.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hi and welcome to The Short Stuff. I'm Josh, there's Chuck, Jerry's here too sitting in for Dave, and the three of us are on the run through the Canadian Arctic, recreating the story of the Mad Trapper, and it's not going very well for us. That's right, the Mad Trapper of Rat River, aka, perhaps, I don't even know about perhaps, almost certainly Canada's most infamous, unknown person on the lam and the largest manhunt in Canada's history conducted to try and get this guy. Yeah, this is, I saw it referred to

as like an iconic Canadian story. This guy just tore us up in 1931, made international headlines, and died. It's still, to this day, no one knows who he is. And not one of those things where we're pretty sure it's this guy, we just can't prove it. They have no idea who this guy is. They're starting to kind of chew around the edges of it, but the fact that he is still unidentified just makes it that much more interesting. But even if you were identified, Chuck, his story is still just totally fascinating on its own.

Yeah, it's not like Somerton Man because that was the most interesting thing about that was the mystery of who he was. It wouldn't care. It wouldn't matter if this guy was indeed Albert Johnson, who was his alias. It's a remarkable story that started in July 1931 when this guy, Albert Johnson, came and moved there. They think he may have come from Sweden, according to, you know to certain people who talked to him here and there, but he was a man of very few words, as we'll see,

when he arrived in the vast remote area of the Northwest Territories near Fort McPherson and built a little eight by 10 foot cabin near the Rat River. Yeah, and we're talking like the northernmost parts of Canada, like basically along the Arctic Ocean. In the 30s. Yeah, he was essentially living where the guys from the terror and the arabes that we

talked about were trying to get to when they were like on their march down toward Canada. Had they done this in 1931, they might have run into Albert Johnson. He was that far up, right? So this is a really, really rugged, wild, dangerous place to live. And like you said, he arrived in July, and a few months after that, I think in November or December of 1931. December. Okay, December of 1931. A couple of trappers from the First Nations who lived up there

got in touch with one of the local police and said, hey, there's this guy, his name's Albert Johnson, and he's messing with our trap lines and he's not supposed to do that. So can you go tell him to stop doing that? And three days later, a couple of cops just knocked on Johnson's cabin door, assuming that they were just going to talk to him and tell him to stop doing that and that would be that, right? Yeah. I mean, these are the Mounties. So these guys are not messing around. The

story is a little confusing because everywhere you look it's a little different, but from what I gathered there were three total visits. One visit when he basically said get the heck out of here and pointed a gun at them. A second visit when two guys came back and this time he supposedly refused to talk at all and when they went to look through his windows he just covered his windows up and ignored them. And then- He pulled down the blind and went, masher.

I guess four total because the third one was when those two guys plus two more, I think it was Alfred King and Joe Bernard and two more guys, came back with warrants, forced the door over and he shot King and a brief firefight ensued. And then finally the fourth visit when they brought a bunch of guys with dynamite and camped out for three days outside his cabin. Yeah, they threw dynamite on his roof to flush him out. And it certainly blew up the roof as expected. It also took down some of the walls of the cabin

and amazingly Albert Johnson survived and even more amazingly he still refused to come out and engaged in a gunfight with this posse that the Mounties had assembled to go take this guy out. Because he shot at an officer who just wanted to tell him to stop messing with trap lines like shot and tried to kill him right so this guy was already a big deal by this time and he managed to hold off this posse from taking him alive they actually had to get out of there because they were

running low on food and the weather was terrible this is yeah this is December in the northernmost reaches of Canada along the Arctic. Now the time you want to be outside, apparently the temperature was negative 45, and this guy's holding these guys down in a gunfight. And then they leave, and four days later they come back, and now they find that this destroyed cabin is now empty. He's fled, and a blizzard has covered up his tracks.

Yeah, I saw that it was like a 60 mile hike just to get to his place. So the fact that they came back four times, when this guy probably could have opened the door the first time and said, all right, I won't mess with their traps anymore. And that probably would have been the end of it. But yeah, he managed to evade them on this manhunt by stepping in caribou tracks and from these storms that would come through. And maybe that's a good time for a break? Yes.

All right, we'll be right back. So, I don't think we've said yet. Now there's a manhunt underway. This guy who they want to take in for shooting at cops is on the run in the Canadian wilderness. And this manhunt lasted seven weeks from December to mid February. This guy kept evading them. They'd catch up to him.

He'd shoot at them. They'd have a firefight. One time he killed a cop, Constable Millen, who was like a member of this posse that was hunting him down, and he would manage to fend them off every time they caught him in a firefight. And one of the other interesting facts about this, Chuck, is this is the first time an aircraft was ever used

in a manhunt, as far as anyone knows. That's right. They got a pretty legendary WW1 Canadian fighter pilot named Wilfred Wap-Mae to come in. A little side note here, Wap-Mae was in the dogfight that ended the Red Baron's life. So a very sort of famous Canadian fighter pilot flying above for the first time, seeing if they could,

seeing if he could just spot trails from above. Yeah, I saw a photo that he took from his aircraft of like this, he was really high up and there's a little tiny speck in the middle of a frozen river and it's identified as Albert Johnson. And then there's like three more tiny specks coming out of the wood line chasing after Johnson. Wat May got a picture of it.

When you understand what you're looking at, it's just astounding what these guys were running through over the course of seven weeks. It's nuts. Yeah, that's amazing. Some people heard about this thanks to the radio, which was still a pretty new invention. But this story that was kind of playing out over the news in real time actually helped sell a bunch of new radios because people didn't want to miss out.

Yeah, supposedly this is one of the really first big news stories to be broken via electronic media. So you've got your first search and rescue, or I guess not search and rescue, search and destroy. Sure. Mission featuring a plane. You've got the first big news stories breaking on radio for the first time. One of the weird parts of this case, I said he was a man of few words, is as the story goes, this guy didn't say a word the whole time.

Like there was never like, you know, it's my right to be here! You know, get away, I'm just trying to live! Like, supposedly this guy said nothing to any of them. That is so unsettling. It is totally. It's another thing that just kinda adds to his legend too. Yeah, for sure.

So, yeah, people by by this time this was during the Depression and a lot of the public that was following the story were actually rooting for him because remember this was a time when the the public rooted for like bank robbers and yeah and other criminals and outlaws because the establishment had basically screwed everything up and taken advantage of every everybody. So there were people who were polling for him. And even if you weren't polling for him, it was just astounding what this guy was doing with just some, I think he had a rifle and a shotgun, he had his clothes,

and he was like out maneuvering and surviving against this posse that was on his trail. And I also saw, Chuck, that one of the unsung or overlooked groups that was part of this posse were some of the First Nation members who helped track him, that this posse probably would have lost his trail in the first few days had it not been for the trackers that came with him. Yeah. I think the Lucho people were the ones who initially filed the complaint. Did you see which tribes helped out in the search?

I didn't. I just saw that one of the members' last name was Rat. So I'm guessing he was named after the Rat River. Of the Rat River rats? His family was. Yeah, exactly. So another part of the kind of a fun fact of this story is, or at least part of the lore, is that at one point they had him pinned in a steep canyon and he supposedly scaled a near vertical wall of ice,

basically, to get out of there. Yeah, so at this point they're like, this guy is not human. Yeah. And again, another First Nations member comes through. I think somebody came back and mentioned that they heard a rifle shot in this like totally desolate area. And the Royal Canadian Mountie Posse were like, well, they can only be Albert Johnson.

And they headed that way. And they found his trail and they started chasing him. They engaged in one last firefight with him. And this this one Albert Johnson didn't come out of alive. That's right. They got him finally after this long, long manhunt, a very successful evasion for a long time. But yeah, they eventually got him. No one, I mean, part of the, you know, the second part of this is just the mystery, like, not only who was he literally, but like, who was this guy to move way out there to not, you know, they supposedly back, you know, closer to town, even though I'm sure that

was super small as well, it was like a very friendly place. And he was known as a loner and very unfriendly, which was not the norm. And like, who was this guy? He just moved out to the middle of nowhere and like didn't speak a word this entire time. Right, yeah. Why would he do this? Yeah, yeah, which just deepens the mystery further. By the way, one other thing, it was Charlie Rat, who was the guy that helped the Mounties

find Albert Johnson. What a name. So they had a picture of him. There's a very, well, I guess, famous, if you're Canadian, picture of his dead body on a morgue slab. Wouldn't mess with the guy. No, he looks rough and tough, for sure. He does.

Like, you could not know his story and see that picture of his dead body and be like, I'll bet that guy could survive in the Canadian wilderness for seven weeks with the cops on his trail. Yeah, for sure. I would want nothing to do with this guy. So they took this picture because they wanted to circulate. Everybody wanted to know who this guy was.

And it made it in all the papers in Canada and the United States and no one came forward. The details of his life and demeanor didn't match anything that anybody knew of. I mean, like, people came forward with tips, but none of them were legitimate or panned out. And very quickly, this guy just became this anonymous weirdo who did some crazy stuff in the winter of 1931. Yeah, so like you said, they exhumed his body in 2007, once DNA sampling was a viable thing, and that has enabled some genetic comparisons to possible relatives. They obviously didn't, you know, no one has come forward with a, with a, like a perfect match or anything. But they made comparisons with more than two dozen families, and they have some strong

circumstantial evidence that what family he may have been from and where they have landed now is that they're pretty sure that his background is Swedish, and he has been linked to multiple descendants of a gentleman named Gustav Magnussen, who died in 1853, and Britta Svindotter, who passed away in 1846, and they are pretty sure that he's a descendant of them, but nobody from any of those bloodlines has come forward either. No, and this company called Othrim, a genome sequencing company, they have figured out a few other things about him that he almost certainly grew up in the Midwestern United States.

His autopsy revealed that he had extensive and expensive dental work. And then he had scoliosis. Yeah, yeah. So this guy did this for seven weeks, scaled a near vertical face cliff with scoliosis as well. He was just amazing in a really kind of specific way. I think one foot was bigger than the other one too. Good Lord.

I thought it was a very strange little add on. Yeah, but also if he grew up in the Midwest, like, the stuff he was doing, there's not many places to learn that. I mean, I guess if you're from, like, upper Minnesota or something, but I'm guessing comparing an upper Minnesota winter to an upper Canada winter is, like, night and day. So they contend he was never, like, a Swedish resident? They don't necessarily contend that. He could have been a transplant from Sweden

who was just raised in like a Swedish speaking community. Yeah, that's what I just wondered about, about like ice wall climbing and stuff. He could probably do that in Sweden. Oh, I see what you mean. Yeah, apparently based on his teeth isotopes that he was raised in or grew up in the Midwestern U.S. All right.

So maybe one day we'll know. Maybe, I mean we found out the Somerton Man's identity, right? Yeah, but I don't think we ever mentioned it on the episode, on the podcast, did we? Yeah, I think we read a listener mail because we got like 10,000 Australians writing us. Great, great.

Well, if it ever comes out who the mad trapper of Rat River was, everybody, we want to know so we can tell everybody else. Yeah, and in the meantime, Chuck, I think short stuff is out. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, myHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.