When Men Still Had the Bark On ’Em

A Review of Sidney Huntington’s “Shadows on the Koyukuk”

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I don’t usually do book reviews on Substack, so this will be a little experiment for you all. Let me know if you love it or you hate it. This isn’t a book review blog, but we could do one every now and then.

I discovered Shadows on the Koyukuk through Dry Creek Wrangler School, a new-ish YouTube channel that’s exploded over the course of only about a year. The channel consists of an older cowboy talking about life as a wrangler, but often about life in general. He’s a pretty wise man who’s seen a lot and is worth listening to—you can see why he has 600K+ subscribers. In one of his videos he gives reading recommendations,¹ and it’s here that I caught wind of Sidney Huntington’s autobiography. He said of the book that it was written by a man who lived “when men still had the bark on ’em”. This is a bit of an understatement in Huntington’s case.

Sidney Huntington was born in 1915 in the Koyukuk River country of Northern Alaska to an Athapaskan mother and a white trapper father. He lived as a trapper basically all his life during a time of change from traditional Athapaskan ways to modernity, reaching the age of 100. Here is a man worth listening to. In Shadows on the Koyukuk he tells his story.

It’s no secret that masculinity is in crisis. The assault on manhood comes from two sides. On the one, you have the soy left for whom the term “toxic masculinity” is redundant. They never met a masculinity they didn’t think toxic, and what they try to sell as masculinity is really just the manhood of a beaten dog—masculinity stripped of anything like honour, nobility, and especially strength. For them, strength is only ever moral strength, but a grovelling and servile morality. For them, a real man is not afraid to risk standing up and bravely saying everything polite society approves of with the full backing of the totalitarian state apparatus.

On the other hand you have that “man’s” retarded inversion, as embodied in someone like Andrew Tate. Not content to be a dickless, noodle-armed progressive, Tate has chosen a different path to servility—he has simply taken what our soyfacing breakfast cereal enjoyer dislikes and leaned into it. Tate is as mastered and governed by progressive ideology as “Satanism” is by Christianity. The product is a thin-skinned, barely concealed psychopathy with no higher goals in life than to glut himself with sense gratification like a dog licking its balls. Tate is hardly the only one—there’s a whole cottage industry of snake-oil peddling life coaches selling McMasculinity to fatherless men. Like them, Tate has no children.

Sidney Huntington, on the other hand, had twenty children—yes, twenty. And unlike our Scylla and Charybdis of fake manhood, he lived a life of note and left a legacy. And unlike them too, it was a life of genuine hardship, overcoming, and ultimately accomplishment. As we will see, he was more a man at age five than Vaush or Tate will ever be.