A film crew, a longbow, and no rifle for backup
In 1923 Art Young went to Alaska with a film crew and a longbow.
No firearm. Not for camp protection. Not as a backup. Just an osage longbow against country thick with brown bear, and a cameraman named Jack Robertson there to document whatever happened next. The two of them spent the better part of two years traveling and filming across Alaska, capturing the territory through every season. The summers especially. The birds, the fish, the small game, the caribou, the sheep, the moose, and the bears that made the territory what it was. Young's job was to hunt. Robertson's job was to film. Nobody had ever attempted anything like it before.
They moved by boat to Kodiak Island. Sometimes the Kenai Peninsula. Inland by dog sled and pack when the terrain demanded it, which in that country was often. They watched the Yukon River break apart in the spring thaw, ice grinding and shifting in a way most men never witness firsthand, and salmon fighting their way upstream through the current during the spawning run while the cameras rolled and Young studied the country he was about to hunt.
No Gore-Tex. No rifle in the truck as backup. No modern broadheads or scent control or any of the things a hunter today considers standard. Just wood, string, and the kind of skill that takes a lifetime to build, carried into some of the most dangerous game country on the continent.
The bears he chose not to shoot
Young's real goal on that trip was bigger than any single animal. Rabbits, squirrels, deer, and moose had already fallen to his bow long before Alaska. What remained was the one thing that would silence every skeptic who claimed a bow could never be a serious weapon against something as large and as dangerous as a Kodiak brown bear.
He and Robertson found bears gorging themselves on salmon in the streams of Kodiak Island. Easy opportunities. The kind most hunters would have taken without a second thought.
They considered it unsportsmanlike and chose to film instead of shoot.
That decision says as much about who Art Young was as any animal he ever took with that bow.
The moose hunt that nearly cost him
The moose hunt is where the real grit of the trip shows itself. One bull went close to 1,600 pounds with a spread pushing sixty inches. Young returned the next day with a companion to pack out the meat, the antlers, and get a photograph properly documented. Getting back to camp meant stumbling through rough broken terrain in total darkness, constantly aware of the brown bears thick in the area, on top of the ordinary misery of dead trees, fallen limbs, and gullies that could swallow a man's boot without warning.
A second expedition the following year produced another moose, taken the exact same hard way.
Young had a clear belief about why this mattered. That there was a legitimate case for taking an animal like moose for food, with the bow playing an honorable part in that process. And further than that, he believed bowhunting big game ultimately served the cause of game preservation itself. That it shamed hunters who relied on overwhelming firepower and pushed the entire sport toward better ethics. A philosophy that traditional bowhunters have carried forward ever since, whether they know where it started or not.
The film that sat forgotten for almost a hundred years
The footage from that expedition captured Kodiak bears, moose, bighorn sheep, mountain goats, and the bowhunting gear of the era. It is widely considered the first bowhunting film ever made. No scent control. No camouflage. No mechanical broadheads. Nothing but raw woodsmanship captured on camera in some of the most demanding country in North America.
That footage sat forgotten for decades until the Bill Wadsworth family discovered the original reel and notes inside a canister while cleaning out the family home in 2019. They donated it to the National Bowhunter Education Foundation, which now offers a restored thirty-minute version as a fundraiser.
This footage directly influenced Fred Bear, among others, to pick up a bow in the first place.
Which means the entire traditional bowhunting world that exists today traces a direct line back to a man with an osage longbow and a cameraman in a boat headed for Kodiak Island in 1923.