In 1957 a bow shop owner from Seattle flew into the Alaska Range with hand-ground broadheads, cedar arrows, and an idea that would change traditional bowhunting forever.
The Man Who Built the Pope and Young Club
Glenn St. Charles. You know the name. The Pope and Young Club exists because of this man. But the story of how it all started, before the records program, before the recognition, before any of it had a name, begins not in a boardroom or a bow shop but on a glacier-fed river in the Alaska Range called the Little Delta.
Glenn had built bows from Cascade yew. Fletched arrows from spruce and Alaska cedar. Ground his own broadheads out of old hand saws. He had hunted everything the Pacific Northwest had to offer until none of it was enough anymore. He needed somewhere wild enough that no outfitter had a name for it yet. He had been frustrated for years by the way bowhunters were treated by the broader hunting world. Dismissed. Laughed at. Written off as men playing at something that could never be taken seriously. He was building something in his head that would change that. But first he needed to go somewhere big enough to match the scale of what he was carrying.
Into Country That Barely Had a Name
He found it along a braided glacier-fed river in the Alaska Range called the Little Delta.
He lined up Keith Clemmons and two other men months in advance. Men willing to gamble a summer on a place they had only seen on a map. The bush plane landed on a survey strip ten miles from where they hoped to hunt because there was no closer way in. From there it was on foot, packs loaded, into country that had not seen a bowhunter in decades if ever. Willow and spruce pressing in from every direction. The kind of terrain that makes a man pay attention to every step or pay for the ones he did not.
Near the end of that first trip they found it. An old trapper's cabin. Weathered but standing. Tucked into a clearing along the river that made a man feel like the last person on earth.
And somewhere in that same season Glenn found what he had come for. A barren ground caribou taken with a bow on ground so remote it barely had a name yet. There is a photograph of the moment. Glenn admiring the animal in country that looks like it has not changed since the last ice age receded. It is not a dramatic photo. It is a quiet one. But it is the photograph the Boone and Crockett Club still uses today when they tell the story of Glenn St. Charles. Because that caribou is where the whole Little Delta legend begins.
Everything that came after traces back to that moment.
When the Country Doesn't Cooperate, Make It Cooperate
The first thing they did after finding the cabin was solve the access problem. That survey strip ten miles back was not a sustainable situation for a hunt they meant to repeat. So Glenn and his party did what men in that era did when the country did not cooperate. They made it cooperate. They hacked a rough airstrip out of the brush by hand. Axe work. Foot by foot through willow and spruce until a bush plane could set down close enough to unload without a full day of hiking on every trip in and out. That is not a sentence that should be read fast. That is an axe and will project done in country thick with grizzly by men who had a hunt to get to and no other way of getting to it.
Glenn had also struck a deal with Alaskan Air Lines before any of this started. He would shoot promotional footage of the hunt. Wild Alaska sold through the lens of men doing something nobody back home had seen a bow do. In exchange the airline would fly him and his gear north from Washington State. It was a good trade on paper. It got considerably more complicated in practice.
He Knew Who to Call. He Just Didn't Want To.
After that first season behind the camera Glenn came to a hard but honest conclusion. He was not a filmmaker. He knew exactly who to call. He had also been hesitant to make the call because the man he had in mind tended to take over anything he touched.
He called Fred Bear anyway.
Fred Bear, Commercial Camo, and the 1958 Gang
Fred said yes and showed up for the 1958 season with Dick Bolding, Bud Fowles, and others. A group that would come to be known simply as the 1958 Gang. Fred landed on that hand-cut airstrip in mid August, found a grizzly had remodeled the cabin door over the winter, fixed it before anyone else arrived, and then did something nobody in that remote clearing had expected. He had outfitted the entire party in some of the first commercially available camouflage clothing on the market. Gear nobody standing in that clearing had ever worn before.
Fred Bear showing up to a hand-cut airstrip in the Alaska backcountry with the first batch of commercial camo is the kind of detail that does not make it into the highlight reels of bowhunting history. But it happened. And it tells you everything about the man.
For two weeks the 1958 Gang radiated out from that cabin in every direction. Hunting. Making meat. Filming. Living the thing as fully as the country would allow. Fred took a caribou and a sheep. The others did the same. When they finally broke camp they nailed crosscut saws to the cabin door, teeth facing outward, hoping it might discourage the next bear from finishing what the last one started.
The next bear was not discouraged.
Fred thought the footage was good enough to justify one more year to round it out properly. Glenn agreed. They went back in 1959.
A Log Bridge Across the Little Delta
That third season gave the men nearly a month in the field and the country used every day of it. High glacial runoff made the usual river crossing impossible so the party spent two days building a log bridge across the Little Delta by hand. The photograph of Fred Bear and camp cook Bob Kelly crossing that bridge, bows in hand, packs on their backs, became one of the defining images in Bear Archery history. Used in company catalogs through the 1970s. Later placed on the cover of a 1974 reprint of Saxton Pope's Hunting with the Bow and Arrow. Fred himself recalled it simply years later. We built that bridge to get across the Little Delta River. It took us about two days to build it but it worked pretty well for the whole hunt.
Fred's own caribou that season became his highest scoring trophy in the record books. Higher than either of his Alaska brown bears. He stalked it on his hands and knees across open ground in rain and sleet, closed to forty yards, and sent an arrow that hit low but found the femoral artery. The bull crossed a creek and went down four hundred yards away. Fred tallied the full expedition cost in his journal when it was over. Just under seven thousand dollars for a hunt logging 121 man-days in the field.
Three Years Was All It Ever Got
It was 1959. And 1959 brought something else that nobody in that cabin had planned for.
The Territory of Alaska became the State of Alaska that year. With statehood came new regulatory authority. Mandatory guides for nonresident hunters. Higher licensing fees. Changes that made what had been three men and a hand-cut airstrip logistically and financially out of reach almost overnight.
Three years was all the Little Delta ever got.
The Reel They Never Used and the Club That Lasted Forever
Glenn delivered the finished promotional film to Alaskan Air Lines when it was done. Three years of work. Footage shot on foot in grizzly country. A hand-built airstrip. A hand-built bridge. Some of the most remote bowhunting footage ever captured on film up to that point.
There had been a management change at the airline while they were making it. The people who had approved the project were not the people receiving it. The film was set aside and never used for its intended purpose.
Word has circulated in bowhunting circles for years that the reel eventually turned up somewhere and was preserved. But if you have seen it you are in rare company. Most people who know this story have not.
What Glenn built in the years that followed is what the traditional bowhunting world knows him for. In January 1961 the Pope and Young Club was founded. Glenn St. Charles was its first chairman. The records program he had been quietly assembling since before that first trip to the Little Delta finally had a name and a permanent home.
He passed away in September 2010 at 98 years old at home in Seattle with his children and his dog Pepper at his side. In 1997 at 85 he had put the whole story down on paper himself in a book called Bows on the Little Delta. 388 pages. Hand-signed. Published by his own hand alongside his wife Margaret. He wrote in it about how hunting had drifted over the decades from a simple walk in the woods into something dressed up with every gadget the shooting sports industry could devise.
It is a line that hits differently once you know it was written by a man who once hacked an airstrip out of raw Alaska brush with an axe because there was no other way to get the job done.