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Did Alaskan Missionary Give Birth to Modern Snowmobile?
By Craig Pinley
MERCER ISLAND, WA (February 20, 2002) - He was a missionary for God, first and foremost, but
some consider him to be a pioneer of one of the most popular recreational vehicles on earth.
Ninety-one-year-old Ralph Hanson is well known in the Evangelical Covenant Church for his 19 years as executive secretary of World Mission; however, he also served as a Covenant missionary to Alaska during the 1930s and 1940s. His most creative work may have been in developing one of the early prototypes of the modern snowmobile.
According to britannica.com, there were prototype versions of the snowmobile in the 1920s - sleds fitted with skis and powered by an engine connected to an airplane propeller. A Canadian named Joseph-Armand Bombadier was credited with being the inventor of the snowmobile, having received a patent in 1937 for a snow vehicle that was steered by skis in front of a
track drive. However, in the same year, Ralph Hanson had created his own version as a way to reach Eskimos for Christ in remote regions where transportation was limited. Hanson's snowmobile version had skis and an engine-driven propeller, but his vehicle was designed much like the classic snowmobile.
"We arrived in Arctic Alaska and we were responsible for five villages with no transportation for seven months of the year," Hanson said during an interview on the occasion of his 90th birthday last year. "Our very small allowance for travel expense was soon used up because villages were 40 to 50 miles apart with no roads in between. It was difficult and the airplanes were just coming into service. The first year we were there, it took a letter over a month to reach us from Chicago.
"I knew I had to solve this problem," Hanson continued, "so I went to the Lord and prayed that we had some way to get around during those seven months of winter. I saw bush pilots taxiing to the big store and maneuver with no difficulty at all. Well, the thought then came to me that if I could get a small airplane in and get three skis - two in the rear and one in the front - and get a light covering to protect us from the cold, I'd have something to solve my problem."
Getting the necessary parts was no easy task in 1937. "I needed an engine first," Hanson recalled. "Where would you think the most likely source of such a thing - in an Eskimo village of 125 people, 200 miles south of the Arctic Circle? I was walking through the Eskimo village one day and I saw Pete Olson standing next to his shack to pass the time, and he had his back to his door. I looked and I saw something in back of him, and I couldn't believe my eyes. I said to him, 'What have you got there?' He said a company sold kits ($25) with an engine and bars and such that permitted a man, if he were skilled, to build a small one-person airplane.
"I built an extremely crude first model, but it worked," Hanson continued. "I traveled some
20 miles from Golovin into White Mountain, where we stayed for the winter. I designed and built a second model that worked so well that I never would've thought about trying another model. But one day, when I was traveling from Golovin, a crankshaft broke off, so I had no choice. I sent out information to a friend in Corvallis, Oregon, and asked him to get hold of a good airplane engine, a Continental A-4, which was a very good engine. The third model I built was sledded and streamlined and I could take my wife and two sons wherever I wanted. However, I was losing part of the strength of the engine." (Hanson constructed a fourth model by altering the engine slightly and mounting the engine in the back instead of the front. He says he got
about one-third more efficiency with the newer version.)
Hanson left Alaska after his wife, Alyce, became ill, taking a pastorate at Berkeley Covenant Church in California and later serving in the World Mission role (1944) after Gust E. Johnson resigned for health reasons. By the late 1950s, when commercially successful one and two-passenger snowmobiles were manufactured and marketed, Hanson was working in a far different climate, helping further mission work in Mexico and Ecuador, among other places. He was also using a different vehicle for transportation, taking advantage of his pilot's license to fly to various sites.
The shift in roles to head world mission marked another significant change in life. "We were celebrating our 40th anniversary of Berkeley Covenant Church (in 1943) and invited President T.W. Anderson," Hanson recalled. "We invited him for dinner and before dinner he asked if I would serve as executive secretary of World Mission after Gust E. Johnson became ill. It was one of the biggest surprises and one of the most difficult to accept. We just couldn't believe it. We were just flabbergasted, but we did what we always did - we prayed and asked God, 'What do you want me to do?' A couple months later, we found ourselves on a railroad from Seattle to Chicago . . . we know God makes no mistakes and we had a wonderful 19 years serving as executive secretary of World Mission."
Following Alyce's death in 1984, Hanson eventually married again. He and wife, Lillian, are now living at Covenant Shores, a Covenant Retirement Community in Mercer Island, Washington.
(Editor's note: the interview upon which this story was based took place May 30, 2001. Hanson had celebrated his 90th birthday the previous November. An article looking at Hanson's career will appear in the March 2002 issue of The Covenant Companion.)
Copyright © 2008 The Evangelical Covenant Church. |
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