Wop May, the Mad Trapper of Rat River, and the Arctic Manhunt That Brought a Bush Pilot Into Minus Fifty to Chase a Ghost

In February 1932, a Bellanca Pacemaker on ski gear landed on the river ice at Aklavik in the Northwest Territories and changed the outcome of the largest manhunt in Canadian history. The pilot was Wilfrid Reid “Wop” May, a World War One veteran turned Canadian bush pilot. The fugitive he had been called north to find had survived six weeks alone in the Arctic, crossed a mountain range on foot in midwinter, and killed an RCMP officer - and no one knew his real name.

Who Was Albert Johnson, the Mad Trapper of Rat River?

Albert Johnson arrived in the summer of 1931 in remote border country between the Yukon and the Northwest Territories, near a creek called Rat River. He built a cabin, trapped alone, and paid cash for supplies in Aklavik - a small settlement on the Mackenzie Delta roughly 150 miles to the north, about as far from anywhere as a person can get and still have a post office. He gave no name. He answered no questions.

In December 1931, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police received complaints from local trappers that Johnson was interfering with their lines - springing sets and stealing fur. Constable Alfred King and Special Constable Joe Bernard traveled by dog sled to Johnson’s Rat River cabin to discuss the matter. Johnson did not answer. King went back to Aklavik and returned with backup.

The Shot That Started the Manhunt

On December 31, 1931 - New Year’s Eve - King arrived at the cabin again, this time with three additional officers. The temperature was well below minus 30°F. King called out that he had a warrant and that the business could be settled peaceably.

Johnson opened the door a crack and shot King through it. The bullet passed through King’s chest and out his back. His partners loaded him onto a sled and drove hard for Aklavik, running the dogs in relays day and night. King survived. The manhunt for Albert Johnson - the man the newspapers would soon call the Mad Trapper of Rat River - had begun.

How Johnson Turned a Trapper’s Cabin Into a Fort

The RCMP returned to the Rat River cabin with more men, a justice of the peace, and a warrant. What they found told them a great deal about who they were dealing with. Johnson had reinforced the cabin walls with logs and frozen earth until the structure could deflect rifle fire. He had dug down the floor so he could fire through the windows from below the sill line, cutting his profile to almost nothing while covering every approach.

The posse brought in dynamite. The explosion blew the roof off the cabin and lit up the snow for a quarter mile. From inside the ruined, roofless structure at minus 40°F, Albert Johnson started shooting again. He held the posse off for hours in the Arctic dark before they finally withdrew. When they returned the next morning with more men and more explosive, he was gone - slipped through a gap in the cordon in the night, leaving tracks the wind was already filling in behind him.

Seven Weeks of Evasion Across the Mackenzie Delta

What followed over the next seven weeks was one of the most extraordinary manhunts in North American history. Johnson traveled when fresh snow would cover his tracks. He doubled back on his own trail and stepped sideways into timber, forcing the tracking dogs to circle while handlers read the ground inch by inch. He built no fires when moving, left no camp that showed how long he had rested. He crossed rivers on the ice to break his scent trail and laid false tracks that led the posse into terrain where the dogs lost him completely and the men burned half a day finding out where he had gone.

The Mackenzie Delta braids into a thousand channels where willow and spruce grow thick enough to hide a moving man, and the low gray light of midwinter makes a trail look different from hour to hour as temperature shifts and wind works on the surface. The posse had experienced guides who had spent their lives in this country. They could not catch him.

On January 30, 1932, the posse cornered Johnson near Barrier Creek. Constable Edgar Millen moved up through the snow to close the distance. Johnson shot him dead.

Who Was Wop May?

Wilfrid Reid May was already famous before anyone called him about the manhunt - because of one morning in April 1918 over the Western Front. A very green Royal Flying Corps pilot on his first combat mission found himself being chased across the sky by a Fokker triplane with Manfred von Richthofen - the Red Baron, 80 victories - at the controls.

May had been told to stay out of the main dogfight. He had not stayed out of it. He got into trouble, and the Red Baron himself was closing the gap over the Somme Valley. Roy Brown dived out of the turning melee to cover May. Australian ground troops below opened up with rifles and machine guns. The Fokker rolled, went down hard, and Richthofen was dead. Whether it was Brown’s bullets or the ground fire that killed him is still contested among historians. What is not contested: Wop May flew home that morning.

After the war, May returned to Edmonton and started flying for money. He co-founded May Airplanes Limited and flew freight, passengers, survey crews, and medical supplies into the Canadian north when that territory had no radio stations worth mentioning, no weather service, no navigation aids, and no useful charts - just rivers and lakes and muskeg, and a pilot who had to learn the country by flying it until the landmarks were stored behind his eyes.

In January 1929, May and fellow pilot Vic Horner made an emergency flight from Edmonton north to Fort Vermilion, Alberta. A diphtheria outbreak was killing children. The antitoxin was in Edmonton. A dog sled relay would take weeks. May flew through temperatures that congealed the oil in his engine’s sump, landed on a snow-covered pasture, delivered the antitoxin, and flew back. The children lived.

That is who the RCMP called when Albert Johnson crossed into the hills.

The Aircraft: A Bellanca Pacemaker at Minus 45°F

By 1932, May was flying for Canadian Airways. When the call came for air support, Canadian Airways sent him north in a Bellanca Pacemaker rigged with ski gear - a high-wing monoplane powered by a Wright Whirlwind radial, reliable under normal conditions and well suited to operating off river ice and frozen lakes.

Flying at minus 45°F meant oil that thickened to near-immobility until the engine warmed, control cables that went tight in their fairleads, and windshields that fogged and iced from the inside. Before every startup, the oil had to be heated on a stove before going back into the engine. The aircraft was tented overnight with a heater running under the cowling to keep the cylinders warm enough to fire. The pilot wore every piece of clothing he owned and was still cold.

May flew north from Edmonton to Aklavik in stages - roughly 1,200 miles in a 1932-vintage piston aircraft in the Canadian winter.

What the Aircraft Changed About the Manhunt

From altitude, in fresh snow, a man’s trail is visible for miles. Johnson was extraordinary at breaking his track in timber and broken terrain. Open country was a different problem entirely. From the air, May could see patterns in the snow that the ground posse spent hours searching for, and he could fly a river drainage in ten minutes that took a dog team the better part of a day. He could look ahead of Johnson’s projected line of travel, read the terrain, and identify the bottlenecks - where the posse needed to position to cut him off.

May also became the logistical spine of the operation. He flew supplies to scattered posse parties, evacuated the wounded, and relayed information between groups separated by distances no radio of that era could bridge reliably. The manhunt could keep expanding instead of contracting every time Johnson slipped away.

Johnson Crosses the Richardson Mountains

Then Johnson made his most extraordinary move. He turned west and crossed the Richardson Mountains - the range running along the border between the Northwest Territories and the Yukon.

The Richardsons reach roughly 4,000 feet above the valley floors. They are wind-scoured and merciless in February, with passes swept by gusts that can knock a man off his feet and snow conditions that shift between hard crust and hip-deep drift within fifty yards. Experienced trappers with full dog teams treated a February crossing as a serious undertaking requiring preparation, sound weather judgment, and a fair measure of luck.

Johnson crossed them alone, on foot, carrying his entire existence on his back, almost certainly traveling in darkness to avoid being spotted from the air.

The Final Confrontation: February 17, 1932

May found Johnson’s tracks emerging from the passes on the Yukon side and heading down toward the Eagle River drainage. The posse redirected west.

On February 17, 1932, the posse caught Albert Johnson on the flat ice of the Eagle River - crossing exposed terrain with no cover and men converging from multiple directions. He turned and fought. Johnson wounded another officer before two members of the posse brought him down. He died in the snow, 48 days after Constable King had been loaded onto a sled and driven through minus-30°F temperatures to save his life.

One RCMP officer killed. Three wounded. The Richardson Mountains crossed on foot in February. And Albert Johnson never told anyone who he was.

The Identity Never Confirmed

Johnson was buried in Aklavik. In 2007, DNA analysis was performed on his exhumed remains. A comparison in 2013 suggested a possible connection to a man named Arthur Nelson from North Dakota. Nothing has been confirmed.

Whoever Albert Johnson was, wherever he came from, whatever combination of desperation, pride, and madness drove him into that remote country to live alone and fight alone and die alone - he kept it.

What the Manhunt Proved About Bush Aviation

The headlines from Eagle River went to the Mounties, as they should have. The honest assessment is that without the aircraft, Albert Johnson might have made it. He had proved he could survive in that wilderness indefinitely. The Bellanca took that option away from him.

This was the work being done by bush pilots across the Canadian and Alaskan north throughout the 1920s and 1930s - collapsing distance, making the impossible merely very hard, connecting a country to itself across spaces that had, until a few years earlier, been effectively impassable.

May continued flying and spent World War Two in training command. His experience was considered too valuable to risk in combat; instead, he helped develop the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan, which turned Canadian airfields into the training pipeline for nearly 130,000 aircrew from across the Allied nations. Wop May died in 1952 at age 56, on a hiking trail in Utah.

Dick North’s book on the Mad Trapper remains the definitive account. Canadian aviation archives hold more of May’s operational records than most researchers realize.

Key Takeaways

Albert Johnson - the Mad Trapper of Rat River - survived 48 days alone in the Arctic during the largest manhunt in Canadian history, killing one RCMP officer and wounding three others before dying on the Eagle River on February 17, 1932
Wop May was a World War One pilot who had survived being chased by the Red Baron; by 1932 he was one of Canada’s most experienced bush aviators
May flew a Bellanca Pacemaker on ski gear approximately 1,200 miles from Edmonton to Aklavik at temperatures reaching minus 45°F to support the manhunt
Aircraft fundamentally changed the operation - May could spot tracks from altitude, move supplies between posse parties, and cover in minutes terrain that took dog teams days
Johnson’s identity was never confirmed; a 2013 DNA comparison suggested a possible connection to an Arthur Nelson of North Dakota, but no formal identification has been made