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Chapter VI
Wrangell, Petersburg and Juneau

During the night we had passed through Clarence and Stikine Straits, and shortly after eight in a morning of wet mist the ship slipped in to the little wharf of Wrangell. Its houses, like those of all coast towns, cling to the mountains as though seeking protection from the surrounding solitude. Tiny patches of grass gleamed emerald between the dark spruce, and scarf-like wisps of mist twisted up among the rocks of the craggy shores and inlets.

Wrangell was named after one of the Russian Governors of Alaska, Baron Von Wrangell, who had established a fort on the island, Fort Dionysius, against the threat of British rivalry. In 1833, Hudson’s Bay Company, hoping to share the rich fur trade of the region, planned a settlement on the Stikine River but they encountered unfriendliness from the local Indians, the Stikine tribe, who, while tolerant of the Russians, refused to trade with more newcomers.

In the previous century the Tsimpshean Indians of the Nass River had made war on the Ban-yaa-yi or Stikine tribe of the Thlinget nation. The rich and powerful Stikine were victorious, and among the reparations they exacted from the Tsimpsheans was the name of their Chief, W Shakes, or Shakes as it became known to the white men.

Thus began a succession of Chiefs named Shakes, the seventh and the last dying in 1944. In 1834, under Chief Shakes IV, the Stikines left their village of Kotalit-an, and settled on the island eighteen miles south beside the Russian fort. These Stikines themselves had a lucrative part in the fur trade, acting as ‘middlemen’ between the Rahitan Indians of the interior at the head of the river, and those along the coast. Going up the river, the fastest navigable in the North, in their dugout canoes, they met the Tahitans halfway, bartered with them for their furs, and selling them subsequently at a good profit to the tribes on the coast.

It was not till 1840 that the British negotiated with their most famous Chief, Shakes V, for a trade route on the river when they took over the fort under an agreement with the Russians by which the coastline from Cape Spencer to Portland Canal was leased to them for an annual rent of two thousand land otter skins and an agreed amount of meat and grain.

This same Shakes V was still Chief when, in 1867 America bought Alaska from the Russians and the fort, occupied by American soldiers became known as Fort Wrangell. Shakes V resisted attempts by early American missionaries to change the religion and morals of his people.

“I don’t care if I got to hell.” he told one of them. “All my people are there!”

Gold was discovered in the Cassier district north of the River in 1872, and Wrangell became, for a brief time a tent city of five thousand. During two years more than two million dollars worth of gold was obtained. Then the gold rush ended. In 1898 the Stikhine River became one of the routes to the Klondike.

Gold, furs and fish! Wrangell boasted all these commodities and during the recent World War, it had become a way through which, up the Stikine River to Telegraph Creek by river boat, from there overland to Dease Lake and the Liard River, materials were transported for the construction of the big airfield at Watson Lake, an important link in the vital air route between the States and the Arctic.

On the starboard side of the lower deck the Chief Engineer was catching flounders with almost monotonous regularity. I asked him if there was time to go ashore, “Why not?” he replied, pulling in another fish.

Crossing the dripping wharf I peered through the window of a curio store filled with ivory, baskets and fringed caribou jackets. A blackened rhinoceros-like horn lay in one corner. I wondered how many ages ago its owner had walked about and by what strange fate it had survived to rest here beneath the gaze of tourists, a clumsy relic among the nugget brooches and souvenir silver. I longed to get inside to stroke the Polar bear skins bunched like wool skeins at the back of the store and search among the creamy lumps of ivory but no one came, the door remained tantalizingly locked and in the dripping stillness Wrangell seemed wrapped in profound sleep. A whisper of gold, the rumour of war, and once again this little settlement might wake into hectic, chequered life but when an hour later it was slipping behind us across the green water it remained for me an early morning vision, framed in mist draped rocks.

Some while later we entered Wrangell Narrows, a passage winding for twenty miles between the islands of Kupreanof and Mitkof, and for another two hours we crept between buoys and beacons marking a channel so narrow that in places one could reach out to touch the markers or toss a stone on the shore. Approaching a wider bend, we stopped to let through a south bound freighter, the “Sailor’s Splice” out of Los Angeles, recently in the news because of a strike, which at a northern port had held up the discharging of her cargo until the townsfolk, tired of waiting for their supplies, had taken over the situation and unloaded her themselves!

After a morning of sparkling sunlight, the North stabbed like ice, piercing furs and wool like paper. Already the scrub was turning rosy and yellow beneath tasseled ranks of Sitka Spruce lining the low, rocky shores. On the far brink of sunny inlets flocks of gulls floated, petal-like on the marble green water.

We passed a clearing where the light-keeper who lived alone in a cabin the year around stood waving from his doorway. The Purser told us he never failed in this greeting to passing ships – summer or winter, whatever the hour, and at night, he would swing a lantern from his lighted door.

At the northern end of the Narrows, Petersburg, founded when Russia dominated Alaska, lies along a low shore, successive ranges of hills rising behind it to distant, snow tipped peaks. With a population of some four thousand, mostly Norwegian, it is today, per capita, the richest city in North America, its wealth due to fur trapping and fishing.

Clustered about the tiny church, crowning it like the ornament on a wedding cake, the little white town glistened as though cut from sugar, the anchored fleet of boats like mirrored birds. A tiny ice flow drifted past, an aquamarine nugget with a gull riding on its point. The channel widened, and more ice chips floated distantly like spilt feathers.

By midday we were passing up the broad waters of Frederick Sound, the mountains on the International Boundary Line lifting to the northeast. The moving light shone on a vast glacier far among the peaks astern, tracing a rainbow on mist shrouded near shores, and revealing momentarily a scarlet blaze of distant rock.

We drifted on up a succession of wide, islanded bays and mountains stippled with snow; sunlight weaving an endlessly changing pattern on sky and water. Dreamlike they vanished as grey curtains of rain cloud swept from the outer islands, parting again beyond our bow to water with the iridescence of shell.

Near me a large man in tweeds slumped in an armchair was pawing over a magazine article entitled “If I were seventeen”, embellished with pictures of a girl in a flounced blouse. Behind him at the writing table a small, grey-haired man wearing a roomy cap, was methodically writing postcards, rising at times to prowl the deck and peer through binoculars for whales.

The afternoon had deepened to a grey chill when, going to my cabin at about five o’clock, a glance through the porthole opposite the purser’s office framed the immensity of Taku Glacier flung quilt-like above. Seamed and creased with intense jade where the light rested in its jagged pinnacles, for half an hour it hung glittering above us, freezing the air. We passed two tiny islets shaped like a pair of brown moccasins, the water about them flecked with ice flows, chips of crystal green from the towering ice fields above.

An hour later we were passing up Gastineau Channel beneath the buildings of the Alaska-Juneau Gold Mine on the side of Mountain Roberts. This mine, burrowing 10 miles into the mountains, with its daily capacity of some twelve tonnes of ore had been the largest gold quartz mill in the US, employing nearly one thousand workers.

We anchored at Juneau and as we should be here until morning, we could go ashore. Originally named Harrisburg, it later became Juneau after Captain Joe Juneau who had prospected the site for gold in 1880. It became the capital in 1900.

In the late 17th century the Russians had visited the country, trapping and fur trading – with a highly lucrative trade in furs with China and Japan – and a hundred years later when Captain Cook pressed north towards the Aleutians and Kamchatka in the course of his search for a northwest passage, he found they had subdued most of the northern tribes of coast Indians. Sitka became the first seat of government in 1806. From then until 1867, when the US bought Alaska, the country was virtually under Russian domination, but although the Russians obtained vast wealth in furs, they did nothing to develop the country. Until now the price paid for Alaska by the United States has been recorded as $7,200,000, but the following article recently published is as follows.

“History records that the US paid Russia $7,200,000 for Alaska – a ridiculously small sum for this vast, rich land. It may be, however that the price was much smaller, for the memoirs of Franklin K Lane, Secretary of the Interior under Woodrow Wilson contain an interesting disclosure. In 1911 Lane writes, he dined with Charles Glover, President of the Riggs National Bank. During the conversation, Glover told him the following story: When he was a boy working in the bank, Glover was handed two warrants upon the US Treasury – one of $1,400,000 and the other for $5,800,000 and was told to put them in the safe. Later those warrants were delivered as payments for Alaska. Glover wondered for years why, two warrants had been issued. And later Senator Dawes explained. Before the Civil War, negotiations for the transfer of Alaska had carried on and the price of $1,400,000 was agreed upon. During the War the matter lay dormant. Meanwhile Great Britain and France were carrying on negotiations for the recognition of the southern states and ignoring the Union Blockade. Tzarist Russia proved to be the only world power on whose friendship the Union could rely. Secretary of State Seward persuaded Russia to mass her ships on both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts as a demonstration of friendship, with the understanding that the cost would be met by the US from contingent funds.

Then came the end of the world, the assassination of Lincoln and a change of administration. It was no longer possible to make a secret payment to Russia as a War expenditure but a way was found. When Seward finally secured the purchase of Alaska, two warrants were issued under the guise of payment. The larger was actually a reimbursement for Russia’s expenditures on behalf of the Union. If this story is true, then the United States purchased this fabulously rich territory for less that one fifth of the sum recorded in history.”
(Note. “Alaska Sportsman, April, 1948”)

After dinner, I was invited by a friendly American and her friend to join them and their two daughters when they went ashore. On the wharf we were met by another friend who took us off up a narrow winding street to the Museum, housed in an imposing building on one of the steep sides towering above the town. From here it was like looking down into a deep box.

We took a lift to the first floor, and as the doors parted, it was as though we stepped from the wet velvet of the night into the full blaze of northern sunlight. The artist, Sidney Lauvernier, had lived and worked in Alaska as a railroad labourer, prospector and gold-miner for twenty years and had so captured the essence of the land that his pictures are strangely alive. Later that evening in the Baranof Hotel I saw several others – one of them an Indian, kneeling in the green dusk before a small, sacred flame, which lit the darkness of the room in which it hung. This portrayal of one of the world’s great mountains held all the untamed beauty and colour of the North, the breath of far off snows and sense of iced stillness.

The museum itself was entrancing, and its Eskimo collection was reputed to be the finest and most complete in existence. There were exquisitely patterned baskets of the coast Indians, some so fine in weave they looked like petit point work, fashioned from cedar root and grasses, dyed in soft colours, also Eskimo ivories, tiny, finely carved fish and animals delicate etchings, an entire scene of whale fighting or seal hunting traced on a tusk of seal or walrus. I saw the perfection of fossilized leaf and shell, the dark imprint of needles immortalized in grey rock, a tiny fish, eternally swimming in stone. And gold! Veins glistened in the natural ore, in nuggets or dust. There were lumps of jade, asbestos and coal, silver, copper and agate. It was a veritable Aladdin’s treasure! And Eskimo knives and fish hooks - no two carved alike. I saw flat soapstone lamps, shallow and rugged which once held a little flame in the long darkness of a forgotten night, kayaks and carved paddles and embroidered parkas, their furs set in elaborate patterns - the expression of simple people, in intrinsic design, colour or beauty of form.

“No one here takes any notice of rain” our guide responded as we returned outside. “It’s just a sort of liquid sunshine!”

Placidly she plodded beside us down the hill between the black, gleaming puddles, a thin scarf tied over her hair, her summer dress covered by an old tweed coat. When my friend asked why she had come here, she told us that one day her daughter announced she had decided to go to Alaska, where her brother was already working. And, on a sudden impulse she also thought this was a good idea so, they had left their home in Seattle within about a week and come to Juneau. That was eleven years ago and when I asked if she was happy, she replied simply that she wouldn’t live anywhere else!

We went into another curio shop where I lost my friends and so spent an entranced hour browsing over a collection of ivory.

“We shan’t get any more of his work” the proprietor said regretfully after I had chosen two miniature seals carved from a walrus ivory, cut by a wandering Eskimo artist who had stayed for a time in Juneau the previous winter on his way back from a college in the South. The same delicacy of touch distinguished all his work among a miscellaneous collection, much of it manufactured in the States and shipped North for the tourist trade, stamped ‘Made in Alaska’.

The owner of the shop held up a tiny polar bear. Barely an inch long, it expressed the sinuous quality of leashed strength, the almost visible movement of bone and sinew within the shaggy fur. An hour’s work with a knife and a bit of emery paper had sufficed for a shapeless bit of ivory to take this form under the artist’s hand, he told me. It was growing late, and he put my seals in a little box, regretting he had never been to England. His daughter had gone when she was nursing there during the War. I asked where she had been.

“Ah” pausing a moment, he looked up doubtfully. Some place he believed round about London? Regretfully we said goodnight and as I turned to close the door, I realized travel does indeed broaden the mind. Until this evening Juneau had held for me the same significance that London had for him!

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