Historic Photos of Alaska , livre ebook

HISTORIC PHOTOS OF
ALASKA
T EXT AND C APTIONS BY D ERMOT C OLE
In 1914, an iceberg from the Taku Glacier southeast of Juneau with a human-like shape prompted the photographer to label this image Flirting in Alaska.
HISTORIC PHOTOS OF
ALASKA
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Historic Photos of Alaska
Copyright 2008 Turner Publishing Company
All rights reserved.
This book or any part thereof may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2007938665
ISBN-13: 978-1-59652-424-8
Printed in the United States of America
08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15-0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
C ONTENTS
A CKNOWLEDGMENTS
P REFACE
T HE A LASKA P URCHASE (1867-1905)
T HE T ERRITORY OF A LASKA (1906-1919)
D REDGING T HROUGH THE D EPRESSION (1920-1940)
T HE L ONG R OAD TO S TATEHOOD (1941-1979)
N OTES ON THE P HOTOGRAPHS
It was more common in the years before World War I to see dogs pulling carts on the train tracks of the Seward Peninsula than it was to see locomotives, which were in short supply.
A CKNOWLEDGMENTS
This volume, Historic Photos of Alaska , is the result of the cooperation and efforts of many individuals, organizations, and corporations. It is with great thanks that we acknowledge the valuable contribution of the following for their generous support:
Alaska State Library
Anchorage Museum at Rasmuson Center
Library of Congress
Rasmuson Library
University of Alaska, Fairbanks
University of Alaska Anchorage Consortium Library
P REFACE
As Alaska prepares to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of its admission to the Union as the forty-ninth state, there is more than a passing interest in considering where we ve come from.
That is the purpose of this volume of historic photos of Alaska, which presents an overview of life in Alaska under the American flag. From the time of Seward s Folly to the development of a modern state providing a substantial share of the nation s oil production, Alaska has undergone a dramatic transformation.
But the wild lands, mountains, rivers, and vast expanses where moose and bears outnumber humans remain part of a timeless and spectacular landscape, where a photo from 1870 might not be all that different from 1970 except for the signs of age on the negative and the camera equipment available to the photographer.
On these pages, there are photos of Native Alaskans practicing centuries-old traditions and gold miners seeking fortunes from the earth, of military campaigns and community celebrations through the decades.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the proclamation admitting Alaska on January 3, 1959. One of the editorial writers who took note of the new state s admission into the Union in 1959 commented that Alaska is not so much in the present as in the future. It is also deeply rooted in the past.
Much has changed during the five decades of statehood. The state motto remains North to the Future, but a real understanding of what comes next must be accompanied by knowledge of what has passed.
Life in Alaska is a unique experience and these photographs, gathered from a variety of archival collections, provide a hint of contrasts and contradictions.
Alaska is more than twice the size of the next largest state, yet its population would fit snugly into the suburbs of many American cities.
The book is arranged chronologically. The first section features photos from the late 1800s until 1905. The next section takes in the years between 1906 and 1919, when the drive for self-government began. Part three deals with the era between the world wars and the final section features the military and construction booms that created the foundation of modern Alaska.
In each section we attempt to show not only how people made a living, but what they did for recreation and how they interacted with the land and wildlife. This volume contains images of some of the most scenic areas in the world, as well as striking photos of people who mastered the art of living with a harsh climate and adapting to conditions that others would have found intolerable.
Even today, with satellite television, shopping malls, and the latest in technology available to the residents of Anchorage or Fairbanks-influences that are making parts of the state more and more like the rest of the country-the wilderness is right next door. For many people in the forty-ninth state, that s what makes all the difference.

The immensity of Alaska is difficult to grasp. This 1897 map shows its size in relation to the states of Washington, Oregon, and California.
T HE A LASKA P URCHASE
(1867-1905)
In 1867, Secretary of State William H. Seward and Russian representative Baron Eduard de Stoeckel worked out one of the great real estate deals of all time-great for the United States. The treaty to purchase the Russian lands on the North American continent for $7.2 million in gold won approval from the U.S. Senate in short order.
The United States took formal possession of what was to be known as Alaska on October 18, 1867, a land with about 30,000 Eskimo, Indian, and Aleut residents spread across a vast area twice the size of Texas.
The sale meant little to the aboriginal residents of Alaska, who had not been asked or informed about the transfer from Russia to the U.S. In the Interior of Alaska there was no official government presence for many years and the Alaska Natives mostly ruled themselves with customs and traditions that had evolved over centuries.
The American flag was raised at Sitka in 1867, but development was slow to arrive in the northland. It took seventeen years for the military government to be replaced with a bare-bones civilian government. In 1884, Congress called for a court system in Alaska and a governor, who would operate as much as possible under the laws of Oregon.
In 1896, rapid change began to arrive because gold was discovered in Canada s Yukon Territory. Tens of thousands of people started out for the Klondike in the latter years of the nineteenth century, many of them arriving on ships that unloaded at Skagway, for the journey over the Chilkoot Trail. Mining meant money and suddenly the United States began to pay attention to its farthest-north possession.
Most of the sojourners never made it to the Klondike or Alaska, but the Dawson gold strike was followed in rapid order by gold finds at Nome in 1899 and in Fairbanks in 1902. Traditional miners meetings, which had served as the law of the land in the Western states, were held in the new Alaska mining towns, followed by more formal government structures.
The population of Alaska doubled between 1890 and 1900, pushing toward 65,000 and higher. The gold rush era was on and Alaska would never be the same.
In the first complete history of early Alaska, historian Hubert Howe Bancroft summed up the controversy about the purchase. Writing in 1886, he said, experience has proved that the territory was well worth the sum paid for it, though at first it was believed to be almost valueless.

After the purchase of Alaska, the fledgling American presence took shape around this complex of Russian-built structures in Sitka, with the customs house at left, a barracks at right and Baranov s Castle on the hilltop, former home of the governor of Russian America, which was destroyed by fire in 1894, about a decade after this photograph was taken.

The Tlingit and Haida peoples of southeast Alaska carved totem poles from spruce or cedar, often to tell the tale of an important event or to honor an individual. This art form was much in evidence in 1887 when this image was photographed.

Gold and salmon attracted settlers to Ketchikan, where the lack of level ground led to crowded conditions along the waterfront. Boardwalks connected houses and businesses around the turn of the century.

Wooden guardians at the grave of a shaman in Chilkat, placed there by Tlingit Indians who believed the images protected the remains of the shaman and his possessions from evil spirits.

Passengers from the S.S. Topeka , traveling the protected waters of the Inside Passage in 1895, go ashore near the Muir Glacier for a sightseeing excursion in what is today part of Glacier Bay National Monument. The naturalist John Muir had explored the area less than twenty years earlier, writing of a solitude of ice and snow and newborn rocks, dim, dreary, mysterious.

Fire was a constant threat in every part of Alaska, especially when stoves crackled to fend off winter s chill. Hose Company No. 1 of the Juneau fire brigade stands ready to roll in the 1890s, before anyone had heard of a fire truck.

Stampeders-gold-seekers stampeding to the newly discovered gold fields-search for the dead after an avalanche on Palm Sunday in 1898 that claimed the lives of men struggling to reach the Klondike Gold Rush over Chilkoot Pass. Over the course of two days, as many as seventy people died in a series of avalanches.

Dyea, at the foot of Chilkoot Trail, was a short-lived boomtown. Thousands passed through on their way to the Klondike, but even the most gold-hungry paused on July 4, 1898, to celebrate.

The schooner Olga , which sailed far and wide along Alaska s coast, tows a small dinghy during the 1898 Edwin F. Glenn Army Expedition to Cook Inlet. The Glenn Highway is named for him.

Circle City, on the Yukon River, was said to be the largest log-cabin town in the world during the peak of its gold boom in 1896, but most of its seven hundred residents left upon hearing the electrifying news that gold was discovered across the border in the Klondike, touching off a stampede that grabbed headlines