A Murder, 135 Years Old

Ten years. Yes, for ten years I have traveled to archives from coast to coast, spent hours squinting at microfilm, and ruminated over the many ways the 1886 murder of Benjamin McIntyre conveys the history of Gilded Age Alaska. I wrote the story below 6 years ago; it was published then in the ADN. Since then, I’ve discovered Ivan Petroff sent his investigation of the murder to MD Ball, District Attorney for Alaska. If this record still exists it is in College Park, MD. The search continues.

Photo Album Provides Glimpse at 130 Year Old Murder

“Oh, I do have an old family album I should send up sometime,” the woman said on the other end of the phone. “It’s beaten to shreds. I don’t know who anyone is, but they must be family, otherwise why would we have kept it? Most of the pictures were taken in San Francisco, and some of the people look like Kodiak Natives. Maybe you want it at the museum?”

The package arrived in Kodiak a few weeks later. As I cut through the bubble wrap encasing the album, I hoped to see images of Kodiak people from the turn of the twentieth century. The album was old. Once it had been made of velvet, but only bits of the softness remained. Each album page fit two portraits; all the portraits were posed. None of the faces were familiar.

But then I saw him, the one with the quizzical left eyebrow, the round ear, the ample beard, and spit-curls. It was Ivan Petroff, that devil of a historian himself.

I continued flipping through the album and gave a shriek at the face that looked up at me. It was Benjamin McIntyre, manager of the Alaska Commercial Company’s Kodiak District. Benjamin McIntyre: murdered at his dining room table nearly 130 years ago. This album not only dated to the 1880s, it contained within it two individuals who had last been together in real life on November 1, 1886, when Petroff sat to McIntyre’s left hand side as a dinner guest and, consequently, a witness to his murder.

McIntyre’s murder reads like a real-life, Alaska history version of Clue - complete with a counterfeiter, a businessman, a soldier, a missionary and an explorer. An investigation into the witnesses, the victim, and the perpetrator exposes both the details of this gruesome deed and a look into Alaska when it was still barely American. Could this album provide new clues into a century-old mystery?

Petroff felt that McIntyre’s murder was pre-destined.  Or, at least that he knew that Peter Anderson would cause him great suffering. “I must get to the house as soon as possible and take some quinine,” McIntyre purportedly remarked when he first saw Anderson’s sloop sail in to the village. Petroff later interpreted McIntyre’s nausea upon meeting his future killer as evidence of a sixth sense, a hunch that he should have trusted.

Right from the start, Petroff figured that Anderson was a good for nothing opium smuggler. The fact that he let company traps rust in the field and mistreated his dogs further indicated that this Russian immigrant with “a red, coarse face almost hidden in beard” and “an herculean body” was most certainly a low-life.

But Petroff wasn’t the most honest of men, either. In 1886, Petroff was customs collector in Kodiak. He claimed to have first come to Alaska in service of the Russian-American Company. This claim, like much of what Petroff said of his life, does not bare scrutiny. Furthermore, the only reason that historians have even looked closely at his biography is due to the irrefutable fact that Petroff was a first-rate counterfeiter. He was a storyteller with the visage of a bureaucrat, a skillful elaborator who fudged translations and embellished known facts with invented details. He also was responsible for the first census of Alaska in 1880, wrote portions of the oft-cited history text, Hubert Howe Bancroft’s The History of Alaska, and was considered a major authority on the north.

But that evening, he was just a dinner guest, interrupted from playing with the dessert crumbs on his plate by a bang overhead. Petroff thought a lamp had exploded, but once he looked around, he saw that buckshot had shattered the window as it passed from outside the house and into the skull of the unfortunate McIntyre. He watched as blood poured from McIntyre’s mouth, even though his fork was positioned to put dessert in it.

Benjamin Woche faired much worse than Petroff. The station agent for AC’s Kaguyak store was sitting opposite to McIntyre and sustained bullet wounds to the face. He only survived because McIntyre’s head bore the brunt of the spray. Woche was in Kodiak merely to receive orders for the approaching winter. You see, McIntyre was to sail the next day to San Francisco and from there on home to Vermont, not to return to Kodiak until the following spring. This last meal was McIntyre’s send-off party.

Later in life, Woche seemed ill-disposed towards leaving the small village of Kaguyak. In fact, he seemed ill-disposed towards much at all beyond complaining, especially about his wife and the poor pay he received from AC after decades of service. He was familiar with San Francisco, having enlisted in the Army at Alcatraz in 1867. He set sail with the Second Artillery’s Battery G to establish Fort Kodiak within what had been recently known as Russian America. His orders: to protect Kodiak Natives from the ravages of the new American wealth seekers and potential aggression from the Danaina or Chugach Alutiiq. Subtext: treat this new American department as Indian Country.

Woche and his Army colleagues encountered a Creole village where one of the greatest dangers was illness, although one unfortunate recruit ‘’burned to death on Wood Island,” according to his grave marker. After two years, Fort Kodiak was decommissioned, and the personnel shipped back to San Francisco. But Woche stayed behind, having married the fetching Alexandra Larionova. He started working for Hutchinson Kohl and Co., which soon later became the AC, and was sent to manage the trading post on the south end of the island.

But now that he was injured by the assassin’s bullet, he would not be heading back to Kaguyak. The closest doctor was in San Francisco. Twelve days at sea is what Woche had to endure with a buckshot splintered jaw. He was given the stateroom in which McIntyre usually travelled. His former employer was stored with the rest of the schooner Kodiak’s cargo, in the hold. A letter that Petroff had recently penned to his daughter was stored aboard, as well. Within it he prophesized, “It will be awfully lonesome here this winter- so many people have gone away for the winter.”

In addition to the letter and funerary load, other provisions for the trip included cans of fruit, bacon and 168 pounds of ‘’fresh beef,” according to the store’s register for the day. The fact that McIntyre traveled in the hold instead of in the stateroom might have been partially attributed to that very beef. In an oral history of Spridon Stepanoff, later described by anthropologist Patricia Partnow, Stepanoff told the story of “Macintine,” the American that was killed at his dinner table. According to Stepanoff, earlier on the day of his death, Macintine butchered a cow. He was from Vermont--- bovine country, indeed--- and likely intended to sell the beef in the store and feast on it during the trip to San Francisco. After the butchering commenced, Anderson asked Macintine for some of the meat. Macintine scoffed at this request, “You! You aren’t a working man!” denying Anderson the meal.  

After outfitting Anderson for several hunting trips and getting few pelts in return, McIntyre had offered Anderson a job working in the warehouse to pay back the money he owed for the hunting provisions. Anderson had refused the work. McIntyre seemed ill-inclined to feed the man who already owed the store money. Perhaps it was the refused beef that drove Anderson over the edge. Or, the fact that without money and without the opportunity for more store credit, he was in a desperate situation. Perhaps Anderson thought a change in management was in order.

Heyward Seton-Karr was relieved when the Kodiak arrived to the village. He’d sketched the wharf, the picturesque Russian Orthodox Church, the old warehouse in which furs, liquor, sugar and tobacco were kept, sketches that today are held at the Alaska Historical Library in Juneau. He was ready to return to the continental US and from there, to his British homeland. Alaska had been quite the adventure. He had come to scale Mt. Saint Elias, and his failure did not prevent him for publishing his travel journal, Shores and Alps of Alaska. He found Kodiak a “comparatively civilised place” and his host, McIntyre, “exceedingly popular with everyone.”

Reverend W.E. Roscoe rushed to the company house. He entered to watch as the witnesses lowered McIntyre to the ground and Seton-Karr treating Woche’s jaw. Roscoe administered the last rights according to his Baptist training. Kodiak had presented a challenge for the Roscoe family since arriving just a few months before. They were the first Protestant missionaries in the solidly Orthodox community. Rev. Sheldon Jackson had dispatched Roscoe, his wife Ida, and their baby boy to Kodiak with instruction to start a school. It was the first American school in Kodiak. Mr. McIntyre had been very helpful, letting the fledgling institution occupy an unused company building. The school opened just a few weeks before, with Petroff serving as translator, since the children did not speak much English and the teacher did not speak Russian or Alutiiq.

After administering the rights, Roscoe and Petroff joined the manhunt. There was but one suspect, Anderson. They found his skiff on shore and rowed to his sloop. It was empty of its owner. Yet, on board was a line of powder that connected a lit lamp to containers of gunpowder. It seemed as though Anderson intended to blow up his vessel, but the lamp never sparked the ignition. For what purpose he would demolish his own craft was not known. In another version of the Alutiiq story of Macintine, Anderson was a hired henchman. Perhaps he planned to start a blaze on his boat in order to catch fire to the schooner Kodiak, moored close by.

Petroff and Roscoe ran to the house of the woman with who Anderson stayed and she claimed to have not seen him. However, a villager had seen him lurking in the alley behind McIntyre’s house soon before the murder. In desperation, Roscoe offered a monetary reward for information on the suspect’s whereabouts. A boy pointed towards Pillar Mountain, pocketing the money. Later, another claimed to see him through his spyglass. Roscoe wrote, “We have searched every hiding place in town and have searched the adjacent country as well as possible without success… As there is no boat or bidarka missing, the man has not left the island.” What became of Anderson is unknown. One legend is that he was but a spirit to begin with. When he passed by, no one could see him or sense his presence. He seemed to evaporate into Kodiak’s winter.

McIntyre’s body was loaded on the Kodiak. It left the next day, as scheduled. Accompanying the body was a letter to the directors of the Alaska Commercial Company from HP Cope, informing them of McIntyre’s violent end. In 1886, Cope was a storekeeper, but he was also Kodiak’s first postmaster. The ink in his letter is splotched, either from a poor performing writing instrument or tears. “The whole town are very much shocked,” he wrote, “and I think I can say that Mr. McIntyre had the respect of all who knew him both Americans and natives.”

It is unlikely that anyone in Kodiak knew that November 1 was the Day of the Dead. Yet la calavera--- the skeleton of Mexican satire and merry making--- was to make an appearance in Kodiak. Skeletal remains were found some thirty years later, overlooking the town of Kodiak. The rusted shotgun clutched in the bony hand contained shells that matched those collected from the dining room floor. Many presumed it was Peter Anderson and that he had died by his own hand. However, in Cope’s letter to AC’s directors, he asserted that, “It is my opinion that we shall not see Peter Anderson alive.” Moreover, soon after the Kodiak arrived in San Francisco, Emma Petroff wrote a worried letter to her husband. She said that a ship had been dispatched north to aid in the manhunt, but, “If the man is found we do not think he will ever get here, or to Sitka alive- because the ‘Co’ will avoid having a trial if they possibly can.”  Could Anderson have been apprehended and killed by vigilantes?

More pressing to the present moment- could the curly haired woman with large eyes, in the portrait slot to the left of Petroff, be his dear wife Emma? Could perhaps these other unknown faces be other witnesses- Woche, Seton-Karr, Roscoe, villagers who searched for Anderson or stayed put in their homes, sensing it was none of their business?

Here, within this photo album could be the very individuals who I know so well by name and by deed, but not at all by face or by voice. This type of taunting is typical for historians of Alaska. For us, the mysteries are rarely ever truly solved.

Introducing Juneau's Climate Change Solutionists

We have solutions. We are the solution. Learn about the ten featured solutions and solutionists here.

For at least 10,000 years the people of Juneau have cared for this land and environment. This is evident from millennia of Tlingit stewardship to the community values expressed through the Juneau Renewable Energy Strategy and Juneau Climate Action and Implementation Plan. Now, as global climate change warms our ocean, threatens our native plants and animals, changes our weather patterns, and threatens our environment and ways of living, Juneau people recognize that we are both part of this global problem and we are part of the global solution.

The Juneau Renewable Energy Strategy asserts Juneau will be powered by 80% renewable energy by 2045. Juneau’s Climate Change Solutionists show us that we can achieve this goal and suggests practical ways that each person in Juneau can contribute to reducing our community’s greenhouse gas emissions.

The solutions featured here come from Project Drawdown, an international effort that quantifies the eighty most effective solutions for reversing global warming. These eighty solutions exist today; they are not fantasy or still under development. Here you’ll find ten of these solutions that “drawdown” global greenhouse gas emissions and ten Juneauites who embody these solutions.

How we power our lives now impacts our ability to sustain a habitable planet in the future. As of 2010, only 20% of Juneau’s energy came from renewable sources. Although our hydro-powered electricity originates from a renewable source, 4/5ths of our energy derives from the fossil fuels we use to heat buildings, fuel all kinds of vehicles, and power daily activities. Juneau needs to electrify as much as it can, and now.

How we care for the land matters a great deal, as well. We also must preserve the ability of our land to process and store carbon. Juneau sits in the middle of a temperate rain forest, surrounded by coastal wetlands and muskeg—known elsewhere as peatlands. Our natural blessings serve as global carbon sinks. These must be protected so they can continue the natural processes required to keep global heating below 1.5 degrees Celsius.

And finally, our own behaviors bear examination. We are located at the end of a shockingly long supply chain, one that in many cases originates at degraded lands. Until that supply chain is electrified and the degradation of those lands abates, our choice in food and our waste management responsibilities carry a carbon weight greater than our biome can take.

Acknowledgements

This project was funded by a Covid-19 Juneau ArtWorks grants. Thanks to project collaborators, Christine Carpenter and Brian Wallace, all the featured solutionists, Stuart Cohen for the initial idea and encouragement, and the Juneau Commission on Sustainability, Renewable Juneau, and Interfaith Power and Light.

Unions Replaced Labor Contractors in Salmon Industry, but Problems Persisted

Last month’s column described how salmon canners outsourced the recruiting and managing of cannery workers to labor contractors, the earliest of whom were Chinese. Unions came to replace the labor contracting system during the Great Depression, a time when wages for low-skilled cannery workers fell 40%.

Asian-Americans eager to procure labor contracts for themselves organized ethnicity-based groups for negotiating with contractors and canneries. Chinese, Japanese, and Filipinos each had their own organizations. In 1933, Filipino workers in Seattle joined the American Federation of Labor’s Cannery Workers and Farm Laborers Union (CWFU) Local 18257. This was a Filipino-only union, dedicated to advancing the needs of the Seattle Filipino community.

Initially, this early union was not much different from the other ethnicity- based workers’ organizations that came before it. Yet change was afoot. The labor contracting system’s unsavory reputation forced canning companies like the Alaska Packers Association to move away from contractors. The press publicized instances of egregious abuse. This helped the CWFU gain membership. But it was the murder of CWFU organizers Virgil Dunyungan and Aurelio Simon in Seattle in 1936 that convinced many laborers to abscond from the contracting system, since people believed that corrupt labor contractors had ordered the murders.

Unions then replaced labor contractors. In 1937, CWFU affiliated with the CIO and became Local 37 of the United Cannery, Agricultural and Packinghouse and Allied Workers of America. This affiliation brought into one union all of the separate ethnic groups that had previously attempted to negotiate with contractors and canneries. Henceforth, many canneries accessed employees through Local 37 instead of through labor contractors.

There were several marked improvements that came with union membership. Workers had written contracts with the union, while with labor contractors these agreements were frequently just verbal. The contracts specified working conditions and wages. Moreover, employees were paid by the cannery, not the intermediary contractor. In 1932, common cannery laborers received $25 to $50 per month. In 1939, after the unionization of cannery workers, laborers received $80 to $100 per month. It is worth noting that this increase wasn’t due only to better negotiated contracts, but also due to New Deal legislation which mandated an increase in workers’ wages.

Unions made serious strides to improving worker safety and pay. Nonetheless, the industry remained segregated and the purview of Local 37 never extended beyond the realm on the Chinese cannery workers in the previous century. The “China boss” who had been responsible for keeping cannery workers in line during the era of labor contractors became the “Filipino foreman,” responsible for managing the Asian American canning crew. Canneries continued to be segregated spaces, dispatching continued to be rife with corruption, and gangs took over the gambling rackets that the contractors had previously managed.

Young union members formed the Alaska Cannery Workers Association. In the early 1970s, the ACWA lodged grievances against Local 37 and the canned salmon industry. The organization charged that non-whites were “channeled into the lowest paying, least skilled job categories,” that there was a lower pay scale for minority employees who performed the same work as whites, and that there were very few promotional opportunities for non-whites. Additionally, the ACWA noted the segregated housing and messing facilities, company policies that prevented white and non-white employees from socializing, and “the permissive attitude of union officials in allowing the companies to abuse the rights of the workers.”

The Civil Rights movement was about to come to the salmon industry.  Stay tuned for next month’s column, which details the work of young Asian-American cannery workers to desegregate Alaska’s salmon canneries.   

For more information, and to find quality primary sources on Local 37, visit the Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project.

Chinese Labor Contractors and the Early Salmon Canning Industry

The first Asian American cannery workers entered the salmon industry in 1870 at George Hume’s cannery on the Washington side of the Columbia River. This was just six years after the Hume family founded the canned salmon industry. That year, Hume hired fifteen Chinese men to work in his cannery. By 1874, only one of the thirteen canneries along the Columbia River had anything but an entirely Chinese crew.  Chinese cannery workers travelled to Alaska in 1878 to help establish the first canneries at Klawock and Sitka.

As early as 1875 canners came to rely on Chinese labor contractors to provide nearly all the “inside” labor for the processing operation. Contractors were responsible for all aspects of managing the cannery crew, from recruiting, to overseeing work and production in the fish house, to feeding the employees and paying them at the end of the season.

Labor contracting provided a means for Asian immigrants to get work. For the contractors, it was a way to become wealthy. For example, when labor contractor Goon Dip died in 1933, he was president or on the board of directors of four different businesses, owned shares in mines, and was the Chinese consul in Seattle. Goon Dip Mountain and Goon Dip River on the west coast of Chichagof Island in Southeast Alaska are both named for this high profile Chinese labor contractor.

Early on, cannery work wasn’t necessarily low-skilled, since it required finesse and practice to efficiently butcher fish, make cans by hand, and test cans to ensure they were properly sealed.  There wasn’t much incentive for canners to invest in new machines or dedicate resources to inventing labor-saving technologies when the canneries only produced canned salmon for a short portion of the year. Much-touted innovations in the canning industry, like Edmund Smith’s “iron chink,” were not invented until decades after the establishment of the canned salmon industry. This can partially be attributed to the fact that canners had little incentive to mechanize since Chinese labor contractors provided an inexpensive, steady, and flexible migrant labor force.

As canners adopted new technologies, Chinese cannery hands weren’t eager to abandon their skilled positions for what had become factory work. Chinese labor contractors sent inexperienced hands, often newer immigrants from Japan or the Philippines, to canneries that used new technologies so that the Chinese could cling to positions that were treated more as trades. This dictated the ethnic composition of canneries and the communities nearby. But as mechanization increased, Asian American workers were stuck in the same places within the cannery as the Chinese tinsmiths who had come before, even as the work had become increasingly lower-skilled. Machines changed, but the purview of the labor contractors and their employees within the cannery did not.

Labor contracting impacted the invention and adoption of new technologies and what ethnic groups worked at which canneries. The very landscape of the cannery was also shaped to accommodate the segregated work force. This was especially true in Alaska, where canneries had to provide bunkhouses and messing quarters for workers, since the plants were rarely established within or near an established settlement. The architecture of segregation was evident in salmon canneries across Alaska. Ethnicities were segregated into different bunkhouses, mess halls, and bath houses, in addition to the segregated work assignments that developed, partially due to the labor recruiting channels adopted by the industry.

There were nefarious aspects of labor contracting. Some workers were never paid at the end of the season. Others left Alaska in debt to the contractor due to losing their earnings in contractor-run gambling rackets. Cannery workers were forced to purchase unnecessary goods, like fine suits at elevated prices from the contractors. Moreover, the only work that was made available for the Asian American cannery hands was in the fish house. Fishing jobs, mechanic work, and beach gang employment was reserved for whites, and to a lesser extent, Alaska Natives.

Journalists in the 1920s drew attention to the cramped and filthy quarters provided to the minority crews on the ships that carried the workers to and from Alaska each year and other shadows inherent within the contracting system. Cannery workers and others filed a lawsuit against a San Francisco labor contractor, Mayer and Young, during which the workers’ attorney asserted that the contractors were responsible for “the worst case of slavery since the Civil War.” The tarnished public image of labor contracting, paired with the Great Depression and the ascent of cannery unions, spelled the end to labor contracting within the salmon canning industry.

Salmon Shadows: Art to Inspire Critical Conversations about Alaska’s Salmon System

CALL FOR ART AND WRITING

Deadline: March 15, 2018 for show traveling in May of 2018

About Salmon Shadows

The Alaska Salmon Fellows, Alaska Humanities Forum, and Island Institute welcome artists and writers to contribute to Salmon Shadows, an experimental public arts and humanities project.  The project challenges Alaskans and others engaged in the salmon system to consider how we’ve developed our collective salmon narratives, what these narratives obscure, and how we can bring these shadows into the light.

The aim of this project is to engage with issues of sustainability and equity in Alaska’s salmon systems, creating a more nuanced understanding of how humans and salmon interact. Salmon Shadows is a group project of the Alaska Salmon Fellows. Salmon Shadows organizers aim to amplify quieted voices, topics, and concerns when it comes to Alaska’s salmon system.

Images of the selected visual art and excerpts of selected literary submissions will travel to communities in Southeast Alaska during the Island Institute’s Tidelines journey in May of 2018. Using a light projector, the selected works will be projected in the visited communities and used to inspire and direct community conversations about sustainability and equity in Alaska’s salmon systems. Please note that the original artworks will not travel, only digital images of the artwork. This is a pop-up, portable art show that will travel via ferry to small and large communities.

Following the Tidelines journey, selections of the artworks and literary submissions will be included in an issue of Forum, the Alaska Humanities Forum’s award winning quarterly magazine.

Rationale

Salmon are a shared value in Alaska; they swim through our ecosystems, fuel our bodies, and sustain our spirits. In a sense, salmon are a projection of Alaska’s greatest attributes: wilderness, freedom, independence, adventure, abundance, sustainability. Alaskans and others from around the world are eager to celebrate salmon abundance and Alaska’s world-class management regime.

But with each projection comes a shadow that humans are less eager to face. We Alaskans are so invested in projecting positive salmon narratives that we conveniently neglect the matching dark sides of our stories.

Submissions of art and writing may be guided by the following questions:

How wild are Alaska’s salmon?

●       One third of the “wild salmon” that hit the market are hatchery fish, reared in pens and fed fish meal until they are released to river systems where they compete with native wild salmon.

●       The “Alaskan” salmon on the plate of a consumer is frequently processed in China.

How sustainable are Alaska’s salmon fisheries? Are we in fact using the best model of management?

●       The systematic and tested observations and practices of indigenous fisheries management are given little space or credence compared with the relatively new principles of western fisheries management.

●       Commercial and subsistence king fisheries are cancelled or severely limited across the state.

●      The carbon footprint of fishing, processing, and shipping a “sustainable” product around the world, and the role of such emissions in ocean acidification and climate change, is rarely discussed.

Are Alaska’s commercial salmon fisheries equitable? Is the work environment a healthy one?

●      Salmon management and its related social and economic systems have privileged whites  and rewarded those with historic access to financing, legal services, and political power.

●       Many women in commercial fishing have experienced sexual harassment or assault.

The organizers understand that there are many other shadow sides to the salmon system that are not listed here and are open to many interpretations of the theme.

Submission Guidelines

Submit art and writing here. 

Artists and writers are invited to submit up to three original artworks or literary submissions of no more than 3000 words. All visual art must be submitted at a minimum of 300 dpi as jpgs; all literary submissions as PDFs.

Name the electronic files as follows:

A_LastName_Title

B_LastName_Title

C_LastName_Title

Visual artists need to provide a short written statement (no more than 300 words) that describes the “salmon shadow” that the work depicts.

Compensation and Use of Art

Submitted materials will be reviewed by Alaska Salmon Fellows and co-curators Ernestine Hayes, Nancy Lord and Apayo Moore. Fellows and co-curators will select visual works - representing a diversity of shadow stories - for our pop up tour and feature pieces of writing. All artists and writers who are selected to be part of the Salmon Shadows will receive a small gift of $50 as thanks for sharing their work, in addition to having their work promoted as part of the project.

Award notifications will be made by the end of April 2018.

Asian Exclusion and Spanish-American War Open Door for Filipino Processing Workers

On July 4, 1915 Filipino cannery workers at the Alaska Packers Association’s Larsen Bay salmon cannery orchestrated a parade and pageant, the likes of which the west side of Kodiak Island had never witnessed. Drummers and guitar players led the parade down the pier. Alder branches and flags were attached to fish carts, turning the carts into parade floats. Within the carts were costumed men. One was dressed as Uncle Sam, another as an American Indian. Acrobats balanced in a human pyramid while workers dressed as policemen looked on.

This day is recorded in a photograph collection at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. These are the earliest known photographs of Filipinos in Kodiak. Filipinos today are the largest minority on Kodiak Island. This remarkable photo collection provides a glimpse of how two peripheries of American imperialism—Alaska and the Philippines—came together in canneries at the turn of the 20th century, and an opportunity to trace Filipino participation in the Pacific seafood industry.

Paul Lewis and Diane Rodill pose in front of the Larsen Bay cannery on the Fourth of July, 2015. Diane's father, Denis, was one of the Alaskeros who took part in the 1915 parade and pageant. Diane and her husband, Paul, traveled to Larsen Bay in honor of the 100 year anniversary of Diane's father working in Larsen Bay. 

Filipinos have been a mainstay of the seafood industry for a century. Before that, “Manila men” were on many early Western voyages to Alaska. But it took two events to prompt Filipinos to begin working in Alaska’s seafood industry-- the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and the Spanish-American War.

With the Chinese Exclusion Act, Congress prohibited Chinese from immigrating to the US. White nativists felt Chinese workers were taking white jobs and threatening their perception of white American identity. These sentiments coincided with an economic depression and a nation-wide debate about “wage slavery” in post-emancipation America.

It also coincided with the beginning of the canned salmon industry. Chinese were skilled tinsmiths. Chinese workers did the grunt work that most white Americans avoided, such as butchering salmon and filling cans on the North Pacific’s most remote shorelines.

It was on the labor of these Chinese cannery hands that much of the Pacific salmon industry was based, but due to the Chinese Exclusion Act, there weren’t young Chinese recruits to replace the aging workforce. Japanese workers, too, became important cannery employees, but in 1907 the US and Japan ended Japanese immigration to the US.

It was at this time that the first trickle of Filipinos sailed for west coast ports. These Filipinos were American nationals, since the Philippines became a US possession following the US’s victory in the 1898 Spanish-American War. Filipinos switched from being subjects of Spanish colonization to American nationals, gaining American passports. As nationals, Filipinos could travel to the US and live and work here, but that was all. They weren’t able to vote, purchase property, marry white women, or a host of other rights associated with citizenship. But work they did, nearly exclusively in low paying jobs. Many became migrant workers, shifting from farm work to salmon work from one season to the next.

These Filipino men had received American-style educations back in the Philippines, often under the tutelage of American teachers. For many, it came as a shock that the American values they had learned about were not evident when they arrived on the continent’s shores. “America came to us with bright-winged promises of liberty, equality, fraternity. What has become of them?”  wrote Filipino immigrant Manuel Buaken.

For Filipino cannery workers, Chinese exclusion granted them the opportunity to enter the Alaska seafood industry since Chinese cannery hands became too old to continue the physically taxing work. Nonetheless, the anti-Asian rhetoric used to muster exclusionary immigration policies also worked to shut the door on Filipinos’ chances of becoming American citizens.

The Filipinos who paraded down the Larsen Bay pier on the Fourth of July in 1915 passed Alutiiq spectators. Like the Filipinos with whom they interacted in Larsen Bay, Alutiiq people, too, were subjects of American colonialism with few political rights. These Alutiiq onlookers were not granted American citizenship until 1924.

The Filipinos who worked in Larsen Bay in 1915 represent the earliest wave of Filipino immigrants to the US, following the Spanish-American War.  Perhaps the patriotic pageant that they executed on the cannery’s boardwalks was a way to prove their knowledge of American customs, history, and values and, at least for a day, take part in reenacting the American dream.

To learn more about the early history of Filipino cannery workers--- and hear from the daughter of one of the men who paraded in 1915--- visit http://kmxt.org/2014/10/way-back-in-kodiak-filipinos-in-larsen-bay-1915/.

Fishing Vessels at War: The Seafood Industry Fills Transportation Gaps in World War II

Through late May and early June of 1940, a motley fleet of 850 recreational, commercial, and fishing boats sailed from England to Dunkirk, France to evacuate 338,000 Allied troops. The “little ships of Dunkirk” had a shallow draft which allowed the vessels to get close enough to shore to retrieve troops without the use of docks. Some of these vessels ferried troops to destroyers that waited further off-shore, while others sailed troops to England. This privately owned auxiliary fleet helped salvage one of Britain’s largest-ever military defeats and saved hundreds of thousands of lives.

A year and a half later, the United States entered World War II. The military uneasily eyed the expansive, unprotected coast of Alaska and considered the logistical challenges of outfitting Alaska, still unconnected by road, for the war. The federal government assessed the “floating equipment” that was required to patrol Alaska’s coast, transport materials for the construction of military installations across the Territory, and transport troops to crew the newly-established posts. The military did not have the vessels required for the task. Similar to the nation’s British allies, the federal government turned to the private fleet to fill war-time transportation needs.

Military themes were adopted on salmon can labels. Courtesy Karen Hofstad. 

In Alaska, no other industry had the capacity to stand up to the challenge as well as the seafood industry. In 1944 alone, the federal government requisitioned 236 vessels from the seafood industry. In 1943, the commercial fishing trade journal Pacific Fisherman reported that “…military operations … have required the acquisition of a more varied fleet than has been the case elsewhere. The fishing vessels required for military service in Alaska have ranged from four-masted codfish schooners down to gillnet boats and dories, and have included cannery tenders, fish scows and pile drivers.”

Some vessels the military bought outright, while others were leased. At the time, most fishing activities centered around the salmon season, so canneries were able to earn money leasing equipment that otherwise laid idle during the rest of the year. Private fishermen, too, leased their vessels. John Molver of Petersburg made an agreement with the Assistant Secretary of Small Boat Procurement to lease his 61-foot packer/longliner Excel for $3000. The Navy painted her gray, placed a 30 caliber machine gun on her bow and a 20 millimeter anti-aircraft gun on her stern, and renamed her P-18 for the duration of her wartime service.

Some seafood industry vessels, like seiners, proved especially useful for the Pacific war effort. Seiners used in the tuna and sardine fishery were particularly prized, being lauded as “a vessel of utmost capability, while the design fits these boats admirably for use as minesweepers and similar duty. Moreover, they are capable of carrying full crews in comfortable quarters.”

Robinson Fisheries and Pacific Coast Codfish Company both had their fleets of codfish schooners requisitioned. Only one schooner continued to fish during the war, the rest of the vessels being converted into barges. The Sophie Christensen, for example, was towed to the Aleutian Islands and used to transport materials to the far-flung military outposts out west, plying the same waters that she usually sailed to fish for cod.

In many cases fishermen’s knowledge and aptitude were put to service in the military. As Pacific Fisherman opined, “Fishermen are hardy and handy, and equipped with particular skills which are in primary demand in a nation at war.”  Take fisherman Oliver Hofstad of Petersburg, who joined the Navy and was sent back to Alaska to captain the Excel, navigating in waters with which he was familiar.

The seafood industry provided other essential services to the federal government during World War II, like supplying food for the war effort. But surrendering vessels typically employed in catching, processing, and delivering fish in order to advance the Alaskan war effort certainly merits mention.

War Comes to Excursion Inlet

Alaska was a tumultuous place during the first two years of World War II. The Territory, like the rest of the nation, was caught off guard by the attacks at Pearl Harbor and the subsequent capture of Kiska and Attu. Following these attacks, there was both a scrambling and influx of people as the military embarked on the Aleutian Campaign. Alaska’s Japanese residents were sent to concentration camps down south, Unangan villagers were taken via transit ships to decaying canneries in Southeast Alaska, 150,000 troops passed through the territory, and the ground was broken on 300 or so military installations, all within those first two years.

War affected remote regions across the state, including Excursion Inlet, which is on the north shore of Icy Strait in northern Southeast Alaska. One of the military installations constructed during the Aleutian Campaign was a top secret shipment facility built right next to the cannery in Excursion Inlet. The so-called Alaska Barge Terminal was meant to ease wartime transportation issues. At the beginning of the war, there were not enough large barges or vessels to properly outfit the military installations on the Aleutian front. With the Alaska Barge Terminal, the military intended to use smaller watercraft to ship materials and people up the Inside Passage to Excursion Inlet. At the terminal, the materials would be loaded on oceangoing barges and then shipped across the Gulf of Alaska.

The military selected the land adjacent to the Astoria and Puget Sound Packing Co. cannery as the site of the trans-shipment port. This cannery, now owned by Ocean Beauty and referred to by the initials XIP, was constructed in 1908, just up the bay from another cannery that was built that very year.

The Excursion Inlet cannery during the summer of 2017.

The military commandeered a portion of the cannery’s property and started filling the tidelands in August of 1942. Over 2700 civilian contractors joined over 800 Army personnel to construct the massive facility. When it was finished, the barge terminal included housing and mess hall facilities to accommodate 260 officers and 4,400 enlisted men. A 3.4 million gallon tank farm was installed, which was intended to fuel nine ocean-going vessels, six barges, two ammunition ships, and two tankers.

Tragically, this top-of-the-line facility was under construction not far from Funter Bay, where villagers from the Pribilofs were sick, hungry, and poorly-housed in the decrepit cannery that constituted their so-called “duration camp.”

The supposed top-secret facility was not much of a secret to the fishermen and cannery workers who labored next door. The seafood industry, too, was mightily impacted by the wartime scramble. There was a shortage of shipping capacity, “floating equipment” (aka vessels), and workers during the war. The most valuable employees were granted a draft deferment, but military matters took precedence over the shipping of people, equipment and fish to and from Alaska. Hundreds of private fishing and processing vessels were requisitioned for the war effort, and this sometimes included the captain and crew. It was an ongoing struggle to procure the materials, people, and transportation required to fish and process Alaskan salmon.

Canned salmon was considered an essential item for feeding servicemen overseas and Americans on rations. In order to fish and process salmon within an active war zone, the federal government instituted a so-called Concentration Plan. With this plan, the Secretary of the Interior determined how many canning lines could be in operation in any given fishing district. “Nucleus” plants were to process the salmon for a fishing area, sharing fishing effort, shipping capacity, and employees with the neighboring plants that were put out of commission. The Concentration Plan produced the salmon pack using the least amount of employees and transportation-related resources. In Excursion Inlet, the Astoria and Puget Sound Packing Co. jointly packed their fish with the neighboring Pacific American Fisheries Plant.

In the fall of 1943, after the cannery had shipped its pack south, the frenetic energy of the trans-shipment port too had gone quiet. The US had retaken Kiska and Attu, rendering this multi-million dollar facility obsolete. It was never used; the War Department declared the 630 acre site as surplus.

In June of 1944, 700 German prisoners of war arrived at Excursion Inlet, sent to salvage the buildings and materials used for the boondoggle. In the few months they spent at the facility, they were able to salvage about twelve million board feet of lumber. Several POWs reportedly tried to escape, but soon realized that there was nowhere to go.

Excursion Inlet plant manager Tom Marshall stands within the museum that he developed on site. The sign next to him shows the cannery's owners over the years.

Tom Marshall, Excursion Inlet plant manager, created a small museum at the cannery. Within, visitors can find plats of the barge terminal, photos of the POWs, and other relics from the cannery’s past.

Yukon Fish Wheels: Adapting an Old Design for a New Era

Charlie Wright, Sr. relates the story of when the first fish wheel was constructed on the bend of the Yukon River where the village of Rampart rests, deep in Alaska’s Interior. Wright’s great grandfather, Al “Cap” Mayo, carried the spruce poles and other materials down to the shore and started assembling the contraption while villagers laughed at him. They wondered, how could that device possibly catch salmon better than the fish fences and traps that they used, or the nets that they wove from whatever materials they could gather? But once Mayo’s fish wheel started scooping salmon from the mighty river, the Koyukon Athabaskan villagers were quickly convinced of the gear’s efficiency. The Rampart region of the Yukon River became fish wheel country.

Cap Mayo might have been accustomed to making people laugh well before making that first fish wheel in the area, having spent his youth as a circus performer before heading to the North. Mayo travelled through Canada, entering Alaska territory via the Yukon River. Beginning in the 1880s, Mayo and his partners Jack McQuesten (of Yukon Jack fame) and Arthur Harper worked as fur traders, store operators, and prospectors from Tanana in Alaska’s interior to Fort Selkirk in Yukon Territory. All three men married Koyukon women. Mayo ran the trading post at Tanana beginning in 1894, with his wife Margaret (Neehunilthnoh).

Mayo, who is the namesake of the village in Yukon Territory, died in 1924, well after fish wheels had become a part of life in the Rampart region. Mayo’s great grandson Wright recalls how the sound of the fish wheel permeated his dreams as a child. “On a calm night, the big kings would be banging in the fish wheel box across the river, and they were so large that the sound would wake us up,” he remembers. A man of slight stature couldn’t help but drag the tale of those huge kings on the ground while carrying them, Wright contends, while today Wright can carry three in one hand, like one would carry silver salmon.

Every year of his youth, Wright worked with his family to harvest young spruce trees, turn them into poles, and then steam bend the poles to prepare for the construction of new fish wheels. Back then, the village didn’t have the heavy equipment required to pull the wheels from the river at the end of the season, so they often lasted just a year, providing Wright with plenty of construction practice. He remembers fish camps every ten miles along the river, full of families operating fish wheels alongside racks of scarlet-hued dried salmon.

Eventually, gillnets began to replace fish wheels as the gear of choice, and knowledge of fish wheel construction began to wane. Moreover, chinook returns became such that even subsistence fishing in the region is curtailed. Prompted both by poor chinook returns, obligations to the Pacific Salmon Treaty and Yukon River Salmon Agreement, and a desire to pass the tradition of fish wheels on to the next generation, Wright is partnering with others to resuscitate fish wheels while modifying them to fit new needs.

One of Wright's fish wheels, under construction. Photo courtesy Charlie Wright.

Wright creates “fish friendly” fish wheels, utilizing soft mesh for the baskets and adding padding to the chute. The salmon travel down this chute to reach a box from which the fish are plucked. The kind of fish wheel that Wright builds doesn’t injure salmon to the extent of typically-constructed fish wheels, helping off-limit species (like kings) to return to the water with a greater chance of survival. These modified fish wheels are particularly friendly to Canada-bound fish, Wright contends, since the fish wheels are set along the banks of the river rather than jutting out towards the center, as gillnets do. He explains that the middle of the river is a fish super highway, destined for Canadian spawning grounds, while fish destined for local tributaries cling to the side. Consequently, these fish friendly fish wheels can help Alaska to respect treaty obligations and enhance returns to Canada, hopefully allowing for more fishing opportunities along the Alaska stretch of the Yukon.

Wright sees returning to traditional fishing methods along the Yukon as a chance to enhance Chinook returns and ensure cultural survival. This summer, Wright has taught youth to build a fish friendly fish wheel in Stevens Village. “It’s feeding many, many families now,” he reports. He also worked with the Tanana Chief Council’s recent Spirit Camp to teach fish wheel construction to kids at camp. The Tanana Native Council has teamed with Tanana Chief Council to extend camps to other villages with the aim of promoting traditional cultural knowledge. If Wright has his way, the legacy of his great grandfather’s fish wheels will persist, the Rampart region will be fish wheel country again, and chinooks as large as one can imagine will bang in fish boxes, waking up a new generation of fishermen.