Laurel Downing Bill's Blog, page 14

Colorful Alaskan Stories Shared at the Anchorage Women’s Club

I had the most amazing time yesterday speaking to the Anchorage Women’s Club in the Chart Room at the top of the Hilton Hotel. I wore this 1890′s costume and shared colorful Alaskan stories from my Aunt Phil’s Trunk Alaska history series. The ladies sure seemed to enjoy the colorful tales … and they bought 55 books at the end of the presentation!

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Historic Alaskan Names Along The Koyukuk

It seems fitting to devote this May blog to the woolly mammoths that roamed the earth 10,000-15,000 years ago. Scientists in Russia have discovered viable blood and tissue from the ancient creatures in ice along the Arctic Ocean and today are attempting to clone the animals back into existence, according to a recent article in the Alaska Dispatch.

Early explorers in Alaska found tusks of the mighty mammoths, like those pictured above, embedded in the banks of the Koyukuk River.



The Koyukuk also was a land of turbulence, gold and mighty men of magic. And there is evidence of a rich heritage in the names of historic Alaskan villages along that river – names such as Batzna, Moses Village, Allakaket, Nok, Kakliaklia, Wiseman, Bergman, Hughes, Bettles – Native villages and gold rush towns.

The Koyukuk villages are notable for having given Alaska some of our greatest dog mushers, men who have won many championship races. David David and Leo Kriska of Allakaket, Warner and Bobby Vent, Cue Bifelt, Jimmie Huntington and George Attla of Huslia brought this section of Alaska to the attention of the rest of the state.

The gold rush period of Koyukuk history was a turbulent and interesting one. Gold was discovered on Evans Bar, Tramway Bar and on Hughes Bar in 1890, according to Gordon Bettles, pioneer of the Koyukuk country. In an article in a 1941 issue of “Alaska Life,” Bettles told how he started his “bean shops,” as he called his trading posts. The first he established at Arctic City in 1894 and the next one at Bergman, which flooded out. Bettles then opened another post and named it Bettles, after himself.

In the article, he said a constant procession of river steamers chuffed up the Yukon and then headed up the Koyukuk, all loaded down with stampeders and their supplies. Once 68 steamers were frozen in solid for the long, cold winter when a sudden cold spell took them unaware. There were 900 people on those ships, and when the adventurers realized they would have to remain a whole year in this desolate part of Alaska, 550 of them took emergency rations and mushed out to the Yukon.

A good many went downstream to St. Michael, vowing never again to visit such an inhospitable country, and 350 stampeders stayed in and around Bettles.

“We had quite an interesting winter with such a varied assortment,” Bettles said.

The first streams on the Koyukuk to yield gold in large quantities were Myrtle, Emma and Gold creeks. As early as 1899, the town of Slate Creek was started. In the summer of 1900, one of the waves of green stampeders got as far as this point, then got cold feet, turned back and left – reason enough to change the name of the settlement to Coldfoot. Wiseman was named after a transient prospector who stopped a few minutes to pan gold at the mouth of Wiseman Creek and perpetuated his name. Bergman was named for a steamboat captain.

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Alaskan Entrepreneurs – From Rags to Riches

Harriet Smith Pullen left her children and a bankrupt farm in Washington state and arrived broke in Skagway on Sept. 8, 1897. Although her husband came with her, their marriage ended in divorce.

Earning $3 a day as a cook, one of many enterprising Alaskan entrepreneurs, the 37-year-old opened a tent restaurant to feed Skagway’s hungry stampeders. She also began baking pies in pie tins made from discarded cans.



Soon Pullen had gained quite a reputation as a pie baker by using the tons of dried apples included in every stampeder’s outfit to create her pastries. She eventually made enough money to send for her three sons to help with the business, which she’d moved into a log building.

An experienced horsewoman, Pullen also saw an opportunity to provide the stampeders with transportation as well as food. She sent for her seven horses, and when they arrived in Skagway, she jumped into a rowboat and guided them to shore because no one else would bring them in.

With grit and courage, along with her care and knowledge of horses, she hired out to pack prospectors and their supplies over the White Pass Trail. Pullen became one of the few women packers on the trail, surviving the rough conditions and the corruption imposed by Soapy Smith and his band of thieves.

Her business was so successful, that when she sold it, she netted a grubstake that funded several future enterprises.

Pullen used some of the profits gleaned from her successful freighting business to rent Capt. Billy Moore’s boarding house, which she later purchased and converted into Alaska’s largest and most elaborate hotel – the Pullen House. Its tables were laden with vegetables grown on land she owned near the old townsite of Dyea, once the major gateway to the Chilkoot Trail, and with milk from her own cows.

Even during tough times, the Pullen House retained its elegance. President Warren G. Harding made it a point to visit the outstanding hotel during his visit to Alaska in 1923.

Over the years, Pullen became a well-known character throughout Alaska. She promoted tourism in Skagway, which at one time was Alaska’s largest city, and amassed a large enough collection of Alaska artifacts to have her own museum. In her later years, she regaled tourists with tales of the Klondike Gold Rush and the shooting of Soapy Smith, an event she claims to have witnessed.

In 1947, after spending 50 years in her adopted town, the grand lady of the North died at the age of 87. She is buried near the site of her once-vibrant hotel.

Her extensive collection, exhibited by granddaughter Mary Pullen Kopanski from the late 1950s, was sold by auction in 1973.

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Fires in Alaska – The Day Dawson Burned

Fires in Alaska – The curse of many towns during the Klondike Gold Rush era, and Dawson was no exception. The extreme cold, coupled with dryness, meant fires burned in all buildings when occupied.

Stovepipes thrust through flimsy walls or roofs of cabins and tents carried smoke from high-creosote spruce. Over time, the creosote built up on the pipes, which increased the draft, and pretty soon that created enough heat to start the creosote burning. Eventually, a red-hot stovepipe could set a building on fire.



The Dawson volunteer fire department built a fire hall and tower down near the bank of the Yukon River by the 1890s. Whenever a report of a fire came, firemen rang the bell in the tower and raced to the scene, pulling their fire-fighting apparatus behind them. Twenty-two alarms in one night was the record.

The fire department had a hose cart that extended only as far as the city’s water system, and chemical carts that were little more than large fire extinguishers to use when water froze inside the hoses. By the time an alarm sounded and the firemen reached a fire, they usually found the tent or cabin gone and spent most of their time trying to keep the fire away from other structures.

To keep fires from spreading during cold weather, residents had a rather unique system. They soaked blankets in water, thrust them out windows and fastened them over walls. The blankets promptly froze and formed a barrier of ice.

But as the town grew by leaps and bounds, the residents needed better fire protection in order to get fire insurance. Insurance companies wouldn’t cover high-risk areas, at least not at rates that most customers could pay.

Some sources say that town merchants collected $5 apiece from the ladies of the evening to buy a fire engine. Others speculate that the ladies collected the money from the merchants and politicians who used their services.

Whatever the real story, the town purchased a steam pumper from the Seattle Fire Department in 1898 and had it shipped north. However, due to human error, the new horse-drawn fire engine with its smoking stack proved useless when a fire broke out on April 26, 1899. The next day, the Klondike Nugget reported:

“Dawson is once again in ashes. The Queen of the Yukon is once more attacked by her old-time enemy. The city’s loss will be fully a million dollars. One hundred and eleven buildings gone up in smoke and flame. Incompetency in operating the Fire Steamer charged with being the cause of the heavy loss.”

While many people said the fire was “an act of God,” several others said it was aided by the stupidity of man.

During breakup, the river had churned under the rotting ice of the river and the shift in pressure had pushed water up through the hole where the steamer sat. Nobody noticed that the water had doused the fire in the firebox, which was necessary to make the steam pump work.

It took almost a half-hour to get the fire lit again, by which time the entire east side of Dawson had already gone up in flames.

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Flame of the Yukon dazzled many miners with her moves

After brief stints in Skagway and Whitehorse, one Kansas girl swirled her way into Gold Rush history when she stepped on stage at the Palace Grand in Dawson City in 1900. Kathleen Eloisa Rockwell, better known as “Klondike Kate,” delighted audiences of miners with her song-and-dance routines.

She wore an elaborate dress covered in red sequins and an enormous cape in one dance that made her famous. Kate would take the cape off and start leaping and twirling with a cane that had yards of red chiffon attached. Onlookers said she looked like fire dancing around.

At the end of her number, Kate dramatically dropped to the floor. The miners, who went wild for the redheaded beauty, named her “The Flame of the Yukon.”



Kate reportedly made up to $750 a night for her performances and spent much of her fortune on fine clothes and jewelry. She boasted later in life that she wore “$1,500 gowns from Paris and bracelets of the purest gold.”

But even though Kate had a successful stage life for a couple of years, her love life proved less fruitful. She fell for a man named Alexander Pantages, who owned Dawson’s Orpheum Theatre on Front Street. He convinced her to invest in a string of theaters in the Pacific Northwest and start their own theater company.

Kate wanted a wedding ring on her finger as part of the deal. But while she was on a trip, Pantages married a violinist and took all Kate’s money. She sued him for breach of promise in 1905, but later dropped the suit.

Although Kate, who later settled in Oregon, led neither an exciting nor a very lucrative life once she left Dawson, she did excel at self-promotion. She traveled on the lecture circuit around the Lower 48, expounding her legend and capitalizing on her life as “Queen of the Yukon,” “Belle of Dawson” and “Klondike Queen,” as she called herself.

In 1931, a Norwegian named Johnny Matson entered her life. Matson, who’d mined in the Klondike and had been smitten with Kate for 30 years, finally got around to telling her how he felt when he attended an Alaska-Yukon Sourdough reunion in Portland, Ore.

He wrote her about their meeting back at the turn of the century, and that began two years of correspondence – which finally led to marriage in 1933. Matson died in 1946.

Kate actively promoted herself and the Gold Rush legends, of which she helped to create, well into her 60s. If she wasn’t dressing up for a holiday parade, reports say “she might be seen rolling her own cigarette with the deftness of a cowboy.”

She later became a recluse and died on Feb. 21, 1957, at the age of 80.

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Alaskan Fortune – Immigrant puts the right foot forward

One of Anchorage’s finest department stores can trace its roots to the gold rush days of the Klondike when a young Swede hunkered down with pick and ax and chipped out a small fortune.

John W. Nordstrom arrived in New York City from his native Sweden in 1887. With $5 in his pocket, and not a lick of English on his tongue, the 16-year-old made his way to Michigan where he labored in an iron mine. He eventually migrated to the West Coast.



While making $1.50 a day as a logger and sawmill hand in the Puget Sound area, he read in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer that gold had been found in Alaska. Like thousands of others, he headed to the Klondike to pursue his Alaskan Fortune.

Nordstrom landed first at Skagway and then crossed the infamous Chilkoot Pass. The young immigrant then floated the Yukon River and landed in Dawson in 1897.

He laid claim to a promising piece of land, and for the next couple of years, he worked in the gold fields with some success. After selling his gold claim, Nordstrom traveled back to Seattle, via the newly completed White Pass and Yukon Railroad to Skagway, with a nest egg of $13,000.

The young gold miner attended business school, spent $2,500 to build two rental houses on Capitol Hill and joined a shoemaker friend, Carl Wallin, in a new shoe store venture.

The men opened Wallin & Nordstrom on Fourth Avenue and Pike Street in 1901. It flourished during the next 20 years, because both Wallin and Nordstrom believed in offering exceptional value, quality, selection and service to their customers. That philosophy proved so successful that the men opened a second store in the University District in 1923.

Nordstrom’s sons Everett and Elmer took over the business after John retired in 1928. They bought Wallin’s interest the next year. The second-generation Nordstroms developed the business into the largest independent shoe chain in the United States, and the downtown Seattle store became the largest shoe store in the nation.

The company started expanding into other areas of merchandise in the 1960s when third-generation Nordstroms took over. It bought Best’s Apparel, a high-quality women’s clothing store, and then began purchasing clothing outlets and opening stores all over the country. The company is now one of the largest department store chains in America.

To set it apart, the corporate culture of the company emphasized customer service. Even today, new employees are told they’ll never be criticized for doing too much for a customer, only too little.

The company went public in 1971 and changed its name to Nordstrom Inc. By 1975 it was in Alaska and had moved into the competitive California market by 1978. The first store on the East Coast opened in 1988 in Virginia.

Beginning with John Nordstrom, who died in 1963 at the age of 92, family members have always been involved in the company. Today, fourth-generation Nordstroms run the business.

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