A BRIEF OVERVIEW OF WRANGELL’S HISTORY

Downtown Wrangell Front Street circa 1930

Russian, British and U.S. control made for a busy 1800s

Thousands of years before fur, gold, salmon and timber brought settlers, adventurers and pioneers to work and live in Wrangell, the Tlingit people arrived in the region via the Stikine River, migrating from the Interior.

In Nora Marks and Richard Dauenhauer’s 1987 book of Tlingit storytelling, “Haa Shuká, Our Ancestors,” Robert Zuboff (Kak’weidí Clan, Kaakáakw Hít) recounted in a 1960s interview the story of how Indigenous people long ago discovered that the Stikine flowed under a glacier. So, they tied a raft together and put two elderly women on the raft and pushed them under the glacier.

The story goes on to say that others were afraid to float under the glacier, so they traveled over it.

Regardless of whether the first arrivals floated under the glacier, walked over it or paddled down the river when it was navigable, the Stikine has been the dominating force in Wrangell’s story since before recorded history. The town is proud of its name: Gateway to the Stikine.

The Russian American Co. decided 200 years ago to take a serious look at the river, particularly its value as a direct trade route to the fur resources of the Canadian Interior.

Coastal Alaska Natives had long been trading with the Interior tribes, and in about 1811 the Russians began trading with the Stikine Tlingit near the site of present-day Wrangell. With its New World headquarters at Sitka, the Russian American Co. ruled the fur trade of Alaska.

But its hold was soon challenged by the British Hudson’s Bay Co., and the showdown between the two commercial giants, each with a vast network of trade stretching across entire hemispheres, was to be played out in a remote and obscure corner of the wild now known as Wrangell Island.

A treaty signed between the two nations in 1824-25 granted the British the right to use navigable streams along the coast crossing Russian territory on their way from the Interior to the sea, providing no Russian settlement stood in the way.

With an eye toward the Stikine fur trade, the British company in 1833 outfitted the brig Dryad to sail from Fort Vancouver on the Columbia River to the Stikine to establish a permanent trading post upriver.

The Russians, however, had thoughts of their own on protecting the Stikine fur trade, and in 1833 Lt. Dionysius Zarembo and a band of men were sent to build a fort near the mouth of the Stikine. A spot was chosen near the north end of Wrangell Island, where the Marine Bar stands today, and the fort was completed in 1834.

The Tlingit village at that time was about 13 miles south, at a site now known as Old Wrangell. The village was moved to the harbor area in the 1860s.

Baron Ferdinand von Wrangel, manager of the Russian American Co. in Sitka at the time, got his confrontation in 1834 when the British brig approached the mouth of the Stikine and was greeted by a volley from the fort and the Russian brig Chichagof, at anchor near the fort.

Zarembo then boarded the British ship, protesting the entry of a British vessel into a river in Russian territory.

It appears no one asked the Stikine Tlingit, who protested against any new party going up the river to trade with the Interior tribes — an ancient trade right they fiercely maintained.

The British protested to the Russian government, and an agreement was reached in 1839 in which the British waived damages from the incident and obtained a 10-year lease of the coastline from the Russians for an annual payment of 2,000 land otter skins.

The British flag was raised over the fort June 1, 1840, renaming it Fort Stikine.

The lease with the British was renewed until the United States purchased Alaska from Russia in 1867, making Wrangell the only city in Alaska to have been ruled under three flags.

But fur, which had attracted Hudson’s Bay, was to face competition with the discovery in 1861 of gold on the Stikine. With the arrival of hundreds of gold seekers, Wrangell began the first of its three lives as a gold rush boom town.

With the onslaught came continuing problems for the Native community, sporadic incidents usually spurred by opportunism and exploitation.

The introduction of steamship service up the Stikine further strained relations. Capt. William Moore took a steamer Flying Dutchman upriver, pushing a barge bringing miners and provisions to the camps. The Stikine Tlingit rioted, claiming the boisterous craft would upset moose and salmon, and finally were paid with Hudson’s Bay blankets to restore order.

The 1861 rush was over only a few years after it began, when the gold deposit was found to be of limited extent. With the lowering of the Russian flag in 1867, Fort Stikine and the rest of Alaska became a possession of the United States. A new fort, named Fort Wrangell, after the baron, was built from 1868-70 at the site of today’s post office.

In 1872, two prospectors returned from Dease Lake in the Cassiar region of the Canadian Interior after finding gold. They left for the winter, seeking reinforcements and returned in the spring with an entire party of hopefuls, including Capt. Moore. The Cassiar gold rush was on, marking the second boom for Wrangell and bringing thousands of miners and everything thousands of miners needed, or at least wanted. Gambling, women and dance halls flourished.

By 1888, the Cassiar rush had all but died. The second boom was over.

Fishing, canneries and a lumber mill were to provide the town with the economic stability gold and furs could not provide. In the late 1880s, the Wilson & Sylvester sawmill, believed to be the first in Alaska, was founded by Capt. Thomas A. Wilson, Juneau’s first Customs inspector, and a retired fur trader, Rufus Sylvester. The mill, which later was to produce high-grade timber for airplane construction, produced packing boxes for the canneries and building lumber.

With the infancy of those industries came the last of the three gold rushes. The Stikine was tapped as a route — although a backdoor pathway — to the Klondike rush of the late 1890s. Miners would travel the Stikine to Telegraph Creek, British Columbia, proceed 160 miles to Teslin Lake and then follow the Hootlalinqua River to the headwaters of the Yukon River.

The Teslin route was more promising than profitable, however, and by the turn of the century the miners were gone and Wrangell was again a quiet town of about 1,500 persons.

More salmon canneries would open, in addition to shrimp and crab operations. The canneries brought the arrival of great sailing ships and, later, the steamers, making their runs between Seattle and San Francisco and the ports of Southeast, including Wrangell.

Before the arrival of air service, steamships were the town’s sole lifeline, and at one time more than 35 ships a week stopped at Wrangell.

Throughout it all, the Stikine continued its role as a major transportation corridor, with riverboat service until that ended about 1970.

The town enjoyed several decades of timber prosperity, with logging camps on the island and around Southeast feeding the sawmills. But economic and environmental restraints later closed down the mills and most of the logging in Southeast, including pulp mills in Ketchikan and Sitka in the 1990s.

Today, the Stikine River continues to serve as a favorite recreation area for Wrangell residents and visitors, keeping with the name: Gateway to the Stikine.