WRANGELL
HISTORY
DISCOVER WRANGELL
01 BEFORE CONTACT
02 SHTAX’HÉEN KWÁAN
03 RUSSIAN
04 BRITISH
05 AMERICAN
06 THREE GOLD RUSHES
07 AFTER THE GOLD
THREE
THIRD OLDEST
AGE
Community in Alaska, second oldest in Southeast.
FLAGS
Tlingit, Russia, Britain, United States — three flags
GOLD RUSHES
Stikine 1861 · Cassiar 1872 · Klondike 1898
AT THE PEAK
Waiting in Wrangell for passage up the Stikine
FOUR NATIONS
10,000 PEOPLE
THE ONLY CITY IN ALASKA RULED BY FOUR NATIONS AND UNDER THREE FLAGS
Wrangell is the third oldest community in Alaska and the second oldest in Southeast. It has been Tlingit homeland throughout, and in the space of about thirty-five years in the nineteenth century it was also a Russian redoubt, a British fur post and an American fort.
Then gold turned it into the busiest town in Alaska, three separate times.
01
BEFORE CONTACT
A significant portion of the North American continent was buried under miles of glaciers during the last Ice Age. Recent archaeological and paleontological evidence indicates that at least part of Southeast Alaska — the outer coast — may have been ice-free during the late Pleistocene.
Three archaeological sites within the Tongass National Forest have been reliably dated in excess of 9,000 years BP: Hidden Falls at approximately 9,860 BP, Groundhog Bay at approximately 10,180 BP, and On-Your-Knees Cave, with rare human remains, at approximately 9,730 BP.
SINCE THE LAST ICE AGE
02
TLINGIT HOMELAND
Wrangell is the homeland of the Shtax’héen Kwáan, the Stikine River Tlingit. They have been here for thousands of years and they are here now.
Tlingit oral history describes a migration through the Canadian interior: a passage known as the hole in the ice, and beyond it a land of plenty on the coast. Shtax’héen Kwáan hold that the hole in the ice was the Stikine corridor — a river running beneath the glacier from the interior down to the islands of Southeast Alaska.
The Stikine Tlingit built and held one of the major trade networks on this coast. Routes ran from Southeast deep into the Canadian interior, up the Copper River and beyond. The written record describes them as formidable in a fight and equally formidable across a table, which are two reputations that tend to arrive together.
Movement into the region by Haida and Tsimshian brought competing claims on the same resources, and disputes over those resources run all through the accounts.
George Vancouver surveyed these waters in 1793 and missed the Stikine River entirely. Captain Cleveland reached the village of Steeken on 16 April 1799 and traded for fur. Neither man discovered anything. Both arrived somewhere people already lived.
SHTAX’HÉEN KWÁAN
03
1834 — 1840
Lt. Dionysius Zarembo, commander of the Russian-American Company ship Chichagof, landed at present-day Wrangell in 1833. Wrangell began in 1834 as the Russian Redoubt St. Dionysius, built to protect Russian interests in the region — both Spain and England had been scouting the extent of Russian settlement with an eye toward occupation themselves.
Chief Shakes V recognised advantages in cooperating with the Russians and moved the Tlingit village from its former site at “old town” to Shakes Island, in the heart of what is now Wrangell, to be near the redoubt.
In June 1834, shortly after the redoubt was completed, Peter Skene Ogden sailed north with eight officers and more than eighty Hudson’s Bay Company employees to establish a post on the Stikine. Zarembo refused to let them anchor and ordered them to leave. Ogden was willing to fight the Russians — until the Tlingit stepped in, claiming their ancient right to the fur region of the Stikine. Unable to fight both, Ogden left.
The Tlingit did not lose that argument. They ended it.
UNDER THE RUSSIAN FLAG
04
1840 — 1867
Ogden took the dispute to Dr. John McLoughlin, who ran all Hudson’s Bay Company posts on the Pacific Coast. They prepared a claim against the Russian government for 21,150 pounds and 10 shillings in denied furs. A settlement was reached: the Company withdrew the claim in exchange for a ten-year lease on the Alaskan mainland from Portland Canal to Cape Spencer, in return for 2,000 land otter skins a year and provisions for the Russian colonies.
On 30 May 1840 the Company ship Beaver reached Fort Dionysius. The Russian flag came down, the British flag went up, and the fort was renamed Fort Stikine. John McLoughlin Jr. was made commander, with only eighteen men left to gather furs and defend it.
The Hudson’s Bay Company held the Stikine fur lands for more than twenty years, and operated the fort until the United States purchased Alaska in 1867.
UNDER THE BRITISH FLAG
05
1867 — PRESENT
The 1867 purchase of Alaska from Russia was mocked as “Seward’s Folly,” after Secretary of State William H. Seward. Most of the federal government believed Alaska was ice, snow and glaciers, with little value beyond furs.
Gold had been found on the Stikine six years earlier.
In 1868 a military post was established and a new fort built at a cost of $26,000, named for Baron von Wrangel of the Russian-American Company. It stood where the post office is today — a stockade with narrow gun holes, block houses, barracks, officers’ quarters and log supply sheds. South of the fort stood a Tlingit village of about thirty-five houses and five hundred people. The Fort Wrangell post office opened in 1869 and was abandoned in 1877.
UNDER THE RUSSIAN FLAG
06
1861 · 1872 · 1898
Gold drove the early development of Alaska, bringing thousands of fortune seekers north. Communities boomed and then collapsed as areas were mined out. Beginning as early as 1861 and spanning four decades to 1898, Wrangell played a part in three major gold rushes — the Stikine, the Cassiar and the Klondike. They turned a small subsistence community into a supply centre of warehouses, hotels, dance halls, saloons, equipment and food stores, and the first of many churches in Alaska.
STIKINE, 1861
Alexander “Buck” Choquette, a former Hudson’s Bay trader with descendants still in Wrangell today, found gold on the upper Stikine in 1861, causing a stampede through Wrangell and on into Canadian territory. Wrangell was still Fort Stikine then, leased by the Hudson’s Bay Company from Russia. Buck’s Bar was a minor find next to what followed.
CASSIAR, 1872
Henry Thibert and Angus McCulloch found gold in the Cassiar District of Canada, reached by way of the Stikine. Thibert struck pay-dirt in a stream by Dease Lake, later named Thibert Creek. It averaged four ounces of gold a day — $125 a day, when a labourer made $25 a month.
WRANGELL’S THREE GOLD RUSHES
It is easy to understand why men quit their jobs and ran for the nearest steamer.
Dance halls went up. Warehouses lined the waterfront. Thousands of miners wintered in Wrangell waiting for spring so they could head up the river. The boom lasted five years before the gold panned out.
KLONDIKE, 1898
In the late 1890s Wrangell again became the base for prospectors heading up the Stikine. There were three routes to the Klondike: the Stikine, already the site of two rushes and advertised in newspapers as the easiest and the all-Canadian way in; Skagway over the White Pass; and Dyea up the Taiya River over the Chilkoot.
At one point more than 10,000 people were in Wrangell at once, waiting for supplies and passage. Cottonwood Island, near the mouth of the Stikine, became a makeshift tent city for prospectors waiting on the spring thaw. Neither Juneau, Ketchikan nor Petersburg existed yet; only Sitka was comparable. For a few years Wrangell was the economic centre of Alaska.
Buck Choquette, who found the gold that started the first rush, took part in all three.
Wyatt Earp came through during the Klondike years, and Wrangell claims ten days of him as deputy marshal. He turned the job down permanently.
He and Josie went north twice. The first attempt, in 1897, got as far as Juneau before they turned back to San Francisco. Josie was pregnant, and Wyatt was still favouring a hip he had hurt in a streetcar accident before they even left. She miscarried once they were home.
They set out again in 1898, this time up the Yukon toward Dawson City. The river froze early and stranded them for the winter in a dirt-floored cabin at Rampart. By the time they got moving the Klondike was staked, so they went to Nome instead — where Earp skipped the digging entirely and opened the Dexter Saloon. They left Alaska in 1901 with something like $80,000.
The records show nothing much happening during his ten days here. Some locals prefer the version where Wrangell was simply too wild for Wyatt.
07
1900 —
Between 1898 and 1900 there was talk of a railway to carry miners to the Klondike from Wrangell, with a road up the Stikine to meet it. Skagway’s route was shorter, easier to build and had more political weight. Even before the Klondike rush ended, it ended for Wrangell. The town took it in stride and turned to fishing and logging.
By 1929 there were two salmon canneries inside the city limits, plus shrimp and crab canneries employing over 150 people. Fur farming mattered too — fox, mink, beaver, marten and muskrat farms on Wrangell and the surrounding islands. On 14 August 1920 the first aircraft ever to reach Wrangell landed on Sergief Island at the mouth of the Stikine.
In 1912 the Alaska Native Brotherhood was founded, and in 1924 successful arguments led to Alaska Native people receiving citizenship and the right to vote.
In 1932 the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs opened the Wrangell Institute, a boarding school for Alaska Native children. Students came from across Alaska, not only Southeast, for grades kindergarten through twelve.
The Institute was part of the federal Indian boarding school system: national policy that removed Native children from their families and their communities in order to assimilate them. The U.S. Department of the Interior has since investigated and documented that system, Alaska included.
Accounts from former students differ, and they belong to the people who lived them. Some describe schooling that was otherwise out of reach. Others describe being taken from home very young, and what that cost. This page does not weigh those against each other.
To learn more, begin with the Wrangell Cooperative Association and Sealaska Heritage Institute.
AFTER THE GOLD
WHAT’S STILL STANDING
Two fires, in 1906 and 1952, destroyed most of the historic buildings. The oldest survivors are on the left side of Front Street, from Norris Gift Shop down to J.R.’s Fish Company in the Biehl building.
Norris Gift Shop began as the Fort Wrangel Brewery Beer Hall. An 1898 advertisement in the Stikine River Journal from proprietor Bruno Grief runs: “It is a pleasure to take up one of those big, foaming mugs and look for the bottom… I wish my throat was a yard long every time I tackle one of Bruno’s best.” Keg beer sold for 40 cents a gallon; bottled beer $1.50 a dozen.
J.R.’s Fish Company was built in 1898 by R. C. Diehl, a merchant from Montrose, Colorado. The lettering at the top reads “Biehl 1898” — a misspelling that went up shortly after construction and was never corrected. Diehl left town a few years later.
In 1898 Front Street was boards laid on pilings over the water. The downtown is on gravel fill now, and still has the false-front look.
Note: before 1902, when the post office shortened and respelled it, the town was Fort Wrangel, with one “l”. The fort was named by the American army after Baron von Wrangel’, governor of Russian America from 1830 to 1835.