AHS Blog
Date Posted: February 25, 2013
Categories: 49 History
A continuation of the story of Melvin Dempsey, a half-African-American, half Cherokee prospector who contributed much to the establishment of early Valdez.
by Andrew Goldstein
With George Hazelet and A.J. Meals, Dempsey discovered gold on Chistochina River in the fall of 1899. Starting for the interior via the glacier route, he arrived at Chisna, placing numerous claims along the Chistochina River between 1899 and 1901. In March 1898, Dempsey became the center of a controversy. Since 1897, the Valdez town site had been a part of the Prince William Sound Mining District, located on Bligh and Busby Islands where the population of prospectors was then centered and the district recorder made his home. Melvin Dempsey and others who at that time had decided not to go over the glacier began staking claims in Port Valdez. In the face of criticisms about the legality of these claims, Dempsey and others called a meeting at the Christian Endeavor Hall to declare the formation of a separate mining district. Nancy Lethcoe writes, “On January 16, 1899, the Port Valdez Mining District was formed. All claims within Port Valdez would be filed with the new district, those outside the Port with the Prince William Sound Mining District.”
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Map of claims in Chisna district placed by Melvin
Dempsey, most likely hand-drawn by Dempsey
himself. Photographed by P.S. Hunt c. 1905. |
In 1900, Dempsey was elected recorder for Chisna (Cherokee) Mining District, as most of Dempsey’s claims were on Slate Creek trail. Dempsey became the postmaster of the new mining town of Chisna, which was renamed Dempsey in his honor. In 1902, Dempsey had accumulated enough wealth to warrant an expansion of the Christian Endeavor Church in Valdez, and became the chairman for the Valdez Mining District the following year. Dempsey also helped to form Valdez’s first Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. This achievement was well warranted, as the treacherous conditions of travel to the Interior applied equally to horses and dogs as well as the prospectors who owned them.
Beginning in 1903, Dempsey’s involvement with Valdez waned. A falling out with the church over financial matters led to him stepping down from his post as the Valdez Christian Endeavor Society president, and resigning from the church altogether the following year. Dempsey spent some of his time traveling between Alaska and the mainland U.S. during the following years, trying to interest investors in his property. Curiously, he was reported as having drowned in the Chistochina River in 1915.
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Melvin Dempsey helped to establish the “Everyman’s Clubhouse”,
Alaska’s first free reading room. The room housed newspapers,
religious publications, popular contemporary books, as well as
games and musical instruments. |
However, Dempsey’s story doesn’t end there. In 2006, descendants of Melvin Dempsey arrived at the Valdez Museum to learn about Dempsey’s adventures in Alaska. In attendance was Melvin Dempsey’s nephew, Avery Chandler, Sr., an elderly gentleman with childhood memories of having met his uncle. According to Mr. Chandler, Dempsey did travel back and forth between Alaska and his family in Michigan in the late 1910s and early 1920s. At one point Dempsey had stopped writing home to his family, and the family hired the law firm of Wilkes & Stone to investigate. The story of the Chistochina drowning may have been fabricated by the firm, based either on hearsay or to cover up a lack of findings. Whatever the reason, Mr. Chandler clearly remembered Dempsey staying with his sister Sarah Chandler, of Battle Creek. Dempsey attempted to get family members to join him in his mining operations because he “couldn’t find an honest man” to help him.
The sad coda to this story is that Dempsey, despite his numerous contributions to Valdez history, was regarded as an outcast by his sister, culminating in her burning a large stack of the letters he had written home. This information is truly heartbreaking to any historian. As the saying goes, “History is written by the winners,” but it is the mission of scholarship to recover that which has been lost. Who knows what may have been revealed by these valuable documents? We may never know.
Do you have questions or answers about Dempsey’s story? Contact Andrew Goldstein, Curator of Collections and Exhibitions at the Valdez Museum, at curator@valdezmuseum.org, or call 907-835-8905.
Date Posted: February 21, 2013
Categories: 49 History
by Andrew Goldstein
In recognition of Black History Month, we’d like to honor one of Old Valdez’s fascinating and influential early residents. Melvin Dempsey was a prospector of African-American and Cherokee descent and an educated man who remains an “unsung hero” in his accomplishments establishing the town’s early infrastructure.
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| Melvin Dempsey, circa 1905 |
Dempsey was born a slave in 1857 in North Carolina, the son of a Cherokee plantation owner and an African-American slave. He moved around in his early life, living in the Michigan towns of Allegan, Holland, and Battle Creek. As a young adult, Dempsey moved to Colorado, where he became Deadwood’s first barber; one Deadwood newspaper described him as “…one of finest men in the hills” and a “model man.” It was around this time that Dempsey established the interests which would influence his life in Alaska: politics, business, firefighting, ministry, and mining. Becoming involved in various mining interests and the 1898 Klondike gold rush, Dempsey turned his attention to Alaska, arriving in Valdez in February of 1898 on the S.S.Alliance.
Dempsey’s family was religious, which may have gotten him involved with the Young People’s Society of Christian Endeavor, a nondenominational evangelical society founded in Portland, Maine, in 1881 by Francis Edward Clark. Its professed object was “to promote an earnest Christian life among its members, to increase their mutual acquaintanceship, and to make them more useful in the service of God.” By 1906, 67,000 youth-led Christian Endeavor societies had been organized worldwide, with over four million members. Various causes championed by both the Society and Dempsey included the education of African-Americans, literacy, youth ministry, and temperance.
Months within his arrival in Valdez, Dempsey had founded the Valdez branch of the Christian Endeavor Society and was appointed a town trustee. Among Dempsey’s numerous accomplishments during his stay in Valdez were the founding of Alaska’s first free reading room, founding Valdez’s first Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, establishment of a relief station on Valdez Glacier, and proprietorship of one of the town’s first restaurants, which also outfitted prospectors heading over the glacier route. In October of 1898, Dempsey was elected a marshal and justice, and was a member of both the town’s volunteer fire department and the Pioneers of Alaska.
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| Dempsey in front of the Christian Endeavor meeting hall. |
The relief stations founded by Dempsey’s group were modest 10’x12’ huts located both on the beach used as a debarkation point for prospectors, and on glacier’s 5th bench, with food, fuel, and bedding. Establishment of the relief stations was a town-wide effort, with contributions from corporations and the military. A 1906 publication by Reverend James S. Dennis, titled Christian Missions and Social Progress: A Sociological Study of Foreign Missions, had this to say:
“Alaska has also seventeen Christian Endeavor Societies, the one at Point Barrow being, it is stated, the most northerly Christian Endeavor group in the world. An interesting statement is made concerning the heroic services rendered by the intrepid members of the Endeavor Society at Valdez. It was organized in 1898, and among its charter members was Melvin Dempsey, a Cherokee Indian. Nearby is the great Valdez glacier, twenty-eight miles long, with an average of over two miles in width. This became the pathway of the venturesome prospectors in their attempts to reach the Copper River Valley. It was a journey of terrible hardships and perils. Fierce winds, with the thermometer from fifty to seventy degrees below zero, bewildered the traveler, and in many instances doomed him to perish without hope of rescue. The brave members of the Endeavor Society at Valdez, acting upon the suggestion of Mr. Dempsey, built a series of rescue stations, with the Red Cross flag as a signal of encouragement and cheer. At these relief stations the society provided stoves, fuel, provisions, and medicines, for the imperiled travelers, and has thus been the means of saving hundreds of lives. When men are lost in the snow-storms this valiant Endeavor band attempts a rescue, but, alas! often too late to save life; in which case it provides for a Christian burial, and makes special efforts to communicate, if possible, with the friends of the deceased. It is a reproduction, in the wintry wilds of Alaska, of the humanitarian work of the Alpine rescue stations.”
To be continued…
Date Posted: February 14, 2013
Categories: 49 History
This announcement provided by the Alaska State Archives. The website is available at:
The Exxon Valdez oil spill was a decisive event in world history. It permanently changed the lives of those who live in Alaska; especially people in the spill region. Lawsuits between the State of Alaska, the United States government and Exxon and Alyeska Corporations and other defendants lasted five years. All state and federal cases were eventually combined as a federal case presided over by Judge J. Russell Holland and a state case presided over by Judge Brian Shortell.
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Alaska State Archives, Record Group 1,
Office of the Governor, series 801,
Exxon Valdez oil spill records.
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The Alaska Department of Law Environmental Litigation Section, led by Barbara Herman and Craig Tillery, tried the case on behalf of the State of Alaska. Over the years the State accumulated a huge case file – testimony, filings, evidence and miscellaneous other material – as many as eight million pages! Storing and managing files was and continues to be a significant cost to the People and State of Alaska.
Final litigation settlement with the State of Alaska came in 1993. (This doesn’t include private plaintiff cases nor the State’s current Reopener Clause litigation, which covers unforeseen additional damages, which were tried and settled separately.) State records policies required the Alaska Department of Law to retain the file for fifteen years. That ended in 2009, and the Alaska State Archives subsequently began to evaluate the records.
But 8,000,000 pages is a lot of material, and portions were spread among several locations in Anchorage and Juneau. Making decisions about these materials was a full time job, only one of many for the State Archives. Fortunately the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC, the National Archives grant agency) provided funds for a special project to address these materials and to hire a project archivist. The State Archives provided one of its permanent staff to act as project director.
The two-year project began October 1, 2011, and will terminate September 30, 2013. It allows archivists to determine what permanent Exxon Valdez litigation files to keep in the State Archives and what files no longer need to be kept. Project staff will sort through, dispose and organize records in Juneau, then move to those located in Anchorage. Records without permanent value will be disposed. Permanent records will be organized and added to the State Archives catalog, then publicized around the world via an online bibliographic catalog.
To assure participation by Alaskans who were most significantly impacted by the spill, project staff has assembled a seven-member Oversight Task Force. The Task Force will meet four times, at about six month intervals, and will review and comment on project activities, and most importantly, will advise project staff on significant issues historians don’t usually deal with – issues like legalities and restrictions, science and technology, community and regional affairs, and how to best keep the public informed and involved.
For more information on the project, contact the Alaska State Archives: archives@alaska.gov; (907) 465-2270.
Date Posted: February 6, 2013
Categories: 49 History
The Nature of Borders: Salmon, Boundaries, and Bandits On the Salish Sea is Lissa K. Wadewitz’s new book about how humans have conceptualized ocean and freshwater boundaries in the transnational context of the Pacific Northwest. The book is published by University of Washington Press. Wadewitz is an assistant professor of history at Linfield College in Oregon. The following interview was conducted by email.
Your book deals with the concept of “borders” on multiple levels (e.g., indigenous, maritime, international). Tell us what the term “border” means in the context of the fishery.
When I started writing my Ph.D. dissertation (from which this book is derived), I knew I wanted to write about how the creation of the international border at the forty-ninth parallel in 1846 (and adjusted in the 1870s among the San Juan Islands) affected fishery management practices as well as salmon fishing activity. In order to better understand the emergence of the industrial fishery of the 1890s and early 1900s, I kept delving deeper into earlier Native American fishing practices. I soon realized that the story I was trying to tell was not just about the international border, it was really about contrasting border systems. The “borders” drawn by Pacific Northwest Native peoples were essentially restrictive access customs that limited who could fish when at the height of the salmon season. The later international political border between the U.S. and Canada, in contrast, created a bifurcated, competitive market with divided regulatory jurisdictions. Since water, salmon, and fishermen move, however, this border became a line of opportunity for fishermen, smugglers, and other fishery workers. It simultaneously became an obstacle to joint salmon conservation policies and created a regulatory nightmare for government officials.
To play with the idea of borders a bit further—another series of borders that appear in the book are the social borders that fishermen and other fishery workers of varying ethnic backgrounds erected between themselves. Fishermen tended to work the same type of gear as their fellow countrymen, so they were often divided by both gear type and ethnicity. Asian, white, and Native cannery workers also rarely found ways to build alliances across ethnic lines because their suspicions about one other obstructed any larger collective bargaining effort in their negotiations with the canners.
Why the Salish Sea?
The Salish Sea is the perfect place to study the impact of border drawing on marine space and a valuable natural resource. Not only are these waters cross-cut by the international border, but they also connected the region’s Native people to one another and to their salmon. As a result, these waterways offer the ideal geographic location for looking at contrasting border practices.
As for the term itself—I initially used “Puget Sound/Georgia Basin” to refer to this series of connected waterways, but that term sounds so clinical and academic I never really liked it. I also think that using “Puget Sound/Georgia Basin” reinforces a sense of disconnection—Puget Sound on one side and Georgia Basin on the other. But these waterways are, in fact, a connected marine ecosystem. The term “Salish Sea” not only emphasizes that ecological fluidity, it also implicitly recognizes the long tenure of Coast Salish people in this region and how they likely thought about this waterscape—as one body of water that connected them to their kin and favored salmon fishing locations.
Although your book is not about Alaska, the theme of transnational fisheries management is of great interests to Alaskans. What parallels do you see between the history of the Salish Sea and Alaska waters?
From what I’ve seen in my research, I suspect that the border between southeastern Alaska and northern British Columbia presented some regulatory difficulties and opportunities similar to those that emerged along the forty-ninth parallel. It would be intriguing to compare the two border regions and tease out their differences. I also know that fish piracy—stealing salmon from salmon traps—was common in Alaska as well. (For a great book on Alaska’s salmon fishery’s history, see David F. Arnold, The Fishermen’s Frontier: People and Salmon in Southeast Alaska.)
But the real connection I see between Alaska and the salmon fisheries farther south is with the salmon themselves. Because salmon spend so much of their lives at sea and intermingle while out on the high seas, they are inherently a transnational fish. As a result, the interests of fishermen and fishery managers all up and down the Pacific coast (and indeed throughout the northern Pacific) are linked because of the salmon’s geographic reach. Historically, this has been a tremendous challenge for fishery managers. Despite the passage of the 1937 Sockeye Salmon Convention that finally brought the U.S. and Canada together to jointly manage this shared resource, the treaty waters did not match up with where people were actually catching fish. Fishermen were increasingly fishing miles offshore in order to catch the fish before their competitors, but the treaty only covered territorial waters three miles out. So from the very beginning of joint management, the area under regulation was simply too small to be effective.
How did you become interested in the topic?
I had just done a reading course in environmental history with my graduate advisor at UCLA and had become very intrigued by the field. Environmental history focuses on the relations of people to nature and natural resources in the past. As I read more, I found that several scholars had noted that although natural resources like water and animals move across international borders at will, few historians were following their subjects and crossing borders in their research. Due to my undergraduate background in Asian Studies, I already had a curiosity about international relations and issues, so I applied this interest to my new research in U.S. history. I also knew that borderlands historians had largely neglected studying the U.S.-Canada border. There seemed to be a lot of possibilities there.
Once I started investigating possible borderlands topics, I stumbled upon this shared salmon fishery between Washington and British Columbia. It seemed the perfect case study to examine the historical impact of border-drawing on a valuable natural resource. Little did I know at the time how rich and complex the story would become. When I started running across references to fish pirates, salmon smuggling, and violent interactions between American and Canadian fishermen out on the water, I knew I was on to something.
Why should people read the book?
Although I freely admit that my book is an academic history, I also worked very hard to make the book accessible to a broader audience. So there are footnotes, but there are also border bandits, fish pirates, and tales of interethnic conflict sprinkled throughout. Because my book reveals both the long history of Native American fishing practices and the serious impacts of regulatory inaction, I think it can add significantly to the general public’s understanding of our current and ongoing salmon crisis. I also think readers will be intrigued by the connections between the fishery management tactics of pre- and early-contact Northwest Native peoples and the new management practices being experimented with today.
Date Posted: January 22, 2013
Categories: 49 History
By Karen Brewster
The recently completed Alaska Mental Health Trust History Project Jukebox is now available online at:
A project of the Oral History Program at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and the Alaska Mental Health Trust Authority, the site features interviews with twenty-nine individuals talking about the history of mental health services in Alaska.
Topics include Morningside Hospital in Oregon, the legal battle and settlement over the management of the state’s mental health trust program, changes in the delivery of mental health services through time, Harborview Developmental Center in Valdez, Alaska Psychiatric Institute in Anchorage, and creation of the Alaska Mental Health Trust.
The struggle for the civil rights of those with mental disabilities in Alaska, the development of a system of care, and establishment and responsibilities of the Alaska Mental Health Trust is a little-known aspect of Alaska history. These stories, many of which have only been known by the individuals who took part in the early days of treating and caring for Alaska’s mentally ill, have rarely been presented in Alaska history classes. Now, Project Jukebox has preserved these stories and made them accessible to the public.
The project is supported by the Alaska Mental Health Trust Authority, Alaska Humanities Forum, and National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed on the website do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
For more information, please contact Karen Brewster at karen.brewster@alaska.edu, (907) 474-6672.
