AHS Blog
Date Posted: February 22, 2014
Categories: 49 History
by J. Pennelope Goforth
Like many Alaskan pioneers of the Bristol Bay area, Charles Herrmann came for the salmon, married for love, and stayed to build boats. Today his work lives on in the ships and the ship models he designed for Alaska Packers Association.
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Charles Hermann on the dock at Koggiung, ca. 1950.
Photo courtesy Adelheid Herrmann |
Herrmann was born in 1893 in the great port city of Kiel, in the Prussian state of Schleswig-Holstein. [1] Located on the south shore of the Baltic Sea, Kiel was one of the original ports of the Hanseatic League and the homeport of the German Royal Navy. Shipyards and docks lined the miles-long Kiel fjord from which the city spread out. At an early age, Herrmann, learned the carpentry trade and worked in the shipyard, earning his master certificate as a shipwright.
Then came the siren call. So leaving his family and friends, in 1910 he sailed for the western coast of America arriving in another busy shipbuilding port, San Francisco. He began his career as a ships carpenter for the growing Associated Oil Company of California. A manufacturer of crude oil products shipped across the Pacific and throughout the Pacific Northwest, the company ran a large fleet of tankers, barges, and tugs. Companies competed for trained capable shipwrights and he moved up the employment ladder to work for Standard Oil Company. Then came an even better offer from Alaska Packers Association that would change his life.
Running a fleet of old square-rigged sailing vessels called the ‘star fleet,’ APA was the largest manufacturer and distributor of canned Alaska salmon. The seasonal sailings of the STAR OF RUSSIA, STAR OF BENGAL, and the STAR OF FINLAND, among others, marked the beginning and the end of the Bristol Bay salmon season. Herrmann signed on as carpenter for a season. When the ship reached Koggiung on the Kvichak River, Herrmann was set to work ashore. He proved so handy maintaining the great complex of wooden buildings that comprised the cannery settlement inhabited by hundreds of workers and fishermen APA encouraged him to stay on.
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The QUAIL in 2008, in Anacortes, formerly with the
Fremont Tugboat Company of Seattle. Photo couresty
Fremont Tugboat Company |
By his third year at the Diamond ‘J’ cannery on the Kvichak River, he remained in Alaska to become the ‘winter man’, the off season caretaker. But he mainly occupied his time over the long snowy winter designing vessels.
Herrmann’s personal life blossomed as well when he met Anna Gartelman. A local Aleut woman from the thriving port village of Nushagak. In the early 1920s they married. Anna returned with him to Koggiung.
There is no road system than connects the canneries and villages of the Bristol Bay other than the waterways of the rivers and the bay itself. Homemade boats were the norm powered by oar and sail. The ‘tall ships’ with deep drafts of the APA fleet could not always approach the shallow tide lines where the cannery docks spilled out from the river banks. Sometimes they had to anchor several hundred yards from the beach. This transportation dilemma spawned mosquito fleets of tugs, tenders, dories, lighters, barges; all manner of craft were employed in moving people and fish and supplies throughout the busy season from ship to shore and back again.
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Model of the QUAIL built in 1951 by Charles Herrmann.
Photo by J. Pennelope Goforth |
Herrmann happily turned his ability to design and supervise the building of these much needed vessels to the service of APA. He built skiffs, lighters and several flat-bottomed barges. He also built a great number of the legendary double-ender sailboats and a few yachts. Almost all the prominent shipbuilders on the Pacific coast tried their hand at constructing speedy sailing yachts, mostly for fun and sport. But he is best known for the utility and timeless grace of the several tugboats he built for APA.
Tugboats were critical in towing the tall sailing ships—heavily laden with thousands of pounds of canned salmon at the end of the season—out to the open bay where they could catch a breeze. The tugs also nudged the powerless barges filled with salmon from offshore to the cannery docks where they were ‘pughed’, speared by pikes and flung on a conveyor to be cooked and canned.
APA named the larger vessels of their support fleet after birds. Two of Herrmann’s tugboats were IBIS (1935) and QUAIL (1940). The QUAIL was 72 feet long, 22 foot beam, boasted a 200hp, 325rpm Atlas-Imperial diesel engine. These engines were considered one of the most serviceable diesels ever built in the U.S. They were in demand since their introduction in 1916 powering tugboats, fishing boats and coasters. With engines in a variety of sizes (2 to 8 cylinders), their diesels became common on the West coast shore. Many engines that were built in the 1920s continued to run into 1951. [2]
He spent the following forty years as APA’s premier shipwright. He and Anna raised their family of six sons in the large village community at Koggiung, later moving to Levelock. When he retired, APA presented him with a gold and diamond company pin.
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Close-up of model bow showing brass fittings.
Photo by J. Pennelope Goforth |
However, he continued to work building model airplanes, children’s furniture like cribs, wagons, beds, even rocking horses. Houses, more skiffs, tank towers, and numerous dog sleds also occupied his time. Later in his life he built two scale models of the tugs QUAIL and IBIS. He spent about eight months working on the models in great detail with finely crafted brass fittings and intricately woven line including a tiny monkey fist, the ball-like weight that is thrown to secure the hawsers.
The IBIS, herself still reportedly working the docks in Newport, Oregon well into the 1990s. Shown here is the QUAIL, owned by Herrmann’s grandson, Gerald, and housed with his granddaughter, Bristol Bay fisherwoman and former state representative, Adelheid Herrmann. Charles Herrmann passed away on March 8, 1959. The QUAIL is still churning up a wake through Pacific Northwest waters.
[1] Herrmann Family Papers, courtesy Adelheid Herrmann.
[2] http://www.oldtacomamarine.com/atlas/index.html
Date Posted: February 11, 2014
Categories: 49 History
By Pennelope Goforth
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Kedge anchor with 5-foot shaft from the
ill-fated COURTNEY FORD now resting
in front of Anchorage City Hall.Photograph by J Pennelope Goforth. |
The iron kedge anchor of the COURTNEY FORD now lies in state in a large flower pot at the entrance to city hall in downtown Anchorage, Alaska. It is one of several anchors placed around the city that are the subjects of this series. The significance of the tragic story of how the anchor came to rest in this unlikely spot over fifty years ago is pretty much long forgotten by all but the saltiest Alaskans. It is a tragic story of sailor and ship, both in their prime, doomed by the act of a ‘dastardly miscreant.’ The steadfastness of Seaman William Ode, his devotion to duty as watchman of the stranded COURTNEY FORD made national headlines in 1903.
The shallow tidewaters of the head of Cook Inlet was a convenient place to anchor up for deep draft vessels. They would off-load their cargos of passengers and freight via flat-bottomed barges and lighters to the trading village of Knik, farther northeast toward the headwaters of the Knik River, or to the silted banks of Ship Creek. In time this practice gave the city of Anchorage its name.
Like many ships sailing Alaskan waters in the late 18th century, the COURTNEY FORD was designed and built by master shipwright Captain Matthew Turner at his shipyard in San Francisco Bay in 1883. An early pioneer in the northern cod fishery, Captain Turner parlayed his knowledge of weather and currents and ship handling in those stormy waters into crafting vessels made to survive the worst storms of the North Pacific. [1] Turner’s passion was sailing yachts, sleek hulled boats built for speed. He was wildly successful in combining the grace and speed of a yachting craft with the yeoman elements of the workboat. The schooner COURTNEY FORD was such a vessel.
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The schooner COURTNEY FORD, c. 1892, with a full cargo
and deck load of lumber. Note the anchor secured to her
port bow. Photographer unknown. |
The two-masted 400+ ton vessel was 146 feet long, a spacious 34 feet in the beam and a 12-foot draft. [2] This translates into a cargo capacity of a half a million board feet of lumber or 300 gross tons of break-bulk goods like sugar, wheat, and fruit, all common trade goods of the day. Sailed by a crew of eight to ten, the COURTNEY FORD was loaded with lumber within days of launching.
Shipping Intelligence reported in the newspapers at ports of call note the movements of the COURTNEY FORD’s busy career hauling fruit from Suva and Fiji to San Francisco, dry goods and materials to Tahiti, and sugar cane from Honolulu, Hawaii. She chartered out on her mainstay coastwise trade: hauling lumber on numerous voyages from the Puget Sound sawmill towns to growing towns and cities all along the Pacific seaboard from Alaska to California.
The 1880s were a boom time for America’s western littoral, especially Alaska. The Morning Oregonian of 1887 carried a detailed article on the front page of the March 26 edition about the Scandinavian Packing Company of Astoria. It chartered the COURTNEY FORD to transport $50,000 of canning equipment, machinery and construction supplies to build their new cannery in the burgeoning salmon packing industry. In a follow-up article the next day, again on the front page, the Oregonianreported that about 100—30 construction workers and cannery supervisors along with 70 Chinamen men—would be shipped up with the supplies. [3]
The COURTNEY FORD had her share of hard knocks, grazing rocks in uncharted Alaskan waters and getting dismasted in North Pacific storms. In 1901, northbound out of Everett in Puget Sound for Unga Island with gold mining supplies and equipment for the Apollo Mine she was caught in a typhoon in the Gulf of Alaska. Shipping Intelligence in the San Francisco Call of October 1 reported that she was ‘bespoken’ (sighted and hailed by a passing ship) by the U.S. Army Transport ROSECRANS seventeen days out of Port Townsend with ‘foretopmast and foretopgallant mast carried away.’ Enough sail remained for her to limp into Unga, effect repairs and get under way again. No big deal for the stalwart ship and her seasoned crew.
However, the following year headed south in ballast out of St Michael for Port Townsend what began as a common stranding quickly turned into a calamity. From the beginning of the voyage the compass headings had been squirrelly, at odds with the daily navigational sightings. Captain N. E. Burgeson and his crew were well seasoned, sailing in good weather and bad. But this autumn voyage found them literally lost in the pernicious fog common to the Aleutian Islands in summer and fall. Thinking the lookout had spotted Akun Island, with the fairway through Unimak Pass off the port bow, Capt. Burgeson ordered the sails let out for a bit more speed. Still, he would have noticed the lack of the immense current generated in the waters of the pass.
The night was dark compounded by fog swirling in squally breezes out of the west.
They heard the roar of breakers before sighting a faint white line of foaming waves through the fog dead ahead. Startled, Burgeson ordered the men to wear ship (turn her away from the wind). But before the crew even reached the rigging the COURTNEY FORD slammed by a williwaw went hard aground past the breakers and stranded herself high on the beach. The impact flung two men off the deck to their immediate deaths in the pounding waves. Burgeson was dumbfounded. No way should there have been a sandy beach on their plotted course.
Suspecting the compass he tore apart the binnacle (housing for the compass) that sits in front of the ship’s wheel. To his disgust and rage he discovered small pieces of iron had been inserted into the space around compass, causing it to give grossly inaccurate readings. He laid it to ‘the dastardly work of some miscreant’ who had it in for the ship or the crew while at St. Michael. [4]
Fearing the ship might breakup, as morning dawned grey and raining he ordered the crew to set up camp where they remained for a week hoping to spot a passing ship for assistance. By now they reckoned the beach was actually the long spit-like Glen Island fronting Izembek Lagoon on the Alaska Peninsula. The Aleut village of Morzhovoi was somewhere nearby and traffic out of the busy post salmon season of Bristol Bay might come close enough to Amak Island in the distance to see their signals. The mate and several men rowed the ship’s skiff to search for the village. The second of the tragic loss of lives happened when the skiff capsized in the surf, drowning two more sailors.
They got lucky when a passing vessel spied their signal fire. Burgeson assigned Seaman William Ode to remain with the COURTNEY FORD while he and the remaining crew went for help.
What happened to the rescue effort is about as foggy as the night they stranded. Some reports say the owner of registry was C. L. Hooper & Co. of San Francisco. But Burgeson wrote in the wreck report that the owner was the Pacific Shipping Co. of San Francisco and more importantly, she was uninsured. In ballast, no cargo to sell for salvage and no insurance money for her value as a vessel, it appears that no efforts were made to rescue Seaman Ode and the vessel.
What is known for sure is the story of how Ode made it to the end. As duty required of the watchman, he kept a log book with daily entries beginning October 4, 1902, with the departure of his crewmates and Burgeson. “Boys left at 10 a. m. Took my stuff back to the schooner and pumped her out. Wind northwest.” [5]
On October 23, 1902, Burgson and his four remaining crewmen arrived aboard the CENTENNIAL at the Seattle docks. Nothing was heard of the COURTNEY FORD or Seaman Ode until eight months later. Captain Lundquist of the steamer ST PAUL southbound out of Nome, which arrived in Seattle in late June, had obtained the log William Ode kept. The news reports of Seaman Ode’s log rocked the country, making the front pages and the headlines of the New York Times in addition to the Oregon and California papers.
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Front page of the San Francisco Call, July 3, 1903, with artist’s drawing of
the COURTNEY FORD and lonesome depictions of Seaman Ode. |
Ode noted the daily tasks of pumping out the ship, gathering driftwood for fires, shooting ducks for food. Battered by winds of hurricane force and howling williwaws Seaman Ode’s makeshift shelter on the ship was smashed. He writes that he can pump her out no more. In a snow squall he attempts to hike out across Glen Island to find the village of Morshovoi.
“November 24—Left schooner. Came about six miles away from schooner and at 5 p.m. was swamped by breakers. Could not return, as beach was too steep.
“November 25—Had a terrible night, which I spent outside. Lay under quilt and oil coat. Turned back.”
Ode doggedly built another shelter from ship’s timbers and sails in the undamaged galley of the ship, making use of the stove and the last of the provisions from the pantry.
“December 1—My twenty-seventh birthday. Carried fifteen barrels of water.”
Christmas came and went. Ode and the COURTNEY FORD were solidly iced in, shrouded in drifts of snow.
“January 3—Wind west…foxes came alongside during the night making terrible noise.”
By month’s end Ode notes with some surprise how weak he has become and can no longer leave the ship to gather firewood or water. His legs and arms swelled painfully from rheumatism. He suspects he also has scurvy by now.
“January 28—I have still a little hope left, but very little. I don’t expect the captain will send help, because they think I am safe in Morshovoi, but the winter came a few weeks too early. If it was not for the snow I could try once more to get away but in the condition I am now I could not travel a mile. Then I can hardly lift my legs high enough to get out the hold with a piece of firewood.”
The next few days he becomes unable to put on his boots and notes that his belly and chest have also swollen up. The shelter is chilled and damp from the rain.
“February 19—One month since I laid up with the schooner. Life is sweet, but death is sweeter in a case like this. I have nothing but cold scraps and snow water. Today I ate some dried apples and a piece of ice. I can make no more fire, as I can’t stay up that long.”
The last entry is faint, the letters shaky: “Death at last. Four months alone.”
Sixty years later, the timbers of the COURTNEY FORD were still visible on Glen Island. Cold Bay resident Mike Uttecht Sr. often visited the scene, which was not far from one of his hunting camps. He salvaged the anchor and displayed it not far from the airport. He told a good story about the COURTNEY FORD, probably cadging many a drink and dinner in the Volcano Room for those weathered in as a result. Eventually, when Mike passed, Bob and Tilley Reeve ‘inherited’ it. Recognizing its place in Alaska maritime history, the Reeve family brought the anchor to Anchorage. They presented it to the municipality, which installed it prominently by the south entrance. It is a fitting tribute to the dedication to duty of Seaman William Ode.
(The author gives a loud shoutout to Mike Burwell for his invaluable collection of Alaska ship wreck material: Couldn’t have written it without you, mate!)
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[1] Turner papers J. Porter Shaw Library, San Francisco, CA.
[2] US Customs Wreck Report filed at San Francisco 1902.
[3] Morning Oregonian, page 1, March 30, 1887.
[4] San Francisco Call, July 3, 1903.
[5] Ibid.
Date Posted: February 9, 2014
Categories: 49 History
From the Alaska State Library comes news of “Heritage of Alaska,” a 1968 television and radio series, that is now digitized and available online at:
Twenty-four of the original thirty-six episodes are held by ASL Historical Collections. Titles include “The Capital Move,” “Flying North,” and “The Story of Attu Baskets.”
Presented by the National Bank of Alaska, “Heritage of Alaska” was created by Elmer Rasmuson and hosted by Rasmuson and Roger Laube. The series’ five-minute episodes highlighted various Alaskan subjects in history, art, and literature.
Take my word for it – click on the above link only when you have a couple hours to spare. You’re going to watch them all. A personal favorite of mine is the episode about the University of Alaska, which has some great shots of campus when the Gruening Building did not yet exist and you could still park your car in front of Constitution Hall.
Date Posted: February 5, 2014
Categories: 49 History
by Richard Ravalli, William Jessup University
This image of a sealskin coat with sea otter trim was included in an 1893-1894 season catalog of H. Liebes and Company. It depicts a time when the San Francisco-based furrier founded by German-Jewish immigrant Herman Liebes was expanding its influence in the Pacific fur trade. Conversely, it was also a time when sea otters were beginning to disappear from Pacific waters. Decades of hunting facilitated by American trade ships after the Alaska Purchase of 1867 had brought the species to its environmental nadir, and entrepreneurs like Liebes played a distinct role in that process. Advertisements for garments with sea otter fur were therefore on the verge of becoming as extinct as the animals themselves. A few years after the H. Liebes catalog was published, sea otters finally began to receive more attention from governmental authorities and Herman Liebes himself passed away, an epilogue symbolic of the real connections between the man and the sea mammals he pursued.
Liebes was born around 1842 and worked in the London fur industry before immigrating to New York during the Civil War. By 1864 he was in San Francisco where he eventually established H. Liebes and Company with partner Charles J. Behlow. Herman’s English cousin Isaac joined them in 1869. [1] In a short amount of time the company rose to prominence in the San Francisco fur trade. The purchase of Alaska from Russia by the United States dramatically increased the flow of Pacific pelts to the city, especially following the formation of the Alaska Commercial Company in 1868, a consortium of businessmen that also included prominent German-Jewish immigrants in San Francisco. Two years later, the ACC was awarded a lucrative government lease to manage the fur seal rookeries of the Pribilof Islands in the Bering Sea for twenty years. [2] While more research is needed on the question, it is possible that many of the firm’s Alaskan fur seal and sea otter pelts were purchased and processed by H. Liebes around this time.
Despite the important role played by the ACC in the Pacific fur trade, San Francisco furriers in the late 19th century ultimately benefited from a variety of commercial vessels that plied the ocean for sea mammals, including some of their own ships. Past sources on H. Liebes have suggested that the company did not engage in direct trading with the natives of the Aleutian Islands until 1887. [3] In actuality, it was in that year that one trader specified that H. Liebes “has been engaged in dealing and bartering for furs on the Aleutian chain for ten years or more last past. They have had several vessels on the coast every year carrying up supplies and carrying back peltries.” [4] A document from earlier in the decade claimed that the company had “8 small vessels hunting seals and trading for furs in northern waters. [5] While sea otter skins came to San Francisco from throughout the Pacific in this era, it was these Alaskan trading ventures in particular that supplied the raw material for the city’s otter fur industry.
Herman and Isaac Liebes expanded their influence in the Alaskan trade with the establishment of the North American Commercial Company. This new firm, aided by considerable political connections in Washington D.C., successfully outbid the ACC and other competitors for a new government fur seal lease at
the Pribilofs in 1890. Isaac was the first president of the NACC and Herman likely played a central role in its founding. [6] While the NACC focused its energies on fur sealing, sea otter hunting was not neglected. In 1896, an ACC employee at Sanak Island in the Aleutians noted the activity of a NACC schooner named the
Therese “which is to hunt sea otter in these waters.” [7] Other Liebes vessels brought sea otter pelts to San Francisco in the 1890s. The
Alexander brought in six skins “consigned to H. Liebes & Co.” in 1891. [8] Relatively low catches such as the
Alexander’s were not uncommon at the time, and fears were mounting that the species was going extinct.
A Treasury Department report in 1897, one of the first government documents to focus exclusively on the sea otter, noted the decline in the otter fur trade and its impact on native Aleutian hunters. As it warned, “Under present conditions the sea otter is becoming extinct, and, as many of the hunting schooners are manned by white hunters from San Francisco, the natives are receiving only a part of the benefit.” [9] That same year, the United States and other countries of the North Pacific made continued efforts to protect both the fur seal and the sea otter. Included in the regulations was the first attempt to impose an international ban on killing otters. [10]
By that time Herman Liebes had moved to London for medical reasons and Isaac had taken over control of his cousin’s business interests in San Francisco. [11] In February of 1898, Liebes passed away in London. He died “far from home,” according to the San Francisco Call, far from the ocean and marine life which enabled him to build a commercial empire. [12]
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[1] “The Fur Trade of San Francisco,” The New York Times, October 6, 1867; Don MacGillivray, Captain Alex MacLean: Jack London’s Sea Wolf (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2008), 67, 279n13.
[2] For the Alaska Commercial Company, see Molly Lee, “Context and Contact: The History and Activities of the Alaska Commercial Company, 1867-1900,” in Nelson H.H. Graburn, Molly Lee, Jean-Loup Rousselot, eds., Catalogue Raisonne of the Alaska Commercial Company Collection, Phoebe Apperson Hearst Museum of Anthropology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.
[3] See Rudolf Glanz, “From Fur Rush to Gold Rushes: Alaskan Jewry from the Late Nineteenth to the Early Twentieth Centuries,” Western States Jewish Historical Quarterly 14 (January 1976), 99; Norton B. Stern, “The Liebes Company: Importers and Manufacturers of Fur Products, San Francisco, California & Alaska,” Western States Jewish History XLI, 1 (Fall 2008), 211.
[4] United States, House of Representatives, Report from the Committee on Merchant Marine and Fisheries, Investigation of The Fur Seal and Other Fisheries of Alaska (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1889), 397. The trader also noted that H. Liebes maintained a store “for several years” at Belkofski on the Alaska Peninsula.
[5] John S. Hittell, The Commerce and Industries of the Pacific Coast of North America (San Francisco: A.L. Bancroft & Co., Publishers, 1882), 337.
[6] MacGillivray, 74-75.
[7] Book I: Unalaska Letter Book #6 (Outgoing), 1895-1897, Page 42, in J. Pennelope Goforth, ed., Bringing Aleutian History Home: The Lost Ledgers of the Alaska Commercial Company, 1875-1897 (DVD, 2011). Special thanks to Alaska maritime historian Pennelope Goforth for providing me a copy of this resource.
[8] The Morning Call, December 27, 1891, 2.
Date Posted: January 21, 2014
Categories: 49 History
by Rebecca Poulson
The five buildings of the Sheldon Jackson College quadrangle were built in 1911. The school began in 1878 as a Presbyterian mission, and retained its Presbyterian affiliation even as it became an independent four-year college. We came close to losing these buildings, when the college closed in disarray in 2007. (For the story of how they were saved, see the Sitka Fine Arts Campus Website.)
I love these handsome buildings, especially the light-filled spaces of the Richard H. Allen Memorial auditorium building.
But that’s probably not how they were ever seen by the college.
In 1946, the school planned to demolish the Allen building (saving all useful materials) and replace it with a new, two-story, reinforced concrete classroom and administrative building. (1)
Thank God, the Allen building was not replaced. But this may have been because just a year later they had a plan to redo the entire campus.
Sheldon Jackson College (E. W. Merrill)
What was it about these buildings that made the Presbyterians hate them so? The new design would have demolished all five of the central buildings, and put in an oval drive, with an informal arrangement of new one-story classroom buildings. That plan was never fulfilled, either. The campus today would have been mere real estate. But that was probably already how the college saw it.
Presbyterians are Calvinists, a particularly stern branch of Christianity. Human nature is hopelessly depraved. We deal with this deep sense of guilt through work; discipline; modesty; thrift; and fulfilling our civic duty. Pretty things, booze, makeup, social dancing, and fancy architecture were just not part of the program.
Native culture was also not part of the program of this Native school. This is also manifest in the architecture, which has no trace of anything remotely indigenous.
While they never appreciated what they had, this philosophy also made them lousy fundraisers. Professor Molly Ahlgren once told me, “They can’t succeed. It’s not who they are.” When they wanted to tear down Allen Hall in 1993, they couldn’t even afford the dump fees.
It also kept them from messing them up with trendy remodels. The buildings were preserved – under layers of plain and functional sheetrock, acoustic tile, and plywood.
In this way, these buildings’ very existence, their fanciful gothic-tudor-craftsman exteriors, and severely plain interiors – express a complex story of Presbyterian faith and works.
