Project Update: Storied Shores- A History of Canneries in Southeast Alaska

I spent December and the beginning of January in Petersburg, relishing the tranquility of this community, partaking in the yuletide festivities (God Jul), and planning for a new book project. With humility and gratitude, I'm excited to share this project with you. Stay tuned for the coming anthology, examining Southeast Alaska canneries as sites of Alaska history, published by Shorefast Editions. Below is a taste of what is to come. 

The illustrations in the book are going to be killer. Derived from the private collection of my collaborator, Karen Hofstad, there is material that will be featured that just may not exist anywhere else. Like this stamp.

In Alaska, canneries are places where fish are put into cans. But they are more than this perfunctory, mechanical description. They are places of work. They are places of leisure. They have served as prisons and relocation camps. They are where Alaskan families have been made, where technological innovations have changed the way the world eats. They are places of segregation and integration. They are the sites of “corporate mortality” and dogged persistence. They are the backdrop for the industrial revolution of the north. They are sites of racial conflict, environmental degradation and scientific hubris. Canneries are theaters of activity and places that have made, shaped, and been the setting for Alaska history.

There are a multitude of ways to consider canneries, and a multitude of historic disciplines through which they can be examined. Political, business, social, environmental, cultural, and gender history come together on the docks, on the decks, and in the mess halls. As such, this anthology will be a seafood smorgasbord, including in its interpretive stances. It will combine both micro-histories of the operations of specific canneries within Southeast Alaska with thematic, interpretive essays. It will appeal to a broad readership as a work with both historical and literary merit.

It is not the definitive history of the seafood industry in Southeast Alaska, and there is much which is not included. But it will serve as a new means of thinking and looking at the places of production, these landscapes of work, and why the places, people, and stories contained within those weather-beaten walls matter.

This book is a labor of love and truly a collaborative effort. It is written in memory of Southeast historian, Pat Roppel. For decades, Pat compiled research on the history of the seafood industry throughout Alaska, but particularly Southeast. She intended to write a book detailing cannery operations throughout the Panhandle and made it so far as to draft over 30 individual cannery histories, in addition to many short biographies of those involved in the seafood industry. But she died before her work was finished, and her papers were donated to the Alaska State Library Historical Collections.

Karen Hofstad was a close friend and collaborator of Pat’s. Over forty years ago, Karen started collecting salmon can labels, fishing industry ephemera, and other source material related to the industry in order to write a book about the history. When she met Pat, she saw that there was already a work in progress, so she shared her resources and a decades-long conversation with Pat.

After Pat’s death, Karen decided that it’s time to finish this book and invited me to take part in the project, in honor of our mutual friend. Pat wrote detailed operational histories of canneries, which are relevant to the local communities to which the canneries pertained. Karen and I decided to create something that will appeal to a broader readership. So, this anthology will incorporate edited selections of cannery histories and essays that Pat wrote with broader, interpretive essays that examine how canneries are representative of themes, events, and ideas in Alaska history.

Readers will turn into time traveling cannery tourists, able to swoop from bay, to strait, to island across Southeast Alaska, touching down at different moments in time. Along the way, they will see the different ways that canneries have been utilized, and examine interactions among peoples, places, nature and technology.

Our first stops are Klawock at Prince of Wales Island and Sitka. Two canneries started in 1878 in Alaska, and they are connected through the stories of early salteries, trade, and cross-cultural relationships. These first Alaskan canneries were a harbinger for what equated the industrial revolution of Alaska. Next, we travel to southern southeast Alaska, to Metlakatla, where we will examine how two of Southeast Alaska’s major industries- timber and fish- were connected. After, we will swoop over to Loring, where we will learn about the history of the Alaska Packers Association and see how an enterprising superintendent’s invention of a floating fish trap shifted fishing methods across the Pacific Northwest .

Next, we will examine Hunter Bay, where a California company known for whaling attempted to diversify its operations into salmon. The Pacific Steam Whaling Company serves as a story of corporate mortality, as it transitioned away from one dying industry and into the palms of a capitalist dreamer whose faith in a “salmon trust” gutted Alaska’s salmon industry.

The origin of Petersburg can be directly attributed to the establishment of a cannery there, in 1898. On our stop at Petersburg, we will get a glimpse of the history of the local fishing industry through five iconic objects, with the daughter of the founder of Icicle Seafoods as our able tour guide.

Port Althrop was one of 13 canneries constructed in Southeast Alaska in one year during WWI, as the industry mobilized to feed troops and Allied nations, leading the trade journal Pacific Fisherman to claim that, “The world war has been to a great extent a war of canned foods.” In World War II, people shuffled and lives crumbled as abandoned canneries like that in Funter Bay become the frigid homes of Unangan people from the Bering Sea, forced from their homeland due to the Japanese invasion. In Wrangell, we see Japanese Alaskan cannery workers sent to relocation camps. And we see German POWs shipped to the Excursion Inlet cannery after the Aleutian Islands were retaken by the allies.

At Wards Cove, we will see how desegregation and the fight for civil rights transpired in Alaska’s canneries. Finally, we will visit Kake, which is no longer in operation but still very much loved. There we will see a community’s work to preserve its beloved cannery.

Between these destinations, we’ll pause for mug-up, an Alaska-wide cannery term that means coffee break. We will rest for poetry, we will take in recipes, we will see the first-hand accounts of those who lived in these places and in these times.

Along the way, you will find material written by me, Pat Roppel, Bob King, Katie Ringsmuth, Sue Paulson, Waynne Short, Pennelope Goforth, Jim Mackovjak, and others, handsomely illustrated with materials from Karen Hofstad’s collection. 

Once published, you'll need to open a can of salmon and get your saltines. You’ll need to fortify your belly with some wild Alaskan foods before you embark on this wild Alaskan ride. 

From the collection of Karen Hofstad. 

Historic Double-Ender to Sail Back to Bristol Bay

Few images are more evocative of the history of Alaska’s commercial fishing industry than the sleek and sturdy profile of a Bristol Bay double-ender under sail. Thousands of these cannery-owned crafts were constructed in San Francisco and the Pacific Northwest and then sent north. Once in Alaska, a two-person crew composed of a skipper and “puller” was responsible for harvesting fish without the assistance of hydraulics while sailing, rowing, sleeping and living in an open watercraft in Bristol Bay. There is a reason why fisheries historian Bob King calls these fishermen the “Iron Men of Bristol Bay.”

Very few of these fishermen are still living, and few of the once-ubiquitous double-enders is still in sailing condition. One seaworthy double-ender is currently in Homer. The vessel is a so-called Libby boat, constructed and fished by Libby, McNeil, & Libby. The company had extensive operations throughout Alaska; in Bristol Bay alone it operated canneries at Koggiung, Ekuk, Nushagak, Peterson Point, and Kvichak Bay. The Libby canneries painted their double-enders butterscotch yellow to demarcate their boats from those of other canneries, a color that old-timers remember as “Libby orange.”

The federal Fish and Wildlife Service was responsible for managing Alaska’s salmon fisheries prior to 1959, when Alaska achieved statehood. Under pressure from the cannery lobby, the Fish and Wildlife Service contended that utilizing sail was a means to conserve Bristol Bay salmon. However, fishermen and many Alaskans knew what was really happening: canneries were reluctant to spend the money required to retool their fleets to accommodate power.

Only in 1951 did fisheries managers allow engines within fishing boats in Bristol Bay. As a result, the Bristol Bay salmon fishery is considered the last major commercial fishery to be wind-powered.  Within a few years, the bulk of the fleet had converted to power, including the Libby boat which is now in Homer.

Dave Seaman owns the old Libby boat. Seaman is a shipwright and a member of the Kachemak Bay Wooden Boat Society. Seaman is hoping to sail the Libby boat back to Bristol Bay this summer and has teamed up with Tim Troll of the Bristol Bay Heritage Land Trust and others to make this historic trip.

Photo courtesy Tim Troll

The Libby boat will take a route that hundreds of Bristol Bay boats follow each year, the Iliamna Portage. It will sail from Homer to the Alaska Peninsula, where it will portage through the Chigmit Mountains before rejoining water at Lake Iliamna. From there, it will sail across Iliamna and down the Kvichak River. “The tentative plan is to launch from Homer on July 4 and arrive in Naknek by the end of the sockeye season,” says Troll, right in time for the annual Fishtival celebration.

This journey will commemorate several important events in Bristol Bay and Alaska overall.  For one, 2017 marks the tipping point in the Bristol Bay salmon fishery, in which there has been “66 years of sail and 66 years of power,” Troll explains.  

Moreover, the sailing of the double-ender across Lake Iliamna will also highlight a significant step forward for sockeye salmon conservation in the region. The Bristol Bay Heritage Land Trust is partnering with Pedro Bay Corporation and Iliamna Natives LTD to create the Iliamna Islands Conservation Easement, which will consist of 173 islands and 12,300 acres of prime sockeye spawning habitat within Lake Iliamna. “Lake Iliamna is the largest sockeye producing lake in the world and is the beating heart of the Bristol Bay commercial fishery,” explains Troll. “We will sail the boat through these [newly protected] islands.”

The return to Bristol Bay. Image courtesy Tim Troll. 

Finally, it is 150 years since the United States purchased Alaska from Russia. Governor Bill Walker declared 2017 the Alaska Year of History and Heritage.  Walker encourages “all Alaskans to take the occasion of this 150thanniversary year to study, teach, reflect upon our past, and apply its lessons to a brighter, more inclusive future.” Returning the Libby boat to Bristol Bay is a way to commemorate the birth of the commercial salmon fishing industry in the Bay, just in time for this statewide celebration.

The project is contingent on donations to cover the cost of a new sail for the boat, some basic maintenance, and the portage. Bristol Bay Heritage Land Trust is leading the fundraising effort. You can help this historic double-ender sail home to Bristol Bay by making a tax-deductible donation to the project at  www.bristolbaylandtrust.org.

For readers in Puget Sound interested in the history of double-enders, visit the APA Cannery Museum at Semiamhoo in Blaine to see the double-enders on exhibit. Moreover, Sailing for Salmon is a photo exhibit highlighting historic images from Bristol Bay, currently hosted at the University of Washington’s School of Aquatic and Fisheries Sciences.  Lastly, the new Alaska State Museum in Juneau features a Libby boat from the Koggiung/ Graveyard cannery. 

The Koggiung/ Graveyard double-ender on exhibit within the new Father Andrew P. Kashevaroff State Library, Archive, and Museum in Juneau, curated by your's truly. 

A National Park for Salmon- Afognak Island in 1892

Hedgehog mushrooms grow hunkered in clusters throughout the spruce forests of Afognak Island, north of Kodiak within the Gulf of Alaska. This fall, I tromped through thick moss to harvest these tasty fungi. It’s the abundance of Afognak’s forest that always beacons me back, but for many, including a visitor named Livingston Stone who came in the 19th century, it’s the salmon that make this place special.

At Afognak, the proverbial forest and stream come together in a historically significant way. In 1892, President Benjamin Harrison issued an executive order to create the Afognak Forest and Fish Culture Reserve. Not only was it the first forest preserve in Alaska, it was the earliest iteration in the USA of a federal conservation ethos that morphed into the National Wildlife Refuge system. The reserve was created not to conserve forests, but to protect the arboreal spawning grounds of what was seen as an at-risk resource- salmon.

Livingston Stone was the person who proposed the reserve. He was a founder of the American Fisheries Society in 1870 and the Deputy Commissioner of Fisheries for the U.S. Fish Commission (the predecessor of NMFS). He directed the construction of the first federal fish hatchery in the nation in McCloud, California in 1872. In 1889 he traveled to Alaska to research salmon and observe commercial fishing practices. On his trip north, he was disturbed to watch beach seines harvest 153,000 salmon over one day at the mouth of the Karluk River, watching only a handful of salmon escape to spawn upstream. He lamented canneries processing fish on the Nushagak River while not leaving enough for local Natives to subsist through the winter.

In a paper presented to the American Fisheries Society in 1892 and reprinted in Field and Stream and other widely-read publications, Stone alerted the nation to the snowballing threats to salmon survival. He wrote of the hastening degradation of salmon habitat in the west, drawing a comparison to what had occurred to Atlantic runs. 

“It was the mills, the dams, the steamboats, the manufactures injurious to the water, and similar causes, which, first making streams more and more uninhabitable for the salmon, finally exterminated them all together. In short, it was the growth of the country, and not the fishing, which really set a bound to the habituations of the salmon on the Atlantic coast.”

— Livingston Stone

Stone was more familiar with salmon conservation than most anyone else in the 19th century. Thus, he spoke with authority when he claimed, 

“I will say from my personal knowledge that not only is every contrivance employed that human ingenuity can devise to destroy the salmon of our West coast rivers, but more surely destructive… is the slow but inexorable march of those destroying agencies of human progress, before which the salmon must surely disappear as did the buffalo of the plains and the Indians of California.”

Stone said that thirty years before, it was unimaginable to think that the buffalo would be on the brink of extinction. He warned that salmon were on a similar trajectory. And like the buffalo, which required the safe haven of Yellowstone National Park to protect the species from the encroachment of industry, salmon needed a place at which they too could be left unmolested. “There is no altar of refuge for the salmon in this country any more than there was for the buffalo.”

Stone claimed that the continental US was already too degraded to support such a reserve. But he had a place in mind that he had visited while in Alaska in 1889, Afognak Island. “It is easy to see what a paradise for salmon this island is, and what a magnificent place of safety it would be if it were set aside for a national park where the salmon could always, hereafter, be unmolested.” President Harrison agreed and created the reserve just several months after Stone initially delivered his speech.

Stone acknowledged that Afognak was not the realm of just fish and forests. Indeed, Alutiiq Natives lived in both the substantially-sized community of Afognak Village and the smaller Little Afognak. Stone asserted that “there would be no injustice done to individuals by making a reservation of the island,” but this was not the case. The two canneries on Afognak Island were shuttered. But more significantly, Afognak residents were barred from fishing for either commercial or subsistence purposes on the island or off shore until a fish hatchery was constructed. Although Stone had lambasted processors on the Nushagak for not leaving enough fish for Bristol Bay Natives and had mourned the supposed disappearance of Indians from California, the reserve for which he advocated left no provisions for the Alutiiq people who lived on Afognak and most relied upon its salmon.

Photo from Bureau of Fisheries publication and made available here. 

It took fifteen years to build the requisite hatchery, and even then Natives could only fish under the supervision of the hatchery superintendent. In 1912, a full twenty years after the reserve was established, Afognak residents were given the sole right to legally and independently fish within the reserve for both subsistence and commercial purposes. 

In 1908, the Afognak Forest and Fish Culture Reserve became a part of the Chugach National Forest. After 1929, fishing regulations on Afognak coincided with those issued for the rest of the region. Much of the original reserve was selected by the Afognak Native Corporation following the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act and became corporate property. Today, the north of the island is part of the Afognak State Park. There, old growth spruce forest, abundant wild mushrooms, and ADF&G-managed salmon runs still pay homage to Stone’s vision. 

The Diamond NN Cannery and the Spanish Influenza

This was initially published in Pacific Fishing's November 2016 issue. 

On June 4, 1919, a sail boat drifted towards Naknek in Bristol Bay. On board were three children, weak from the Spanish flu, and two men who had died before reaching shore. The Spanish influenza pandemic that killed over 30 million people around the world had gripped the villages and canneries of Bristol Bay.

This summer, historians Bob King and Katie Ringsmuth walked the quiet docks of Trident’s South Naknek Diamond NN cannery and came across the very hospital in which Naknek villagers convalesced and died. This cannery served as the center of the relief efforts in Bristol Bay during the summer of 1919.

“Instead of outposts of civilizations, canneries served as global hubs, which brought men, women, and an array of ethnicities together for over 100 years,” Ringsmuth says. She and King are documenting the social and architectural history of the cannery. Diamond NN (often shortened to <NN>) became the first industrial processing plant on the Naknek River when the Arctic Packing Company opened it as a saltery in 1890. Several years later, it became part of the Alaska Packers Association (APA), which converted it into a cannery in 1895. Con Agra purchased the facility in 1982, and Trident gained full ownership of the plant in 1995. Until recently, fishermen who sell to Trident used the plant for boat storage.

South Naknek's <NN> Cannery. Photo by Katie Ringsmuth.

At the time of the flu, APA’s <NN> operated as the head station for five canneries in the Naknek region. The superintendent, JF Heinbockel, lived at <NN>. It was also the location of a company hospital, at which nurses and doctors served both cannery employees and local Native villagers.

On May 22, 1919, the cannery steamer Kvichak anchored at the cannery. Four days later, four men from the village arrived at the cannery hospital, stricken with the flu. Dr. Frederick Spencer immediately informed the superintendent. Together they made plans to quarantine the cannery, enact a stringent sanitation program and prepare to care for sick cannery workers and villagers.

Over the next month, ninety Natives were treated in the <NN> hospital. Of those, fifty two died, which does not include the number who died in Naknek. “About eighty known died at Naknek. Adult population practically wiped out… Am giving all possible assistance at my command here and Ugashik. Nurses required to handle orphans,” Heinbockel wrote in a wireless message sent to a government agent in Dillingham.

Each day during the outbreak, Dr. Spencer, nurses, and cannery employees carried hot food, firewood, medicine and clean clothing to the village, since the sick residents were too ill to provide for their most basic needs. APA nurses also travelled to the villages of Ugashik and Savanoski, which were severely impacted. Thanks to the quarantine, the village of Egegik escaped unharmed.

<NN> was converted into a makeshift orphanage in order to feed, house, and care for all the children who lost parents to the flu. Forty-four children from Naknek and Ugashik lost their parents. These orphans stayed at the cannery until the salmon season was over, at which time they were taken to Dillingham.

These days, South Naknek is quiet. But the history of the cannery still speaks through its buildings. The bright blue paint that colors many of the structures is peeling away, exposing APA’s red underneath. Animal pens under the mess hall hint at how hundreds of people were fed before the advent of refrigeration.  The dilapidated buildings that constitute China Town provide testimony to Asian exclusion in the 19th century and segregation in the 20th century. But it’s the old hospital building that contains one of the most heart-wrenching stories of the 20th century: the Spanish Influenza.

Hospital at <NN>

As part of their efforts to tell the story of <NN>, historians Ringsmuth and King are planning an exhibit which will commemorate the history of the cannery and the 1919 flu epidemic in Alaska.  To learn more about this project and the history of <NN>, visit Tundra Vision's Facebook page or read this blog post at the Alaska Historical Society's website.  

Death at the Doorway

Posted in honor of El Dia de los Muertos.

Death came in the glassy eyes and prickled matte of tongues suspended from the mouths of bucks hanging upside down in the arctic entries of houses as we knocked on doors, holding out our plastic jack-o-lantern buckets and saying in unison, “Trick or Treat!” The musty scent from tufts of fur, wet from the grass in which the deer last bed, lingered in the doorways long after the deer were aged, butchered, wrapped in freezer paper, labeled, and stacked in the freezer.

My dad and stepdad at Blue Fox off Afognak Island. 

Death came in the constant sighting of killed magpies and crows on the side of Mission Road and within the saucer of sand over which the tire swing circled at the park by my family’s house. Magpie was my Native name, Uguusik. Such a squawker I was. Magpie--- my own name was a personal omen for death, just around the bend.

Death came over the phone. The spiral cord twisted as my mom gasped to hear of a friend who was missing after a halibut opener or shot through the door of a cabin.

Death did not come in hospitals, where my siblings were born and where I would bring buttermilk to my dad’s bedside as he pulled me to the chest of his white hospital gown. He was admitted again for overconsumption of something-or-other, or the fights and car crashes that resulted from that consumption. Dad was impermeable to death, until he wasn’t.

Death came every night as zombies and vampires stalked me, aliens dissected me, ghosts possessed me and diabolical men chased me through cavernous, cold houses.  Night terrors were the only dreams I knew.

But life- life came from my mother, who smelled of the dental office in which she worked mixed with a dash of Camel Straits. Life came from holding her hand, the way she described good things as “just loverly,” her effervescent laugh, her alto voice as she sang Jimmy Cliff or Johnny Horton. But death was still so close, always so close, that at 5 PM I would watch the cars on the road from the dining room window of our trailer, waiting for the Chevy Astro to appear, certain that with each car that passed that was not hers, she was surely dead.

My mother was life, but throughout my childhood, I intuited that her death was just a moment away. 

Trees Cause Weeping

Awake you told me of burst trees- 
hardwood trunks that
become brittle in the cold. Their sap moves
slowly- stops- expands-
like a seal bomb in the heart.
Like a shattering of sinew.
The ordered growth of ice
crystals advancing the natural
cruelty of winter.

This story made my chin shake
in sympathy for that frigid forest.

That night asleep in your bed,
I heard the feminine crash of the sea, the particles of
water hitting rock
a choir of cymbals,
like the soft snap of closing scallops.
Countless droplets singing sweeter
than the gale.

This sound made my spirit quiver awake.
I had so much to share with you.

I knew those droplets
turn to heavy dew, floating
yellow leaves to the ground.

I knew those droplets
make your hardwood trees quiver, too.

Then I heard what I hoped to forget.
The song of the sea, the trees,
your hopeful heart, my rushing blood.
It was all one, that purest of sounds.
It was the tenderness of heartbreak.

I knew then
the crystal-song of winter ice that sounded out
during your burst tree's
last sway.

Harry Caray, Mookie Wilson, and One Alaskan Family

My main chore as a child was to deliver Rainier from the crisper of the fridge into the hands of my stepdad and uncles as they watched Cubs baseball. The slurred voice of Harry Caray, the alcoholic sportscaster for the Cubs, boomed from the wooden paneled television that sat on the floor of our trailer. My stepdad and his friends mimicked Harry Caray by getting increasingly buzzed as the innings bunted along. We’d sing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” during the seventh inning stretch, shouting towards the cable box that delivered WGN to Kodiak and concomitantly ensured a legion of Chicago sports fans on the island.

My younger sister was born to be a Chicago fan. She is such a rabid Bears supporter that she switched car insurance companies when State Farm hired a Green Bay Packers quarterback to be their spokesperson. She had very little choice but to love Chicago. Her name derived from a Cubs game, after all. 

The evening before my sister was born, Mom was tired. She was tired of the game, tired of the guys on the couch, tired of being pregnant. “Go home, Ronnie!” she hollered at the most frequent couch denizen.

“Listen, Pam--- the bases are loaded. Mookie Wilson is coming up to bat. If he hits a homer it’s a grand slam and the game is over. And you have to name your child Mookie!”

Mom huffed and turned away, her noncommittal answer implying consent.

Mookie Wilson indeed hit that grand slam, the game was over, and Mom’s water broke later that night.

The next morning, Ronnie visited her and my newborn sister at the hospital. He chuckled, “Well, we know what her name is!”

“I am not putting that on the birth certificate,” Mom responded. But she was called Mookie from the day of her birth. And for years, when we four children sang along with Harry Caray while my stepdad conducted with one hand and clung to a Rainer with the other, we were proud to have a sister named for a Cubbie.

Newborn Mookie in the arms of Gustav. 

Or, so the story went for 29 years, until the Cubs made it to the World Series and I shared the story of Mookie’s name on Facebook. “Mookie Wilson never played for the Cubs,” commented a friend from Nevada.

Peculiar, I think. A quick search of baseball stats confirmed it as fact. On August 6, 1987, Mookie Wilson was playing for the New York Mets against the Cubs. His run did bring the game to an end--- in favor of the Mets! My sister was named for the player who beat the Cubbies, not for the Chicago hero that we siblings mistakenly thought he was.

“You mean my entire life has been a lie?” My sister said in disbelief as I told her she was named for a Mets player.

Well, not quite. Carrie Rose Trueman is the name on her birth certificate, chosen in honor of two great grandmothers. But I wonder if my stepdad approved of the name partially because it was shared by Harry Caray, that voice who competed with the yelps of his infant daughter while my stepdad paced back and forth in front of the television, cooing to his baby. 

These days, my sister goes by Carrie.

The Spanish-American War, Connecting Alaska to the Philippines

Adapted from an article published in Pacific Fishing. 

Beth Fields wiped the dirt from a peculiar button she found at her family’s set net site, exposing a gleaming, albeit worn, eagle crest. She discovered that the button likely once graced a Spanish-American War uniform. But, how would such a memento from the 1898 war make it to the Old Uyak set net site on Kodiak Island? And what does that war have at all to do with the seafood industry? It ends up, quite a bit. The button very likely was carried to Alaska in the sea bag of an early Filipino cannery worker.

It is indisputable that Filipinos have been the backbone of the Alaska cannery labor force. This is partly attributed to the Spanish-American War. Prior to the war, the Spanish crown controlled the Philippines. The Philippines became a U.S. possession soon after Commodore George Dewey obliterated the Spanish forces in Manila. The United States co-opted the Filipino’s long-lasting battle for independence from Spain. Instead of belonging to the Spanish, the Philippines now belonged to Uncle Sam. After the Spanish-American War, the US’s territorial holdings stretched from the isles of the Philippines to the salmon rivers of Alaska.

The timing of the war was fortuitous for American-owned Pacific enterprises that needed a source of cheap labor, especially Hawaiian sugar planters and Alaska salmon canners. Now that the Philippines was a US possession, Filipinos were considered American nationals. They were not citizens; they could not own property or vote. But as nationals, they could travel to the US without a passport and work.

Once the new Filipino immigrants arrived in the US, many hopped on a boat in San Francisco or Seattle and headed north. They were on their way to remote salmon canneries, like those in Uyak Bay. Included as passenger might have been the man who presumably carried the American-issued military jacket on which the eagle-crested button was affixed.

One of the two canneries built at the Uyak Achorage, just inside Uyak Bay on the west side of Kodiak Island. Image from the collection of Anjuli Grantham. 

It was just one year before the war (1897) that two canneries were built near the Uyak Anchorage, where the Fields family’s set net site is today. Cannery worker demographics extracted from old federal salmon reports indicate that at the turn of the twentieth century, most of the Alaska cannery crew hailed from Japan or China. Yet, Alaska’s salmon packers were in need of a new, cheap labor supply to replace the aging Chinese workers. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 severely limited the number of Chinese who could enter the US. Thus, new recruits were needed to solder cans, butcher fish, and the myriad other tasks required to put up cases of salmon. Filipinos, these new American nationals, fit the bill. What started as a trickle of Filipino workers to Alaska canneries turned into a wave, so much so that by the 1930s, Filipinos outnumbered other ethnic groups in Alaska’s canneries.

We will never know who it was that brought that old Spanish-American War button to the cannery at Uyak. However, that one button reminds us that Alaska’s salmon industry has long been connected to global events.  

Cannery History on 360 North

Last month I joined historians Bob King and Katie Ringsmuth on 360 North's public affairs television program, Forum@360. During this live studio taping, we discussed why the history of the seafood industry is important in Alaska, what efforts are underway to document this history, which canneries have been in operation for over a century, and more. 

"Alaska's Historic Canneries and the People Who Worked There" is available for viewing at 360 North. Special thanks goes to our host, Matt Miller. 

From left, Katie Ringsmuth, Bob King, Anjuli Grantham and Matt Miller during the taping of Forum@360.

Hansen Maid: Book Project Recounts Stories of Hansen Boat Co's Iconic Seiners

The graceful sweep of the hull, the cut of the flying bridge and the railings that lead to it, the 27 degree angle utilized in much of the construction: these tell-tale signs advertise a Hansen Boat Co. vessel as much as the winged insignia on the bow of the boat. Now, a Hansen admirer from Ketchikan is working to document the history of this stalwart business and the boats that have come from Hansen Boat Co.’s shipyards.

“I asked a lot of questions when I was a kid on the docks of Ketchikan about the boats,” Kevin Kristovich explains, “and I remember most of the information.” Kristovich is a third generation mariner who started seining when he was a teenager. More recently, he started sharing his boat photos and knowledge within a Facebook group.  Group members encouraged him to convert his passion for Hansens into a book. Now, Kristovich is several years in to writing Hansen Boat Co: The Men, The Boats, and how they were “Maid.”

The Hansen family settled in the Seattle region in the late 1800s, coming to the US from Norway. TheViking ship in the center of the company’s brand pays homage to their Scandinavian heritage. The Hansen’s were a fishing family who initially constructed seine boats for their own use. Reportedly, each time they built a boat they would find a way to improve the design, sell their vessel, and then go back to the shipyard to innovate.

In 1927, Harold Hansen Boat Co. was officially established in Ballard. Harold’s son, Don Hansen, took a class in boat design at Ballard High School and got that very job working for his family’s business. Kristovich asserts that the company would produce boats for a decade based off the same design. Likewise, many of their boats were christened with a similar name, like Norse Maid, Victory Maid, Yankee Maid.

The boats have a distinctive appearance, but through the years Hansen boats adapted to changing materials and technologies. During the 1950s, the boats had a greater beam to accommodate larger fish holds. Cabins increased in size, as well, to accommodate on-board amenities like hot and cold running water, refrigerators, and sinks. In 1955 the Puretic power block revolutionized seining and became an important feature on all commercial seine vessels.

In 1966, Hansen put out its last wooden seiner, the Patricia Ann. Henceforth steel construction dominated, although beginning in the 1970s the company produced fiberglass boats. It was in 1978 that the company dropped the “Harold” from its name, becoming merely Hansen Boat Co.

Kristovich notes that since the 1980s, the company has been mostly engaged in conversion projects and repairs from the company’s Everett shipyard. However, the company still puts out new commercial fishing boats, with the most recent being the Anthem. “They are still pumping out boats. It’s a good testament to time.”

“I have 500 photographs but not a lot of information about the Hansen family themselves. They are a low-key family business,” Kristovich explains. He will be spending time in Washington this fall to seek out more information about this family enterprise, now in its fifth generation.

Kristovich’s work in progress is more about the boats that Hansen produced than the business which built them. His book will include the stories of boat owners, captains, crews, and the fishing communities that have turned to Hansen for generations, communities including Hoonah and elsewhere. “There aren’t a lot of Hansen’s in Prince William Sound,” he says, “but there were plenty of pocket seiners in Kodiak and Chignik.

“There was nothing cheesy or cheap about their boats,” he continues, “They built a prettier boat than most other builders,” Kristovich says.

Kristovich has started a GoFundMe campaign to fundraise for travel, research, and publication costs associated with producing the book. He is still seeking good quality photos that show the entirety of Hansen boat, including the rigging.  Kristovich is also looking for help to identify the original photographers who took some of the photos he would like to highlight in the book. You can see these photos by visiting “Hansen Boat Co.” on Facebook and contribute cash to this project at gofundme.com.