Ten years. Yes, for ten years I have traveled to archives from coast to coast, spent hours squinting at microfilm, and ruminated over the many ways the 1886 murder of Benjamin McIntyre conveys the history of Gilded Age Alaska. I wrote the story below 6 years ago; it was published then in the ADN. Since then, I’ve discovered Ivan Petroff sent his investigation of the murder to MD Ball, District Attorney for Alaska. If this record still exists it is in College Park, MD. The search continues.
Photo Album Provides Glimpse at 130 Year Old Murder
“Oh, I do have an old family album I should send up sometime,” the woman said on the other end of the phone. “It’s beaten to shreds. I don’t know who anyone is, but they must be family, otherwise why would we have kept it? Most of the pictures were taken in San Francisco, and some of the people look like Kodiak Natives. Maybe you want it at the museum?”
The package arrived in Kodiak a few weeks later. As I cut through the bubble wrap encasing the album, I hoped to see images of Kodiak people from the turn of the twentieth century. The album was old. Once it had been made of velvet, but only bits of the softness remained. Each album page fit two portraits; all the portraits were posed. None of the faces were familiar.
But then I saw him, the one with the quizzical left eyebrow, the round ear, the ample beard, and spit-curls. It was Ivan Petroff, that devil of a historian himself.
I continued flipping through the album and gave a shriek at the face that looked up at me. It was Benjamin McIntyre, manager of the Alaska Commercial Company’s Kodiak District. Benjamin McIntyre: murdered at his dining room table nearly 130 years ago. This album not only dated to the 1880s, it contained within it two individuals who had last been together in real life on November 1, 1886, when Petroff sat to McIntyre’s left hand side as a dinner guest and, consequently, a witness to his murder.
McIntyre’s murder reads like a real-life, Alaska history version of Clue - complete with a counterfeiter, a businessman, a soldier, a missionary and an explorer. An investigation into the witnesses, the victim, and the perpetrator exposes both the details of this gruesome deed and a look into Alaska when it was still barely American. Could this album provide new clues into a century-old mystery?
Petroff felt that McIntyre’s murder was pre-destined. Or, at least that he knew that Peter Anderson would cause him great suffering. “I must get to the house as soon as possible and take some quinine,” McIntyre purportedly remarked when he first saw Anderson’s sloop sail in to the village. Petroff later interpreted McIntyre’s nausea upon meeting his future killer as evidence of a sixth sense, a hunch that he should have trusted.
Right from the start, Petroff figured that Anderson was a good for nothing opium smuggler. The fact that he let company traps rust in the field and mistreated his dogs further indicated that this Russian immigrant with “a red, coarse face almost hidden in beard” and “an herculean body” was most certainly a low-life.
But Petroff wasn’t the most honest of men, either. In 1886, Petroff was customs collector in Kodiak. He claimed to have first come to Alaska in service of the Russian-American Company. This claim, like much of what Petroff said of his life, does not bare scrutiny. Furthermore, the only reason that historians have even looked closely at his biography is due to the irrefutable fact that Petroff was a first-rate counterfeiter. He was a storyteller with the visage of a bureaucrat, a skillful elaborator who fudged translations and embellished known facts with invented details. He also was responsible for the first census of Alaska in 1880, wrote portions of the oft-cited history text, Hubert Howe Bancroft’s The History of Alaska, and was considered a major authority on the north.
But that evening, he was just a dinner guest, interrupted from playing with the dessert crumbs on his plate by a bang overhead. Petroff thought a lamp had exploded, but once he looked around, he saw that buckshot had shattered the window as it passed from outside the house and into the skull of the unfortunate McIntyre. He watched as blood poured from McIntyre’s mouth, even though his fork was positioned to put dessert in it.
Benjamin Woche faired much worse than Petroff. The station agent for AC’s Kaguyak store was sitting opposite to McIntyre and sustained bullet wounds to the face. He only survived because McIntyre’s head bore the brunt of the spray. Woche was in Kodiak merely to receive orders for the approaching winter. You see, McIntyre was to sail the next day to San Francisco and from there on home to Vermont, not to return to Kodiak until the following spring. This last meal was McIntyre’s send-off party.
Later in life, Woche seemed ill-disposed towards leaving the small village of Kaguyak. In fact, he seemed ill-disposed towards much at all beyond complaining, especially about his wife and the poor pay he received from AC after decades of service. He was familiar with San Francisco, having enlisted in the Army at Alcatraz in 1867. He set sail with the Second Artillery’s Battery G to establish Fort Kodiak within what had been recently known as Russian America. His orders: to protect Kodiak Natives from the ravages of the new American wealth seekers and potential aggression from the Danaina or Chugach Alutiiq. Subtext: treat this new American department as Indian Country.
Woche and his Army colleagues encountered a Creole village where one of the greatest dangers was illness, although one unfortunate recruit ‘’burned to death on Wood Island,” according to his grave marker. After two years, Fort Kodiak was decommissioned, and the personnel shipped back to San Francisco. But Woche stayed behind, having married the fetching Alexandra Larionova. He started working for Hutchinson Kohl and Co., which soon later became the AC, and was sent to manage the trading post on the south end of the island.
But now that he was injured by the assassin’s bullet, he would not be heading back to Kaguyak. The closest doctor was in San Francisco. Twelve days at sea is what Woche had to endure with a buckshot splintered jaw. He was given the stateroom in which McIntyre usually travelled. His former employer was stored with the rest of the schooner Kodiak’s cargo, in the hold. A letter that Petroff had recently penned to his daughter was stored aboard, as well. Within it he prophesized, “It will be awfully lonesome here this winter- so many people have gone away for the winter.”
In addition to the letter and funerary load, other provisions for the trip included cans of fruit, bacon and 168 pounds of ‘’fresh beef,” according to the store’s register for the day. The fact that McIntyre traveled in the hold instead of in the stateroom might have been partially attributed to that very beef. In an oral history of Spridon Stepanoff, later described by anthropologist Patricia Partnow, Stepanoff told the story of “Macintine,” the American that was killed at his dinner table. According to Stepanoff, earlier on the day of his death, Macintine butchered a cow. He was from Vermont--- bovine country, indeed--- and likely intended to sell the beef in the store and feast on it during the trip to San Francisco. After the butchering commenced, Anderson asked Macintine for some of the meat. Macintine scoffed at this request, “You! You aren’t a working man!” denying Anderson the meal.
After outfitting Anderson for several hunting trips and getting few pelts in return, McIntyre had offered Anderson a job working in the warehouse to pay back the money he owed for the hunting provisions. Anderson had refused the work. McIntyre seemed ill-inclined to feed the man who already owed the store money. Perhaps it was the refused beef that drove Anderson over the edge. Or, the fact that without money and without the opportunity for more store credit, he was in a desperate situation. Perhaps Anderson thought a change in management was in order.
Heyward Seton-Karr was relieved when the Kodiak arrived to the village. He’d sketched the wharf, the picturesque Russian Orthodox Church, the old warehouse in which furs, liquor, sugar and tobacco were kept, sketches that today are held at the Alaska Historical Library in Juneau. He was ready to return to the continental US and from there, to his British homeland. Alaska had been quite the adventure. He had come to scale Mt. Saint Elias, and his failure did not prevent him for publishing his travel journal, Shores and Alps of Alaska. He found Kodiak a “comparatively civilised place” and his host, McIntyre, “exceedingly popular with everyone.”
Reverend W.E. Roscoe rushed to the company house. He entered to watch as the witnesses lowered McIntyre to the ground and Seton-Karr treating Woche’s jaw. Roscoe administered the last rights according to his Baptist training. Kodiak had presented a challenge for the Roscoe family since arriving just a few months before. They were the first Protestant missionaries in the solidly Orthodox community. Rev. Sheldon Jackson had dispatched Roscoe, his wife Ida, and their baby boy to Kodiak with instruction to start a school. It was the first American school in Kodiak. Mr. McIntyre had been very helpful, letting the fledgling institution occupy an unused company building. The school opened just a few weeks before, with Petroff serving as translator, since the children did not speak much English and the teacher did not speak Russian or Alutiiq.
After administering the rights, Roscoe and Petroff joined the manhunt. There was but one suspect, Anderson. They found his skiff on shore and rowed to his sloop. It was empty of its owner. Yet, on board was a line of powder that connected a lit lamp to containers of gunpowder. It seemed as though Anderson intended to blow up his vessel, but the lamp never sparked the ignition. For what purpose he would demolish his own craft was not known. In another version of the Alutiiq story of Macintine, Anderson was a hired henchman. Perhaps he planned to start a blaze on his boat in order to catch fire to the schooner Kodiak, moored close by.
Petroff and Roscoe ran to the house of the woman with who Anderson stayed and she claimed to have not seen him. However, a villager had seen him lurking in the alley behind McIntyre’s house soon before the murder. In desperation, Roscoe offered a monetary reward for information on the suspect’s whereabouts. A boy pointed towards Pillar Mountain, pocketing the money. Later, another claimed to see him through his spyglass. Roscoe wrote, “We have searched every hiding place in town and have searched the adjacent country as well as possible without success… As there is no boat or bidarka missing, the man has not left the island.” What became of Anderson is unknown. One legend is that he was but a spirit to begin with. When he passed by, no one could see him or sense his presence. He seemed to evaporate into Kodiak’s winter.
McIntyre’s body was loaded on the Kodiak. It left the next day, as scheduled. Accompanying the body was a letter to the directors of the Alaska Commercial Company from HP Cope, informing them of McIntyre’s violent end. In 1886, Cope was a storekeeper, but he was also Kodiak’s first postmaster. The ink in his letter is splotched, either from a poor performing writing instrument or tears. “The whole town are very much shocked,” he wrote, “and I think I can say that Mr. McIntyre had the respect of all who knew him both Americans and natives.”
It is unlikely that anyone in Kodiak knew that November 1 was the Day of the Dead. Yet la calavera--- the skeleton of Mexican satire and merry making--- was to make an appearance in Kodiak. Skeletal remains were found some thirty years later, overlooking the town of Kodiak. The rusted shotgun clutched in the bony hand contained shells that matched those collected from the dining room floor. Many presumed it was Peter Anderson and that he had died by his own hand. However, in Cope’s letter to AC’s directors, he asserted that, “It is my opinion that we shall not see Peter Anderson alive.” Moreover, soon after the Kodiak arrived in San Francisco, Emma Petroff wrote a worried letter to her husband. She said that a ship had been dispatched north to aid in the manhunt, but, “If the man is found we do not think he will ever get here, or to Sitka alive- because the ‘Co’ will avoid having a trial if they possibly can.” Could Anderson have been apprehended and killed by vigilantes?
More pressing to the present moment- could the curly haired woman with large eyes, in the portrait slot to the left of Petroff, be his dear wife Emma? Could perhaps these other unknown faces be other witnesses- Woche, Seton-Karr, Roscoe, villagers who searched for Anderson or stayed put in their homes, sensing it was none of their business?
Here, within this photo album could be the very individuals who I know so well by name and by deed, but not at all by face or by voice. This type of taunting is typical for historians of Alaska. For us, the mysteries are rarely ever truly solved.