newsminer.com

Courtesy of Michael Carey

Grace Hard, left, and Jessie Howard on the streets of Ophir.

Courtesy of Michael Carey

Courtesy of Michael Carey

The history of the American people is a history of a people in motion. This has been true in every decade since the pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, but in no decade have people in motion had more influence on Alaska than the 1890s.

The discovery of gold in the Klondike set off a mass migration to the north. As Canadian historian Pierre Berton noted, thousands of men — and women — woke up one morning, packed a bag and never looked back. Some didn’t bother with the bag. The influx of greenhorns made sourdoughs of anyone living in the north before the great stampede of 1898.

The 1900 Alaska census reveals the consequences. It shows the names of many communities that did not exist in 1890, and pages and pages of the names of new Alaskans who arrived here in in the spring and summer of ‘98.

The three Rose sisters, formerly of Eureka, Calif., are among those enumerated in 1900. By April 1898, they were in Juneau: twin sisters Jessie and Emma, 30, and Grace, 23.

Juneau and neighboring Douglas were established communities, not tent cities, boasting a combined population of 3,000. Both were proud to offer modern amenities found Outside. Hotels bragged about “strictly first-class” rooms with electric lights and “radiators in every apartment.” Steamship schedules demonstrate travel between Juneau and the states was fast and frequent.

Nevertheless, the Rose sisters would have had to muster courage to leave northern California for distant southeast Alaska. Perhaps they were bolstered by the knowledge their parents, John and Jessie Rose, were immigrants who left a long trail of footprints before they settled in California.

It’s not clear if the three Roses traveled north together or if Jessie, a school teacher in California, preceded them. There is reason to believe she came ahead, because she was married by the summer of 1898 — to Frank Howard, a newspaperman who had lived in Juneau since 1887. In April 1895, Howard, 32, had been the victim of one of the most sensational crimes in southeast Alaska history: An irate reader, subject of an inflammatory story, walked into his office at the Juneau Mining Record and shot him twice at point-blank range. The stunned community prepared for his funeral, but Frank Howard lived for 35 more years.

• • •

Newspaper stories about the deaths and hardships along the route to the Klondike may have intimidated some stampeders. Not Frank and Jessie Howard, who left Juneau for Dawson where, Frank recalled, they first saw the northern lights in ‘98. The marriage seems to have been a happy one. In 1906, Frank told a Fairbanks friend Jessie was a “little girl with brains and a disposition that smoothes life’s pathway.”

The couple mined until 1904, but by 1905, they definitely were in the small Koyukuk mining camp of Coldfoot, which now survives as the well-known truck stop on the Dalton Highway. Coldfoot was one of the most inaccessible communities in North America, if not the world, when the Howards arrived. In Coldfoot, Frank Howard abandoned mining and became the U.S. commissioner or magistrate, which earned him the title of judge. The federal appointment paid modestly but the commissioner enjoyed local prestige.

Howard was a big man who radiated solidity and strength. In his courtroom, a cabin, he may have imposed the law by his imposing physical presence. Surviving examples of his prose show he wrote far better than the typical commissioner, as might be expected of a professional journalist.

• • •

Emma Kate and Grace Rose remained in Juneau until 1904 or ‘05, when they were on the move once more — southward. Emma Kate joined her mother in Eureka, where she married Martin Fulton, 20 years her senior, who was a clerk in a local store. Grace settled in southern California with her husband, Cecil Shaver, whom she met in Juneau. Cecil, in his early 30s, had been a salesman for a Juneau merchant.

Many women who came to Alaska during the gold rush era have a biography that includes a chapter titled “Return to the States and Marriage” with no more references to Alaska. But Grace Rose Shaver’s bio did not follow that script.

Grace’s correspondence and the census demonstrate the Shavers lived in several locations in or near Los Angeles. By 1917, they were settled in Bakersfield, where Cecil managed the grocery department for Ira Hochhiemer, a prominent local merchant. Grace and Cecil had a comfortable life until Feb. 6, 1918, when Cecil’s car exploded in fire as he pulled out of his garage. News stories describe a horrific public tragedy that shook the community and left Grace a widow with a 12-year-old son, Tommy.

• • •

Frank and Jessie Howard remained in the Koyukuk region into the early ‘20s, when they moved to Tanana, where Frank served as commissioner for eight years. When he became ill in the late 1920s, Jessie assumed his responsibilities. He died in the summer of 1930 at age 67.

Court records demonstrate Jessie was in Tanana until at least 1932, but by 1934, she lived in Ophir, near Iditarod, where she was again commissioner. Her letters and papers don’t explain why a woman in her early 70s would move to a town more isolated than Tanana but the answer must include a declining opportunity to make a living. Alaska had fewer people in 1930 than in 1900. A number of communities died in that period, including Ft. Gibbon, the military installation near Tanana. Alaskans’ expectations were damaged as badly as the census figures — then further damaged by the stock market crash of ‘29 and the Great Depression.

Jessie Howard may have been slowed by age when she reached Ophir, but public records prove she was an able public official. With more than 30 years of experience among miners, trappers and Natives she knew what to expect from Alaskans and seems to have had a gift for inspiring confidence. Her province included marriages, divorces, minor criminal cases, the filings associated with mining law, and conducting elections, inquests and sanity hearings. (The typical sanity hearing involved an old timer who had become a danger to himself and perhaps others.) The commissioner also was expected to extend endless good will to members of the community — holding mail, storing tools and machinery (anything smaller than a Caterpillar tractor) as well as passing along messages, keys, and checks.

Jessie lived by herself in a cabin that doubled as her office until 1935 or 1936, when Grace joined her after more than a 30-year absence from Alaska. Why? Grace’s correspondence offers no clue but she may have been responding to the pressures of the Depression. She may have been close to broke.

But Grace wasn’t with Jessie long. In 1936, approaching 60, she married miner Eric Hard, 65.

Eric, born in Sweden in 1871, lived the life of a classic gold-rush stampeder in his early years. A man on the move, he passed through Ellis Island on his way to northern Wisconsin in 1891, and in 1898, he made his way to Dyea and up the Chilkoot Trail to Dawson. His Dawson diaries often contain the miner’s most elementary entry “Today, started digging a hole” — followed inevitably the next day by “Down in the hole digging.” From Dawson, he went westward to the Fortymile, Ruby, Iditarod and Ophir. It’s surprising Eric never spent much time in Fairbanks, which attracted so many former Klondike miners.

By the time he married, Eric had abandoned digging with a shovel — he now had tractors, draglines and other heavy equipment as well as men to run them.

Well into old age, Eric and Grace’s life followed a rhythm of summers in Ophir, winters in a Seattle hotel — a rhythm no doubt interrupted by World War II. Those who knew Eric report he was a mild-mannered man with a bookish streak who, with a different background, might have become a dentist or doctor. In Ophir, he was both of those things to men who could not afford to fly to Anchorage for medical care.

• • •

Jessie Howard, sister Grace, and Eric Hard died in an Alaska they could not imagine in their youth. It was an Alaska in which the airplane, the automobile, the radio and television had transformed travel and communications. It was an Alaska in which Fairbanks and Anchorage, which did not exist when they arrived, had surpassed Juneau in population and influence. Grace died first, in Ophir on Dec. 29, 1954. She was 78 and in steady decline. Jessie followed her eight years later to the day at age 94 — in the Sitka Pioneer Home, where she had lived since 1960. (Her twin sister Emma Kate died in Eureka in 1946).

Eric also died in the Pioneer’s Home, on June 21, 1964. He was 92 — one of the last, if not the last, of those who climbed the Chilkoot Pass in ‘98. When he was laid to rest, the Alaska he, the Rose sisters and Frank Howard encountered in their youth existed only in books and in the minds of tourism promoters.