Josie’s Story: The settlers’ colony

Second of eight parts. This series tells the untold story of Josie Rudolph, the first settler girl born under the U.S. flag in Alaska — and how her birth here helped her escape from Nazi Germany. Read part one and more about this series here.

On May 18, 1868, a small single-mast sloop sailed past Mount Edgecumbe into Sitka Sound. As it tacked with the wind toward the town, a cheer rose up from the six passengers. They had been tossing in the cramped boat for a month since leaving Puget Sound. Among their number was Emil Teichmann, a 21-year-old Englishman of German descent, who presented himself as one of Alaska’s first tourists, though he was in fact a secret agent.

Teichmann’s employer, the London fur merchants Oppenheim and Co., had a longstanding contract with the Russian America Company to buy their Alaska furs. They had sent Teichmann undercover to the new American colony to find out what happened to the previous year’s shipment, the harvest prior to the sale of the Russian company’s assets. On his way north, he learned a shipment of furs had been delivered to a rival company in San Francisco. He was looking for evidence that certain Russian officials, taking advantage of the confusion, had cut a side deal.

Teichmann would remain in Sitka for six weeks that summer, carrying a revolver in his pocket while posing as an eccentric naturalist — asking questions about the country and its people, collecting curiosities, and “sketching as ostentatiously as possible.” The whole time he kept a secret journal, which he later revised into a book-length manuscript. In 1925, a year after he died, “A Journey to Alaska” was published by his son, providing a unique first-person description of Sitka in its first year as part of the United States.

From the water, Teichmann wrote, Sitka presented a welcoming sight: the whitewashed buildings on the waterfront, the Russian governor’s mansion atop a rocky rise, and the onion-dome cupola of the Orthodox cathedral — “if one can bestow that name on a building made entirely of wood.” To the left, houses of the “Indian village” ran for a mile along a beach where “there is always something going on.” The whole scene was backed by snow-capped mountains and “dense primeval forest.”

Up close, the American outpost was less impressive. A few major structures were built from sawmill boards or nicely dovetailed logs, crafted by imported Finnish laborers — but most were simple round-log buildings. Everything was starting to rot. For two weeks, as it rained steadily, Teichmann negotiated the muddy main street over mossy planks.

The former company town had gone overnight from a feudal quiet to a boomtown clamor. Teichmann counted around 50 non-military Americans, sorting them into three classes: an upper crust of respectable officials, a second tier of merchants, fur traders and dealers in spirits, and a fortune-hunting class of unlucky prospectors and trouble-making ruffians.

Half a year after the flag was raised and “we all rejoiced that we now stood on American soil,” as one visiting correspondent had put it, the principal business of Sitka still involved cleaning out the wealth of the Russian era. Ships sailed south with manifests of furs and trade goods from the Russian American Company’s liquidation sale. The bulk of what remained had just been sold to the San Francisco firm of Hutchinson, Kohl and Co., soon to be known as the Alaska Commercial Company. Hutchinson’s purchase covered the company’s facilities in the Pribilof Islands, source of the fur seal wealth, but the company passed over most of the buildings left in Sitka, evidently seeing no immediate commercial use of the area.

That left Sitka’s destiny in the hands of a circle of investors and promoters who had rushed north to cut deals with the departing Russian officials. Foremost among these visionaries was William S. Dodge, Sitka’s first mayor and Alaska’s first elected politician.

Mayor Dodge was a 29-year-old Massachusetts man who came north to serve as customs collector, the outpost’s main government job. Dodge’s effort to avoid service in the recent Civil War had not prevented him from establishing the political connections essential to secure such an appointment. A military transport delivered him to Sitka with his wife, the sister of Hayward Hutchinson, the ACC founder. He bought up Russian buildings unclaimed by his brother-in-law or the Army, then invited the other businessmen to the customs office to organize a city government. They elected him mayor. Dodge also served as the town’s judge and put up the cash to start the town’s newspaper. That first summer, when it came time for a Fourth of July oration, Mayor Dodge addressed himself to “Liberty: Her Struggles, Perils and Triumphs.” The city council appropriated $179.50 to reprint the speech in a thousand pamphlets.

Despite Dodge’s efforts, the economic boom he foresaw turned out to be a mirage. The U.S. Department of War would remain in charge for years to come, leaving the city council and “mayor’s court” no real legal authority. There was no legal title to the unsurveyed lots in town being traded by storekeepers and speculators. Taxes were imposed on the dubious basis of mutual consent. The city fathers wrote letters to a distant Congress seeking a more secure legal foundation.

Teichmann, meanwhile, made progress on his secret investigation. Eventually he found a former Russian official willing to provide an affidavit regarding the missing fur shipments in return for a number of $20 gold pieces. All Teichmann needed now was to stop by the customs office to get the affidavit notarized by Mayor Dodge. The secret Russian informant was terrified that the mayor would be able to sniff out his identity, putting his life in danger. But Dodge hardly glanced at the document before stamping it. Alaska’s first elected politician was too busy trying to convince Teichmann to allow his sketches of Sitka to be reproduced for promotional purposes in the New York illustrated newspapers.

Next: In the era of Western “Indian wars,” the Army trains its cannons on the Sheet’ká Kwáan.

Read part one: Birthplace

Support for this project was provided by the Alaska Center for Excellence in Journalism.