Josie’s Story: Jews of the frontier

Fourth 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 the first three parts and more about this series here.

This much we know: Martin Rudolph first appears in Alaska’s historical records on Nov. 1, 1867, when he shipped 100 blankets and 27 casks of liquor south from Sitka to San Francisco.

The date would put Josie Rudolph’s father among the first Americans to arrive in Sitka, where Russian warehouses full of trade goods were being liquidated. Rudolph’s shipment went out on the steamship John L. Stephens, which had dropped off U.S. Army troops to oversee the formal transfer ceremony two weeks earlier.

We don’t know exactly when Martin Rudolph and his wife, Fanny, came to Alaska. We don’t know why they came. They weren’t prominent historical figures, the subjects of monographs and plaques. They did not leave behind journals or revealing letters.

My friends from New Jersey, Amy Weiss and her cousin Susie Hoffman, searched through boxes and grilled their cousins about the early years of Josie Rudolph — not because Josie was the first American pioneer girl born in Alaska, but because she was their great-grandmother, their “Omutsch,” and the mother of their beloved grandfather Baba.

They found stories of Josie’s later return to Germany and the rise of the Nazis. But working together on her Alaska story we found mostly bare names and dates, detached from motive or emotion. Also a large copper tea samovar, owned by Susie’s brother in Pennsylvania, which is said to have come from Russian America.

We do know that Martin and Fanny Rudolph were part of a substantial community of Jews in Sitka. Among the several score Americans drawn by the promise of opportunity in those first years, their names endure in property records and census lists — Abe Cohen and his family, the Shirpser brothers, Aaron and Benjamin Levy, Lazar Caplan, Sam Storer, Sam Goldstein, and the town butcher, Isaac Bergman, who was married to Fanny Rudolph’s younger sister, Ida.

We know, too, that their presence in Sitka was a consequence of a surge of Jewish migration in the middle of the 19th century: out of Germany to the United States, and then, less well known, west across America to the frontier.

In Bavaria and other German states, 19th-century Jews were restricted as to occupations, where they could live, whether they could own land, and even whether they could marry and start families of their own. These restrictions gradually loosened as Germany coalesced into a modern state, historians say, but emigration to America continued to grow, especially among younger Jews.

Many Jewish immigrants settled in large cities on the American east coast, but others headed west. Historical journals are full of accounts of Jewish businessmen moving into rail hubs or small mining camps to fill newfound mercantile needs, taking up the social role they’d been allowed in Europe. In frontier towns where all the white civic leaders were outsiders of one kind or another, Jews wrote letters home saying they were more likely to be judged for their contributions than their backgrounds. According to the Western America Jewish Museum in Pomona, California, less than 1% of America’s population was Jewish in 1870, but some towns in the West were 5%, and the proportion was 10% in San Francisco, where interest in the new Alaska purchase was highest, and where Jewish businessmen were deeply involved in the fur trade.

Not that traces of old prejudices had disappeared. Early travelers in Alaska wrote, sometimes with a sneer, about Jews showing up to take part in the transfer from Russian control.

Frederick Whymper, an English travel writer who visited Alaska in 1867, referred to “the inevitable Jew and the irrepressible Yankee” in Sitka’s commercial mix, adding that the weak local fur market had disappointed the “Israelitish” traders. William H. Dall, the noted Smithsonian scientist and early explorer, referred in a book to “Wandering Jews” engaged in unsavory trade with the Natives.

Even Emil Teichmann, the fur company spy posing as a tourist, impressed as he was by their piety, accused Sitka merchants “of the Jewish race” with carrying on “a more or less illicit trade with the soldiers and Indians.” He said they were “liable to prosecution at any moment had the administration of the law not been so lax.”

This, then, was the community joined by Martin and Fanny Rudolph in the first year of American Alaska.

“Martin Rudolph” was a made-up name. Back in Wurttemberg, Germany, he was Rudolf Monheimer. Like many immigrants of that era, he started over when he arrived at Ellis Island in New York City, in June 1853, at the age of 20. Generations later, his family remembered the name change, but not the reason for it. Martin Rudolph showed up in the 1860 U.S. census living in central Washington with “L. Monheimer,” presumably his brother.

Fanny Heymann had emigrated from Bavaria as a young woman with her brother and sister, according to a letter written by the sister, Ida, and read, many decades later, at Fanny’s funeral. Ida married Isaac Bergman in 1862 and they settled in Astoria, Oregon. Presumably Fanny met Martin Rudolph around that time.

It is reasonable to assume that the sisters and their husbands traveled to Sitka together in 1867.

In Sitka, Isaac Bergman set up a butcher’s shop — “He keeps a large supply of fresh meat, when he can find it, always on hand,” said his advertisement — and was a civic minded community member. He served as an election judge and later as a city councilman.

Near the Russian Orthodox cathedral, on the main street newly renamed Lincoln Street, Martin Rudolph bought a building for Bergman’s butcher shop from Prince Maksutov, the last manager of the Russian-American colony. The Bergmans and Rudolphs lived in apartments upstairs. The building was later sold, expanded into a hotel, burned down, and rebuilt.

Martin Rudolph leased space nearby for his dry goods store and grocery. Farther from town, he set up one of the town’s two breweries in a former Russian tannery. Breweries were legal in the military district. Indeed, beer was the only manufactured product in Alaska shown to be profitable.

In the early city records, taken down in meticulous longhand and preserved today in the state archives, Rudolph’s name pops up every so often: being sued for some small claim, or suing someone, or asking the city council to reduce the licensing fees on his brewery. One time he was accused of getting rough with the Russian deacon’s pregnant wife. A jury in the mayor’s court acquitted him.

Another time, Martin Rudolph was fined for selling liquor without a license. The liquor laws changed frequently during Sitka’s first years, as the question of importing alcohol into the military district seemed to be the one Alaska question that captured the attention of Washington, D.C. The customs collector may have been the first government civilian in Sitka, but smuggling remained one of the principal local industries. Rudolph’s decision to ship 27 casks of liquor out of Sitka in November 1867 probably came to seem a hasty one, given the growing local demand. With the fur trade’s decline, alcohol made the economy churn. Even the customs collector, Mayor William S. Dodge, owned a share of the Sitka Brewery. In September 1869, the court records show, postmaster John Kinkead, who was later appointed Alaska’s first governor, and whose wife was a founder of the local temperance committee, was fined $500 for smuggling alcohol in cans marked “coal oil.”

In the summer of 1869, a girl named Josephine was born to Martin and Fanny Rudolph. They called her Josie. There were two boys born in American Sitka before her. So: She was the third settler baby in Alaska and the first girl.

We know the exact date thanks to Alaska’s first newspaper.

The Sitka Times had been launched the previous September as a weekly paper hand-copied in cursive longhand by hired scribes. “The appearance of the Times, being written rather than printed, will perhaps cause many a laugh,” declared the paper’s first editorial. “Until we see better inducements, than there is now offered, a press can be dispensed with, although, the copying of so small a sheet as the Times requires much labor.”

In the very first issue, alongside the editorial and the shipping news, a description of a recent “brilliant and simetrical” aurora, and ads for saloons, was a promotion for the dry goods store of M. Rudolph, which singled out his “large selection of gents, boys, and ladies Understandings.”

The newspaper’s editor was Thomas G. Murphy, a tailor with some background in law and an arrest record in Idaho for selling counterfeit gold dust. His wife was the schoolteacher and his son, Henry, the actual first settler baby in Sitka. Alaska’s first newspaper editor was known to his contemporaries as a jovial, spirited Irishman, committed to journalism as a town-building enterprise. But he gave up this first newspaper attempt after eight weeks, declaring in November:

“The suspension is not in any way owing to a want of patronage, as we have more demands than we could supply, neither to a want of finances, as it was a moderately paying institution, nor do we think it is owing to a want of brains. The parties who have done our copying are unable to work, as they have done heretofore, to twelve o’clock every night in the week. Other copyists are not to be had in Sitka for money.”

Murphy sailed to San Francisco in search of a printing press. By April 1869, he was back in business with a more legibly printed product and a new name, The Alaska Times, thanks to an investment from the town’s mayor, Dodge.

That summer, the newspaper’s weekly editions covered the budgetary decision to trim the city’s boardwalks from eight feet wide to four, a vote to shoot loose dogs if they lack the $2 license, and discussion of troubles caused by loose pigs. The big scandal was a theft of valuable articles from the Russian Orthodox cathedral. A town meeting was called and the guilty soldiers drummed out of the service and shipped south.

Writing under his own name, Murphy editorialized for more military spending — “No man is willing to risk life and capital among the savages in their present unadorned state of civilization” — while defending Brig. Gen. Jefferson Davis against “malicious representations” of lax administration. He campaigned tirelessly for the priorities of Mayor Dodge, the newspaper’s proprietor. These included, above all, the need for federal action to establish civil administration in Alaska and do away with the questionable “squatter’s title” held by property owners, including Mayor Dodge.

Meanwhile, at the bottom of page two of the Aug. 6 edition, beneath a story recounting a reception given for the visiting statesman William H. Seward, the “grandest affair we ever saw in Alaska,” a rare birth notice appeared:

“BORN — In this city, Aug. 4th, to the wife of M. Rudolph, a daughter.”

Next: Famous visitors, prejudice and white man’s justice — Alaska’s first boom goes bust and the Rudolphs sell out to the Cohens.

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