Josie’s Story: Alaska’s first boomers

Fifth 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 four parts and more about this series here.

On the week that Josie Rudolph was born, Sitka received a visit from William H. Seward, the secretary of state who negotiated the treaty for Alaska. He was greeted as a hero, the most famous person ever to visit the former Russian colony — and also as someone who might usefully exert his influence to boost the region’s drooping economic and governmental prospects.

Standing at Seward’s elbow as their steamship approached Baranof Island on July 30, 1869, was Alaska’s first elected official: William S. Dodge, Sitka’s mayor and the town’s biggest booster (and one of its most ambitious real estate investors). Dodge had traveled all the way to Chicago in June to intercept the retired statesman as he set out on a Pacific tour extending from Alaska to Mexico. Dodge and Seward traveled together over the newly opened transcontinental railroad. In San Francisco, Dodge made sure Seward was not distracted, and helped arrange a steamer to carry the politician’s party north.

The distinguished 68-year-old guest took an exhausting three-hour walk upon reaching Sitka. His son later recalled they encountered “Russians in their national dress; United States soldiers in their blue uniforms; Indians in blankets and feathers, and traders and travelers clad in the latest style of Montgomery Street, San Francisco.” Seward toured local businesses, including the Sitka Brewery, in which Dodge shared an ownership interest with Martin Rudolph (Josie’s father) and other businessmen.

Meeting with Dodge and the city council, Seward declared himself pleased with the hospitality of this simple town “on the outward verge of our republican jurisdiction,” and promised their push for civil government and attention from Congress would have his “affectionate solicitude and earnest sympathy.”

Seward sailed around Southeast Alaska for two weeks, meeting with Chilkat Tlingit leaders near modern-day Haines, and observing a solar eclipse in the company of a Coastal Survey team that the secretary himself had sent north two years earlier.

Secretary Seward left Sitka with a boatload of gifts, including Chilkat blankets, 7,000 board feet of yellow cedar siding, and a bald eagle that lived for several years in a cage at his New York estate. Before departing, he delivered a speech at the Lutheran Church, which was smaller than the Russian Orthodox cathedral but boasted pews for the listeners who packed the place.

Seward predicted a great future for resource extraction and tourism, extolling Alaska’s scenery and sunsets in descriptive prose that would make a modern cruise ship publicist blush. He lauded the citizens of Sitka as civilization’s “advanced guard” made up of “mountaineers and sea-faring men,” the virtuous liberty-loving stock of northern European countries.

Of Sitka’s Jewish immigrants from Middle Europe, Seward said nothing. But he lamented that Alaska’s Indigenous population, eventually and inevitably, must vanish once “civilized white men come.” In the meantime, however, the shrewd and experienced diplomat had quickly apprehended the Tlingit system of justice and reciprocity, personally intervening to procure 36 military blankets to satisfy an outstanding compensation claim by Chilkat chiefs that threatened war against Sitka’s Sheet’ká Kwáan.

In other cases, however, where Native demands for compensation were made against white settlers rather than rival kwáans, the Army had not always shown the same delicacy. Soon after the Army destroyed Kake village, in March 1869, a Sitka shopkeeper named James Parker chased down a Native who broke a glass showcase and shot him dead with a Henry repeating rifle. Parker was briefly locked up — but by November, he had been appointed the town’s marshal.

Then in December, during a break-in at Isaac Bergman’s butcher shop, Parker spotted a boy running away from a broken window and shot him in the back. An Army investigation concluded that the boy had simply wandered over from a wood-gathering party to see what was going on. His killing was judged “unjustifiable.” But Brig. Gen. Jefferson C. Davis again failed to keep Parker locked up, and this time paid 50 Army blankets to the boy’s family to settle the murder.

In his speech, Seward said the decline of the Tlingit population was being “accelerated by their borrowing ruinous vices from the white man.” A special investigator, sent to Sitka that same summer by the government’s new humanitarian Board of Indian Commissioners, put it more strongly: Drunken soldiers were bullying, assaulting and raping the Tlingit and mixed-race Russian “creoles.”

“Many has been the night when soldiers have taken possession of a Russian home, and frightened and browbeaten the women into compliance with their lustful passions,” Mayor Dodge told the investigator, Vincent Colyer.

In his blistering report, Colyer blamed the region’s social problems on a nearly comical failure to enforce laws against alcohol smuggling and trade with the Natives.

Sailing to Sitka, Colyer’s steamer had stopped at the military outpost of Fort Tongass, where alcohol could only be imported for the private use of officers. While Colyer watched, the ship unloaded five barrels of whiskey, rum and brandy, multiple cases of Champagne and porter, and 10 barrels of ale. The post had four officers. It was 500 yards from a large Tlingit village. When the federal inspector reached Sitka and reported this outrage, Davis sent a boat to Tongass to confiscate the liquor. Regulations were strictly followed thereafter: The alcohol was impounded for a statutory period, then sold in Sitka at public auction, thus reentering the “Indian trade.” Alaska’s liquor laws, Colyer concluded, were a “farce.”

“The principal teaching (the Indians) at present are receiving is that drunkenness and debauchery are held by us, not as criminal and unbecoming a Christian people, but as indications of our advanced and superior civilization,” said the post’s medical doctor in an appendix to Colyer’s report.

Colyer’s position was that the Tlingit were industrious and eager to assimilate. He was the first of the Protestant reformers in Southeast Alaska, whose boarding schools were presented as the enlightened alternative to violence and neglect. Those schools tore Native children from their homes and culture, however, and are condemned today for their destructive influence.

Meanwhile, the drinking and shooting continued. In December 1869, at Fort Wrangell, two Tlingit brothers were killed when a Christmas dance party blew up in a fight. Their father put on his fire-red clan regalia to seek compensation and, finding the fort locked, shot and killed the local trader, Leon Smith, who two months earlier had told Colyer his Indian neighbors were “quiet and well-disposed toward the whites.” Two days of gunfire followed, including 23 cannon shots fired from the fort into the adjacent village. Finally the Tlingit called for a ceasefire. The father gave himself over to the Army post and was swiftly tried and hanged. He reportedly said he would explain the principle of just compensation to Leon Smith when he saw him in the afterlife.

By this time, settlers had started leaving Sitka and returning south. Despite Seward’s lofty speech, the Tlingit were not vanishing, and the government still ignored the colonists. Then in May 1870, Sitka received a visit from the second most famous person ever to visit Alaska.

Lady Jane Franklin was the aging widow of Sir John Franklin of the Royal Navy, the Arctic explorer lost in 1847 while searching for a Northwest Passage. Lady Franklin had famously devoted her life and fortune to searching for clues to her husband’s fate. She arrived in Alaska that summer with her niece, Sophia Cracroft, who kept a revealing journal of their time in Sitka.

The journal especially revealed the snobberies and prejudices of the upper-crust English ladies. Miss Cracroft complained about barking Indian dogs, the painful “twang” of American accents, and the presumption of the town’s lesser ladies, such as Mrs. Levy, a storekeeper’s wife, whose several social invitations had to be politely declined during their monthlong stay.

Miss Cracroft’s chief complaint was aimed at their landlord, Josie Rudolph’s uncle, Isaac Bergman, whom the genteel visitor referred to as “the Jew Butcher.” She was certain they were being overcharged for room and board. He told her he needed to pay the absentee owner of the building. “We do not believe one word of it,” she said. For the record, her low opinion of the local butcher and city councilman was strangely at odds with everything else people said about Bergman, who later settled in Oregon and served as mayor of Astoria. When he died in 1911, the Oregon Journal said Bergman “was so well liked here that it is seldom the death of a single individual causes such deep and sincere regret in a community.” But Lady Franklin grew eager to leave Sitka, her niece said, because of the extortion of “our Jew.”

On the other hand, her journal pleasantly describes how an edition of The Alaska Times had been printed on pink paper because Mr. Murphy ran out of white, how a portrait of the czar in the governor’s mansion had a new face painted over the previous emperor, and how Lady Franklin ended up being charmed by the youngest Levy daughter and giving her a bottle of perfume.

Lady Franklin found Davis getting ready to leave — the furniture already shipped south from the Baranof mansion, precluding a proper reception. The Army was closing all its outlying Alaska posts, including Fort Wrangell, and downgrading Sitka.

Mayor Dodge was already gone, having resigned back on Oct. 23, 1869, and jumping on the next Army transport ship. His local prospects collapsed swiftly after Secretary Seward’s visit, when a new interpretation of the transfer treaty back in Washington concluded that the Russian buildings purchased by Dodge had actually been government property. The Army reclaimed title to his shop, storehouse, bakery, coal shed, wharf and crane, among other holdings.

Several years later, William Dodge was able to reflect drolly on the schemes and ambitions of Sitka’s earliest pioneers: “It may as well be confessed that most of us thought that political greatness would be thrust upon us, and we were prepared to submit gracefully.”

Dodge sold Alaska’s first newspaper to editor Thomas Murphy for $500, and within a year, Murphy had left as well, moving The Alaska Times to Seattle. The paper continued publication there but without much news from Sitka, and in 1872 merged with other papers into what would become the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

The Army’s official census and report on Alaska to Congress, completed in December 1870, concluded that economic prospects were indeed bleak: Russia’s going-out-of-business sale was now over, the local fur trade was shrinking, no market existed for fish or timber, and gold prospecting had fallen off. Alaska’s scenery was drawing a first few tourist ships, but Sitka’s reputation was not enhanced when Appleton’s travel guide described it as “beyond doubt the dirtiest and most squalid collection of log houses on the Pacific slope.”

In February 1873, the city council folded. In 1877, even the Army garrison closed, the troops called south to chase Chief Joseph across the Pacific Northwest.

The handful of settlers and storekeepers who remained in Sitka peered warily out their windows after the Army sailed away. The Tlingit set quickly to pulling down the log palisade that had divided the white and Native communities. They helped themselves to window frames and tools and fixtures from the hospital. There were angry flare-ups but no uprising. Trade continued. A shaky peace held.

Thus did the curtain close on the first act in America’s northern colony. The early settlers had settled very little about Alaska’s future. Population would later follow capital investment and industrial colonialism driven by extraction of resources — gold, fish, timber and oil. It would be a full decade before a new generation of prospectors and Presbyterians finally began to stamp a settlers’ civilization on the land.

The Jews of Sitka were leaving as well. The Rudolphs and Bergmans departed early in 1871.

We don’t know the exact date. Property records show that in December 1870, Martin Rudolph sold his store and his one-third interest in the Sitka Brewery to Aaron and Esther Levy for $3,500. Isaac Bergman sold two houses that same month. Earlier, Rudolph had sold his other business, Rudolph’s Brewery, to Abe Cohen, whose family was one of the few to remain.

It had been a little more than three years that the two sisters, Ida and Fanny, had lived with their families in Alaska. They returned to Oregon. Ida Bergman never had children. When she died in 1914, her biggest bequest, $5,000, went to Josie, “my beloved niece.”

Fanny and Martin Rudolph returned to Germany in 1875, taking Josie with them. According to a letter written by Ida, the visit to Europe was meant to be temporary, undertaken because of family illness back in Bavaria. But life took an unexpected turn.

We don’t know if Martin and Fanny Rudolph ever naturalized as U.S. citizens during the two decades before they returned to Germany. But we know that under the birthright clause of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, adopted the year before Josie was born, the Rudolphs brought back to Europe a 6-year-old American.

Next: In Nazi Germany, Alaska’s pioneer daughter finds herself in mortal peril.

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