Josie’s Story: A trip to Alaska

Last 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 seven parts and more about this series here.

In the summer of 1968, Martin Thurnauer, 74 and retired after a successful career in the American lighting business, traveled to Alaska to find out what he could about his mother’s origins.

After escaping Nazi Germany with a U.S. passport thanks to her Alaska birthplace, Josie Thurnauer had joined her son Martin in America on Dec. 23, 1938. She was able to mark several milestones during the last decade of her life, including the wartime marriage of Martin’s daughter, Lilo, to an American GI. She settled into a small apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and that was where Alaska’s first colonial settler daughter died in 1948, at the age of 79.

My friends in New Jersey, Amy Weiss and her cousin, Susie Hoffman (Lilo’s daughter), never knew their great-grandmother from Alaska. But they adored her son, their grandfather, Martin, and could see something of a pioneer’s spirit in him — in his energy and curiosity and embrace of life. They were slightly in awe of his getting thrown into prison by the Nazis, and admired the efforts made by Martin and his wife, Leni, to help other Jews escape Nazism before the war.

Susie went along with her grandparents on that 1968 trip to Alaska. She had just graduated from the University of Chicago with an anthropology degree and the trip was her graduation present. Susie took notes and wrote up a report for the rest of the extended family describing their quest.

“I had a ring from my great grandmother, with a red, white and blue stone, symbolizing her claim to be the first American white girl born in Alaska,” Susie wrote in her report. She described their mission to pierce the “vague storylike past” surrounding Josie Rudolph’s parents, hoping to find out “why they had come, what they really did there, and what their life was like.”

Martin’s curiosity had been brewing for a while. In 1958, as his business and family obligations eased, he started writing letters to certain historians and journalists. Alaska statehood was looming large in the national news at the time. Had they ever come across the names of Martin and Fanny Rudolph, in their research touching on Alaska?

“Many colorful Jewish personalities enriched the raw, vigorous life of that land and helped to forge a prosperous and stable society in that distant American outpost,” the historian Bernard Postal had written in one article. Postal replied to Martin’s letter, pointing to a 46-page booklet self-published in 1953 by Rudolf Glanz called “The Jews in American Alaska (1867-1880).”

Glanz described Alaska as “one of the classic examples of Jewish merchant-pioneering.” He concentrated on the Jewish backers of the Alaska Commercial Company and their monopoly of the fur trade. But he also described the merchants of early Sitka, admiring their energy while conceding their struggles to make a living: “The lowly beginnings of the Jewish traders, who settled in Alaska, do not show them in a favorable light.”

Susie’s grandfather knew little about his own grandparents. There was a vague family legend that Josie’s father had once been a horse thief. Was that why he changed his name, upon entering the U.S.? Was that why no stories ever got handed down? They approached their trip to Alaska a bit warily, Susie wrote, afraid of uncovering scalawags, while “secretly hoping they were in some way outstanding.”

But her grandfather, Martin, wasn’t looking for role models. He was looking for historical truth.

In 1968, Alaska had just finished celebrating the centennial of its U.S. purchase. Susie, with her new anthropology degree, would come to wonder how the original inhabitants of the Tongass National Forest felt about that celebration of the pioneers.

In fact, the Tlingit and Haida tribes of the Southeast region had been pursuing a federal court claim since 1929 to be compensated for the forceful dispossession of their lands after 1867. Only six months before Susie’s visit, the U.S. Court of Claims had finally agreed to a settlement — at a pitiful 43 cents an acre, and nothing for their fish, but a recognition nevertheless of the tribal people’s aboriginal claim to the Tongass. That decision helped bring about the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act three years later.

In recent years, though, the ceremonial hilltop raising of the American flag in Sitka every Alaska Day, Oct. 18, has been countered by a well-attended Mourning Ceremony at the bottom of the mansion hill, featuring woeful Tlingit songs of loss.

So many powerful forces of history converging on the outer coast of Baranof Island: the birth of American imperialism, the seizure of ancestral Tlingit lands, the expulsion of European Jews, the failure to open Alaska to refugees from the Nazis. Secretary Seward and his caged eagle! So much for the modern world to regret.

But a baby born into a house on Lincoln Street in Sitka was saved from the horrors of Julius Streicher Strasse in Nuremberg.

Susie Hoffman’s report to the family cited two particular highlights of her grandfather Martin’s trip to Alaska. The first came during their visit to Sitka.

Sitka was a working-class mill town of loggers and fishermen, not the cruise ship destination it would become. In 1968 the town was buzzing with pride over its importance as Alaska’s birthplace. The federal government had sponsored an exposition at a new civic and convention center built for the Alaska centennial.

People treated their family like “visiting dignitaries,” Susie wrote. Her grandfather, whom she called Baba, told everyone his family’s story. “The population of the town is not large, only about 7,000 for the whole area, and we soon knew a large percentage of it,” Susie wrote. “They were all fascinated by Baba’s story, recollected that they had heard the name Rudolph in connection with a brewery or a store, and yet were hard put to produce any clear documentation.”

That evening, they found a store still open on Lincoln Street and went in to buy postcards. The store owner got to chatting with Baba about some craft projects in her display. Then he said “Now that you have told me so many stories, I have a story to tell you.” Susie and her grandmother wandered to the postcard rack, bored to hear the story again, but the store owner, Mrs. Trierschield, jumped when she heard the name Rudolph.

“She brought out the deed and we looked through it, turning the pages, almost too fast to see anything, but there, as if waiting to be seen, almost jumping out at the passing eye, were the words, Martin and Fanny Rudolph, the onetime owners of the property we were standing in.”

The other highlight came in Juneau, after meeting Robert DeArmond.

DeArmond was Alaska’s great popular historian, a prolific researcher and writer and editor whose hundreds of articles told especially the story of Southeast Alaska. Born in Sitka in 1911, he rowed a dory south to Tacoma to attend his first year at the University of Oregon. DeArmond reported for newspapers in Ketchikan and Juneau, and served as aide and press secretary for Alaska’s territorial governor, Frank Heintzleman. He edited Alaska Sportsman magazine, published 14 books, filled 14 boxes of material at the state archives in Juneau, and many of his columns can be found in a searchable online collection called Digital Bob.

DeArmond immediately recognized the name of Martin Rudolph. Eager to help, he led the family to the state historical library, where they spent a day going through early papers written out in longhand. Baba studied the court records, Susie wrote.

“He had only to turn a few pages to find each time another case of Mr. Rudolph vs. someone else ... His petitions to the mayor and council for lower taxes and a road in front of his property, his numerous financial transactions, and his constant court cases brought to light the kind of man who might have had the courage and drive to come to Alaska in 1867.”

Above all, it was from DeArmond, an authentic conservative old-time Alaskan, that the family sensed an answer to the question lurking behind their whole trip north. Yes, the Rudolphs were true Alaska pioneers.

When he returned to New Jersey, Martin thanked DeArmond by mail and sent him a copy of Glanz’s book on Jews in early Alaska.

DeArmond replied with a characteristically generous two-page single-spaced typed letter recounting his additional findings: “I have put your ancestor Martin Rudolph in the fur business at Sitka.” DeArmond had gone through the Customs House records and found four ships with manifests of furs and other materials in Rudolph’s name. The earliest sailed south Nov. 1, 1867 — “only two weeks after the formal transfer of Alaska,” he pointed out.

Bob DeArmond, who died in the Sitka Pioneer Home at the age of 99, did not forget that 1968 visit with the grandson of early Sitka pioneers. In 1981, when he edited and published Sophia Cracroft’s journal about Lady Jane Franklin’s visit to Sitka, his introductory essay about the town’s beginnings described Martin Rudolph as “one of the busiest of the new Sitka entrepreneurs.” And in 1996, he wrote a 10-part series for the Sitka Sentinel on “Jews in Early Sitka,” which included a whole article about Rudolph and his brother-in-law, Isaac Bergman.

After recounting the now-familiar record of Martin Rudolph’s business holdings, DeArmond concluded his Sentinel article with a new discovery. DeArmond’s deadpan ending placed Rudolph in the pantheon of pioneer bootleggers that included just about every other white male settler in early Sitka, including Alaska’s first governor, John Kinkead:

“The last word I have found about Martin Rudolph is in the files of the Customs Service for Alaska. On April 18, 1871, Collector of Customs William Kapus wrote to Secretary of the Treasury George Boutwell: ‘Seized at Sitka from on board the GEORGE S. WRIGHT on February 10, 1871, two kegs of whiskey, about five gallons each. The kegs were old beer kegs and when placed on board the steamer were supposed to contain lager beer. They were shipped at Portland, Oregon, by Mr. M. Rudolph.’”

For more: How the ‘Josie’s Story’ series was reported.

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