This Week In Alaska History 11/7-11/14

November 7

Beneath the perpetual pall of Gastineau Channel's drizzling dome near Juneau, shovels broke sod for the city's long-craved small boat harbor on November 7, 1938—a concrete-wombed refuge for trollers and tenders battered by the Inside Passage's capricious gales, birthing a basin that would cradle keels through tidal tantrums and salmon surges, etching maritime mercy into the panhandle's rain-riven rocks.

Gastineau Channel 2011, from Douglas overlooking the Small Boat Harbor

November 8

On the frost-kissed campus of the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, beneath the auroral anticipation of territorial twilight, fifty-five delegates—miners, missionaries, and matrons from bush to borough—convened the Constitutional Convention on November 8, 1955, their quills poised to draft the blueprint of statehood from permafrost prose, forging articles of alliance that would hoist the 49th Star amid the midnight sun's defiant gleam.

Constitution of Alaska Ratified in 1956

November 9

From the ice-rimed ramparts of Point Barrow, aviator Carl Ben Eielson and mechanic Earl Borland vaulted into the Arctic void aboard their burly biplane on November 9, 1929, charting the audacious first flight to Norway across polar wastes—only to vanish in Siberian squalls, their wreckage a silent requiem amid tundra tombs, etching eternal epitaph to bush pilots' boundless bravado in Alaska's frozen firmament.

Carl Eielson

November 10

In the Klondike clamor of Skagway's muddy maelstrom, where stampeders jostled amid tented taverns and tidal trails, the U.S. Postal Service planted its flag with the outpost's inaugural post office on November 10, 1897—a canvas-clad conduit for claim chits and sweetheart scrawls, threading gold fever's frantic missives through White Pass perils to the nation's ink-stained heart.

Skagway wharves and harbor c. 1898 photo by Eric A. Hegg

November 11

Across the Atlantic's heaving gray in a London cradle of coal-scented fog, Hudson Stuck entered the world on November 11, 1863—a future Episcopal priest whose sermons would summon souls to Alaska's wilds, his boots first tracing Athabascan trails before crowning Denali's virgin summit in 1913, a transoceanic torchbearer of faith and frozen firsts for the North's unyielding altar.

Hudson Suck Circa 1914

November 12

Off Katalla's coal-blackened coast where Controller Bay's breakers gnaw at gravelly gums, the storied steamer Portland—the "Gold Ship" that ferried Klondike fortunes from Seattle's docks—foundered on reefs in a southeasterly snarl on November 12, 1910, her hull holed and holds awash, a total forfeiture to the Gulf of Alaska's insatiable maw amid the territory's tempestuous trove hunts.

SS Portland

November 13

In Seattle's bustling Elliott Bay, where ironclad hulls jostle like frontier fists, the bark A.J. Fuller—belly-deep with Alaska's prized pink salmon tins from Bristol Bay's briny bounty—succumbed to a steamer's ramming ram on November 13, 1913, her timbers splintered and cargo cascading into the harbor's churn, a sudsy sepulcher for the territory's tinned treasures adrift in Puget Sound's indifferent tide.

Seattle's Elliot Bay 6 Years Prior To The Alaska Salmon Spill

November 14

Along the verdant defile of the Copper River Valley, where glacial silts weave silver threads through taiga tapestries, the Copper River and Northwestern Railroad—spine of Kennecott's copper colossus from Cordova's tideflats to the bonanza's bonfires—laid down its final spike in decommissioning on November 14, 1938, tracks rusting into relic as ore veins waned, consigning locomotive legends to the wild's whispering weeds.

This old Copper River and Northwestern Railway bridge is along the McCarthy Road.