Well, hello again, men and women of the Arctic Brotherhood tribute band. It seems that it's been a really long time (once again) since I've updated this. At times i've had big plans to post weekly entries, and then life gets in the way sometimes.

But, as always, the men of the Arctic Brotherhood rarely leave my mind for more than a few hours. They walked these streets, they climbed these mountains, they made these buildings, and they designed the logo on my arm. It's hard to not be immersed in them, really, in a place where history is so alive.

The question everyone always seems to ask me, besides "What is the Arctic brotherhood?" is "What happened to the Arctic Brotherhood?" Whenever someone asks me that, if any of my friends who know me very well are around, they smile, shake their heads, and hopefully LEAVE as soon as they can to avoid hearing that long, long story all over again.

That question is, really, what drove me to the AB in the first place. That question, and a man named Henry Bowman (sadly, no relation). I ended up finding a lot of answers by November of last year on that, but in a lot of ways it's still something that never really got resolved in my mind.

Why did the Arctic Brotherhood fail? OK. There are several factors involved. First, easy ones.

Number 1. When the AB first started in 1899, the white population of Alaska, the Yukon, and northern British Columbia was mainly made up of men (like that alliteration?) who were miners and merchants (BAM, take that Dr. Seuss). As everything became a little more settled over the years and decades, women joined the ranks. And, in this last frontier, traditional gender roles simply did not apply on either side. When the Alaska Native Brotherhood formed in 1912, the Alaska Native Sisterhood followed shortly. All kinds of other fraternal organizations began allowing women to join, even in the form of women's auxiliaries.

But did the Arctic Brotherhood? Never!

This is important to think about considering that when Alaska became a territory in 1912 (thank you AB Past Arctic Chief James Wickersham of Nome and Fairbanks), women were never denied the right to vote as they had been in other states, districts and territories. Women were, under the law, equal to men. An organization specific to the north that did not allow them to be equal to men would maybe have naturally faded out.

Number 2. The population of Alaska dwindled post-Klondike. The gold rushes to Nome and Fairbanks, among others, kept bringing people in for a few years, but a good deal of men and women came to the north looking for gold and never found it. Sure, lots of them stayed. But lots of them didn't. Where did they all go when they left? Vancouver or Seattle.

When they all found themselves in those western ports of call and realized they were among fellow Arctic Brethren, they wanted to meet with each other the way they had done up here. But could they? Of course not!

Why? Because one of the tenets of the fabric holding the Arctic Brotherhood together was its geographic exclusivity. Its innate northern-ness is what made it so unique. In order to be a member, on top of being male, over 18, and probably white, a man had to live north of the 54'40" line. (Not 54 feet and 40 inches. 54 degrees and 40 minutes. In case you were confused.) "BUT!" you might say, if you knew that honorary members like Senators and Presidents were initiated into the AB (which i'm sure you don't), "how come visiting dignitaries got to be members then?"

Well, they were just special. That's all. Even Governor General Earl Grey (not the tea guy) was given ceremonial honors by the AB when he visited Dawson, Camp #4. But these men were honorary members, not full members with all the privileges.

This became an interesting conflict within the AB. Just think about it, even in terms of the people who inhabit the great white north today. So... you come up north and live that incredibly difficult lifestyle inherent to the area, powering through it all because you love living here, and you're a part of an organization that celebrates that lifestyle... then your buddy gets tired of the 60-degrees-below-zero winters and the isolation, moves away, and still wants to be a part of that organization? I can tell you with absolute certainty that it would piss people off.

There's this thing about Alaska that you may not realize if you've never visited or lived here. People are really proud to be Alaskan. Not in the same way people are proud to be New Yorkers or Bostonians. The length of time you've lived in Alaska, the number of winters you've put in, is absolutely a status symbol. Not everyone's vocal about it but there is a certain hauteur and condescension put on by people who have been here a while. And i don't think it's a new phenomenon.

Robert Service observed it best in one of his poems: "I'm one of the Arctic Brotherhood, i'm an old-time pioneer. I came with the first, oh GOD! how i've cursed this Yukon-- but i'm still here."

Number 3. This is a little more abstract, so if you've been drinking while reading this you may want to come back another time.

When the AB started in 1899, like i said, Alaska was the last frontier. It was undeveloped, rugged, unimproved, remote. A good deal of towns, cities and villages were completely inaccessible in the winter time except by dog sled, if you were lucky. (Remember this last winter how Nome had to get fuel from a Russian tanker? It was even worse back then.) Even during the summer months, the main connections between points on the map were waterways. The mighty Yukon connected a good deal of former AB camps to each other, along with water routes in the Inside Passage and the Gulf of Alaska.

There weren't a lot of roads. Apart from the 100-mile stretch from Skagway to Whitehorse at the turn of the century, there weren't railroads in those early years of the AB. And a good deal of communities were hundreds of miles away from the next town over. Things were isolated.

So it's only natural that fraternal orders were such a big deal in those days. The Masons, Elks, Eagles, Knights of Pythias, Moose, Sons of the North, Maccabbees, to name a few, all flourished in this corner of the world in the early days of white people invading.

It makes sense. These communities were isolated, remote, and quite often, entirely miserable to live in. Groups like the AB did things to make people feel more at home -- had social gatherings - to help people support each other - medical care and rescue missions - and to give people something to do in the long winter months - built libraries and pool halls. People relied on these organizations to take care of each other.

Then industrialization happened. (Yeah, we have running water now. it's cool.) Planes started coming in to bring the mail. The Alaska Railroad was completed in the early 20s (the reason for President Harding's visit to Alaska, during which he chilled with the AB men here at Camp #1). The Richardson Highway was in progress (thank you AB member Captain Richardson). Technology made new Alaskans and Yukoners a lot more mobile. And suddenly, or gradually, they realized they didn't need the clubs so much.

When you can get from one town to another pretty quickly, it's not that important to have such a close-knit support network in your neighborhood, I guess.





At the same time, although the AB died out, maybe due in part to each of those three reasons, other similar organizations are still alive and well. The Alaska Native Brotherhood and Sisterhood are still going strong, as are the Pioneers of Alaska and Yukon Order of Pioneers (YOOP - love that acronym). As any Skagwegian will tell you, the Elks and Eagles survived long past the gold rush in our little town and still are very important to the community in ways beyond the fact that they're the only 2 bars open through the entire winter.

So... if other organizations didn't fall to the same wayside, why did the AB? That, my children, is another story for another day, even though that's the story I set out to tell in this post. Evereything I've put out here has just been theories. There was a very concrete event in 1909 which spurred the upset within the AB that doomed them forever. That story and its resulting story arcs are outside the realm of hypothesis -- it was very well-documented by Dr. Moore and our faithful anonymous journalists of the era.

But more on that later. Brace yourselves, AB fan club, for the next chapter in this epic tale.

Thinking about Dr. Moore

I've been taking long AB documents-- newspaper and magazine articles-- and transcribing them, typing them into Works Word Processor. The goal is that not only will i read them in the process, but then I'll have a more legible and more easily navigated digital copy of the sources. Last night I started typing Dr. Moore's serial for Alaska Weekly magazine which began in 1931-- a history of the AB. I typed all through Clash of the Titans, which i really wanted to watch but somehow lost interest in as soon as it started.

A few lines really stood out to me as I typed:

"I will aim in this article to give you the origin of the Arctic Brotherhood as I recall it, and to remind you of its influence upon early life in Alaska with the hope that it may help perpetuate its history authentically while facts are yet fresh in the memory of some of its early members."

That's my purpose, after all, in writing my book...

"On this holiday occasion let us survivors of the Arctic Brotherhood-- as we recall our early history-- think of those who have passed to the Camp of the Last Pass, fill our glasses, and drink to the memory of our living and absent brothers."

This is exactly how I felt when I sat in the Arctic Club in Seattle...

"To write of the men who, by crushing rock and sifting sands, produced gold and silver from a land which yields immortal youth and stored energies of inexhaustible mines, is like speaking of an imperishable race whose achievements are wonderful in scope and splendid in promise."

I just thought it was interesting that he made the metaphor of an imperishable race... considering the ABs' writings implied that they considered Alaska Natives inferior to them.

"With tender recollections of our precious cabin home in Alaska and of associations with the grand characters who made that country, I offer this second section of my story as the tribute of a grateful heart. No garlands of rhetoric or language of mine can do justice to those of whom I write and the grandeur and glory of their wonderful country I ask you to accept it with its outlines as a tribute of love which I give to associations of my life that are my richest heritage."

As I read Dr. Moore and re-type his words, the way he writes about trying to preserve the heritage of an organization that, by the time he was writing, had already fallen apart, inspires me to do the same in the book that someday will be finished. As of now it's only thirteen pages (half the length of my senior thesis, and two hundred pages shy of the length of the longest work of fiction i've ever written), but all the research is there in two massive binders and files on my desktop. It's a massive and humbling undertaking and I only hope that I can honor the memories of the men who so influenced the great land I live in.

November 1-2 in AB history... part one.

Last month i introduced Arctic Brotherhood camp #11, Council City, on the Seward Peninsula near Nome (western Alaska for the cheechako). Camp #11 was organized in October of 1900 and became, according to the 1909 book the AB put out, an important part of Council City's social culture. The town had no kind of meeting place or recreational facilities, so the AB was poised to give a lift to the population. At the time of its inception, Council City was the "most northernly camp" in the AB's ranks.

BY November 2 of 1900 it was a serious question as to whether or not the campw ould survive because of the exodus that occurs in Alaska in the fall. As a result, five "faithful and energetic men" met to decide the camp's future. It was a close vote-- but majority ruled that day as 3 of the 5 voted in favor of continuing the camp. They quickly added eight more members and within a month the camp's numbers had doubled.

Unlike so many other camps, #11 survived past its infancy. In November of 1902 the Arctic Brothers decided to put together a library-- "for the hours of reading are long in the winter time, as Council is but one degree below the Arctic Circle, and is isolated from the rest of the world from October to June, except by transportation by dog sled." See, even though Council was right up the river from Nome, on the coast, ships at the time didn't head that far north in the winter.

The library was a success. From November of 1902 to March of 1903, 1090 books were checked out of the stacks to 116 customers. According to the Ab's, "brooding and gloomy despondency lessedned by 25,000 hours!"

The brothers pointed out that the Council area of the Seward Peninsula hadn't yet been mined. Most of its inhabitants, according to wikipedia (oh-so-reliable, sarcasm) migrated to Nome when the gold fever moved that way in 1900. Today there is one B&B in Council (also according to wikipedia), making it, along with a handful of others, an AB town that is no more.

Because there was a HUGE controversy in the Arctics on November second of 1909--the most divisive of its kind, which pitted camp against camp-- this will have to be continued tomorrow for a Tuesday edition of This Week in AB History.

October 25 and beyond

Of all the tragedies to hit the Skagway area, as far as I can tell, the most sensational is the wreck of the Princess Sophia. She was southbound from Skagway carrying 300 passengers and 65 crew members, 92 years ago today. That’s more than the Palm Sunday avalanche, and it’s a story more shrouded in mystery than the Christmas Day murders. The main reason that so little was known for so long – and in many ways, so little is still known today—is that the company who owned the vessel destroyed all records related to the incident. Bad press, you know?

At the time of the wreck, in 1918, Sophia was one of many regularly-scheduled ships to cruise up and down the coast much like today’s Alaska marine highway ferry system. This was before regular air service, and before well-developed roads, so the water was the main form of transit for many. Each fall, just like today, a mass exodus left Skagway. In 1918 it wasn’t just Skagway's summer workers heading home; back then Skagway was one of the main access ports to getting in and out of the Yukon, northern BC, and interior Alaska. The exit from Skagway was made up of people from all over; most notably Dawson.

Members of Dawson’s Arctic Brotherhood who were on board included entrepreneurs William C. Sharron and Albert Pinska; Sam Henry; carpenter Thomas Collins; James A. Clarke; and customs officer Edmund Ironside. The wife and daughter of C. J. Vifquain were also on board, as well as Council City member John Haynes. Ironside is the most notable character of the AB group on the ship. The book written by Betty O’Keefe and Ian MacDonald on the subject give light to the well-loved officer of the law. According to a tale by Ironside, another passenger, Lulu Mae Eads, was the same “Lady Lou” of the Robert Service poem “The Shooting of Dan McGrew.” Ironside himself had no misgivings in admitting that his own poetry was modeled after Robert Service’s—at the time, many amateur Northern poets styled their poems after their favorite poet (who, by the way, mentions the AB in two poems but was not himself a member).

Ironside was traveling with his mother for a winter holiday. Nostalgia raged among the passengers, crew, and the farewell parties in Skagway as Sophia’s final voyage of the season lay ahead. This year, according to O’Keefe and MacDonald, there were more people leaving than usual. Unlike past years, many of them planned to never return. Ironside, wrought in emotion as well as everyone around him, captured the moment in a short poem called “Leaving Dawson.” The final few lines:

It isn’t “goodbye” forever
That is the message you vain would send,
To the magic city of Dawson as the
Ship sails around the bend.

Unfortunately, Ironside’s words held an ominous foreboding, as for at least 365 oceangoers, it would be goodbye forever.

The wreck happened in the midst of a blizzard. Many rescue attempts were thwarted by the weather. It was another Arctic Brother, Governor Thomas Christmas Riggs, who orchestrated the recovery efforts and coordinated the search for bodies from Juneau. Charles Garfield, a member of Nome’s AB camp, was the sailor who confirmed that none of the passengers or crew of Sophia survived. If Dawson had the most passengers on board, Juneau was equally captivated by the disaster by heading up relief efforts. No one in Juneau was unaffected by the search.

After the Titanic sinking in 1912, ship safety had been heightened; but the Princess Sophia had added extra berths last minute to over-extend their passenger capacity. The final report ended in much controversy by stating that the ship's pilot had indeed been going too fast as well. In spite of the hope that many ships gave the passengers and crew in the hours following the initial cause of the wreck-- collision with a reef, about halfway between Skagway and Juneau-- no rescue would occur. Many passengers wrote out their final wills and letters to loved ones in the moments before water filled the boat and the lives of 365 were lost.

Shortly after the disaster, Governor Riggs quarantined Juneau, banning all maritime traffic due to an influenza outbreak. It was this same Spanish flu that had tragically ended the young life of Skagway officer Vincent Dortero in October of 1918, around the same time. Dortero was in Iowa serving with the military. Not only was he an AB, he also was a member of the Eagles, Pioneers, and Knights of Pythias. His death was reported in the Skagway papers, and was a rude awakening to many.

On a more positive note to close out October in AB history, the 1909 Arctic Brotherhood book documents two clubs being founded in this month.


October 22nd of 1900 marked the founding of Camp #11, Council City. The camp was established with fifteen charter members by Walter H. Ferguson, the US Commissioner for that district. Council City was located in the vicinity of Nome on the Seward Peninsula. At the time of the camp’s founding, Council City was on the decline. It was debatable as to whether the camp would survive at all… more on that next month!!

Also in October of 1907 the Arctic Brotherhood camp in Fairbanks, #16, was re-organized. It had originally been founded in 1903, but poor management had caused its breakdown and its members decided that a re-establishment was in order. Next month Fairbanks is in the spotlight again, with a night to remember for many.

October 1-18 in Arctic Brotherhood History

First off, it's important to note that today, October 18th is Alaska Day... not just a day off from work, it marks the day that Alaska went from Russian hands to American. KTNA in Talkeetna explains the difference between Alaska Day and Seward Day.




It's fitting to begin this blog on Alaska Day, because the day that the United States took control of Alaska is, essentially, the first in many steps toward the Arctic Brotherhood's inception. In an abstract and removed way, that makes October 18 of 1867 a very important day in the AB's history.




There are a few other dates from October 1st through the 18th that are directly significant to the Arctic Brotherhood:




October 9, 1901: Camp Dawson, #4

Work on Dawson's AB hall began today, according to Ken Spotswood. The Daily Nugget, newspaper in Dawson, reported on the new construction. According to the paper, the building was slated to be 50 feet by 100 feet, and to stand at a story and a half high. The construction took only three weeks and $16,000.




October 10, 1907: Camp Skagway, #1

One of Skagway's newspapers reports that on this date new officers were elected to Arctic Brotherhood camp #1. Among them were Arctic Chief Edward Rasmusson, who at the time was US Commissioner; and Vincent Dortero and his father Tony.




October 15, 1908: Camp Hot Springs, #24

Deputy Grand Arctic Chief C. A. Davidson on this date established an AB camp at the town of Hot Springs, 100 miles west of Fairbanks in the Tanana Valley. According to the Arctic Brotherhood's book, published 1909, "the camp has such a position in the Tanan valley that it is sure of acquiring a goodly membership, and at present shows a healthy growth." 21 charter members were present at the first meeting.




October 16, 1917: Camp Juneau, #32

Juneau, one of the most short-lived camps in the rolls of the Arctic Brotherhood, began in January of 1916 with 130 members at its first meeting. Its last recorded entry in the attendance roster book at the Alaska state archives in Juneau is on this date, with only one member present. What happened to Juneau's camp? Your guess is as good as mine... but there were many factors involved.




October was a busy month for the AB's! In the next posting, a few more camps will be established, and the AB blog will pay tribute to some fallen ABs. One was killed at the young age of 22, and at least six more perished during one of the North's most sensational (and oft-forgotten) disasters.