St. Michael: Alaska's Western Crossroads
By Joan M. AntonsonEditor's note: Joan M. Antonson is Alaska's state historian
In 1833, Ferdinand P. Wrangell, governor of the Russian-American Co., sent an expedition led by Lts. Michael D. Tebenkov and Adolph K. Etholin to explore the coast of Norton Sound and select a site for a fortified northern trading post. Although earlier Russian exploring expeditions had passed along the western coast of Alaska, this one was to study the coast in more detail. Tebenkov chose a site between two Yup'ik Eskimo villages on the southeast side of a small, treeless island only 50 feet off the southern shore of Norton Sound. The Native villages were Tackik, a half mile from the site the Russians selected, and Atuik, today's Stebbins.
The island, which Tebenkov named Mikhailovskii (St. Michael), was 60 miles north of the mouth of the Yukon River. The Bering Sea is extremely shallow, and the site selected was the closest deep-water bay to the river's entrance. It also provided some protection from the open sea and was an advantageous position for defense.
Redoubt St. Michael became the western district fur depot for the Russian-American Co. The log buildings at the post were arranged in the form of a square, each side about 120 feet long, with intervals between the structures closed by a 10-foot stockade. By 1842, two log blockhouses with six cannons stood at opposite corners of the stockade. There was only one entrance to the fort, where a guard was stationed 24 hours a day. Inside the fence, the buildings, built of spruce logs imported from Sitka, were painted yellow with red planked roofs. Buildings included a four-room house for the commander, two warehouses for furs, separate barracks for married and unmarried workers, a kitchen and a bath house. Outside the stockade the Russians constructed a shed for boat storage, a storehouse for furs, a blacksmith shop, several residences, a house maintained by the company for native visitors and in 1842 a small Russian Orthodox chapel. The chapel was built of logs with one cupola topped with a cross. Bishop Innokenti (Ivan Veniaminov) sent Grigori Golovin, a Russian Orthodox priest at Unalaska, to St. Michael in 1843. He reported baptizing 163 Natives. The Russian Orthodox Church established a permanent mission in western Alaska in 1845 at Ikogmiut (Russian Mission). Although a church building replaced the chapel at St. Michael in 1886, it was not consecrated until 1900. A priest was not permanently assigned to the Church of the Holy Protection, as the St. Michael's church was called, until 1901.
Traders collected furs from three outposts on the lower Yukon River and from Kolmakovskii Redoubt on the Kuskokwim River and brought them to St. Michael to store in warehouses until a company ship arrived in the summer. Between 1842 and 1860, furs shipped from St. Michael to company headquarters at Sitka included 49,398 beaver, 4,934 otter, 10,216 red fox, 1,403 white fox, 183 bears, 8,253 marten, 4,668 muskrat, 330 mink, 52 wolverine, walrus ivory and 3,315 pairs of beaver castors (glands in the groin that contain an odorous substance used in making perfume). The Russian-American Co. assigned a commandant and 23 men to the post in 1833. In 1860, the company staffed the St. Michael district with 30 Russians and 15 Creoles. In 1866, a regular workman at the post reportedly was paid about 20 cents a day; his monthly food ration consisted of 50 pounds of flour, one pound of tea, three pounds of sugar and no meat but a large quantity of fish.
The company sent several expeditions from St. Michael to investigate the Yukon River area and extend the fur trade into western Alaska. In addition to the expeditions of Andrei Glazunov and Lavrentii A. Zagoskin, Assistant Navigator Petr Malakhov, a Creole, traveled from St. Michael to the Yukon River and established a log trading post at Nulato in 1838. Although the Russian-American Co. sent no other official explorers, traders visited the rivers to collect furs, and several Russian Orthodox priests traveled extensively throughout the area.
In 1865, members of the Scientific Corps of the Western Union Telegraph Expedition arrived at St. Michael. This ambitious project sought to construct a trans-Siberian telegraph line to connect the United States and Europe. From St. Michael, the men explored the country in all directions until Mid-July 1866, when the project was terminated after an Atlantic cable was successfully laid. Later, accounts of several expedition members were published with illustrations of the post. The expedition brought a small steamboat, the Lizzie Horner, to St. Michael, but never put it in service.
Following the sale of Alaska to the United States in 1867, Hutchinson, Kohl and Co., reorganized as the Alaska Commercial Co. (ACC) in 1870, purchased the St. Michael post. The company hired 20 of the Russians and Creoles formerly employed by the Russian company on one-year contracts to trap and trade for furs. St. Michael continued to be the principal depot for the Yukon River fur trade, although in 1880 the population was reported to be only nine non-Natives. A second company, the Western Fur and Trading Co., opened its headquarters at St. Michael in 1877. Five years later, it was bought out by ACC. Throughout the years, several other companies tried to enter the western fur trade without much success.
(Mrs. Michael Lorenz, wife of Alaska Commercial Co. manager at St. Michael after Francois Mercier resigned.)
At the time of the Klondike gold rush 30 years after U.S. purchase of Alaska, ACC buildings predominated at St. Michael. In the late 1880s the company had an agent and his assistant to maintain the store, a captain and an engineer for each of two small river steamboats, and a carpenter and a laborer at St. Michael. A few buildings belonged to a competitor, North American Transportation and Trading Co. (NAT&T) that had entered the Yukon River trade in 1892.
St. Michael was also site in 1874 of one of the first meteorological stations the U.S. Army Signal Service established in Alaska. Pvts. Lucien Turner and Edward W. Nelson, who are well-known today for collecting ethnographic material for the Smithsonian Institute, were the first two Signal Service employees assigned to St. Michael. The U.S. Government established a post office at the site in the 1890s. Prior to 1896, it was the only post office for the entire Yukon River region.
In 1886, the Rev. Octavius Parker opened an Episcopal mission at St. Michael. The church had an agreement with Sheldon Jackson, General Agent for Education in Alaska, that the church would establish a school. The government would pay a stipend to the mission and provide housing for the teacher. The school remained open after the mission station moved to Anvik in 1887. In all, St. Michael consisted of about a dozen buildings in 1896.
In 1869 a trading outfit, Parrot and Co., brought the first stern wheeler, Yukon, to St. Michael for operation on the Yukon River. The St. Michael was assembled at the port in 1879, and the New Racket in 1882. In subsequent years, other small steamboats moved passengers and freight from St. Michael to points up the river, but riverboat traffic was limited before the 1897 Klondike gold rush created a huge demand for steamboat service on the Yukon.
In 1897, nine steamboats left St. Michael for the Klondike and the boom town of Dawson City. Within a year, more than 30 steamboat companies had formed to operate on the Yukon, bringing 60 new steamboats, eight tugs and towboats and 20 barges to the river. The all-water route, taking a steamship from Seattle, Portland or San Francisco to St. Michael, and then a stern wheeler up the Yukon River was the longest, but easiest, route to reach Dawson and the gold fields. For a few hectic years, St. Michael boomed as the transshipment center. Several companies assembled their steamboats at St. Michael. Others built warehouses and opened stores. NAT&T Co. built the Hotel Healy that could accommodate 500 guests. An estimated 20,000 people stopped at St. Michael during 1897 and 1898. Between 1897 and 1900, 137 stern wheelers, tugs, barges and launches transported supplies and people on the Yukon. Passengers paid $125 to $220 to travel by steamboat from St. Michael to Dawson. Most supplies for the Interior were shipped by the all-water route at a freight rate of $85 per ton, and the river trip from St. Michael to Dawson, 1,800 miles, took from six weeks to two months.
To maintain order among the adventurers, the U.S. Army opened a post at St. Michael in 1897. For a year the town was the military headquarters for Alaska. War Department General Order 59, issued October 20, 1897, declared St. Michael Island and all land within 100 miles of the flagstaff a military reservation. The order specified that privately owned buildings within the reserve would not need to be removed, and that new structures could be built after securing permission from the War Department.
The post buildings were constructed in 1898. Fort St. Michael, with a complement of 200 men, was a complex of yellow and white frame buildings and metal-sided warehouses. The military had four separate locations around the island for its operations. The barracks, warehouses, armory and jail enclosing a parade ground stood northwest of the ACC complex. Southwest of this area, along the waterfront, was the post's dock and quartermaster's depot. On the eastern tip of the island was the Washington-Alaska Military Cable and Telegraph System (WAMCATS) station and post cemetery. Target ranges were northeast and northwest of the village. The waterfront, square and WAMCATS station were connected by railway tracks, and mules pulled cars between the sites.
In 1898, three Scandinavians discovered gold on Anvil Creek, 130 miles across Norton Sound from St. Michael. The new town of Anvil City, renamed Nome, replaced St. Michael as the commercial and population center of northwest Alaska. Nome did not replace St. Michael, however, as the transshipment point for the Yukon River. Although the gold rush boom was over by 1908, steamboats continued to carry freight and passengers to mining and trading communities along the Yukon.
Shallow-draft steamboats calling at St. Michael had to make the dangerous run from the river's mouth along a coast exposed to the open Bering Sea. Between 1908 and 1911, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers dredged a canal south of town about 11 miles to make the journey safer and shorter. Like elsewhere in the nation however, railroads slowly strangled riverboat service. The White Pass and Yukon Railway, and later the Alaska Railroad, forced many steamboat companies out of business, because the railroads could operate year-round.
Most of the transportation companies operating on the Yukon left the business as activity slowed or were bought out by the Northern Transportation Co., which, with the Northern Commercial Co., succeeded the ACC. In 1919, only nine steamboats plied the Yukon.
The population of St. Michael declined from 500 people in 1910 to 371 in 1920. Ten years later its population further declined to 175. St. Michael's days as transshipment point between the west coast and interior Alaska ended shortly after completion of the Alaska Railroad in 1923. The military post closed in 1925. Steamboats were abandoned on the shore at St. Michael. Companies boarded up their buildings, and the town's population became predominantly Yup'ik Eskimo.
Today a jungle of rusting metal and machinery litters the beach in front of the village. Few buildings remain that testify to St. Michael's former glory.
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