A Letter From the Yukon to Dutzow

by Bob Brail

Receiving a personal letter from an old friend has always been a special event for most people. We enjoy hearing from the people who have been important to us in some way. “Catching up on the news” that our friends have to share with us is something we all look forward to.  Imagine being a young man living near Dutzow in 1891 and receiving such a letter. This letter, however, is even more special because, besides being from a friend, the letter is sent from Alaska, and tells of life there amidst temperatures of sixty degrees below zero, white ice bears, and the beginnings of the Yukon gold rush.

The letter was written in early 1891 by twenty-five year old William F. Hoelscher from the village of St. Michael, Alaska Territory, near the mouth of the Yukon River on the western coast of Alaska. Hoelscher was the son of a Washington-based steamboat captain, Frank Hoelscher, who owned and operated the Mary Bryan on the Missouri River. The letter was written to Alex Peterson, age thirty-one, who was also the son of a Missouri River steamboat captain, Peter Peterson, who lived across the river from Washington in the Dutzow area.

The letter has been edited to correct spelling and some grammatical errors:

Steamer John J. Healy

Yukon River Alaska

Jan. 21, 1891

Mr. Alex Peterson

Dear Sir and friend

I've been wanting to write to you all this last summer, but was kept so busy that I did not have time, as our summers are short. They begin in July about the first week. July 30 is fall and in Aug. winter begins. I am still in Alaska and aboard my boat in winter quarters. Our winterquarters are short; it begins in September and lasts until June 15th-22 generally, so we come near putting in 9 months in soliltude, do nothing but eat and sleep. Days are awful short about 2 ½ hours of sun. The coldest so far we had 59 below but we expect some cold weather to come yet. Had a mild winter up to the present. There are 23 of us on board the boat. I am in charge of all our company boats in winter quarters and Master of Str. Jno. Cudahy during running season, I was Master of the Str. Porter B. Wear, one of the company boats. They have 8 large river boats, 4 ships, and 3 tow boats. We don't get quite as much salary in winter quarters as we do in steamboating season. I am the highest salary man in the company employ during the winter. I get 175.00 per month and all my expenses, free doctor. I make about 225.00 during the summer from June to Oct. 31 and my fare home with expenses. That beats boating at home but I tell you she lonesome, dreadful lonesome. Think of it, 8 months see nothing but ice and snow and to listen to the wind howling like a drove of wild lions. Snow flying you imagine you'd cover up boat and all in snow drifts. The wind keeps the snow amoving. I made 4 round trips to Dawson last season, 3400 miles to the trip, 18 days to the trip. How is that for steamboating. Boat loaded to the guards every trip. These boats are equal to the Spread Eagle in speed, looks and model.

Lots of people died here last summer on the river. Thousand of Indians died. An Epidemic broke out among the Eskimos, and it cleaned out their villages. Some houses they found as many as 8 or 9 dead. Several cases, one particular that I saw myself where six dead Indians in a shack 2 living not quite dead, to weak to move and laying alongside the dead and where a child of about 9 months was crawling around on its dead mothers breast and wanted to nurse, child almost starved. And their dogs not being fed were eating Indians alongside the weak live ones. Talk about sights, I will never forget that. They died so fast they couldn't bury them. They had to throw them in ditches by the dozen. Few more years and they will be out of existence. And in September, a tidal wave came over them and drowned many, also many white people.

Well Alex, I lost your address so I will mail my letter in care of M. Hobelman of Dutzow for him to forward to you. The wind has been blowing a hurricane for several days. We can't put our heads out of doors until the wind quiets down. We have quite a few Indians around us, we feed them. They are getting superstitious about the white people. They say white man brought Indians sickness from states in a little box and now Indians must die. Indians have threatened to kill the white people off on the Euskokwim river. They have killed several white people. There were 35,000 people that came up this last spring to go to Cape Nome to dig gold. Talk about a mob of busted people, Nome had them. Nome had at least 15,000 paupers that had to be taken out of the country by Uncle Sam by ship or perish. So U. S. transports came up and took them out. Diggings along the Yukon are good. Wages 1.00 per hour for labor, steady work. $150.00 to $75.00 per month and board. All we have to do is get up in time for meals, and give the chinaman cabin boys a chance to fix the beds. Some of the boys have a poker game going to get rid of their surplus cash. Poker is played quite extensively in Alaska. You can see few hundred dollars exchanged every night. Lots of foxes, white, gray and some silver foxes and bear white ice and black bears. I've been out hunting several times for prairie chicken and fox. But I have confined my hunting stricyly to prairie chicken, rabbits and foxes if I can catch them asleep. Bear's too much sport for me to tackle. Several days ago one of our neighbor Indians shot a lynx, which are larger than a fox and as fierce as a catamount. Since this fellow made an appearance, I am doing all my shooting from the roof of my boat, no more going out in the foot hills of the mountain. Several white people froze to death last week. Got caught in a snowstorm Say I tell you when the thermometer gets down to 41 to 68 degrees below when you blow out your breath it cracks like breaking a plank, water in your eyes freezes. People are traveling every day here average 40 miles per day. The government has mail stations for their mailmen to stop in, no stoves but they are out of the weather with their dogs and themselves. They sleep in sleeping bags made of fur. Well I guess I better close or I may make you tired reading my long letters. I have so many to write to my family, my parents. We just got mail in saying Bill and Ted were elected – Hurrah for them. Give my regards to your Mother, brother and sister. Hoping to hear from you as a letter from you would certainly be appreciated.

Yours respectfully

Wm. F. Hoelscher

c/o N. A. T. & T. Company

St. Michaels

Alaska

Based on information contained in a later newspaper article, it is clear that this was Hoelscher's first year in Alaska. Most likely he arrived just in time for steamboating during the summer season. This would be the beginning of a career of Alaskan steamboating that would last more than fifty years. Actually Hoelscher's steamboating career began before his departure for Alaska. At the age of fourteen, he had quit school to become his father's cabin boy on the Mary Bryan in Washington. Hoelscher rose rapidly among the ranks of boatmen, eventually becoming a steamboat pilot of the Dora on the Missouri River in 1887 at the age of twenty-one.

Hoelscher went to the gold fields of Alaska specifically to work in the steamboat business, not to prospect for gold. Therefore he disembarked several hundred miles from the Yukon Territory, near the mouth of the Yukon River at the village of St. Michael. He found employment with the North American Transportation and Trading Company (N. A. T. T.) and soon was transporting miners and their supplies 1700 miles to Dawson, the town on the western edge of the Yukon gold fields. By the time Hoelscher completed each trip and returned to St. Michael, he would have been gone eighteen days. After working a few years for N. A. T. T., Hoelscher moved to the Alaska Commercial Company to captain steamboats. When Hoelscher began working in Alaska, there were already about 1,600 prospectors working in theYukon River basin. In 1896, the year usually viewed as the “beginning” of the Yukon Gold Rush, there were 25,000 prospectors in the same area. Clearly, Hoelscher moved to Alaska at an opportune time for making money as a steamboat captain. Hoelscher thereafter spent his summers working in Alaska, and wintering in Seattle or St. Louis.

It is likely that William Hoelscher knew Alex Peterson since both of their fathers captained steamboats in that area, hence the letter's greeting to a “friend.” It is possible that Hoelscher was hoping to convince his friend Peterson to join him in Alaska to work on steamboats for wages that “beats boating at home.” If so, Hoelscher did quite a job of “selling” Alaska! Although he writes of the high wages, good hunting, and easy living during the long winter months, Hoelscher writes at greater length about the deadly cold weather, lonesomeness, deadly epidemics, corpse-eating dogs, dangerous Indians, and 15,000 paupers in Nome.

Alex Peterson apparently never went to Alaska; this writer was unable to find any documentary evidence indicating he ever left the St. Louis area. During his early adult years, Peterson worked in the Dutzow area as a farm laborer. After his steamboating father died in 1887,

Peterson moved with his mother and two siblings to the city of St. Louis, where Peterson worked as a watchman and a packer, retiring before 1930. When his mother died after the turn of the century, Peterson,who never married, continued living with his unmarried sister and brother, finally dying in 1936. From this simple life sketch, it seems fair to conjecture that one reason Peterson never left for Alaska is that he was deeply attached to his family. Whatever the reason, Peterson can hardly be described as a person who loved a life of adventure.

Hoelscher, though, would continue living the adventures of Alaska until his retirement to Washington in 1947 when he was eighty-one. His riskiest adventure, without a doubt, was his wintertime trek 680 miles through the Alaskan wilderness in 1906 when he was forty years old. In middle of October, Hoelscher's steamboat was stuck in the frozen Yukon River from an early winter storm, far from his home port of St. Michael. Hoelscher was faced with spending an extra six months in Alaska with an infant child he had never seen at home in the States. Hoelscher and three other men decided to walk out and were successful, despite brutal weather conditions. Hoelscher was home in St. Louis before Christmas. By the time Hoelscher retired in 1947, he had skippered twenty-two steamboats on the Yukon River, making the 3,400 mile roundtrip from St. Michael to Dawson dozens of times. Just before his death, Hoelscher moved to Seattle, where his son lived. Hoelscher died of heart failure on November 5, 1957, at the age of ninety-one.

Because William Hoelscher spent many of his winters in his home on Nebraska Avenue in St. Louis, it is possible that he and Alex Peterson, who lived with his siblings on Benton Street in the city, continued their friendship until Peterson's death in 1936. If this were the case, Hoelscher must have spent many an evening regaling Peterson with his stories of his adventurous life in the North.

Sources: “Alaska's Heritage” (akhistorycourse.org); Familysearch.org; Federal Censuses; Findagrave.com; “He's Still Under the Spell of the Yukon,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch 12/19/1947 (ProQuest Historical Newspapers); “Klondike GoldRush” (Thecanadianencyclopedia.ca); Missouri Death Certificates (S1.sos.mo.gov/records); Library of Congress (Loc.gov/pictures); “N. N. A. & T. and Company” (Scripoworld.com/records); Typescript of letter, Wm. F. Hoelscher, Alaska, to Alex Peterson, Dutzow, Mo. (Missouri Historical Society Library, St. Louis); “Walked 680 Miles Over Snow Covered Trails in Alaska,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch 12/21/1906 (ProQuest Historical Newspapers); Washington State Archives (Digitalarchives.wa.gov).