Digital Bob Archive

Awk, Auk or Auke. Which spelling is correct? The answer is not easily discovered, as I found out when the question was put to me. It was correctly pointed out that for decades the local media used the \"Auk\" form before it switched to \"Auke.\" Was there good reason for the change?

The search for an answer goes back to the morning of March 17, 1869, when the side-paddle gunboat Saginaw, Commander Richard Worsam Meade, was steaming south in Stephens Passage. According to her smooth deck log, \"At 8:10 came to anchor off a village of 14 houses on Admiralty Island opposite Douglas Island. At 9 got under way from Awk village.\" The log for the forenoon watch was signed by Midshipman Seaton Schroeder.

Who told Schroeder the name of the village? Probably it was Robert Hicks, the civilian pilot of the Saginaw. He had learned these waters during service on the trading vessels of the Hudson's Bay Company, before 1867. There is no way of knowing whether Hicks also spelled the name for Schroeder.

When the government published the second edition of the Alaska Coast Pilot in 1883 it listed \"Auke Bay, 14 miles from Point Arden on Admiralty island, with a small stockaded village. Named by Meade in 1869.\" There was no mention of what is now known as Auke Bay, north of Juneau. In its fourth edition, in 1901, the Coast Pilot changed the name of the Admiralty Island bay to Auke Cove, and it continued using that name until 1932 when it dropped it entirely.

In that same 1932 edition the Coast Pilot discovered, for the first time, \"Auke Bay, northwestward of Fritz Cove.\"

In the meanwhile, In 1901, the government published the first edition of a \"Geographic Dictionary of Alaska.\" It listed Auke Cove, Admiralty Island, but it was not until the second edition, in 1906, that it reported \"Auke bay, indenting the mainland at the northeastern end of Stephens passage, just north of Fritz cove. Local name reported by Spencer and Wright, 1903.\"

Spencer and Wright were members of the U.S. Geological Survey. Their published report for that year does not contain the name Auke; we do not know how they spelled it in their field notes which, if they still exist, are buried in Washington. Local usage, from the earliest days of Juneau, had favored Auk. Did someone at the Board of Geographic Names arbitrarily tack an \"e\" on the end of the locally favored spelling?

Auke became the official form, sanctified by Washington. For years and years, well into the 1950s at least, Juneau newspapers eschewed the redundant \"e\" but in time they succumbed. The Auke spelling is probably too deeply entrenched to be eradicated now.

There is, however, an officially approved Auk Bay. It is away up on the Kenai Peninsula and was named in 1929 by the USC&GS \"for the Auk subdivision of the Tlingit Indians.\" If enough people dislike the Auke spelling, perhaps we could make a trade with Kenai.