Digital Bob Archive

Halibut was the mainstay of the Juneau fishing fleet for a half a century or more, and it was more than 90 years ago that the first iced halibut were shipped to the states from this port. That shipment was in March, 1896, when a fisherman named M. McCauley came in from Icy Strait with a couple of tons of halibut, knocked together some big wooden boxes, repacked his fish in glacier ice, and sent them off to Portland, Oregon, on the mail steamer City of Topeka. That may have been the first time iced halibut was shipped from Alaska on a commercial steamer, but it is necessary to say \"may have been.\" In 1889 a former Gloucester, Massachusetts man who was fishing out of Sitka announced that during the winter he planned to ship halibut south, using ice from a local lake. But no report has been found that he actually did so. In 1890, however, it was announced that he was sending a thousand pounds of halibut to Juneau every week. That indicates that nobody was catching and selling halibut here.

Pioneering fisherman McCauley was followed by Captain Dan Gallery with the sloop Alcedo. His first landing here, or at least the first one reported in the local papers, was in March, 1897, when he brought in 8,000 pounds of halibut from Frederick Sound, packed them in boxes with ice from Taku Glacier, and sent them to Seattle. He made at least one more shipment that year, 16,000 pounds packed in 36 boxes and consigned to the Seattle Fish Company.

Another halibut shipment from Juneau was also made in October, 1897. Peter T.
Buschmann was building a saltery in Taku Inlet and brought the material north in his small steamer, the Annie M. Nixon. While the construction was going on he sent the vessel to Icy Strait to fish halibut. She came in to Juneau with about 15,000 pounds of flatfish and they were sent to Seattle on the mail steamer.

Other reports on the local fishing scene at that time are scarce in Juneau newspapers. This was strictly a mining town; a headline that said \"Big Salmon\" turned out to be about a gold strike on the Big Salmon River in Yukon Territory.
News stories about commercial fishing were virtually non-existent in the local papers and, come to think about it, things haven't changed much.

Those early halibut shipments would seem to have given Juneau a head start in developing as a fishing port. Steamboats called regularly, and ice, lots of ice, was available as bergs drifted in from Taku Glacier. That was something that Sitka, Wrangell and Ketchikan did not have. Peter Buschmann nullified that advantage. He built a cannery and wharf at the north end of Wrangell Narrows where ice from LeConte Glacier was plentiful. And the new town of Petersburg had a good harbor, which Juneau did not. It would be a long struggle before Juneau acquired a halibut fleet.