Digital Bob Archive

If the Peel murder case comes to Juneau, as seems probable it is unlikely to become as locally divisive as was another murder trial transferred here from Valdez nearly 80 years ago. That was the trial of Edward C. Hasey on a charge of second degree murder in the spring of 1908.

That case resulted from what was known as \"the shoot-out at Keystone Canyon\" which took place on September 25, 1907. The Copper River & Northwestern Railway, owned by the Guggenheim mining interests, had been engaged in blasting a railroad grade out of the canyon wall. A late-coming rival, the Alaska Home Railroad, owned by promoter H.D. Reynolds, tried first to buy the right-of-way, then threatened to take it by force.

Edward Hasey, who had been a deputy U.S. Marshal at Valdez for five years or longer, was sent to guard the CR&NW property. On the morning of September 25 a mob of Reynolds men appeared at the canyon, seized the CR&NW foreman and a workman, and advanced on the work site. Hasey was armed with a rifle. He shouted a warning; then as the mob advanced waving clubs and rocks, he fired once over the heads of the men and once into the ground. They continued to press forward and he fired into the mob, wounding five men, mostly in the legs.

One of the wounded men died five days later, of blood poisoning. There was a great deal of anti-Guggenheim sentiment in Alaska at that time, especially in Valdez and among the miners' unions, and in Valdez there was talk of lynching Hasey. A grand jury indicted him on one count of second degree murder and four counts of shooting with intent to kill.

The trial was moved to Juneau but in some quarters here the anti-Guggenheim feeling was almost as strong as in Valdez. There were four attorneys, probably paid for by the CR&NW Railway, on the Hasey defense team. District attorneys from Valdez and Juneau carried the prosecution, but they were handicapped. They brought in some 45 witnesses, but used fewer than half of them because the testimony of many would have helped the defense. Hasey was acquitted. A key point in the defense was that many Reynolds men had been armed with sticks of dynamite, capped and with short fuses and some of them were at the top of the cliff above Hasey.

A member of that jury was Charles W. Carter who later served as Juneau postmaster and mayor but was then a clerk in a hardware store. Forty years after the trial he was still bitter about it.

\"We were out less than two hours,\" he told me, \"and during that time we had dinner. We took only one ballot and it was unanimous. We knew that dynamite with that short a fuse was only for throwing. But little did we know what we were in for.

\"The Reynolds people were desperate to convict Hasey. They accused us of having been bribed. They had Pinkerton detectives following us around and listening to our conversations, and many of my friends wouldn't speak to me. I was ostracized for a long time.\"

Another jury convicted Hasey in 1909 on the reduced charge of assault with a dangerous weapon and the judge expressed regret at having to sentence him to 18 months in the penitentiary.