Digital Bob Archive

The Shackleford political machine seemed firmly in place early in the year 1909, but it soon began to break down. Thomas Lyons, Shackleford's law partner, had been appointed District Judge at Juneau but he was soon ordered to Fairbanks because of his involvement, as a lawyer, in so many of the Juneau cases.

Then Governor Hoggatt resigned and left Alaska. His successor, Walter Eli Clark, was as strongly anti-Wickersham as Hoggatt had been but he had close ties to President Taft and tended to remain aloof from the Shackleford crowd. Dan Sutherland, who had been a Wickersham campaign manager, was appointed U.S. Marshal for the First Division, but Shackleford was able to get rid of him after he had been in office only nine months. H.L. Faulkner, who succeeded Sutherland, was not really satisfactory to Shackleford, either, but he held the office for the full term.

In 1910 Wickersham again ran for Delegate and again succeeded. He got a majority of the votes in Juneau even though Shackleford's paper, the Record ran headlines: \"A Vote for Wickersham Is a Vote to Move the Capital.\" The paper's virulent campaign turned many Juneau residents against it and it folded the following year. The daily Transcript had also gone out of business, leaving the Juneau newspaper field to Ed Russell's Dispatch, a strong supporter of Wickersham.

The Shackleford crowd suffered another blow in the summer of 1911 when a national bank examiner came to town. It did not take him long to discover that something was terribly wrong at the First National Bank. He gave the directors a month to straighten out its affairs. The bank's president, \"Big Clem\" Summers, an associate of Shackleford, left the bank and left town. Fred W. Bradley of the Treadwell Mining Company, rescued the bank.

He did this by assuming the obligations of Summers which showed on the bank's books as less than $5,000. But he had withdrawn at least $53,000 to buy for himself interests in the Ketchikan Power Co., the Cordova Power Co. and the Farmers and Merchants Bank of Wenatchee, Washington. The following January a grand jury returned a 54-count indictment which covered 142 pages. Summers ultimately entered a plea of guilty. Judge Lyons was back on the First Division bench by then and he sentenced Summers to five years on each of the 54 counts, but with the sentences to run concurrently.

The final political blow to Shackleford came in 1912 when the Republican party split nationally as well as in Alaska. A Democrat, Woodrow Wilson, was elected President, but Wickersham was again elected Delegate from Alaska. Being the National Committeeman of the party out of power is an empty office and Shackleford relinquished it. He continued to represent the Treadwell mines but in 1917 after the mines caved in he moved south. He died at Tacoma in July, 1929.