Digital Bob Archive

A second crossing of Gastineau Channel has been discussed for some time now, but perhaps it should be remembered that the first crossing was under discussion for at least 40 years before it became a reality. Until that happened, the residents of Douglas and Juneau made do with a variety of ferry boats.

Ferry service on Gastineau Channel of course had a beginning and an end. The end has a definite date and time: At 12:30 p.m. on October 31, 1935, Captain Art Nelson gave three blasts on the whistle of the ferry Teddy and left the float at Douglas for the last scheduled crossing of the channel, ending 38 years of service by the Juneau Ferry & Navigation Company.

The first car had crossed the Douglas bridge on September 2, 1935, and the bridge was dedicated and officially opened for traffic on October 13. The ferry company continued service for nearly three weeks after the bridge was officially opened to see whether enough people preferred the boat to make it worth continuing. It was soon obvious that it would not pay and the shut-down was ordered.

The date of the end of Gastineau Channel ferry service is known; the date when it began is uncertain. John Treadwell built his first stamp mill at the mine that came to bear his name in the summer of 1882. That was for a test, and when it proved successful he built a 120-stamp mill in 1884. It required a much larger force in both the mine and the mill, and ferry service that followed some kind of schedule probably began then.

A man named Robert Michaelson told the Douglas Island News in October, 1899, that he had operated a ferry service from 1884 until 1888, using an open Columbia River model boat with sails. The fare was 25 cents. It may have been his boat that was skippered by Fred Helm when she left Treadwell around 8:30 on a November morning in 1885. There was only one passenger, a Chinese man, and there was a squally Taku wind. After daylight the boat was found bottom up in the channel and there was no sign of the two men.

Other sailboats tried the ferry business, too, and perhaps even some rowboats. A Captain Taggard had a boat he called the Kushdekaw, an unpropitious name for any boat. Charles Lual, who was known as Dutch Charley, ran an open sailing ferry for some time, then sold out to the operators of a steam ferry. In January, 1889, P. Pettersen was planning to put a boat on the route, and soon the \"Fast sailing open boat Olina, P. Pettersen, master\" was advertised to \"make trips day or night between Juneau and Douglas, carrying freight and passengers,\" In August, 1891, there was an item that Pettersen had abandoned the ferry business and gone to work at Treadwell, but in May, 1894, Peter Peterson had started an open boat ferry. That may have been another man.

Just the thought of crossing Gastineau Channel in an open sailboat on a winter night with a Taku blowing is, at the very least, chilling.