Digital Bob Archive

The Alaska Mill & Mining Company, owner of the Treadwell mine, at an early date found need to have its own workboat. A suitable craft was found on Puget Sound, the steamboat Lucy built in 1883. She was 52 feet in overall length and was brought up to Gastineau Channel in March, 1886, and for the next 20 years was a part of the local maritime scene.

One of the main duties of the Lucy was towing logs from places as far away as Wrangell Narrows to the sawmill owned by the Treadwell mine and was usually operated by someone under lease. But she also substituted as a cross-channel ferry when the regular boat was laid up for repairs, did some search and rescue work, and when not otherwise engaged carried picnic parties to nearby sites and hunting parties to more distant ones.

The first skipper of the Lucy after she arrived here was Frank Mehrwalt and he was followed by Thomas Fisher, formerly of the ferry Julia, James Haley and J.T.
Martin.

What was probably the Lucy's first mercy errand was in the summer of 1886 when an anti-Chinese gang stuffed more than eighty Chinamen aboard two small sailing craft, with orders to leave and not return. Many of the Chinese had been employees of John Treadwell and he sent the Lucy to overtake them and give them 15 sacks of rice so they wouldn't starve.

Another mercy mission a few years later sent the Lucy and another small steamer racing around to the west side of Douglas Island to pick up people who had survived the sinking of the Canadian Pacific passenger ship Islander.

In 1895, however, the Lucy went on a search that ended in disaster for her. The little steamer Yukon was also engaged in towing logs for the Treadwell sawmill and became overdue. Robert Purvis, who was operating the sawmill, and Martin Benson took the Lucy to look for her and at Port Houghton struck a reef. The boat sank in a few minutes but the men escaped in a canoe and paddled it back to Juneau. Meanwhile, the Yukon had arrived safely with her log raft. She was loaded up with empty barrels and other flotation materials, raised the Lucy and brought her back to the channel.

The little steamer narrowly escaped another sinking right on the channel a year later. Edward Webster and Frank Bach had put in a pair of telephones to connect Douglas and Juneau (in time it grew into the Juneau and Douglas Telephone Company), and at first had trouble with the wires spanning the channel. In 1896 they borrowed the Lucy, Captain James Haley, to run a new set of wires. Like many small steamers of that day, the Lucy had a very tall funnel and while she was at work in a strong tide and wind the funnel fouled on one of the wires. The boat was thrown on her beam's ends and had Captain Haley not walked out on the horizontal funnel and cut the wire, she would have gone down.

The Lucy was never converted to a gas boat, as so many small steamers were. She remained in the register of vessels until 1908.