Digital Bob Archive

March is Women's Month in Alaska and it reminds us how little we know about Juneau's pioneer women. The real pioneer women, that is, the ones who came here during the community's beginnings, its first five years, before the year 1886. It is possible to name some of the women who were here in those early years, but there is no roster of them that can be relied upon as being anywhere near complete. The compilation of such a roster would be a worthy project for an organization, or an individual, interested in the history of women in Alaska.

It is relatively easy to compile a fairly complete roster of early male pioneers of Juneau. They tended to claim town lots or to file notices of one kind or another in the mining records. Those records, which are quite voluminous, are available to researchers. But women's names appear very infrequently in the mining records, so researchers must go to other, more obscure and more scattered sources.

One would be the roster of the 1887 Pioneers Association, which was organized in 1907. That roster shows 17 women members who claimed residency in Alaska by 1885.

Juneau did not have a newspaper during those first five years of its existence, and in fact until November, 1885, there was not a newspaper in Alaska. A paper then began publishing at Sitka but it was several months before it began to carry Juneau news. There were, however, newspapers at Victoria, B.C., Port Townsend, Washington Territory, and Portland, Oregon. The monthly mail steamer that served Juneau began its journey at Portland and called at the other two ports both northbound and southbound, and the papers at all three places published whatever Alaska news they could get from Alaska passengers.

The detailed census returns are also of some help in finding people who lived in Alaska in early years. These list names, birth dates and places, marital status and occupations of the individuals who were enumerated. The 1900 census also shows \"Date arrived in Alaska\" and \"Last address before coming to Alaska.\" That information would serve to identify Juneau residents who had arrived by 1885.

Unfortunately, the National Archives in Washington has been unable to locate the detailed Alaska returns for the 1890 census, which would be even more valuable than the 1900 returns as a source. Then, after exhausting the possibilities of the census returns, efforts could be directed to biographical sketches and obituaries published in Juneau newspapers, the first of which began publishing in January, 1887. Scanning the papers is a long and slow process but it often yields results obtainable in no other way.

Next week, in support of Women's Month, I will list a few of the very early women residents of Juneau.