Digital Bob Archive

Circle City on the Yukon was virtually a suburb of Juneau during its early years. Much of the population of what was soon billed as \"the world's largest log cabin city\" had previously lived in Juneau. One was William McPhee, who had been one of the builders of Juneau's Opera House. And there was the George T. Snow family who had put on many theatricals in that Opera House and who built a second Opera House in Circle City. Juneau newspapers published all of the news they could get hold of from the new northern mining camp, and early in 1896 George F. Miller and Lockie MacKinnon opened the Circle City Hotel on Third Street in Juneau.

On March 19, 1896, the post office of Circle was established; the Post Office Department never did recognize it as Circle City, which nearly everyone else called it, just as it had refused to recognize Juneau City some years earlier. Establishing the Circle office was no great problem for the Department, but getting mail to it was. The Alaska Commercial Company and the newer North American Commercial Company both ran steamboats from St. Michael to Circle and Forty Mile during the short navigation season, but that service was erratic at best, and there was no regularly scheduled steamboat service from San Francisco to St. Michael.

It was finally decided that mail for Circle could best be carried from Juneau via Chilkoot Pass and the Yukon River, and bids were called for four trips from Juneau to Circle and return between November, 1896, and May, 1897. Frank Corwin and Albert Hayes of Juneau got the contract, but would not begin their first trip until the river had frozen sufficiently that they could travel most of the way on the ice.

During the summer of 1896, while the Post Office Department was fussing with bids and contracts, a good deal of mail for Circle was accumulating at Seattle. It was finally decided to issue a one trip contract in order to get the mail to Circle before the freeze-up, and Bernard H. Moran and William Ash of Juneau got that contract. The mail was slow in reaching Juneau and the two men did not start from here until September 16. Experienced Yukoners estimated that was 10 days late if they were to reach Circle by canoe before mush ice blocked the river, but they made it after a hard trip.

Juneau lost one of its most colorful and enterprising young men when \"Casey\" Moran took off with the mail for Circle. As a newsboy in Seattle he had been known as the \"Union Kid\" - not through any labor activity but because, with fists and boots, he had established Second and Union as his territory. When he came to Juneau he established himself selling ice \"by the pound, ton or berg.\" Up North, he was among the first to move from Circle to Dawson where, after trying his hand at mining, he turned to newspaper reporting and got national attention with a story of the discovery of what seemed to be the remains of an ark on a mountain in the Koyukuk country. And eventually he went national as a writer for Collier's Magazine.