Digital Bob Archive

By the year 1901 Juneau was not only the largest town in Southeastern Alaska but a business center for much of the Panhandle. It was a banking center, for one thing. Except for Skagway, which had a branch of a Canadian bank, Juneau's two banks were the only ones east of Nome in the entire Alaska.

Juneau, by 1901, was the hub of a growing marine transportation industry, fueled in good part by mining and increasingly aided by mail-carrying contracts. The Gastineau Channel area had its own very healthy mining industry, with the big Treadwell group of mines as the star performer. In the Gold Creek Valley back of Juneau there was still some placer mining, the Alaska-Perseverance Gold Mining Company was starting to build a 100-stamp mill at Silver Bow Basin and farther down the valley the Alaska Juneau Gold Mining Company was operating its 30-stamp mill each summer. Several other small mills also operated in the valley; lode mining was thriving to the north at Jualin and Kensington, to the south at Snettisham, Sumdum and Windham, and to the west at Funter Bay, and in 1901 there was a stampede to a newly discovered placer diggings at Nugget Creek.

An industry that was growing in the Juneau area by 1901 and was helping at least the transportation business was fishing. Salmon canneries had been built at Dundas Bay and Snettisham in 1900; in 1901 there was another new cannery at Sitkoh Bay and a cold storage and cannery at Taku Harbor.

Because litigation was very much a part of the mining industry, by 1901 the District Court had moved from Sitka to Juneau despite the fact that the court house had burned in 1898 and had not yet been rebuilt. Very soon after the district government was created in 1884, with Sitka named as the seat of government (it was never officially the capital) some Juneauites had begun advocating removal of the government to Juneau. A single sentence slipped into a 1900 bill had accomplished what they wanted, on paper. But in 1901 the governor's office was still in Sitka and was being kept there, it was felt in Juneau, by the stubbornness of the former Presbyterian missionary who inexplicably happened to fill it.

More and more regional business came Juneau's way as new mining camps, canneries and salteries, sawmills, logging camps and other small settlements came into being and looked to Juneau for banking, supply and transportation services.
All of that put money into the local economy, but it was not without cost.
The general public has had few love affairs with banks or transportation companies, and Sitkans were disgruntled because they felt that Juneau had unfairly sneaked government offices away. An anti-Juneau feeling would last for several decades, much like the anti-Seattle sentiment of later years and the anti-Anchorage bias of more recent times.