Digital Bob Archive

The Silver Bow Ptarmigan Club's annual dance at Perseverance was one of the highlights of the winter social season for several years when the century was still young. In 1913 it was held on the Saturday evening between Christmas and New Years and some 300 people from Juneau and Thane and Treadwell and Douglas attended. They traveled to Perseverance in horse-drawn sleighs which began leaving Juneau early Saturday afternoon and continued through the evening.

Dinner was served to those who arrived early and the dance started at 9 in the big recreation hall, with music furnished by the Treadwell orchestra. Dancing continued until 2:30 a.m. when what was described as a sumptuous banquet was served in the big dining room, presided over by H.H. Morton, the mine steward.

Sometime in the late spring or early summer following that social event, Juneau's first local passenger stage line started business, running from town to Perseverance on a regular schedule. It was operated, over the next six or seven years by a number of different men, using a variety of motor vehicles, and the Juneau newspapers sometimes referred to it as \"the jitney bus.\" In the slang lexicon of that day, a jitney was a nickle. Was it really possible to ride in an automobile from downtown Juneau to the head of Silver Bow Basin for a nickle?
It may have been; inquiry hasn't turned up anyone who remembers.

Harry Smith was an early operator of the stage route and he began with a big Stewart auto truck fitted with seats. It apparently couldn't handle all of the traffic and he shipped in a five-passenger Ford. Later that same year he bought a Buick roadster that had belonged to J.F. Mullen and had it refitted with a five-passenger body. For some years he made three round trips a day, leaving Juneau at 11 a.m., 4:50 and 11 p.m.

Ettore Scataglini was operating the Perseverance Stage in 1917 and 1918, and he may have had some competition from Joe Cristovich, known to the miners as \"Big Joe,\" who in 1917 bought a seven-passenger Buick touring car especially for that service.

A good deal of baseball was played here in those years and the ball field from 1914 until 1922 was in Last Chance Basin. The ball games generated some additional business for the stage line during the summer months. Thane, Perseverance, Juneau and Treadwell teams made up the first Gastineau Channel League, and the Alaska Juneau Mine also fielded a team, starting in 1915. It was a very competitive league and the mine and mill crews from Perseverance and Thane appeared to have had a special rivalry.

In addition to the passenger traffic and the trucks hauling supplies to the camp at Perseverance, there continued to be some heavy-duty hauling with teams of horses. A ten-horse team pulled a big compressor up the hill and on to Last Chance Basin for the Alaska Juneau Mine, and a 140-ton tube mill from the Hallum property was moved down the hill and out to Salmon Creek by an eight-horse team. Both jobs required a lot of very careful driving around the many bends of the road.