Digital Bob Archive

The Taku subsistence salmon fishery began nobody knows how many decades ago, and there has been a commercial salmon fishery on the Taku River and Inlet for more than a hundred years. There may have been earlier ones, but Charles Brown is the first man who left a record of his commercial fishery.

Brown was a vintage Alaskan, known as one of the '61 men, the prospectors who came north to the Stikine River after Alexandre \"Buck\" Choquette found gold there six years before the Russians left Alaska. After the American occupation he settled at Wrangell but also did some mining at Windham Bay. In 1879 he was listed as the owner of one of the ten general stores in Wrangell and also had a meat market and, as Brown & McVetty, had a fishing business, probably on the Stikine. In the summer of 1880 a number of men were reported working on a gold claim at Sumdum for Charles Brown & Co.

Early in 1881 Brown joined the stampede to the new diggings at what is now Juneau. He staked a couple of placer claims and a town lot and in December, 1882, he flied a claim to \"three miles of the Taku River for the purpose of catching salmon.\" In 1884 his establishment there included \"houses, sheds, fish tanks, fishing boats and a scow.\"

Brown died at St. Ann's Hospital in Juneau on September 1, 1889, at the age of 61 and was buried from the Mission Church with the Rev. Eugene S. Willard conducting the service. The Juneau City Mining Record said, \"Of late years he has been engaged in salting and smoking salmon and was doing well.\" His estate included a lot, store and dwelling in Wrangell, sold to A. Choquette for $199; a lot and building in Douglas, which brought another $199, and the Taku Fishery which included a cabin, smokehouse and shed, three old boats, two fishing nets and some barrels of salted salmon backs and heads. William F. Reed of Juneau bought the whole outfit for $25, according to the estate records, but it is possible he was also writing off a store bill that Brown owed him.

Reed was another oldtimer in the country. A native of Tennessee, he taught school until he joined the gold rush to California. After mining there for a time, he headed north to the Fraser River, the Omineca and the Cassiar, then settled in Wrangell for a few years. In January, 1882, he and three other men loaded a large dory and headed for Juneau where they arrived after a month of hard traveling.

By the time he bought the Taku Fishery, Reed owned a general store on the drug store corner of Front and Seward Streets with what was said to be \"one of the largest stocks of merchandise in town.\" He also owned two hotels on Second Street - the Central Hotel and the Reed House, which advertised that it was \"strictly temperance - no wines, beers or cigars obtainable in this establishment.\" Reed had a 160-acre ranch at the mouth of Lemon Creek, and beginning in 1890 he operated the Taku Fishery with hired help. It apparently shut down after Reed's death in 1894.