Digital Bob Archive

Juneau was a mining town in its early years and the local media reflected that fact. Mines and mining received a great deal of attention in the half dozen weekly papers that were published here, beginning in 1887, and the two dailies that came a little later. They had little space for the fishing industry, logging and sawmilling or fur trapping and hunting. The fishing industry, in particular, was virtually ignored, a situation that is not vastly different today.

The Juneau Packing Company is an example. We know that it existed because in 1905 it was promoting smoked halibut and salmon as a breakfast dish. The late Lloyd \"Kinky\" Bayers, an indefatigable researcher into Juneau's past, finally learned that it had been located on the site of the later Winter & Pond store at the south corner of South Franklin and Admiral Way, which was the corner opposite the present Red Dog Saloon.

But while the Juneau newspapers ignored the Juneau Packing Company, the office of the U.S. Commissioner of Fisheries did not. From the files in the National Archives at Washington It is learned that the company was operated by Ashton W. Thomas who later went to Prince William Sound where Port Ashton was named for him. In 1905 the company had three traps, two purse seines and two drag seines. The traps were up on Lynn Canal but some of the seining and drag seining was probably done at Taku Inlet. King, silver and red salmon were sold at the traps, but the report does not name the buyer. It may have been salteries on the Inlet or the cannery at Taku Harbor, or both. Pink and chum salmon were brought to Juneau and salted, the pinks probably as salmon bellies. The company put up 110 tons of dry-salted chums and 4100 barrels of salt herring. It also produced four tons of fertilizer and 500 gallons of fish oil, but the newspapers did not even notice its activities enough to complain of the smell.

In the meanwhile, the fishing and salting of salmon continued on Taku Inlet and River. Billy Layton and A. Hipe were listed as operating in 1894 and the Polar Fish and Trading Company in 1895. This was a New York company with J.P.
Whitney as resident manager. Whether either of these operations was at the old site on the river first claimed by Charles Brown In 1882 has not been learned.

In 1897, according to an article in The Pacific Fisherman in 1931, the first mild curing of salmon in Alaska took place at Taku. The article does not pinpoint the exact location. Mild curing, for the uninitiated, uses much less salt than the regular cure and salmon so prepared are ultimately smoked to produce lox. In the United States, mild curing of king salmon began about 1889 on the Columbia River where, at first, the fish were packed in old casks in which wine or whiskey had been shipped. Most of these were the size known as tuns, holding 252 standard U.S. gallons. They were immense, unwieldy things and eventually the industry standardized on the tierce, holding 800 pounds of fish or four times as much as a barrel, for mild cured salmon.