Digital Bob Archive

It was Sunday morning, June 2, 1929, when pilot Anscel Eckmann took off from Juneau in the Alaska-Washington Airways Lockheed Vega named Juneau. It was the same plane with which, just six weeks earlier, Eckmann had made a record nonstop flight from Seattle to Juneau.

Now he was about to make another record by landing the first airplane passenger at Tulsequah. The passenger was Roy 0. Moore, a Los Angeles mining man who was going in to examine a group of claims which had been staked several miles up the Tulsequah from its mouth. Eckmann circled the camp, then set the Vega down in the slough at the river's mouth and put Moore ashore. After he took off he made another pass over the camp to be sure someone was heading down to pick up the passenger.

Eckmann made several more trips to the Taku Valley in the summer of 1929, some of them to carry supplies to prospectors in the field. By the time the ice went out of the Taku in 1930, the airplane had become a fixture in the transportation system to the Tulsequah mining district. Pilot R.V. \"Bob\" Ellis, who had been the navigator for Eckmann's non-stop flight from Seattle in 1929, handled most of the 1930 trips to the Tulsequah with another Alaska-Washington Lockheed Vega float plane, this one named Taku.

Riverboat transportation increased in 1930, too, attracted no doubt by the $100 per ton freight rate to the Tulsequah, reported by Stroller's Weekly in Juneau.
Captain Syd Barrington, Stikine River operator, announced in the fall of 1929 that he would build a 90-foot boat to run on the Taku. Nothing came of that, but Captain William Strong, L.H. Metzgar of the Alaska Juneau mine, and banker John Reck organized the United Transportation Company which ordered a boat to be built in the yard of Woodman and Berntsen at Juneau.

The new boat was the Jeanne, named for Mrs. Strong, the former Miss Jeanne Robbins who was a nurse at St Ann's hospital in Juneau when Captain Strong married her in July, 1929. The Jeanne's official measurements were 63.6 feet in length with a beam of 18.4 feet and a power plant of two 150-horsepower Scripps gas engines. The vessel could carry 40 tons of freight, up to 40 passengers and had sleeping accommodations for eight people. The Jeanne proved to be a real workhorse and during the next ten years or so, using both her own carrying capacity and that of a number of barges, she transported hundreds of tons of supplies, equipment and machinery from the mouth of the Taku to Tulsequah Landing. From there much of the cargo was carried several miles up the Tulsequah, or to other sites where mineral exploration was going on, in outboard motorboats.

Captain Strong's riverboat, the Nakina, became a part of the new United Transportation Company, but the official record of vessels lists her as abandoned in 1930. It is reported that her bones are buried in the Taku River near Canyon Island. Strong then built another boat approximately the same size as the Nakina, the Redwing, which also saw long service on the river.