Digital Bob Archive

John L. Carlson, who built a cannery at Sunny Cove in Taku Inlet in 1900, was among many cannerymen out of a job in 1904 when the big Pacific Packing & Navigation Company went out of business. He might easily have purchased the Sunny Cove plant, but he was probably disenchanted with the inlet as a cannery site. Instead, he leased the cannery of the Alaska Fisheries Union at Chilkat Inlet and operated it for two seasons.

Carlson's next move was to Taku Harbor where he leased the cannery and cold storage plant then owned by the Pacific Cold Storage Company. Several years later he bought the Taku Harbor plant, increased the capacity of the cannery, and each year until 1918, under various company names, he put up packs of both canned and mild cured salmon as well as freezing some halibut.

Carlson used gillnet fishermen in Taku Inlet and had a number of traps; 15 of them when he sold out to Libby, McNeill and Libby in 1918. It may have been Carlson who in 1908 experimented with a scow-mounted fish wheel on the Taku.
The device was used extensively on the Columbia River but this was said to have been its only trial in Southeastern Alaska. The wheel was mounted between two scows, each 40 feet long and moored parallel to each other. The wheel had two dips, each 22 feet wide and hung with netting. The wheel was kept in place throughout the king and red salmon runs and, according to one observer, \"caught a dozen sockeyes and several thousand trout.\" The wheel was not used again.

Floating icebergs continued to be not only a nuisance but also at times a danger to the fishermen in Taku Inlet. Sometimes the big bergs were so thick in the inlet that the excursion steamers could not get close enough for their passengers to see Taku Glacier, and gillnet fishermen spent much of their time trying to avoid the big and at times fast-moving icebergs.

Both the fishing season and the tourist season were past when a Juneau paper reported, on October 10, 1906: \"Old Taku Glacier has slid to the beach and Taku Inlet is full of ice, trees and debris which were swept into the sea by the mad race of millions of tons of glacier ice as it traveled with a mighty roar two miles to salt water. Had it happened during the sight-seeing months there might have been a terrible accident.\"

There was an accident, although not to a sightseer, in August, 1917. Said a news report: \"Breaking out of the dead glacier at Taku and a cave-in of ice from the live glacier created a tidal wave that resulted in the death of Ole Sagen, a gillnet fisherman from Tacoma. For the past two weeks there have been preliminary warnings of unusual doings at the two glaciers. It is believed that the water cut an enormous cave in the dead glacier and when the roof of the cave collapsed, with a sound like an explosion, it not only sent out a great wall of water but triggered an enormous fall of ice from the face of Taku Glacier. So much ice tumbled into the inlet that the next day the steamer Spokane, with a full load of tourists, was unable to get anywhere near the glacier.\"