Digital Bob Archive

Captain William Strong was the man who brought commercial power boats to the Taku River, but he was one of those people with many friends, none of whom appears to have known very much about his history. He was a British subject and may have been born in India of English parents. He was said to have grown up in London and he came to Alaska as the Canadian Customs officer at Wrangell. The date is uncertain but probably was around 1914. At Wrangell he became interested in Stikine River transportation and by 1916 he was one of the owners of the Cassiar Transportation Company and was known as Captain Strong.

In the spring of 1916 the company built a new river boat at Wrangell and named it Cassiar. The vessel was 59.5 in Customs measurement length, which probably made her close to 65 feet long overall. The beam was 19.3 feet and the power was a 44-horsepower gasoline engine. The Cassiar was classed as a passenger vessel. Commencing on June 15 that year, the new boat made several trips up to Telegraph Creek, B.C., with Strong as skipper. In later years Strong had a fur-buying post at Telegraph Creek and it may have been in operation by 1916.

The year 1916 brought changes to Stikine River transportation. That was the year Captain Syd Barrington brought his Haul B. 2 down from Wrangell and put her on the river. He was soon joined by his brothers, Hill and Harry, and before long they had four boats running on the Stikine.

Rather than tussle with the Barringtons for business, Strong brought the Cassiar up to the Taku in the summer of 1917 and began running excursion trips up the river, including those sponsored by Percy Pond as part of his promotion of the Taku Road. On one trip early in September, Pond himself, a reporter from the Empire named M.S. Perkins, and several engineers and officials went up to inspect the road being built by the Territory of Alaska, then continued on up the river for some distance past the boundary. Either that year or next, Strong established a fur trading post where the Inklin River and the Nakina River merge to form the Taku.

Captain Strong's river boat did not have any competition on the Taku, but it did not have many customers, either. After the river opened in 1918, he ran a few excursion trips, then turned the Cassiar into a fish-buying station. The fish were sent to the cannery at Taku Harbor. What happened to the Cassiar after that is uncertain. It was not until 1925 that she was listed in \"Merchant Vessels\" as being abandoned and she may have been used for a time as a fish-buying barge at Pleasant Harbor, Seymour Canal. In 1919 Strong teamed up with A.H. Humphries and had a new river boat built at the Woodman and Berntsen yard in Juneau. This one, named Nakina, was shorter and narrower than the Cassiar - 46 by 13.7 feet - but with a 60-horsepower engine. Strong apparently never became a United States citizen and the managing owner of the Nakina was listed as John Reck of the First National Bank. The new boat had overnight accommodations for a dozen passengers and began making three and four-day excursion trips to the head of navigation.