Digital Bob Archive

Taku Glacier is pretty well fixed as the name of one tongue of the great Juneau Ice Field, but it has had other names in the past. The Tlingit name is reported as Kiummma Gutta, or some variation of that spelling, and there is a Tlingit tradition that some 500 years ago the glacier surged across the inlet so that the Taku River backed up and formed a lake. Some scientists predict that this could happen again.

In 1883 it was given the name Schulze Glacier for Paul Schulze, the head of the Northwest Trading Company. His company had opened several trading posts in Southeastern Alaska, starting in 1880, and in 1881 established the first large store in Juneau. It also founded the fisheries town of Killisnoo and built a salmon cannery at Pyramid Harbor, near present Haines.

Then in 1890 the U.S. Coast & Geodetic Survey renamed it Foster Glacier for Charles Foster, who was serving as Secretary of the Treasury under President Benjamin Harrison. That name didn't stick and it has been known as Taku Glacier since about 1890.

During much of the time since Juneau was founded, Taku has been a \"live\" glacier which dropped thousands of ice bergs into Taku Inlet, from where they floated into Stephens Passage and Gastineau Channel. They were not little ice cubes and some of them were immense. At times they virtually blocked the channel, and more than once a big berg, caught by the tide, knocked down a dock or tore away a float.

On the other hand, it was that readily available supply of ice that enabled Juneau to get into the business of shipping fresh fish to Seattle, and that in turn attracted a local fishing fleet, a mainstay of the town for many years.

Taku Glacier was a long-standing tourist attraction, too. Muir Glacier, in Glacier Bay, was the first Alaska glacier regularly shown to tourists, but in 1899 that part of the country was visited by a major earthquake. So much ice broke loose that for the next eight years the tourist ships made Taku Glacier their alternative attraction.

Not that Taku Glacier was always docile. In October, 1906, a Juneau paper had this report: \"Old Taku Glacier has slid to the beach and Taku Inlet is reported to be 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. Steamboat men have complained that the waters near the inlet are full of floating debris, but the source was a mystery until the Thelma made a trip to the inlet and ascertained the truth. Had it happened during the sight-seeing months there might have been a terrible accident.\"

Nor was that an isolated incident. In August, 1917, the steamer Spokane was unable to get near the glacier because of floating ice after another break-out. And as late as 1920 Captain William Barton of the Lighthouse Service tender Fern reported trouble with ice in Stephens Passage. A solid mass of giant bergs was jammed up against Point Arden, he said, and extended nearly across to the mainland shore.