Digital Bob Archive

The valley of the Taku River was home for one branch of the Tlingit Indians for nobody is sure how long, but there is little information about early settlement there by white people. The first year-around resident may have been Charles Hilty, but it is uncertain just when he moved there.

Hilty was born in Switzerland in September, 1856, and is reported to have come to the Juneau area in 1881 and to have settled on Douglas Island. While it is certainly possible that he was here that early, he did not get into any of the written records that have been preserved, such as mining location notices and town lot claims. He apparently went to the Interior a few years later but again, that is undocumented.

The first record found of Hilty, in fact, is in one of Juneau's newspapers, The Daily Alaska Dispatch, for October 2, 1911. The paper said: \"Charles Hilty, who has a homestead about 30 miles up the Taku River, where he lives, works a quartz claim and also works the river bars for placer gold, is in town for medical care.

The need for medical care came about, according to the paper, as the result of an encounter with a grizzly. He was at work on his quartz claim when he saw a big grizzly and went after it to kill it. Then two more bears appeared on the scene. Hilty emptied his gun at them and wounded one of the three. The other two ran off but the wounded bear charged him. It grabbed him by one leg, about at the knee, and hung on.

According to Hilty, he was able to get out his hunting knife and while the bear chewed on his leg, he plunged the knife in its throat. They rolled around together on the ground as he stabbed the bear several more times, and it finally died. Hilty pried its jaws open and started for his cabin, which was ten miles away. He was too badly injured to walk and crawled the distance.

\"Hilty lives alone with no neighbor within 30 miles,\" the Dispatch said. He stayed in bed for several days, but it became obvious that his leg needed a doctor's attention. He managed to get into his boat and down to the river mouth, but the paper is silent as to how he got to town from there. Perhaps Ben Bullard took him. At any rate, he got to a doctor and was patched up and was able to return to his Taku homestead.

Hilty's next hospital appearance was in June, 1918, and this time the cause was reported as rheumatism. He got no better and in August was sent to the Pioneers' Home at Sitka. He died there on October 10 and was buried in the Pioneer Cemetery.

Ben Bullard, who may have succored Hilty in 1911, had homesteaded near the mouth of the river a year earlier, at what is now known as Bullards Landing. Born in Michigan in 1848, he had grown up in California and was said to have been educated as a civil and hydraulic engineer. He came north with the Klondike Rush, mined in the Interior for a time, and landed in Juneau at the turn of the century just when the Nugget Creek stampede was starting. He mined placer gold on Nugget Creek and Steep Creek, then moved to the east bank of the Taku where he lived for the next 23 years. He died on his homestead on May 22, 1933.