Digital Bob Archive

The Court House Gang, feathered variety, appears to be thriving and, thanks to good folk such as Charlie and Isabel Skuse, Bill Dunn, and others, they are regularly fed.

Pigeons have been a part of the Juneau scene since the 1890s and around 1909 the owners of the Jualin Mine at Berners Bay brought in some carrier pigeons to carry messages between there and town. It may not have worked out too well; they installed a wireless station a short while later.

A great pigeon feeder of an earlier day was the late H.S. \"Shelly\" Graves who had a clothing store near where Front Street runs into South Franklin.
And a real pigeon fancier was the late J. C. Thomas of Thomas Hardware Co., now Lyle's downtown store. He lived at Norway Point and kept his birds well under control, perhaps due to a sad experience he had at Sitka before he moved to Juneau in the 1920s.

At Sitka, Thomas sent for a pair of English pigeons. They were handsome birds and he had a cage built for them of chicken wire and with a little house where they could get in out of the weather. Thomas was very proud of those birds, and they were much admired in the town.

One evening after work Thomas went to feed his birds, and they weren't there. They had disappeared completely although the door of the cage was shut and latched. As he looked for his birds he spied Montana Pete Ferrell sitting on a log on the beach near the cage and he went down to inquire whether Pete had seen the missing birds. He went to the right place.

Montana Pete was an old reprobate said to have been blue-ticketed out of nearly every town on the coast until he reached Sitka where he was admitted to the Pioneers' Home. Some people called him a tin-horn gambler, although his game ran more to cards.

As Thomas approached Pete's log he saw that Pete had a little fire going, and he soon perceived that Pete was holding a stick over the fire, and that skewered on the stick was a pair of birds, plucked and drawn and roasting nicely. Pete lived through it but not by a whole lot.

Back in 1931, during the administration of George Parks, he promoted and the legislature passed a law with an appropriation of $2500 to establish and maintain carrier pigeon lofts at one or more aviation centers. That was before Alaska planes were equipped with radio and the idea was that each plane would carry a pigeon or two and that if it got into trouble the bird could be released to carry a message back to the flying field.

The law was repealed in 1947, but in view of the number of searches there are for missing aircraft these days, I'm not at all sure the repeal wasn't premature.