Digital Bob Archive

Captain William Strong had been running river boats on the Taku River ever since 1917, and about 1932 he got a yen to get into the aviation business. In 1929 when the mining boom started in the Tulsequah River section of the Taku drainage, he formed the Taku Trading Company and built a wharf at the mouth of the Tulsequah. He built a home there and opened a store and restaurant. The post office of Tulsequah was opened in May 1930 by the Canadian government. The first plane to fly to Tulsequah, so far as can now be determined, was in June 1929 and by 1930 Pilot Bob Ellis of Alaska-Washington Airways was flying there frequently. In 1932 the Eastman-Mitchell expedition brought up five small flying boats to use in prospecting the Laird River country, and that may have convinced Strong that he needed an airplane too.

In the spring of 1933, Strong purchased from the Gorst Air Transport Company at Seattle an 8 passenger Fokker flying boat with a 575-horsepower engine. Pilot Lucian Frank Barr flew it north, first to Juneau, then to Tulsequah. Barr had been a pilot the previous year with the Eastman-Mitchell expedition. Strong named the plane Taku and called the operation Alaska-Yukon Airways.

Barr was quoted as saying that the Fokker wasn't much of an airplane, but was a wonderful boat. He flew it from Tulsequah to Atlin, Juneau and various mining camps, and the machine's three-bladed propeller was so noisy that some in Juneau claimed they could hear the plane when it took off at Tulsequah.

But that did not last very long. On July 18, after five weeks of flying, a cylinder head cracked and Barr had to set the Fokker down in a slough some 20 miles upriver from Tulsequah. The stories vary somewhat after that. A Juneau newspaper reported that Barr started out afoot for Tulsequah and was making his way through the wilderness when Strong, traveling by boat, found him days later. But the story, as told in Dermot Cole's biography of Frank Barr, is that he had plenty of emergency supplies and camped by the downed Fokker for eight days until Strong arrived with the boat Redwing. To those who remember Frank Barr, that seems the more likely story. The plane was towed to Tulsequah and repair parts were ordered, but the last news found of the Fokker, in September, was that it had been hauled out for the winter. If it ever flew again, the fact was not reported in Juneau.

Strong purchased a World War I DeHaviland Moth biplane and Barr flew it for a time, then formed his own company and flew out of Atlin. Later he operated in both the Yukon Territory and Alaska and eventually turned from the airways to politics and served two terms in the Alaska Territorial Senate.

Captain Strong was not yet through with aviation. For the summer of 1936 he chartered a Fokker Universal seaplane and hired Pilot E.R.R. \"Ted\" Field to fly it with Tulsequah as a base. He also continued to operate his river boats and there was an increasing tonnage of cargo going up for the Polaris-Taku mine. The mine got into operation but was closed down by World War II and Captain Strong abandoned the Taku and went off to run boats on the MacKenzie River.