The Haleys and Silver Bay
Columns by Bob DeArmond published in the Daily Sitka Sentinel
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The Haleys and Silver Bay, by Robert N. DeArmond, from columns in the Daily Sitka Sentinel newspaper.
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\^sf03Haleys & Silver Bay, Part 1 --^sf01 At least a couple of dozen families settled in Sitka from outside Alaska between 1867 and 1880. Some of them stayed for a few years, some for more than a few, but it was Nicholas Haley and his offspring who kept the family name alive in Sitka for something on the order of 85 years.<
\It is next to impossible to write about the Haley family at Sitka without telling about their mining activities, and especially about those at Silver Bay. There were, however, a number of other mining developments at Silver Bay in early years, but this series will deal only with those in which the Haleys were directly involved.<
\There are numerous discrepancies in the available records of the Haley family, including the census returns and newspaper stories, so that their story does not always exactly dovetail together. For some of the information I owe much to a great-granddaughter of Nicholas and Ellen Haley. She is Mrs. E. Marion Sim whose home is at St. Albert, Alberta, Canada. She has assiduously pursued her family history and has been generous in sharing such information as she has discovered.<
\Nicholas Haley was born in County Kildare, Ireland, the son of John and Brigida Tesdal Haley. He was born as early as 1836 and as late as 1839, depending upon which document is used. His age was listed as 21 on November 30, 1857, at Rochester, New York, when he enlisted in the United States Army to serve for five years. He was illiterate and signed the enlistment document with ``his x mark.''<
\He was assigned to Battery M of the 3rd Artillery and later transferred to Battery I of the same regiment.<
\It is reported that Haley was with the Army units that built the Mullan Road from Fort Benton in Montana to Fort Walla Walla in Washington in 1860. That was real frontier country and some Indian fighting may have been involved. It also may have been when Haley first became interested in gold mining. Gold had been discovered near Deer Lodge, Montana, in the 1850s.<
\Haley was in the Army until November 13, 1862, so 19 months of his Army service was during the Civil War. According to his statement in a land claim some years later he ``fought in the Civil War in 1861-62,'' but no record has been found of where he fought.<
\He received his discharge as a private at Alcatraz Island, then an Army post, on San Francisco Bay. Less than two weeks later, on November 24, he married Helena Ryan, born in Ireland, the daughter of Michael and Maria Anna Donnigan Ryan. The name Helena appears in the marriage record, which is in Latin; in the Sitka records she was Ellen Mary. She was born on September 14, 1841 (1843 in one census).<
\Ellen Mary was a nurse during the Civil War according to statements made many years later, after her death, by her only daughter, but no other information regarding that has been found.<
\During the next nearly eight years, Haley apparently worked in the gold fields of Northern California and Nevada. The Haleys' first son was born sometime in 1863 and was named John with the initial N. A second son was born to them in Nevada in May 1866 and was named Edward J. In the years before 1870 four more Haley children were born in the Rio Vista/Vallejo area: Annie, Joseph, Frank and Mary. The latter two may have been twins. All died about the same time, but whether the cause was an epidemic or some other catastrophe is not known. The parish records were destroyed when the church burned.<
\As with the other four Haley children who lived to adulthood, there is confusion as to when Thomas Colbert Haley was born. His application for admission to the Pioneers' Home in 1956 lists his birth date as October 5, 1866. The census taken by the Navy early in 1881 lists his age as 12, which would make for a birth year of 1868. The federal census of 1900 says he was born in September 1872 and the census 10 years later gives the date as September 1873. Three of the records agree that he was born in California; the Navy census is silent on that subject. To add to the confusion about the birth dates of his younger sister and brother, the Pioneers' Home record states that he arrived in Alaska in 1868.<
\On September 12, 1870, at San Francisco, Nicholas Haley, age 34, again enlisted in the Army for a term of five years. He again signed the document with ``his x mark'' and he was assigned to Battery H, 2nd Artillery, which had just been ordered transferred from Sitka to the Presidio at San Francisco. In the summer of 1872 Company H. was ordered back to Sitka to relieve Company I and join Company C. So far as is known, Haley came north at that time.<
\It is less possible to guess when Ellen Haley came to Sitka and this is because of the discrepancies in the birth dates of her two youngest children. Julia E. Haley was born in Alaska in July 1876 according to the federal census of 1900, but in July 1875 according to the census of 1910. Charles A. Haley was born in Alaska in December 1878 according to the 1900 census, but in December 1876 according to the 1910 census. His obituary, when he died in 1956, however, said that ``he was born on his father's Indian River homestead on Christmas Day, 1875.'' The Navy census taken in February 1881 lists his age as four years, which doesn't jibe with any of the other dates.<
\To add to the confusion, if any more is needed, is a question that was asked of the people who were being counted in Alaska for the 1900 census. The question was ``What year did you arrive in Alaska and where did you come from?'' Both Nicholas and Ellen Haley answered, ``In 1879, from Virginia City, Nevada.''<
\One conclusion I have reached after examining a great many census returns is that people answering the questions of the census-taker are likely to say the first things that pop into their minds.<
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\^sf03\Haleys & Silver Bay, Part 2 --^sf01 The best available information is that Nicholas Haley arrived in Sitka in the summer of 1872 with three more years to serve of his five-year Army enlistment. Mrs. Ellen Haley and sons John, Edward and Thomas came to Sitka sometime in the 1870s. Two more children, Julia and Charles, were born in Sitka.<
\A census taken by the Navy in the spring of 1881 has this listing of the Haley family, with their ages: Nicholas, 43; Allen (Ellen) M., 40; John, 18; Edward, 16; Thomas, 12; Julia, 7; Charles, 4.<
\At some date after he arrived in Sitka, Nicholas Haley claimed title to a large tract of land on Lincoln Street. He may have claimed it with soldier's script, a land exchange document issued to many veterans of the Civil War. Or he may simply have squatted on it and held it by right of possession. The original claim extended along Lincoln Street from Dog Creek to the Blarney Stone, when that landmark was in its original location. John Brady later claimed the next land to the east as a homestead and donated it to the Presbyterian Mission for what is now the Sheldon Jackson College campus.<
\In 1887 when it became desirable to have a direct route to what is now the National Cemetery, Nicholas Haley and the Presbyterian Mission each donated a strip of land to form Jeff Davis Street. Still later, in 1914, Haley sold a large piece of his claim to the Mission. That land became the part of the college campus that is west of Jeff Davis Street.<
\In June 1882 Nicholas Haley filed another location notice: ``I claim the 160 acres on the edge of town on my discharge as I served in the Army in '61 and '2. It is on Indian River N. bank, all above high tide. It shall be known as Sitka Park and Haley's Homestead. There is a house on the N. bank of the river.'' The claim was on the Jamestown Bay side of the river and included a portion of the present Sitka National Historical Park. The ``house'' actually stood some distance from the river and was built in 1883 and 1884 of upright poles. It measured 12 by 18 feet and had a single room. So far as can be determined the family never lived there but perhaps some members did camp there in the summer and tended a small garden plot. They also owned some cows that were pastured there.<
\Charles Haley claimed to have been born on Christmas Day 1875 on ``my father's Indian River homestead,'' but according to the Navy census he was five years old when the homestead claim was filed. There was a house on the Lincoln Street property, perhaps a log house, but whether Haley built it is not known. In May 1887 The Alaskan reported that he was building a new house ``near the Mission grounds and adjoining the house he now occupies.''<
\Tom Haley, and perhaps the older boys as well, attended the Sheldon Jackson Institute, as it was then called, as day students for a time in the early 1880s. Except for the Russian school it was the only school in town. After 1886, when Dr. Sheldon Jackson established a public school, Tom, Charles and Julia Haley attended it.<
\Nicholas Haley had worked in the mines in California in the years between his Army service, and it may be that the reason he remained in Sitka after his enlistment expired in 1875 was because of what he saw as a potential for mineral development. Some prospecting had been done before he arrived in Sitka. The first discovery of gold in the Sitka area was reportedly by an ex-soldier named Edward Doyle. He first found gold in float ore in Indian River, then discovered a quartz lode at Silver Bay where he was prospecting with William Dunlap and Frank Mahoney. That may have been as early as 1871 although Doyle did not record a mining claim until 1877.<
\In 1872 Dunlap and Mahoney worked together on a small quartz ledge about a mile from town, on Indian River. They sent some ore samples to San Francisco for assay but the results were unsatisfactory. The first gold lode claims to be recorded at Sitka were at Silver Bay and were located by brothers Allen B. and Edward H. Francis. The location notices were filed for record on December 28, 1874. The brothers were the sons of Allen Francis who for many years was the American consul at Victoria, B.C. Edward Francis had a long career in Alaska, as a fur trader, in government service and as a marine pilot.<
\At least one mining claim, and a very important one, was discovered in 1873 but for some reason was not recorded until 1877. Major Joseph Stewart and A. H. Prince, stationed at Sitka with the Army, discovered what became known as the Stewart lode claim, on May 29, 1873. Nicholas Haley was said to have been with them when the discovery was made. The first stamp mill in Alaska would be erected to crush ore from the Stewart lode.<
\On the same day that the Francis brothers recorded their claims on what they called the Francis lode, they sold a one-third interest in them to Herbert Gaston of Victoria, B.C., and another one-third interest to Nicholas Haley. They received $20 apiece from the sales and that was probably the first money anyone made from Silver Bay mining. The two claims appear to have been on what is now known as Lucky Chance Mountain, which in earlier years was known as Lake Mountain. Two of the three lakes on the mountain, shown on today's maps as Lucky Chance Lakes, were first known as West Francis Lake and East Francis Lake.<
\After Nicholas Haley invested $20 in two Silver Bay claims, he at once set about recouping his investment by selling stock in the claims. Standard lode mining claims are 1,500 feet in length and 600 feet wide. In a custom that had been imported from California and Nevada, the miners, when selling portions of their claims, divided them into 1,500 ``shares,'' each of which represented one foot of the length of the lode.<
\Haley began at once to peddle his portion of the two claims, at $2.50 a share. His first sales were 10 shares to Lieutenant A. B. Dyer of the 4th Artillery, 40 shares to Henry C. Clifford, Army hospital steward, and 40 shares to Captain Ed Field, 4th Artillery. Thus, assuming that he collected cash from the sales, he received $225 on his $20 investment and still had four-fifths of his interest in the claims.<
\It is small wonder that Nicholas Haley saw a great future in Sitka. He had begun a lifelong career of selling stock in mining claims.<
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^sf03\Haleys & Silver Bay. Part 3 --^sf01 After Nicholas Haley had, early in 1875, made a clear profit of $205 on his investment of $20 in two Silver Bay mining claims, he began to stake some claims in his own name.<
\On April 17, 1875, he staked two claims on what he named the Haley Discovery lode ``on the left bank of the small creek flowing into Silver Bay known as Slate Creek.'' He named the claims the Haley and the Haley Extension. The claims were a quarter of a mile west of the Stewart lode, whose discovery he had participated in two years earlier. His next location, on September 21, 1875, was the Bald Mountain lode. It was described as four miles from Silver Bay and apparently was on what is now known as Last Chance Mountain.<
\Haley sold one of the two claims on the Haley Discovery lode to Samuel Miletich, a Sitkan of 1867 vintage and the proprietor of Sitka's classiest saloon. The sales price was not disclosed but the two men formed a partnership to develop both claims. On October 6, 1876, they entered into an agreement with a San Francisco mining engineer named Simeon J. Serebrenikoff. In return for a two-thirds interest in the Haley and Miletich claims he was to sink and timber a shaft 20 feet deep. If the showing at that depth warranted further work, he was to be in charge of operations and receive two-thirds of the net proceeds.<
\Serebrenikoff that fall did sink a shaft 14 feet on the Haley discovery claim, the first of many holes in the rock in Silver Bay. He then returned to San Francisco and on December 13 he wrote Haley and Miletich a letter. The letter clearly shows that English was not his first language. He said: ``The contains of gold in ore is gradually disincreasing from the top to the bottom of the shaft. The assay of ore from the bottom of the shaft has proved $7.38 in silver and $10.04 in gold, or a total of $17.42 per ton. To get one ton of this ore you must work your shaft at least three feet deep. This will give you an idea of the amount of expense. I would not denounce your mine to be without any value, but it requires very expensive exploration. If you want my advice, I advise you to let your mine be idle till the time when any of the other Sitka mines is well explored and developed.''<
\What the engineer's advice apparently boils down to was: ``Your mine isn't much good, but if a good mine is developed in the area, perhaps you can sell it.''<
\Six weeks later Serebrenikoff wrote again, this time to Haley alone and with a somewhat different tack. He said he couldn't see much value in the Miletich claim but thought the Haley claim might have some potential. While he couldn't invest any money himself, he said, he suggested that Haley look around for someone to put up the money for further work.<
\Haley followed the suggestion. He worked his own bailiwick first, selling stock in the various claims, most of it to Army men stationed at Sitka, and to their wives and children. An ingenious salesman, he offered a half-rate for children. At a time when he was peddling his Bald Mountain claim at $2 a linear foot, he sold 10 feet to each May and Susanna Brunn, the daughters of Sergeant Robert Brunn, at $1 a foot. This gimmick might have paid handsome returns in a richer and more populous area, but the pickings in Sitka were meager.<
\Aside from the Customs officers and one or two others, the only men on a payroll in Sitka were the soldiers, and one news story indicates that their pay, in addition to being small, was not very regular. Payday one year was on August 17 when a paymaster arrived from San Francisco. It was the first payday since January 1.<
\But Nicholas Haley, although his pickings were miniscule, had demonstrated that there was more than one way to make money out of ribbons of quartz containing a few specks of gold. Others in Sitka took note and began staking mining claims at Silver Bay and elsewhere. Edwin H. Francis, who had been the first to record a mining claim at Sitka, staked a second claim and so did Sam Miletich. Antonio Cozian, who had piloted ships for the Russian American Company and was a Dalmatian like Miletich, staked a claim in the Green Lake area. Others were Edward Doyle who was said to have made the first gold discovery in the area; Thomas Mooney, another ex-soldier and owner of a saloon in Sitka; and Edmund Bean who a few years later would lead the first party of prospectors over the Chilkoot Pass and into the Yukon River country.<
\Nicholas Haley also staked another claim a mile or so from his Bald Mountain claim. He named the new one the Witch lode. It must have become obvious to him by then that he was not going to be able to finance the opening of a lode gold mine with the penny-ante capital available at Sitka. Early in 1877 he went south and got in touch with the former commanding officer of the Sitka post, Major Joseph Stewart, at Fort Vancouver, Washington.<
\As a result, the Alaska Gold and Silver Mining Company was organized at Portland, Oregon, on March 13, 1877. Haley put into the pot his Bald Mountain claim and Stewart put in the Stewart claim which he had staked in 1873 but which had not yet been recorded at Sitka.<
\Others in the company were C. H. Woodward of Portland as president and two Army officers as directors. They were Lt. Colonel E. J. Bailey and Brevet Colonel Henry Clay Wood. Since the president and directors did not have mining claims to contribute, the presumption is that they were to raise the capital for the machinery and development work. That was slow in coming and it was not until 1879 that the company was able to install a stamp mill at Silver Bay, the first in Alaska.<
\After Haley returned to Sitka he and Miletich continued their association and Miletich went to San Francisco to see how he could do as a salesman. He succeeded in interesting seven men and sold them a group of three claims for an undisclosed amount. The seven were Elia Chielovich, William Bryan, Samuel B. Watson, Walter Hoge, Lazarus Radovich, Samuel Martinovich and Giovanni Olivia. Their names are listed here only because they appear to have been the first ``outside'' capitalists to invest in Alaska mining ventures. They seem to have gotten cured of such adventuring in a hurry, too, because they did not remain associated with Alaska mining for very long.<
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^sf03\Haleys & Silver Bay, Part 4 --^sf01 In 1877 Samuel Miletich of Sitka talked seven San Francisco men into investing in three Silver Bay mining claims owned by Nicholas Haley and himself. They formed the Baranoff Island Mining Company but apparently did not incorporate it. They then entered into an agreement by which Haley and Miletich were to work the property for one third of the net proceeds.<
\When Miletich returned to Sitka from his San Francisco trip, he found that Haley was not satisfied with the arrangements he had made. Haley went to San Francisco himself and secured a verbal agreement that he was to be in charge of operations of the Baranoff Island Mining Company and would receive a salary of $50 a month until such time as the mines began to pay.<
\When Haley returned to Sitka, Giovanni Olivia and Walter Hoge accompanied him to see what they had bought. They staked a couple of additional claims on the Haley and Miletich lodes and a mill site. Olivia also staked the Olivia Plumbago lode claim ``located on Sandy Island one mile southeasterly from Sitka and adjoining T. Haltern's claim on the island.''<
\Plumbago is an ancient name for lead. I have not found that Haltern recorded his claim, but for many years Galankin Island was known in Sitka as Haltern's Island. It is a little difficult, however, to imagine it described as Sandy Island.<
\About that time Samuel Miletich, who may have been the shrewdest man in the lot, sold all of his mining interests to E. Gracini of Victoria and pulled out of the organization. No doubt he considered his Sitka saloon a more reliable gold mine than any of the quartz outcrops at Silver Bay.<
\When Olivia returned to San Francisco he also gave up on Silver Bay and sold half of his interest there to Henry Plagemann and Robert Kanzee for $238.19, which may have represented the cost of his Alaska trip. A year later he sold his remaining interest to the same men for $40.<
\As soon as Hoge and Olivia reached home, Nicholas Haley's pay of $50 a month was stopped. Communications being what they were at that time, it was several months before Haley discovered this. When he did, he gave public notice that the whole thing was a swindle and that the deal was off. But after a couple of months he cooled off and on February 17, 1879, he was on the Chielovich doorstep in San Francisco, doing his best to get back in the good graces of the capitalists.<
\It was undoubtedly with this in view that Haley sold 50 feet of his Last Chance claim at Silver Bay to Mary Catharine Chielovich for one dollar and another 50 feet of the same claim to Jane Chielovich for the same consideration. His move was a winner. On the following day Chielovich, along with Samuel B. Sattson, Water Hoge, Lazarus Radovich, Samuel Martinovich, R. Fanzee, Henry Plagemann and William Bryan organized three mining companies and incorporated them under the laws of California.<
\The three were the Witch Gold and Silver Mining Company, the Haley and Miletich Gold and Silver Mining Company, and the Cozian Gold and Silver Mining Company. Each of the three was incorporated with an authorized capitalization of a million dollars, but a couple of thousand dollars seems to have been all the cash that was ever invested in them.<
\Haley exchanged a two-thirds interest in his Witch claim for stock in the Witch Company, and the others received stock in all three companies in exchange for their various undeveloped mineral holdings at Silver Bay.<
\Another man who was attracted to the presumed bonanza at Silver Bay was Alley Radovich. He may have been a brother or son of Lazarus Radovich. He appeared at Sitka, staked a mining claim at Silver Bay and recorded it as the Globe lode claim; then returned to San Francisco.<
\In his efforts to pump up a mining boom at Silver Bay, Nicholas Haley had help from some unexpected quarters. He was a devout Catholic and when the Right Rev. Charles John Seghers, Bishop of Vancouver Island, visited Sitka, Haley hauled him out to Silver Bay for a look at the mines. The bishop obliged with an interview in The British Colonist upon his return to Victoria. Of one claim he said, ``The shaft is down three feet and with every blast the gold comes out glittering. Specimens assay from $246 to $7500 per ton.''<
\Of the Stewart lode he said, ``The outcrop is six and one-eighth feet wide, with gold glittering all over it.'' According to the Colonist, the bishop was ``showing Silver Bay quartz all around town.''<
\The bishop's golden prose did have some consequences for Sitka. It brought an influx of population. By 1879 the placer mines in the Cassiar district, north of the Stikine River in British Columbia, were beginning to play out and a lot of discouraged miners were looking for a new place to light. The Victoria newspaper was probably the one most read by the miners, and in the summer of 1879, 70 or 80 of them headed for Sitka to see what was going on at Silver Bay.<
\In the meantime, while Nicholas Haley was in San Francisco courting favor with the investors, he ran into a man he had known while working at the St. Patrick mine, before he went to Alaska.<
\The man was George E. Pilz, a mining engineer who was born and educated in Germany. Haley showed him some ore samples and painted a glowing word picture of mining prospects in Alaska. He then took him to see Major Joseph Stewart, who by then was stationed at The Presidio in San Francisco.<
\The major also had some ore samples, from the Stewart lode at Silver Bay. Pilz was impressed by them and he and Haley were able to revive Major Stewart's interest in the Alaska Gold and Silver Mining Company. Pilz was hired to make a trip to Silver Bay to look over the ground and determine what machinery would be required to develop a mine.<
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^sf03\Haleys & Silver Bay, Part 5 --^sf01 The German mining engineer, George Pilz, was hired by the Alaska Gold and Silver Mining Company in the spring of 1879 to evaluate its property at Silver Bay. This was the Stewart lode, located by Major Joseph Stewart, U.S. Army, in 1873.<
\Nicholas Haley and Pilz made what appear to be conflicting reports on the condition of the claim. At San Francisco Haley gave an interview which appeared in the first issue of a new paper, the Alaska Appeal, on March 6. There was a 100-foot tunnel in a quartz ledge that was 14 feet wide, Haley said, plus a shaft down 45 feet. He also mentioned a ``mill'' that was in place and ready to operate. He did not explain that this was an arrastra, a rather crude rock grinder invented by Spanish miners.<
\Pilz wrote to the directors of the company on April 8: ``I feel highly elated over the mines and their outlook, although very little toward opening them has been done.'' The 100 feet of tunnel and 45-foot shaft reported by Haley would seem to have been more than ``very little'' and may have been largely Haley hyperbole. The Pilz report continued: ``Your mill will answer the purpose of testing the qualities of your ores, but only more extensive works will pay profits to your stockholders.''<
\That statement seems to indicate that Pilz had brought with him a small prospecting mill for testing the ores. He apparently delivered the report to the Portland stockholders in person. Some years later he wrote that it had been necessary for him to go south to buy provisions, tools and powder because he could buy nothing in Sitka.<
\``The local merchants,'' he wrote, ``were interested only in peddling molasses and dried fruit for the Indians to make into hoochinoo.''<
\When Pilz returned to Sitka in May 1879 he posted a notice calling a meeting to organize a mining district. The meeting was held in the Custom House on May 18. The organization was formed and Nicholas Haley was elected recorder, with M. D. Ball, the Collector of Customs, as his deputy. He needed a deputy because, as was shown earlier, he was illiterate.<
\Pilz put several crews to work at Silver Bay. They built a wharf and a small warehouse at the head of Silver Bay and hacked out a road to the Stewart claim, a mile or so from the beach. At the claim they put a mill building, an office with assay shop, a bunkhouse and messhouse. Up on the Haley and Miletich claims they built a bunkhouse and on the Witch claim they built a bunkhouse, a blacksmith shop, an arrastra and a building to house it, a tool house and a shaft house.<
\A five-acre landing area was staked by Pilz at the wharf, and Ferdinand Alisky, one of the Cassiar men, filed a claim to a 320-acre townsite. He called it Golden City, but it neither became a city nor produced a great deal of gold.<
\If the assay reports that appeared in a San Francisco newspaper early in 1879 were accurate, it should have produced great quantities of gold. According to The Alaska Appeal, published in San Francisco, the secretary of the Alaska Gold and Silver Mining Company reported these values: from the Stewart tunnel, first assay, $29.82 in gold, $3.14 in silver, per ton of ore. A second assay showed $28.25 in gold. $3.15 in silver. From a section of the ledge that was being called Payshute No. 1, an assay showed $733.98 in gold and $35.78 in silver. Payshute No. 2 yielded an assay of $88.77 in gold, $11.28 in silver per ton.<
\Those were wonderful figures, especially for someone who was trying to sell stock in Silver Bay mining claims. But exactly what was assayed? Did the assays represent the values of a full ton of ore? It seems likely that the assays were made on very small samples from each area, perhaps as little as ten pounds. If a ten-pound sample had been carefully selected to contain bits of ore in which gold could be seen with the naked eye, the assay result when multiplied by 200 would be enormously satisfactory. In the light of later results, something of that sort undoubtedly happened.<
\On the strength of those assay reports, however, the directors of the company ordered a stamp mill and accessory machinery shipped to Silver Bay. On the basis of the information available, it is difficult to determine the sequence of events. Some 30 years later, when he was an old man, Pilz wrote that the machinery for the mill was landed at Silver Bay on Thanksgiving Day, 1879, and included two batteries of five stamps each, two hand concentrators with self-feeders, two boilers 12 feet long with 36-inch shells, a 40-inch turbine water wheel, a chlorine apparatus, and some miscellaneous equipment.<
\Other sources seem to indicate that the machinery did not all come at one time and that one battery of stamps may have been on the ground as early as July. On August 30, The Alaska Appeal published a report signed by J.S., perhaps Joseph Stewart, the original locator of the claim:<
\``The Alaska Gold & Silver Mining Co. is prospering, its shares having advanced 50 cents. Fifteen white miners are employed under the superintendence of Mr. Pilz. The long flume and ditch connecting Francis Lake (today's Green Lake) with the mill was completed July 29. The mill was started the next day, but after a run of four days the dam gave way. On the 9th of August the mill was running again, but Mr. Murphy, the amalgamator, broke his collar-bone in a fall and there was no cleanup. The battery and plates, however, showed well with amalgam and there were also 12 or 13 tons of concentrates valued at $250 to $300 per ton.<
\``A cleanup will be made by September 7, in time for the bullion to be shipped by the next steamer. A force of men has been set to work 75 feet above the tunnel, where the ledge is right between walls, six feet of it pay ore. A crosscut is being made in the ledge at the end of the tunnel, 106 feet from the surface, and although they are 15 feet from the hanging wall, there is no appearance of a footwall yet. Seven feet of this is good pay ore, and rich rock is expected to be found on the footwall. The five additional stamps will soon be in position.''<
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^sf03\Haleys & Silver Bay, Part 6 --^sf01 In August 1879 The Alaska Appeal at San Francisco had carried a glowing report on the prospects of the Stewart mine at Silver Bay.<
\Commander Lester A. Beardslee, USN, then joined that chorus. He had arrived in Sitka with the JAMESTOWN in June and he mentioned the Silver Bay mines in a dispatch to the Sectrtary of the Navy on September 8.<
\He wrote: ``During the last month parties representing San Francisco companies have purchased a one-sixth interest in one slightly developed mine from the original locator for $7,500, and an offer of $20,000 has been made and refused for an undeveloped ledge. Every steamer adds to the number of miners. There is, I believe, ore which will pay, if judiciously worked in every one of a dozen ledges in this vicinity. Lumber, water-power, fuel, labor and food are plentiful and cheap. Every one here who has any money is investing in the mines.''<
\The Beardslee letter was probably buried in Navy Department files; had it been available for circulation it would have been a mine promoter's delight.<
\George Pilz may have been influenced more by what he saw than by what anybody wrote, and he showed faith in the future of Silver Bay mining. On June 28 he had paid Nicholas Haley $100 in gold for substantial interests in four lode claims: the Lake Mountain, Brown Bear, Burning Moscow and Edd. He claimed a mill site on Sawmill Creek ``300 yards below the old sawmill.'' He also staked additional lode claims in the Silver Bay area, alone and with others. He located the Saul claim with Joe Juneau, the Tip-Top with John Brady, John Prior and William Stewart, and the Narrow Neck with Nicholas Haley.<
\Others who staked claims at Silver Bay that fall included M. H. Gibbon, F. L. Alisky, C. A. Alisky, F. Burton, Edwin James, Edmund Bean, Alonzo E. Austin, M. Salomenson, M. P. Berry, S. B. Matthews, William M. Donnelly, T. C. Doran, G. W. Reynolds and Thomas Lloyd.<
\To carry on the development work, Pilz needed miners. He arranged with Ed C. Hughes, the purser of the CALIFORNIA, to bring half a dozen men on each monthly trip, either from ``below'' or from Wrangell where there were men who had been in the Cassiar district of British Columbia. After six years of mining, the gold there was getting scarce.<
\Pilz did not have a very high opinion of the Cassiar bunch or, for that matter, of any placer miners. ``I had great difficulty in getting a crew of hard rock miners,'' he wrote. ``I got a few broke Cassiar miners, but except for two or three they were not hard rock men. Nine out of ten of them could not, and most of them would not, punch a hole in soft muck.''<
\On November 10 Commander Beardslee again reported to the Secretary of the Navy: ``Most of the miners have been driven in from the mountains by the snow, and the town is rapidly developing into a mining camp. The Stewart tunnel is the only mine far enough advanced to continue its operations through the winter. The mill of this mine has run but four days during the month, the water supply having been shut off by ice. I am informed by the superintendent that, owing to the remarkable richness of the rock crushed and treated during the four days, the clean-up amounts to $1,800, gold. It goes down by this steamer which on the up trip brought engines, boilers, etc., to be put up at once.''<
\Beardslee added that November had been wet and cold. Walter Pierce, one of the men who worked for Pilz, wrote: ``Our boarding house was at an elevation of 1200 feet above sea level and was made of lumber with the cracks battened up. Often the victuals would freeze on the table while we were having our meals.''<
\Pilz kept a crew working all through the winter of 1879-80 and at times had from 50 to 60 men mining ore, packing ore from the various mines to the mill, and running the mill. The Sitka men who worked for him included James Hollywood, Andrew and Phillip Kashevaroff and Peter Startzoff.<
\Hollywood, born in Ireland in 1822, had come to the United States in time to fight in the Civil War, and arrived in Sitka in the early 1870s. He married a daughter of Chief Katlean, died in Sitka in 1894, and has numerous descendants in this area.<
\Phillip Kashevaroff, the son of a sea captain and age 35 in 1879, spent most of his working life as a mariner. He died in Sitka in 1904. Andrew Kashevaroff, who may have been a cousin of Phillip, was born at Kodiak in 1863. He later became a priest in the Orthodox Church and still later the curator of the Territorial Museum at Juneau. He married Martha Bolshanin of Sitka and also has descendants here.<
\Peter Startzoff and his younger brother Anescim, were born in Sitka and appear to have been the last of their line.<
\Pilz wrote, many years later: ``There was not enough gold for a paying proposition. I ran the mill till April with ores from the different ledges. I concentrated all the tailings in several ways, put up a small reverberatory furnace and a chlorine process, but the ores were too low grade and rich pockets were too scarce and small.<
\``The Stewart widened to 14 feet and I drifted 200 feet on the foot and hanging walls. On the hanging wall there was a strip six to ten inches wide that would pay $15 per ton, and on the foot wall there was a streak of coarse pyrites which would go over $10 per ton after concentration, but the center of the vein was barren quartz with not a trace in it. So I shut everything down, only keeping a few men doing a little more prospecting.''<
\Whether these ``few men'' did any prospecting around Silver Bay is unclear. We do know that he sent out eight prospecting parties to other parts of Southeastern Alaska. Pilz wrote: ``I sent out the men in pairs with some Indians with each pair. I paid my men four dollars a day and furnished a complete outfit of supplies. The Indians I paid one dollar a day with a ration of three hard tacks and one cup of seal oil.''<
\The prospecting party best known to history, because it was the most successful, was headed by Joseph Juneau and Richard Harris. They made a discovery that resulted in the founding of the city of Juneau and the opening of several lode gold mines.<
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\Haleys Part 7<
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^sf03Haleys & Silver Bay, Part 7 --^sf01 George Pilz, the mining engineer, with all of his trying, was unable to develop a paying mine at Silver Bay. But then, in the 116 years since he gave up on the area, nobody else has developed one, either.<
\When Pilz shut down operations at the Stewart mine in April 1880, he did two things that infuriated Nicholas Haley, the chief promoter of Silver Bay mining. For one, he committed the most heinous crime in the book, from the viewpoint of a mine promoter: He told prospective investors, and the public, that a profitable mine would be impossible at Silver Bay.<
\Haley never forgave him, but he must have been terribly frustrated because there was no newspaper in which he could vent his wrath. There was no newspaper then being published in Alaska. So Haley had to wait until November, 1885, when The Alaskan began publication at Sitka. Haley was ready with articles on Silver Bay for the first two issues. Who wrote them is unknown. As related earlier, Haley was illiterate and could not even sign his name on his Army enlistment papers. The articles, however, appeared over his name. The first article said:<
\``That George Pilz purposely and deliberately set about wrecking the Alaska Gold and Silver Company there is no room for doubt; that he plundered his employers and so managed affairs as to cast a grave doubt on the value of the mine is equally certain. He gave the now known to be rich lodes of Silver Bay a black eye from which it has never been able to recover.''<
\Haley implied that had Pilz wished to, he could have done for Silver Bay what John Treadwell did on Douglas Island.<
\``Had the work initiated in 1877 been honestly conducted, there is little doubt that thousands of stamps would be dropping today within 20 miles of Sitka,'' the Haley article said. His specific charges against Pilz were:<
\The mill was poorly constructed and a large part of the gold was allowed to escape into the tailings.<
\His drift ran away from the paychute and into barren rock, and company money was squandered in exploring other lodes.<
\A portion of the bullion extracted at the mill never reached the company's coffers.<
\The purpose of all this chicanery, according to the Haley article, was so Pilz could get hold of the property for himself. The fact that Pilz never attempted to do so was ignored. So far as can be discovered, Pilz never again even looked toward Silver Bay.<
\The second thing that infuriated Haley was that Pilz filed a mechanic's lien against the Witch, Haley and Miletich and Cozian lode claims, in each of which Haley had an interest. Pilz claimed he had expended $3,411.13 for lumber, tools and supplies in developing the three properties and had received only $1,097 from the owners. That amount included his salary of $150 a month. There was at that time no court in Alaska in which Pilz could foreclose the lien, and there is no record that he pursued it after a court was established in 1884 or that he ever collected any of the money he claimed was due him.<
\It is not known whether Haley made any effort to run the mill on the Stewart property after Pilz left. He did, apparently, continue mining on a small scale, and to sell stock, when he could find a buyer, in some of the claims at Silver Bay. A few years later he was making an occasional shipment of selected ore to San Francisco for milling. He owned a mule that he had purchased from the Army when it abandoned Sitka in 1877, but whether he used it in packing ore to the beach at Silver Bay is unknown. Haley and his two older sons may have carried it on their backs. It is also possible that Haley used one of the arrastras that had been built on or near a couple of the claims, and he perhaps used a mortar and hand pestle to recover free gold from bit of very rich quartz.<
\Haley seems to have had less success selling mining stock to Navy men than to Army people at an earlier date, but it wasn't for lack of trying. One Navy commander barred him from his ship after he discovered that Haley was taking whiskey aboard and giving it to the sailors as an inducement to buy. Mrs. Ellen Haley was an imaginative sales lady, too. She was quoted as telling prospective buyers, ``Sure and he put in one shot and it looked like a jewelry shop with all of the gold glittering in the trees.''<
\In addition to themselves, Nicholas and Ellen Haley had five children to care for and feed. In 1881, according to a census taken by the Navy, their ages were: John 18, Edward 16, Thomas 12, Julia 7 and Charles 4. How much schooling the older ones got is questionable. It is possible some of them attended the day school opened by Alonzo Austin for white children in the fall of 1879. And in the fall of 1882, soon after the Sheldon Jackson Institute was opened in a new building on the present campus, Austin wrote to Dr. Sheldon Jackson that the Haley boys had contracted scarlet fever and that as a result the Navy doctor had advised him to close the school. That would seem to indicate that one or more of the Haley children was attending the school as day pupils, as were others from the town and Native village.<
\On June 1, 1882, Nicholas Haley claimed a 160-acre homestead on the east side of Indian River, including a part of what is now the Sitka National Historical Park. He recorded the claim on February 19, 1883. In the claim notice he said that he was entering it ``on my discharge as I served in the army in 61 and 62.'' From this it sounds as though he planned to get the land by using soldiers' script. This script was issued to some Civil War veterans and could be exchanged for homestead land without any of the regular requirements for homesteading. So far as is known, however, Haley did not have any script. And he never met the requirements for gaining title to the land.<
\In 1890 by proclamation President Harrison set aside a part of the Haley claim as a park reserve. The Haley claim was examined by a representative of the Forest Service in 1908. On the property, he reported, was a pole house measuring 18 by 20 feet, one room, uninhabitable. There was a garden plot that had not been used for three years, and much of the ground was swampy.<
\Haley apparently believed, according to the forester, that the government owed him $1,000 for the part of his claim it had taken for park purposes. But he got neither the $1,000 nor title to the remainder of the land.<
^sf03To be continued=
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^sf03\The Haleys & Silver Bay. Part 8 --^sf01 As noted earlier, Nicholas Haley was not nearly as successful in selling mining stock to Navy personnel as he had been with Army men. But in 1884 Congress provided him a new and continuing line of potential prospects. The Alaska Organic Act, enacted on May 17, created the Civil and Judicial District of Alaska with five salaried officials to be stationed at Sitka. They were a Governor, U. S. District Judge, U. S. Marshal, U. S. Attorney and Clerk of the Court.<
\Salaried positions and regular payrolls were scarce in Sitka at that time. There were the Navy people aboard the little gunboat PINTA. There were paid positions at the Presbyterian Mission, but the pay was low. The same was true of the Russian Orthodox Church which had a priest and a deacon or two. The Army Signal Corps had one weather observer stationed here, and there was the Collector of Customs and two deputies. The only other government official was the Postmaster, who was paid on a fee basis.<
\Except for the Clerk of the Court, the first officials of the new government lasted only a year, but the second round of appointees showed more promise so far as the development of the country's resources was concerned. The second governor was Alfred P. Swineford, who hailed from the mining district of Michigan where he had published a newspaper, The Mining Journal, at Marquette. At Sitka he was the sparkplug for starting The Alaskan, Sitka's first newspaper in eight years. Nicholas Haley made use of the paper both to vent his ire at George Pilz, as reported earlier, and to promote his own mining properties.<
\In the first issue of The Alaskan, on November 7, 1885, an article appeared over Haley's name describing the Silver Bay District. This is a somewhat condensed version of that article, but it contains all of the physical details:<
\^sf02From the head of Silver Bay, where a pier has been built, it is about a mile to the first mine in the range, the Haley and Roger. There the ledge is about nine and a half feet wide at a depth of 48 feet, to which depth a shaft has been sunk, covering the entire width. A drift was made on top of the ledge for a distance of 41 feet. The quartz is known as blue ribbon and has red and rose colors. It shows free gold to the naked eye, some very large nuggets having been thrown out by the blasts. There is an abundance of wood and water for all purposes.<
\Next is the Stewart, about half a mile to the northeast of the Haley and Rogers. There the quartz vein is 14 feet wide. A drift has been driven about 140 feet on the quartz and from that a shaft sunk to a depth of 30 feet.<
\Next in order is the Wicked Falls, a quartz lode four feet wide. The quartz is a dark blue color and carries free gold and sulphurets. Then comes the Eureka ledge with six feet of blue ribbon quartz carrying black sulphurets and free gold. The Pinta lode has a width of over eight feet. The quartz is porphyry heavily charged with minerals. From it nuggets of free gold worth from from $2.50 to $20 have been taken.<
\The Nickle lode discloses free gold to the naked eye and has a width of about five feet. The quartz is red and rose colored. Next to it is the Porphyry lode which has about the same characteristics as the Nickle. The Lucky Chance claim, at the top of the mountain, has a shaft 25 feet deep from which a drift has been driven 30 feet in quartz rich in free gold. The Cleveland lode shows some fine nuggets of free gold. The Free Gold ledge is six feet wide. The Shamrogue is a vein of red and rose quartz, rich in free gold. The Bullion lode is from one to eight feet wide on the surface and has outcrops for over 700 feet.<
^sf01\Nicholas Haley and his two older sons, John and Edward, also had a placer claim extending southeast from the Lucky Chance lode.<
\After he reviewed all of the lodes at the head of Silver Bay, Haley was quoted as saying, ``These are high grade ores. This will be the richest gold mining area of Alaska.'' Haley may have believed his own rhetoric and, although he was a failure as a prophet, he had remarkable powers as a salesman. He put them to work on Alaska's new governor.<
\A. P. Swineford arrived in Sitka on September 15, 1885, to take over as governor. He was accompanied by a man named B. K. Cowles who was looking for an opportunity. It did not take Nicholas Haley long to show him one. He returned south and before the end of the year the Lake Mountain Mining Company was incorporated in the State of Wisconsin with a capitalization of a million dollars, represented by 100,000 shares at $10 each. C. A. Swineford of Baraboo, Wisconsin, a brother of Governor Swineford, was president of the corporation. J. Garfield Fuller was vice president and general manager, and B. K. Cowles was secretary and treasurer. M. C. Clark of Madison, Wisconsin, and Nicholas Haley of Sitka were directors.<
\Governor Swineford was a stockholder, but the extent of his holdings is not known and probably was not large. In fact, it does not appear that anybody put up any great amount of cash money. The corporation bought the Lucky Chance, Porphyry, Cleveland and Nickle claims and the Haley & Sons placer ground. All were on what was then called Lake Mountain, but which shows on modern maps as Lucky Chance Mountain. As nearly as can be determined now, Haley was to receive $100,000 for the claims. But he received only a small down payment, with the balance to be paid from the earnings of the mines.<
\In the meanwhile, in that fall of 1885, Nicholas Haley was continuing his own mineral activity. In 1872, together with Patrick Burns, a Sitka saloon keeper, and a young Russian blacksmith, Henry Herman, he had located three lode claims close to Sawmill Creek. The claims were named the Pinafore, the Mariana and the Henrietta. In November 1885 Haley, with Reuben Albertstone and Simeon Lindquist, relocated the three claims, which were renamed the Reuben, the Serebrenikoff and the Pride of Silver Bay. The Round Mountain Mining Company was formed with Albertstone as its president. Beyond that it appears that little was ever done with the three claims.<
\With the beginning of the year 1886 Haley was eagerly awaiting the arrival of the other officers of the Lake Mountain Mining Company and a new beginning at Silver Bay.<
^sf03To Be Continued=
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\^sf03The Haleys & Silver Bay, Part 9 --^sf01 The high temperature at Sitka on New Year's Day 1886 was 41 degrees, according to the Army weather observer who was stationed here. With the exception of a few short cold spells, the mild weather continued through January and February, with very light precipitation. It seemed ideal for the Lake Mountain Mining Company to make an early start at developing its properties.<
\The mail steamer IDAHO, making its regular monthly trip, arrived from Portland, Oregon, on February 19. Aboard were J. Garfield Fuller, the general manager, and B. K. Cowles, the company treasurer, and his wife and two children. There was also a Lafe Cowles who was probably a younger brother. The children were Laura and Byron, who entered the public school. Lafe began working for Governor Swineford as a clerk but later worked at the mining property.<
\The Cowles family moved to the second floor of Building 29, today known as the Staton Building. A small store building next door, on the site of The Cellar, was rented as an office. One of the first things installed in the office was a mineral display, probably furnished by Haley, with some of the gaudier samples of Silver Bay quartz. Fuller and Cowles made a trip to the head of Silver Bay in the PINTA'S steam launch to examine the wharf and warehouse. They found that the wharf needed only minor repairs. The Navy men took soundings and determined that the water was deep enough for the IDAHO to tie up at the wharf. She did so on March 14 and unloaded supplies and perhaps some machinery for the company.<
\The company purchased the steam launch KATY for transportation between town and the head of Silver Bay.<
\The next task was to get the supplies the three and a half miles, by trail, to the Lucky Chance property. Fuller offered Indian packers two dollars a day, but they demanded three, which was going wage at Juneau for experienced hard rock miners. Chief AnnaHootz urged them to accept the lower pay, but they were obdurate. Before that was resolved there was a heavy fall of snow that delayed the operation. Fuller was then able to recruit several white packers and four of the huskiest boys from the Presbyterian Mission. Superintendent W. A. Kelly gave them a ``vacation'' so they could earn two dollars a day.<
\On April 3 The Alaskan reported: ``Several Indians have gone to Silver Bay. They are beginning to see which side their bread is buttered on.'' The supplies were taken to the Stewart mine and stored in the buildings there while the rest of the trail was being partly cleared of snow. Up at the Lucky Chance it was reported that the basin was full of snow and that only the tip of the stovepipe on the cabin could be seen. Some of that was cleared away and a crew of men was sent up to begin work in the drift under the direction of H. E. Heppner, who had the title of superintendent. Bad weather continued, including both snow and wind. On some days the KATY could not get to Silver Bay because of the wind. On May 1 there was snowfall at sea level and it continued to fall at the Lucky Chance as late as May 20 when it was reported there was more snow on the ground there than there had been on April 1. That did not bother the underground work. The first blast in the drift was on May 7 and the tunnel was driven 15 feet in the next eight days. Fuller began showing samples, sparkling with gold, around town and said the assay was $1,760 to the ton. He did not say how much ore had been assayed.<
\In the June 12, 1886, issue of The Alaskan there was a legal advertisement offering the property of the Alaska Gold & Silver Mining Company at Silver Bay for sale to the highest bidder. It consisted of a mill building, office, assay office, mess house, bunk house, blacksmith shop, wharf and warehouse, two 5-stamp mills and associated machinery, a 90-horsepower steam engine, a 20-inch turbine water wheel, two boilers measuring 36 inches in diameter and 12 feet long, and assorted mining equipment and tools. This was the mining property George Pilz had tried to develop in 1878 and 1879. There were no bidders.<
\The heavy late fall of snow continued to handicap the operation. It had been planned to work the placer ground for some possible quick returns, but this was late in starting because of the snow. There appear to have been other problems, too. J. G. Fuller, the general manager, left in May and did not return. That was not mentioned in The Alaskan until several months later and there was no explanation.<
\M. C. Clark, one of the directors of the Lake Mountain Mining Company, arrived from Wisconsin at the end of September and soon after that the operations at Silver Bay shut down for the winter. This, said The Alaskan, was for ``reasons which in the minds of the directors seemed good.'' There would be more details in another issue, the paper said, but these failed to appear. The paper did say that work would resume ``early in the spring.''<
\In the meanwhile, Nicholas Haley had not been idle and in September it was announced that he and his sons had sold the Haley and Rogers lode claim to a group composed of Governor Swineford, Captain P. T. Tracy and W. B. Stone, who represented a number of eastern capitalists. Captain Tracy, described as ``a mining man of much experience,'' was to be in charge of work on the property.<
\The Alaskan, in a review of the history of Silver Bay mining, estimated that $175,000 had been expended there since the beginning. That is not much in today's terms, but it was a lot of money back in 1886. For example, the appropriation by Congress for the salaries of the civil officials in Alaska -- governor, judge, marshal and deputies, attorney and clerk of the court -- for the year 1887 was $20,600.<
\At the beginning of 1887 The Alaskan reported: ``There has been much local criticism of the management of the Lake Mountain Mining Company for its early shutdown last fall, and it is charged that much of the work done last year was unnecessary and unproductive. One of the critics is Nicholas Haley, the original owner and one of the directors. He recently went to the mine, put in one shot at the bottom of his original shaft, and brought out about 150 pounds of beautiful ore samples, gleaming with specks of gold. He says he will send a sample to each of the eastern stockholders to convince them of the worth of the mine.''<
\Apparently Haley did not send the samples but delivered them in person. He and his wife, Ellen, left Sitka early in 1877 for a trip to the eastern states.<
^sf03To Be Continued=
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^sf03\The Haleys & Silver Bay, Part 10 --^sf01 Nicholas Haley, his wife Ellen and their two youngest children, Julia and Charles, left Sitka on the December 1886 mail steamer for a lengthy visit in the states. He carried with him some ore samples he had taken from the bottom of the Lucky Chance mine after it had closed down early in the fall. He planned to show the samples to some of the stockholders, who appear mostly to have been residents of Wisconsin.<
\The samples plus Haley's sales pitch were persuasive. At a meeting of stockholders at Madison, Wisconsin, on January 30, 1887, there was some reorganization of the company and arrangements were made to ship a five-stamp mill to Sitka. M. C. Clark, who was a director, was made secretary and treasurer in place of B. K. Cowles, who was still in Sitka. And Nicholas Haley, who was also a director, was made superintendent of the work on the company's properties at Silver Bay. Charles Swineford, a brother of Governor Swineford, continued as president of the company.<
\Not long after that The Alaskan said: ``B. K. Cowles, a treacherous scoundrel, has fled to Victoria.'' There was no delineation of his treachery.<
\Haley had other successes, too, during his trip. He confirmed the conditional sale of the Haley & Rogers claim to Governor Swineford, Captain P. T. Tracy, L. Q. Olcott and W. B. Stone. And he made a conditional sale of the Free Gold claim to another group whose names were not reported. The news story in The Alaskan said the Haleys would be visiting their former home, but where that was is not known. They returned to Sitka about the middle of April and it seems doubtful that they would have had time to visit Ireland.<
\The Haley family returned home on the mail steamer ANCON, on which Governor and Mrs. Swineford were also passengers. Also aboard was L. Q. Olcott, who represented Governor Swineford and others who had purchased the Haley & Rogers claim on the condition that it would prove worth developing. He at once went to Silver Bay, gathered samples from the property and sent them south for assays.<
\The paper had several items about the Haleys that spring of 1887 that had nothing to do with mining. Nicholas Haley was having a picket fence placed around his property, which was next to the Presbyterian Mission on Lincoln Street. Later that year he built a two-story dwelling on the property. Mrs. Ellen Haley bought the James Schmeig dwelling, which was farther west on Lincoln Street. This was a small, square one-story house with a pyramid roof and, in its later years at least, was shingled and painted or stained brown. It stood on the site now occupied by St. Gregory's Church. It remained in the family until after the death of Thomas Haley in 1956. The third news item was that John, Edward and Thomas Haley joined the Sons of the Northwest when it was organized that spring.<
\Nicholas Haley began the season by having the company's steam launch, the KATY, overhauled and painted. He announced that he would build a log cabin on the beach at Silver Bay and as soon as the snow permitted would provide a foundation for the five-stamp mill that had been ordered from the Frazer & Chalmers Company of Chicago. The first machinery to arrive, however, was a sawmill. Arriving with the sawmill were Mr. and Mrs. Monroe Jaycox. He was a millwright and sawyer and, according to the paper, would erect the sawmill and operate it. For some reason, however, the sawmill was not erected until the following year.<
\By May 7 Haley had packers and trail-builders at work and by the end of June he had men at work in the tunnel. ``As soon as the tunnel is completed,'' he announced, ``I expect developments which will astound the people of Alaska.''<
\The mail steamer IDAHO unloaded the stamp mill, 20 tons in all but broken down into smaller pieces, at Silver Bay on July 21. Also arriving on that trip of the IDAHO was Charles A. Swineford, president of the Lake Mountain Mining Company. He had recently retired as superintendent of the Madison Division of the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad and announced that he would become the general manager of the mining company but that Haley would continue as superintendent.<
\Obviously, however, Swineford was in charge. Soon after he arrived the men working in the tunnel demanded a wage increase. He laid them off but kept a crew of Indians at work packing lumber up to the mine and building a bunkhouse there. A little later they built a mill building at another location.<
\On its September trip the IDAHO brought the company a span of mules and three burros. They were taken to Silver Bay and work was commenced at once on a four-mile road from the beach to the upper falls of Salmon Creek, where the mill was to be placed. That put it about a mile from the mine. Work on the road was in charge of a long-time Sitka resident, Stephen Gee, and it was continued through the winter despite rain and snow. By January 1888 the mules and burros were reported packing the mill machinery to the mill site, although the road was by no means finished. Steve Gee went off to mine placer gold at Yakutat and M. J. Drown, a stockholder, arrived from Baraboo, Wisconsin, and finished the road job. Just as it was finished, in April, there was a four-foot fall of snow, the heaviest of the winter.<
\Swineford went south early that spring and returned with 13 men to work for the Lake Mountain Mining Company. They included John C. Jackson, millman; James Waters, foreman; Samuel Nielsen, machinist and blacksmith; Jess Winsted, carpenter; Ben Paddock, who would run the sawmill; and eight miners and mill workers.<
\Both the stamp mill and the sawmill were assembled and it was then discovered that there was less water in the creek than Haley had estimated and that the Leffel wheel, which ran on a head of 50 feet, did not supply enough power to run both mills, and if the creek was low it would barely run the sawmill alone. That mill could handle 37-foot logs and turn out 7,000 board feet of a lumber a day. M. J. Drown sent an order to California, by slow mail, for an impact wheel and iron pipe to give a head of 225 feet. The stamp mill began crushing rock on July 23. M. J. Drown then left for his home in Wisconsin.<
\Ore was packed from the mine down a steep trail to the mill, but at that time there was no indication whether men or animals did the packing. It was stated, however, that Nicholas Haley and two of his sons were at work on their properties, the Wicked Falls and the lower claim at the Haley & Rogers.<
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\^sf03The Haleys & Silver Bay, Part 11 -- ^sf01By the late summer of 1888 the Lake Mountain Mining Company was running smoothly on ore packed down the trail from the mine by burros.<
\Stockholders and directors of the company arrived from Kalamazoo, Michigan, and Madison, Wisconsin, to inspect the operation and gave it their approval. They talked of buying a larger mill, with 20 to 25 stamps, but did not actually order its purchase. The mill continued to run into October, then shut down for the winter.<
\C. A. Swineford left for the south but said he was convinced that the property was worth developing. Nicholas Haley, although he remained a director in the mining company, was not active in its operation. He was a confirmed prospector and a first class promoter but seems not to have had the skills to be a mine manager. He and his son John worked that summer on other properties, but neither of the boys inherited their father's fascination with mining.<
\In June Edward joined the Customs Service and was appointed inspector afloat aboard the steamer GEORGE W. ELDER. Later he was in charge of the Mills store at Yakutat for a year or two. John Haley, too, soon left Sitka. He was skipper of the tug LUCY for the Treadwell Mining Company for a time, then went south and became a civilian employee of the Navy at Bremerton. Three Haley children, Thomas, Julia and Charles, remained at home. According to the Navy census of 1881, their ages in 1888 were 19, 14 and 11.<
\C. A. Swineford and M. J. Drown both returned to Sitka in the spring of 1889. Drown was to be the active manager of the Lake Mountain Mining Company. Swineford reported that an aerial tramway was being ordered and when built would be able to carry six tons of ore an hour from the mine to the mill. He also announced that the previous season the mill had produced $28 per ton of ore plus another $9 to $10 in the tailings if they were saved and shipped to a smelter.<
\The mining company borrowed $75,000 in Chicago that spring. Of that, $10,000 was to discharge all debts, the balance to be used for working capital. The interest was 10 percent, payable annually.<
\A concentrator was installed at the mill before it began the season's operations on August 19. The new machinery worked well, but it was a short season. Operations were suspended in mid-September when all of the miners walked off the job. The reason was not stated, and Swineford said it was too late in the season to send for replacements. That may have been merely an excuse for shutting down the operations, however, as they were not resumed in the spring or for several years afterward.<
\Nicholas Haley had an accident while prospecting in 1889 that nearly cost him his life. On either June 29 or 30 a .44 caliber revolver he was carrying accidentally discharged, wounding him in the calf of his left leg and he nearly died before he was discovered by one of his sons. It must have been a bad wound because it was two months before he could return to town. What medical attention, if any, he had was not reported. He was a tough Irishman. Several years before that he had had a close enounter with a brown bear and carried some scars to show for it. His own explanation of the affair was said to have been, ``Sure, and I stood up to him and pounded him on the snoot until he'd had enough.''<
\The term of A. P. Swineford as governor ended in June 1889 and he was replaced by Lyman E. Knapp from Vermont and left Sitka. He would return some years later to spend the rest of his life in Alaska. His brother, C. A. Swineford, left Sitka in the fall of 1889 and neither he nor any of the principal officers of the Lake Mountain Mining Company returned in 1890 to operate the mine. The Alaskan offered no report on this failure, and in fact never printed anything negative about mining in this area. The supposition can only be that mining was not resumed at the Lucky Chance mine because it was not paying. So far as can be learned C. A. Swineford never returned to Alaska.<
\During the years 1890 to 1895, while work on the Lucky Chance and other claims of the Lake Mountain Mining Company was at a standstill, there was an attempt to revive Silver Bay's first mine, the Stewart Lode. That attempt ended in tragedy.<
\So far as can be determined, after George Pilz gave up on the Stewart in 1879 no work was done there until 1892. In that year T. C. Doran of Sitka went to Portland, Oregon, and acquired the property from the stockholders of the Alaska Gold and Silver Mining Company.<
\Doran, a veteran of four years in the Civil War, had come to Sitka around 1880. He became a partner with John Brady and Amos Whitford in the little steamboat ROSE and operated her for several years. In partnership with Brady he then built a sawmill and operated it for a time. After he acquired the mining property at Silver Bay he renamed it the Cash mine and began to work alone there to rehabilitate the ten-stamp mill and get it into operation. By August 1893 he was about ready to hire a crew and begin mining.<
\On August 24 W. P. Mills, John Burns and Dr. C. S. Ingersoll, the Navy doctor, made a trip to Silver Bay. Burns owned a claim there and Mills may have been going to inspect it although he was one of the few Sitka people with money who did not sink some of it in Silver Bay. At any rate, they decided to visit Doran at the Cash mine and there they found his lifeless body at the mill. The evidence was that he had accidentally ingested some cyanide while testing ore samples. The body was brought to Sitka the following day, there was a large funeral and he was buried in what is now the Sitka National Cemetery. That was the end of work on that first mine; the remains of the mill are still on the site.<
\There were dozens of mining claims scattered around Silver Bay in the early 1890s, and there was work on some of them. Claim owners included Reuben Albertstone, John G. Brady, John Burns, H. L. Bahrt, Sr., the Startzoff brothers, Nicholas Haley, and various public officials and Navy officers. The mining law, then as now, required $100 worth of work on a claim each year in order to hold it. That represented the best part of a month's work at prevailing wages in those years. Very often, instead of doing the annual assessment work the claim was simply restaked with a different name. Because of that it is difficult to determine how many separate pieces of mining ground there were.<
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^sf01\The Alaska Department of Fish and xxxxxx<
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^sf03\The Haleys & Silver Bay, Part 12 -- ^sf01In December 1894 C. A. Swineford, president of the Lake Mountain Mining Company, wrote to friends in Sitka that he would return in the spring and that work at the company's mine at Silver Bay would resume. He died, however, at his home in Wisconsin on January 14, 1895.<
\Then in April word was received from A. P. Swineford, the former governor, that he had raised all the capital necessary and would soon return to Sitka to operate the Lucky Chance mine.<
\Nicholas Haley immediately proclaimed that the Lucky Chance would be the world's richest mine. Presumably he was still a stockholder and a director in the company. How active he was in actual mining at that time is unclear. His son John was running a tug boat out of Treadwell; Edward had quit the Mills store at Yakutat and was beach mining at Kayak Island, and Thomas had gone to Westward on the mail steamer DORA to work for the North American Commercial Company at one of its trading stations. He soon changed his mind and returned to Sitka. Ed also returned having found beach mining hard work with small returns.<
\At about the same time the news came from A. P. Swineford, The Alaskan reported: ``Many negotiations are being carried on for the sale of mining property in this area, but very little actual mining is going on.'' Most of the mining claim owners were trying to sell their claims rather than do the development themselves. Every now and then The Alaskan would announce that a claim owner had bonded his claim for $100,000 or for some other figure. That meant that he had given an option to buy the claim but usually had received no actual cash. Soon a mining engineer would arrive, spend weeks or a month investigating the claim, then disappear. The Alaskan never reported that an option had been dropped; its editors were nearly as up-beat about Silver Bay mining as was Nicholas Haley.<
\A. P. Swineford returned to Sitka on June 1, 1895, aboard the steamer CITY OF TOPEKA. He hired Ronald Becker, who had some mining experience, as foreman for the mine. On June 17 the steamer WILLAPA, making her first trip for the newly organized Alaska Steamship Company, brought John A. Shortall, ``a mining expert'' from Colorado, to inspect the property. He left at once for Silver Bay in Percy Hope's sailboat, accompanied by Becker, Peter Trierschield, E. Otis Smith and J. D. Rhoades. They found that heavy snow had crushed the roof of the bunkhouse at the mill but that the mill building was in good shape. Because of the depth of snow they did not push on to the mine.<
\During June and July William Maydenbauer, William Millmore, Hugh Patton, Peter Startzoff, E. Otis Smith, John Davis and J. A.Becker all filed lode mining claims in the Silver Bay area. And that summer the Sitka Mining Bureau was organized with William Millmore as president, Reuben Albertstone as vice-president and E. Otis Smith as secretary-treasurer. Other members included John Brady, Owen Roberts, Major M. P. Berry, Otto Nelson, Captain Smith, M. E. Magee, F. E. Frobese, H. L. Bahrt, Charles Anderson, Harold Longjord, Peter Romanoff, Charles Anders, F. Thompson, Peter Startzoff and Percy Hope.<
\The mill of the Lake Mountain Mining Company was started up about the middle of August and at the end of that month a clean-up was reported to return $8 to $10 per ton of ore. Roland Becker was making a survey for an aerial tramway.<
\In August Shorthall, the mining expert, was reported examining the claims of William Maydenbauer and Percy Hope. These were the Tyee, Alameda, P. I. and Demurph, all at Silver Bay and, reported The Alaskan, ``were said to be among the richest in the district.'' Ore samples from the claims were to be shipped south for mill tests. The Liberty mine was one of those being developed at Silver Bay by the owner, W. F. Turner, but he died on February 19, 1896, at his residence in Sitka at the age of 65.<
\In March Percy Hope, Herman Bauer and William Maydenbauer organized the Alameda Mining Company and ordered a Briggs reduction mill, to be placed on the Alameda claim at Silver Bay. Herman Bauer would spend most of his remaining years attempting to make it into a paying mine. Mr. and Mrs. E. Otis Smith made a trip to Rhode Island during the winter and upon their return in April he announced that he had raised some capital for the development of his mining property.<
\Raising capital for gold mines in Alaska had been made easier by the Cook Inlet gold rush which had started in 1895 and continued in 1896. It was by no means a Klondike rush but news of it spread across the country and increased the interest in Alaska gold. Ships loaded with gold seekers headed for the Cook Inlet country stopped at Sitka on their way north, and a few Sitka men joined the crowd. One of them was James Brightman who returned after a few weeks and reported that all of the good placer ground had been claimed before he got there.<
\Sitka did benefit from the mining at Cook Inlet, however, as many of the miners who had found good pay spent the following winter here.<
\Mr. and Mrs. A. P. Swineford and their daughter Agnes, who had spent the winter in Wisconsin, returned to Sitka in July 1896. He reported that he was having difficulty hiring miners because so many of them had gone to Cook Inlet. He hired 30 men in Sitka and sent them to Silver Bay to repair the road and the mill bunkhouse, haul lumber and supplies and generally to get the mine in shape for operation. Roland Becker was in charge of the work. Swineford said miners would be hired when they could be found, to work on the Last Chance and Porphyry lodes.<
\At the end of July The Alaskan reported that ``it has leaked out that mill tests of the Last Chance and Porphyry lodes are much richer than at first believed, running $16 for the former and $60 for the latter.'' It sounds like a leak designed to snare investors.<
\At the beginning of August R. W. Rodgers of Ashland, Wisconsin, arrived to be the business manager of the operation. Becker would be in charge of running the mine and mill. Swineford had returned south. Whether he had taken his brother's place as president of the corporation is not known. Becker had an ore flume built from the mine to the mill. Presumably the ore was washed down the flume with water from one of the high lakes. The Alaskan said, ``the flume beats all other methods for conveying ore from the mine to the mill.''<
\Early in November 1896 the Lake Mountain Mining Company made a clean-up at the mill, then shut down for the winter, according to The Alaskan. There was no report of the clean-up's value.<
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^sf03\The Haley's & Silver Bay, Part 13^sf01 ^sf01Despite the 1896 report of $16 per ton ore from the Lucky Chance and $60 ore from the Porphyry, the Lake Mountain Mining Company did not resume operations in 1897.<
\It seems apparent that either the value of the ore had been exaggerated or the cost of mining and milling it exceeded its value. Although there must have been local speculation about the company's failure to resume operations, The Alaskan simply ignored that failure. The company was not mentioned in the paper during the entire year 1897.<
\There was, in fact, very little actual mining at Silver Bay that year. Following the death of W. F. Turner in February 1896, Mrs. Turner maintained ownership of the Liberty mine by having the annual assessment work done. In the fall of 1896 she hired Percy Hope to do the work. He went to Silver Bay with his wife, Refenia, who was the step-daughter of Deputy Marshal John Hanlon. It was Hope's last mining work in this area; in 1897 he went to the Klondike and never returned to Sitka. Mrs. Turner continued to hire the assessment work done in subsequent years while she tried to find a buyer for the claim.<
\The first lawsuit over a Silver Bay mining claim, so far as I've discovered, came at the beginning of 1897. William C. Maydenbauer asserted he was the original locator of the P.I. claim and that Peter Romanoff and H. Stevens had moved his claims stakes and altered his original location notice. A jury heard the case in U.S. District Court and took only 15 minutes to decide in favor of Maydenbauer.<
\The spring and summer of 1897 brought the beginning of the Klondike Gold Rush which drained a few people away from Sitka. Silver Bay was being abandoned. William C. Maydenbauer and Herman Bauer went to Skagway to open a store; Percy Hope and others went to Dawson and The Alaskan lost the foreman of its print shop. All the mules and burros were taken to Dyea and Skagway and many Sitka Natives went to Dyea to work as packers on the Chilkoot Trail. It was reported that any Indian with a big canoe could make from $60 to $80 a day freighting from tidewater up the Taiya River as far as the canoe would go.<
\Prospects for the future of Silver Bay mining began to brighten in 1898. Former Governor A. P. Swineford returned to Sitka in June. ``He still has mining interests in this area,'' said The Alaskan, and he was no doubt pestered with questions about the mine and when it would open. It was next announced that the Lucky Chance property had been bonded to Rhode Island parties in a deal workedout between Governor Swineford and E. Otis Smith.<
\Smith, a small, energetic man, and his wife, Martha, had come to Sitka in 1892. He was 50 years old in 1898, had been born in Ohio and was a printer by trade. Martha was a couple of years older than her husband and had been born in Massachusetts. It may have been The Alaskan that brought him to Sitka; at any rate he edited the paper for two different periods during the early 1890s. He became interested in mining and, like half the white residents of Sitka at that time, located or otherwise acquired a couple of lode claims. They were the Osprey at Sawmill Creek and the St. Charles on Mount Verstovia, and in 1897 he hired J. H. Lee to get out some ore for tests. The claims proved worthless and Lee went south for the winter. Exactly what connections Smith had in Rhode Island is not known but he evidently had them.<
\The Providence & Sitka Gold Mining Company was organized in Rhode Island early in 1898 and was incorporated in Maine with a capitalization of $30,000. That was a good conservative figure and may have indicated that the incorporators actually intended to do some mining. Mining companies of that day often incorporated for a million dollars and appear to have been more interested in selling stock than in mining. Smith was president of the new corporation and those were the ``parties'' that took the option on the properties of the Lake Mountain Mining Company. Among the papers of Governor Swineford is a Proof of Labor affidavit signed by Smith and dated December 31, 1898. It certifies that $100 worth of labor or improvements had been done at the expense of the Providence & Sitka Mining Company, lessee, on the mining claims owned by the Lake Mountain Mining Company: the Lucky Chance, Nickel, Porphyry and Cleveland lode claims and the Haley and Rogers placer claim.<
\J. H. Lee returned to Sitka in July 1898 with the title of superintendent of the Sitka & Providence Company. He advised Smith that the company had purchased a steam launch and that it was being shipped to Sitka from the Atlantic coast. Nothing further on this boat was reported in The Alaskan but a couple of years later it did report that the company was getting a larger boat.<
\Lee took a crew of men to the Lucky Chance and began doing the assessment work mentioned above. Said The Alaskan: ``At last it looks as though the Lucky Chance property will be put in good shape and successfully operated. Preliminary work is now being done and it is hoped to continue it all winter. Probably no mining property in Alaska has been so woefully mismanaged. Thousands of dollars have been wasted. No doubt it will prove lucrative if properly managed.''<
\It is unknown whether work was continued all winter but apparently no ore was milled that year. The Alaskan reported nothing further on the company until the following summer.<
\William Maydenbauer, who had accompanied Herman Bauer to Skagway at the beginning of the Klondike Rush, returned to Sitka in May 1899 and put a crew to work on what was called the Bauer property at Silver Bay. The property included the Alameda, P.I. and Tyee lode claims. Bauer would soon return to Sitka, too, bringing with him the merchandise inventory of the Skagway store. He disposed of the goods in a special sale at his Sitka Trading Company, then closed that business and devoted his time and efforts to mining.<
\In September 1899 The Alaskan announced that what it called the Sitka & Providence Gold Mining Company had purchased the property of the Lake Mountain Mining Company at Silver Bay. This was evidently the company it had previously called the Providence & Sitka.<
\``About $10,000 is being expended at once and an aerial tram will be erected,'' the paper said. ``It will be 4090 feet in length and will be operated by water power. Mr. Smith says the ore from the mine is running about $25 to the ton.''<
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^sf03\Silver Bay, Part 14^sf01 -- ^sf01Late in December 1899 The Alaskan announced that Mrs. Turner had sold the Liberty mine at Silver Bay ``to Eastern capitalists who will soon commence development work.''<
\Apparently, however, it was an option rather than a sale, and she may or may not have received any payment. No reports of development work were reported in the paper, and six years later Mrs. Turner was still advertising it for sale.<
\In January 1900 work was reported progressing on the Bauer property, with William Maydenbauer in charge. Bauer had organized the Chicago Sitka Mining and Milling Company and there were plans to put 100 men to work. Among other things they would build a deep water wharf at the head of the bay, a house for the superintendent near the wharf, and would improve the road from the wharf site to the mine.<
\Herman and Mrs. Bauer arrived in Sitka in July and brought with them Sitka's first gas boat. This was the 30-foot metal-hulled SILVER BAY. On her maiden voyage in Sitka she was said to have gone to the head of Silver Bay in an hour and a half. The main problem with the vessel in those years was that gasoline was a scarce commodity in Sitka. Bauer made at least one trip to Juneau in her to buy gasoline and dynamite. The SILVER BAY had a long life but probably spent more time in a cradle on the beach where Totem Square is today than she did on the water.<
\In the early 1930s she was used for commercial trolling but by then electrolysis had eaten pin holes in her hull and she was abandoned.<
\As the year 1900 opened, E. Otis Smith was in New York but was expected to return soon to open the Lucky Chance property. When he did return he announced that George Garside of Juneau had been awarded a contract to construct the aerial tramway from the mine to the mill. The mine would reopen as soon as the snow permitted, Smith said. The tramway, it turned out, would not be built at once. It was not until late December that the mail steamer COTTAGE CITY delivered 35 tons of machinery and equipment, including the tramway material. At that time 25 men were working at the mine and mill and Smith said he would hire 50 more if he had accommodations for them. He was building another bunkhouse.<
\On December 5, 1900, Reuben Albertstone, H. L. Bahrt, Sr., Thomas Mooney and John Clement formed a partnership as the Capital Mining Company. They had four lode claims near the entrance to Silver Bay: the Henrietta, Crown, Baranof Queen and the Silver Bay. They did the annual assessment work and hoped for a buyer.<
\In May 1901, when enough of the snow had disappeared that they could begin work on the Providence & Sitka Mining Co. tram, it was not Garside but a Mr. Semple from the Sumdum mine, south of Juneau, who was in charge of the work. Nine of the 12 towers were up by the end of September and a month later the tram carried the first load of ore from the mine to the mill. In November Smith reported that the tram was carrying lumber up to the mine as fast as the sawmill could cut it. A shed was being built over the upper terminal of the tram. A bunkhouse was to be built beside the terminal shed and a covered passageway from the bunkhouse to the mine audit so they could work all winter.<
\A Mr. Dearden, from Brockton, Massachusetts, was superintendent of the operation in 1901 and until near the end of 1902. Mrs. Dearden was with him and lived at the camp with an occasional trip to town.<
\The mill ran only a part of the time, apparently because of a power problem. A Pelton wheel was laboriously transported from Billy's Basin, up Indian River, to the Lucky Chance property, but that would have helped only if there was adequate water to turn it. Despite that handicap, the company made two shipments of bullion to the mint and had several tons of concentrates ready to send to a smelter. But if it was going to run all winter, it was stated, steam power would be necessary.<
\Meanwhile, The Alaskan was doing its part to boost things along. In April it said, ``Experts have declared that the outlook for the Lucky Chance is excellent. Local people have not hesitated to invest in it.'' And in August it added, ``Rumor has it that the Lucky Chance has made a rich strike. There is great hope for the future.'' Men continued to work at the Bauer mine until late in the year but it was closed down for the winter. W. R. Hanlon was appointed watchman and also had a contract to build the wharf, a float and a corduroy road. His step-father, John Hanlon, was to help him. Herman Bauer, announced early in 1902 that he would put $13,000 worth of machinery on the property and expected to have it in operation by the end of June.<
\The old Stewart mine, first opened in 1879 and later renamed the Cash, got back into the news in 1902. Frank C. Hammond, a widely known mining engineer, visited Sitka and upon his return to Seattle was interviewed by the Post-Intelligencer. Title to the property had been in litigation for 30 years, he said, but if he could get that cleared up, he had some people who wanted to buy it. The title business is something of a mystery because H. C. Doran had been able to get some kind of agreement on it, as related earlier, and then had reached an untimely death. In July 1902 Charles Davidson, who later became Surveyor General of Alaska, arrived in Sitka and hired four local men to help him survey the Stewart claim. Who he was working for is not known but it was possibly Governor John Brady, who had once been a partner with Doran. At any rate, a crew of men was working on the Stewart under the direction of Hugh Patton who was Brady's father-in-law. In the end, however, nothing came of any of that activity.<
\Mr. and Mrs. E. Otis Smith returned to Sitka in the summer of 1902 after a winter in the East, and he had purchased additional stamps for the Providence & Sitka mill. The machinery arrived in September and was laboriously hauled over the trail to the mill site. There is no mention of horses or mules in the process. The moving was under the direction of C. H. Carleton and it required more than 11 days to move the mortar, the heaviest part of the machinery, from the beach to the mill.<
\That task had just been completed when a heavy wind storm in November 1902 knocked a dozen large trees and many smaller ones across the trail. The roof of the shed at the upper site and the blacksmith shop were blown away and there was substantial damage at the stamp mill. Developing a mine at Silver Bay was not easy.<
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^sm2500^sf03^ps100^sl100^fl0008This house was built by Nicholas Haley in 1887 and remained in the Haley family until 1922. It was razed after being gutted by fire in 1942.<
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\^sf03Haleys & Silver Bay, Part 15^sf01 -- ^sf01Not long after he came to Sitka in 1872 as a soldier, Nicholas Haley claimed a homestead on the eastern edge of town. It extended along Lincoln Street from the middle of present Jeff Davis Street, westward to and including all of present Finn Alley.<
\The family lived in a house that may have been of Russian origin and already on the property. Presumably it was the house to the left of the new house in the picture above. Construction of that house was started in May 1887, soon after the family returned from their trip ``below,'' as the expression was in those years. The date of the picture is unknown but to judge by the clothing worn by Miss Julia Haley, standing on the sidewalk, it was early. In time spruce trees grew up around the house, almost shutting it from view.<
\For many years it was the home of all of the Haleys who were living in Sitka, and Nicholas Haley may have been confined to the house at times during his later years. From the day The Alaskan, Sitka's newspaper, began publication in November 1885, Nicholas Haley and his mining operations were much in the news. That is, until 1894. In that year, when A. P. Swineford announced that he had raised the capital to operate the Lucky Chance mine, Haley was quoted as predicting that it would be the world's richest mine. That was the last time he was mentioned in The Alaskan in connection with mining. The following year the paper reported that he was growing a fine vegetable garden. After that his name was not mentioned in the paper at all. From 1905 until 1912, Polk's Alaska-Yukon Gazateer listed Nicholas Haley as a farmer.<
\Because of this blackout we have no comment from Haley on the failure of the Providence and Sitka Mining Company to resume operations in 1903. After the damage to the mill buildings, reported in last week's column, the operation remained closed. No doubt Haley's comment would have been bitter; he was very anxious to have the Lucky Chance develop into a successful mine, partly to vindicate his own optimistic forecasts and, even more, to get the rest of his money from the original sales agreement. <
\In an earlier column I mentioned that Haley made light of his encounter with a bear. But W. R. Hanlon had a different version of that. Hanlon was born in Sitka, spent virtually his entire life here, and knew Haley. In his newspaper, The Sitka Sun, which began publication in 1920, he wrote that Haley was an invalid for two years after the bear worked him over. In 1889 Haley suffered an accidental gunshot wound in the leg and that may have kept him inactive and confined to his home for a prolonged period.<
\But if Nicholas Haley was not in the news, he was in the record books kept by the U.S. Commissioner who was the ex-officio Recorder for the precinct. Claimants to mining ground are required to do work to the value of $100 each year on each claim in order to hold it. Furthermore, they must put in the records each year an affidavit that the work has been done. Some cynics have contended that those requirements have made liars of a multitude of mining claim owners. Be that as it may, the $100 figure has not been changed since the law was written in 1872 when wages were $2 to $3 a day. Nicholas Haley or one of his sons did the annual assessment work on the claims they owned up until 1904, but that year Tom and Charles may have been otherwise engaged and Nicholas may have been incapacitated. Elbridge W. Merrill filed an affidavit in January 1905 that he had done the assessment work on the Pinta, Swineford, Bullion, Free Gold, Julia, Wicked Falls and Ada Dell lode claims for the year 1904 on behalf of the Haleys, owners of the claims. Merrill was a photographer, an artist in that medium, and had a portrait studio and curio store in downtown Sitka. The mining work was something decidedly out of the ordinary and in view of another record one wonders whether he was considering becoming a member of the Haley family.<
\On December 30, 1903, Merrill and Julia Haley had jointly located the Boston quartz lode three and a half miles from Sitka. The claim was apparently in the Billy's Basin area in the Indian River drainage and the location notice was posted on the door of a cabin on the claim. Neither of them retained ownership of the claim by later meeting the requirments of the mining law. At that time Julia was a clerk in Merrill's curio store, but three years later she quit and opened her own curio store. The local scuttlebutt was that it was a romance that went sour. Both parties were ticketed in Sitka as ``a little strange.''<
\In the years subsequent to 1904 Nicholas Haley filed affidavits that he had done the necessary work himself on some of the claims and his sons took over the job on others. He had, it appears, learned to sign his name. It was previously reported that he had signed his Army enlistment papers with an ``X,'' but by the 1890s the documents he put on record were all signed ``N. Haley.'' This was not, of course, the original document but a copy by the Recorder. Other documents with ``X'' signatures had, however, been entered in the record books with the ``X'' instead of a signature.<
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\^sf03Haleys & Silver Bay, Part 16 -- ^sf01The Providence & Sitka Mining Company's mining property at Silver Bay suffered heavy damage during a windstorm in November 1902, as reported in Part 14 of this series. The company had been capitalized for only $30,000 and most of that had been expended for an additional five stamps in the mill and a tramway, nearly a mile long, to carry ore from the mine to the mill. During the time the company had worked the mine the gold recovered had probably not paid the cost of operations.<
\E. Otis Smith, the president of the company and its chief promoter, no doubt tried to raise funds to make repairs and continue operations, but the Southeastern Alaska mining climate had changed. True, the Treadwell mines on Douglas Island were having great success, but in the same area the Bear's Nest and the Alaska Union mines were failures despite the expenditure of large sums of money. Closer to Sitka, much work had been done at Rodman Bay, including the building of six or seven miles of railroad, with almost nothing to show in the way of returns to stockholders. At Silver Bay a number of mining engineers, some of them with international reputations, had looked over the field and gathered samples for testing. Apparently they had arrived at the conclusion that George Pilz had reached in 1879: that there was not a sufficient ore body to support a paying mine. It was getting more and more difficult to raise the kind of venture capital that E. Otis Smith required for the Providence & Sitka to carry on.<
\The company controlled the Lucky Chance, Porphyry, Cleveland and Nicholas lode claims and the Providence placer claim, but could hold them only by doing the annual assessment work, $100 on each claim. Smith took care of this year after year on behalf of the corporation, either doing the work himself or hiring it done. He also acted as watchman and caretaker of the property. In addition to the mining claims, the company's property consisted of a small wharf, a warehouse and a boat shed at the mouth of Salmon Creek. A short distance from the wharf via a corduroy road was the superintendent's house. From there a wagon road, corduroyed most of the way, ran between five and six miles to the sawmill and stamp mill. At the mill there was a two-story dwelling, a blacksmith shop, powder house, the mill building, manager's office and the lower terminal of the tramway which extended some 4,000 feet up the mountain to the mine.<
\By July 1908 the corporation had five creditors in Sitka. They were E. Otis Smith, $6,500; W. P. Mills Corporation $2,243.93; Bernard Hirst $2,637.24; Edward deGroff $138.66 and John Kaznakoff $925. Four of the creditors assigned their claims to Mills who on August 3 filed suit against the corporation for $12,444.83 plus costs. A judgment in that amount was issued and the U.S. Marshal was directed to sell the property to the highest bidder to satisfy the judgment. The sale was held on September 18 and the property was deeded to Mills on his bid of $4,000.<
\The deed did not include a patent to the mining claims. The best hope of the creditors was a sale of the property and they retained possession of the mining claims by doing the annual assessment work for several years. John Kaznakoff did the work and presumably was paid by the other creditors.<
\The predecessor of the Providence & Sitka on the property had been the Lake Mountain Mining Company, incorporated in Wisconsin. In the transfer to Providence & Sitka, many and perhaps all of the Lake Mountain stockholders had taken stock in the new company. In 1910 they held 50,000 shares, valued at $12,443. Whether there were other stockholders is not stated in the agreement reached by the creditors. They agreed that if the property was sold they would share proportionately but that one-tenth of the proceeds would go to the shareholders. That one-tenth would come out of Smith's share. But no buyer was found for the property or any part of it and eventually the annual work was discontinued and the mining claims reverted to the public domain. Some or all of them were later staked by others, but whether the stamp mill was ever operated again is unclear. And all indications are that neither the creditors nor the stockholders of the Providence & Sitka Mining Company ever recovered a dime. At least two other outfits were hanging on at Silver Bay during the first decade of the new century, performing the required annual labor and hoping for a buyer. The Liberty mine was the one nearest Sitka, on the western side of the bay and not far above the water. William Turner had sunk every dollar he could get hold of in driving tunnels and trying to develop a paying mine. Following his death his widow continued to hold the property by having the required work done each year. Twice it had been examined by mining engineers and options taken, but no sale had resulted. She finally abandoned the property.<
\Nearly opposite the Liberty, near Bear Cove, was what was known as the Mooney mine. Tom Mooney had been puttering around with mining at Silver Bay since the 1870s. With H. L. Bahrt, Reuben Albertstone and John Clement he owned the Baranoff Queen, Henrietta, Crown and Silver Bay lode claims. Several times they announced that they had bonded the claims to a mining company but apparently no money changed hands and the options were never taken up.<
\Over the years W. R. Hanlon engaged in one way or another with mining in the Sitka area. He was employed for a time by Herman Bauer's Chicago and Sitka Mining Company as winter watchman and in wharf and road building. Hanlon and Peter Kaznakoff staked what they called the New York lode near where the Vodopad River plunges into the bay, and in 1906 Hanlon staked the Copper King lode claim at Bear Cove.<
\He was born in Sitka in 1879 to Frederick and Anna Schmakoff Richter. Anna married John Hanlon after Richter's death and her son took the name of his stepfather. He was always enterprising and among other things delivered fresh water from Indian River to Sitka homes, operated the Poplar Tree Bath House and the Sitka Dray and Wood Company. For many years he was also closely associated with members of the Haley family in their mining ventures and he continued to work at times for Herman Bauer.<
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\^sf03Haleys & Silver Bay, Part 17 -- ^sf01Herman A. Bauer was a man bitten by the gold bug, a virulent form of the bug. He wanted to develop a gold mine at Silver Bay and he devoted his energy for more than 20 years, and all the money he could scrape together, toward that end.<
\Bauer was born in Chicago in 1863. When he moved to Seattle is not known, but by the spring of 1884 he was working for the merchandise firm of Toklas and Singerman in that city. A part of that company's business was outfitting schooners for fur seal and sea otter hunting in northern waters. Bauer developed an interest in Alaska and in the spring of 1884 signed on aboard the schooner CHAMPION, Captain Henry McAlmond, which was going on a combined trading and otter hunting voyage. John Amesworthy was in charge of the trading and Bauer was to be his assistant.<
\The schooner stopped at Kodiak and at Pirate Cove and Coal Harbor in the Shumagin Islands. A dispute of some kind developed and Bauer was put ashore at Coal Harbor where there was a small Native village and one white man named Dingley. Bauer had a shotgun and lived on fish and such ducks as he was able to shoot. It was 24 days before another schooner came along and took him to Sand Point where the schooner LEO was at anchor. The LEO was owned by the Sitka Trading Company and was on a trading voyage in charge of John G. Brady, one of the partners in the company. Bauer exchanged his shotgun and other possessions for passage to Sitka.<
\In Sitka Bauer worked for several months in the Sitka Trading Company store, then the largest in town. The LEO made freighting trips to Puget Sound several times each year and Bauer returned to Seattle in her and agreed to become the company's agent there, buying merchandise and shipping it north in the LEO or in one of the Pacific Coast Steamship Company's steamers. It was not a full-time job and Bauer organized the Crescent Manufacturing Company and became its president. The company initially dealt in spices and condiments but soon branched out into the manufacture of baking powder and other products. A chemist who specialized in the production of artificial flavors joined the company and they became one of its important lines. Mapeline, for the production of artificial maple syrup, was one of its best known products.<
\The Sitka Trading Company underwent changes in the 1890s. Brady closed out his interest in 1891 and went into the sawmill business. In 1893 Amos Whitford also retired and sold to Bauer the merchandise company and an interest in several Silver Bay mining claims. Bauer hired a succession of managers for the store but that proved unsatisfactory and eventually he moved to Sitka. Bauer was a partner with Whitford in the Julia claim and with Whitford, Brady and several others in the Second Grip claim. Neither claim proved to have value, but the gold bug got in its first bite.<
\William Maydenbauer, who may have been related to Herman Bauer, arrived in Sitka in the summer of 1895. He and Percy Hope, who was running the store for Bauer, located four claims at Silver Bay and named them the Alameda, Tyee, P. I. and Demurph. John A. Shorthall, who The Alaskan identified as ``the mining expert,'' said the four claims were among the richest in the district. Those words were so common about then that the paper must have kept them in standing type. Ore samples from the four claims were sent south for mill tests. It was reported that values as high as $319 a ton were disclosed by these tests.<
\Maydenbauer and Hope then sold an interest in the claims to Herman Bauer and the three men formed the Alameda Mining Company but did not offer stock in the company for sale to others. They did order a Briggs reduction mill for the property. By the summer of 1896 Bauer had moved to Sitka and he and Hope and Maydenbauer all did some work on the claims. The first case of claim jumping in the Sitka area, or at least the first that went to court, came in the late fall of 1896. As reported in Part 13, Maydenbauer charged that Peter Romanoff and A. Stevens had moved his claim stakes on the P. I. lode claim and posted a new location notice. A jury decided that Maydenbauer was right.<
\News of the Klondike strike reached Sitka in the spring of 1897 and Percy Hope sold his interest in the Silver Bay claims to Bauer and took off for the Yukon. The Sitka Trading Company, once the largest store in Sitka, was now far behind the Mills and deGroff stores in sales, so Bauer closed it and moved the merchandise to the new and booming towns of Skagway and Dyea. Maydenbauer went with him. They maintained their ownership of the Silver Bay claims by hiring the annual assessment work done.<
\In May 1899 Maydenbauer returned to Sitka and put a crew to work on the Silver Bay property. By the end of the year 13 men were at work, machine drills were being installed and ore was being hauled to the beach on what was probably a surface tramway. Maydenbauer and his wife were living on a cabin on the beach at Silver Bay. By then the operation was named the Chicago Sitka Mining and Milling Company but it was locally known as the Bauer mine. Herman Bauer and his wife arrived back in Sitka in July 1900 and brought with them Sitka's first gasboat, the steel-hulled SILVER BAY. Bauer had closed the store at Skagway and brought its remaining merchandise to Sitka where he disposed of it at heavily discounted prices.<
\From then on he devoted his resources and a great deal of his time to developing the claims at Silver Bay. He sold his interest in the thriving Crescent Manufacturing Company and sank the money in the mine. He borrowed money from his family in Chicago and put that into the mine. Maydenbauer worked with him for a few years but evidently became discouraged. At any rate, he disappeared from the scene.<
\One of the men who worked for Bauer was W. R. Hanlon and in 1908 the Skagway Alaskan carried this news item from Sitka, dated January 28: ``Capt. W. R. Hanlon was carrying supplies to the Bauer mines at the head of Silver Bay in an open launch. He spotted a whale near the head of the bay, ran up alongside it and pumped four shots into it with a 30.30 rifle. The whale gave the boat a blow with its tail, turning it clear over and throwing the cargo and crew into the sea. Hanlon was severely injured but Charley Haley managed to keep him afloat until a party of miners came to the rescue from shore. The whale went on about its business.''<
\Sitka's newspaper had ceased publication by then. The Skagway paper was owned by Dr. W. H. Keller, a dentist who visited Sitka regularly and picked up the story during one of those visits.<
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^sf03\Haleys & Silver Bay, Part 18 --^sf01 ^sf01Since I wrote the first part of this series, published on April 10 of this year, some additional information on Nicholas Haley's birthplace and birth date has come to light, thanks to the persistent efforts of a great-granddaughter, Mrs. E. Marion Sims, a resident of Canada.<
\According to information she received from Ireland, Nicholas was the son of John and Bridida Tysdell Haly and was born on April 4, 1836, at Loughanure Commons, County Kildare, Barony Clane. That is in the upper west corner of Kildare, near Meath County. In all probability the spelling of the name was changed to Haley either when Nicholas entered the United States or soon afterward.<
\The last time Nicholas Haley filed a Proof of Labor affidavit with the U.S. Commissioner at Sitka was on March 31, 1914, when he attested that he had done the necessary work on the Wicked Falls, Haley and Rogers and Bullion claims. Not long after that he signed another document, a deed to part of his homestead.<
\Away back in the 1880s Alonzo Austin, the superintendent of the Sheldon Jackson Institute, had written to Dr. Sheldon Jackson that he was trying to buy a piece of the Haley homestead as an addition to the campus but was having no success. The sale finally took place on June 4, 1914, and involved a piece of ground measuring 183 by 432 feet. The price was $1,000 and the land is the portion of the Sheldon Jackson College campus that is west of Jeff Davis Street.<
\By that time Haley was in need of hospitalization. It is possible that for a time he was cared for at the infirmary of the Sheldon Jackson School, the only facility of that kind in Sitka. The money from the land sale made it possible for Haley to be taken to Juneau to enter St. Ann's Hospital. Just before he left Sitka for Juneau, on July 20, Haley executed a quit claim deed giving ``all property owned by me'' to his son Charles. The document does not list the property but it presumably included both the homestead claim in town and the one east of Indian River as well as a number of mining claims. The deed had to be a quit claim because he did not have title to any of the real property. There is no indication why the other children were excluded.<
\He died in Juneau on August 19, 1914, and was buried in Evergreen Cemetery in that city. He was 78 years old.<
\When Nicholas Haley died his widow, Ellen Mary, was still living in the big family home on Lincoln Street. In 1887 she had purchased, in her own name, the Schmeig residence on Lincoln Street, on the present site of St. Gregory's Church. For many years she rented the house but at some date after the death of Nicholas she moved there, as did her daughter, Julia. On October 15, 1921, she deeded that property to Julia. Ellen died in the house a month later and was buried in the National Cemetery. She was 80.<
\The big house and the remainder of the homestead that surrounded it were sold in 1922 to Kalle and Hilda Raatikainen. Thereafter any of the siblings who were in town lived in the little house. John N. Haley, the oldest of the five surviving children, worked at Treadwell as a tugboat captain for several years, then moved south and about 1894 began working as a civilian employee at what became the Bremerton Navy Yard on Puget Sound. On June 4, 1900, he married Miss Annie Knutson of Bremerton. Nothing further has been learned of him, but when Nicholas Haley died in 1914 John was not listed as one of his survivors.<
\Edward J. Haley, the second son, after working at Silver Bay with his father, serving for a short while with the Customs Service and working in several other areas, was married at Juneau on July 7, 1896, to Miss Edna Sprague who was identified in one of the Juneau papers as the niece of Mrs. Matt Laughlin of Juneau. The ceremony was not performed in the Catholic Church but by the Episcopal minister, the Rev. H. Beers. The Edward Haleys had two children, Donald and Dorothy. Donald married a nurse at St. Ann's Hospital, Miss Bertha Ellen Brown who was from Vancouver, B.C. They eventually moved to Canada and Donald was killed in an accident. Three generations of his survivors presently live in Canada.<
\Dorothy, who worked for many years as a newspaper reporter and editor in Alaska, first married Donald Austen, then John Pegues. She had six sons who carry on the name in Alaska.<
\Edward and Edna separated and he returned to Sitka at some date unknown. He may have done some mining. At any rate he got into a squabble with Anesim Startzoff over a mining claim. The two men were about of an age and had grown up in Sitka, so it may have been a continuation of an old quarrel. Startzoff filed a complaint that Haley was insane. There was a hearing in the U.S. Commissioner's court with a jury of six men. Haley was represented by an attorney and there was testimony from a physician, several of Haley's acquaintances and the complainant. The jury found against him and he was committed to an asylum at Morningside, near Portland, Oregon.<
\Less than a year later a Juneau paper carried a wire story that Haley and two other men had walked away from the hospital and had not been seen since. The authorities were not going to look for them because, they said, all three were trusties and were about to be released anyway. I have heard that Edward Haley later returned to Juneau for a time, but I have not been able to verify that.<
\Thomas Colbert Haley, the next younger of the children, was 12 years old in 1881 according to a census made by the U.S. Navy. As was noted in the first part in this series, a number of different birth dates were ascribed to him in various public documents, but the Navy's data is probably as good as any of them. Just how much formal education Tom had is not known. He may have attended the Sheldon Jackson Institute as a day pupil before there was a public school and more than likely he attended the Russian school in what is now the Bishop's House.<
\Tom would have been 16 or 17 by the time Dr. Sheldon Jackson established Sitka's first government-operated public school and probably did not attend it although his younger brother, Charles, was enrolled there. According to Charles Haley's daughter, Mrs. Margo Britch, both boys attended school in Victoria, B.C., for a time, but the date is unknown.<
\One thing that Tom did acquire outside of school was a fair fluency in the Tlinget language. That was not, of course, unusual back in the 1870s and 1880s. To work in a store in Southeastern Alaska in those years, some knowledge of Tlinget was almost obligatory.<
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^sf03\Haleys & Silver Bay, Part 19 --^sf01 ^sf01After Thomas C. Haley returned in 1902 from working in the Treadwell mines, he engaged mostly but not entirely in the mining field.<
\In the years 1915 to 1917 he also operated a drayage business in Sitka. Whether this was something he started himself or whether he took over the enterprise started earlier by his younger brother Charles is not known. There was no newspaper in Sitka at that time and the fact of his drayage business is known only because it is recorded in the books of the Mills Corporation which are now in the archives of the Sitka Historical Society.<
\He regularly hauled freight for the Mills store and building materials for the W. P. Mills dwelling at the end of Maksoutoff Street.<
\For the most part, however, Tom Haley was involved with his sister Julia and his brother Charles in locating mining claims, maintaining both the claims they located and some that had been located earlier by their father, Nicholas Haley. It is difficult to determine how much of the time of any of them was devoted to actually extracting gold from the multitude of quartz veins that are threaded through the country rock of the Silver Bay area. Tom was probably the mainstay in small scale mining of gold and Tom and Julia especially may have lived at times on what gold he was able to extract.<
\The three of them did not confine their efforts to Silver Bay. After the Chichagof Island gold discovery in 1905 Tom and Severin Swanson located the Lucky Strike lode claim and Charles and Julia located a claim they called the Big Speciman. Both claims were in the Klag Bay area where the rich Chichagof mine was developed, but neither of the Haley claims proved to be winners.<
\Julia was the first of the Haley offspring born in Sitka. The Navy census of April 1881 lists her age as seven and says she was attending the ``English school.'' Presumably that was the one taught by Miss Henrietta Austin whose father was at that time establishing a boarding school for boys, the Sheldon Jackson Institute. In September 1885 she was enrolled in St. Ann's Academy at Victoria, B.C. It is not known how long she attended that school.<
\In the early part of 1887 she accompanied her parents on a trip to Chicago and while there she and her parents each had their pictures taken at a professional studio. The portraits are now in the possession of Julia's niece, Mrs. Margo Britch of Sequim, Washington.<
\During the 1890s Julia Haley appears in the news columns of The Alaskan only once. The item appeared on May 30, 1891: ``Miss Julia Haley has an educated pig named Darby. It is now six weeks old, follows her like a dog and responds to its name. In the mornings he goes to the foot of the stairs in the Haley home and keeps up a continual grunting until someone comes to feed him.''<
\The Haleys did keep pigs, as did several other families in Sitka. A difference was that the others penned their livestock; the Haleys let theirs roam at large to forage for themselves. It was not uncommon for the Haley pigs to root for clams on the Crescent Beach, and almost as common to see a raven perched on a pig's shoulders, ready to hop down and make off with any clam or cockle that the hard working pig uncovered.<
\In addition to the pigs and perhaps some chickens, the Haleys had a mule named Jim which Nicholas Haley had purchased from the Army when it pulled out of Sitka in 1877. It, too, roamed the streets with the pigs and occasionally both species did their foraging in someone's vegetable garden. That brought protests but little else. There was no city government to make regulations, and the federal court, after it came to Alaska in 1884, was far less active in regulating the fringes of social conduct than it is today. It is sufficient to say, perhaps, that the Haley family was not the most popular family in Sitka.<
\If the Navy's census is correct, Julia Haley was 17 in 1891 when she was being followed around by her pig, Darby. Jobs for women in Sitka in the 1890s included teaching, cooking, sewing and clerking in a store and housekeeping. Julia did some store clerking and ran a couple of businesses of her own. Almost nothing is known of the first one, in 1900, except that she rented the Cohen building which stood on a part of the site now occupied by the Sitka Bazaar. She paid the rent of $10 a month to W. P. Mills, the agent for the Cohen heirs, but no clues have been found as to the nature of her business.<
\It may have been curios, a growing summer business in Sitka and other Southeastern Alaska towns. Tourists began coming north on the regular mail-passenger-freight steamers in the early 1880s and curios originally called ``Indian curiosities'' became a part of the stock in trade of most merchants.<
\In the 1880's the principal tourist carriers were the ANCON and IDAHO. It was the IDAHO that made the first trip into Glacier Bay with a few tourists, and a travel writer, in 1883. Two experiments with passengers-only cruise ships were tried in the 1880s. The first was the OLYMPIAN, a big side-paddle vessel that had been brought around from the East Coast. She made six or eight trips, including calls at Glacier Bay, in 1887 but the experiment was a financial failure.<
\The Canadians then tried that business with the ISLANDER for a couple of voyages in 1889 and several in 1892, but was then withdrawn from the northern run until the start of the Klondike Rush. The QUEEN, GEORGE W. ELDER and CITY OF TOPEKA carried most of the Alaska tourists, along with their regular freight and passengers, in the 1890s.<
\Sitka had an advantage over Wrangell and Juneau, the other main ports of call, because it was the turn-around point and the ships commonly stayed here at least 24 hours and sometimes longer. The COTTAGE CITY and SPOKANE joined the vessels regularly calling at Sitka after 1900, and the QUEEN continued regular visits here into the 1930s.<
\In Sitka in 1900 there were at least half a dozen merchants who advertised that they sold curios and Julia Haley may have been unable to compete. At any rate, she stopped paying rent on the Cohen building after about a year.<
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^sf03Haleys & Silver Bay, Part 20 -- ^sf01For approximately a year at the turn of the century Julia Haley rented store space on Lincoln Street near the Russian Church. She probably sold curios for the increasing tourist trade but she closed that store early in 1901. Subsequently but at a date unknown she began clerking in E. W. Merrill's photograph studio and curio store. It was previously noted that Julia and Merrill had jointly located a mining claim in 1903 and it is likely she was working in his studio and store at that time. They were on the first floor of the Mills Block, which stood on the present site of The Cellar.<
\Julia worked for Merrill for several years but by 1909 she had opened her own curio and antique shop, The Old Russian Trading Post, in the west end of a long log building on Lincoln Street. Her shop would have been approximately at the site of today's Conway Building, which houses a fur shop during the summers. The shop occupied perhaps one-eighth of the building, but the name soon became the name of the entire building. Thousands of postcard pictures of the old building were published over the years, naming it the Old Russian Trading Post although that had not been its purpose Russian times. At the time Julia Haley opened her shop many leftovers from Russian days remained in Sitka and they were her main stock in trade -- samovars and other utensils of brass and copper, trade beads, Russian coins, trinkets and furniture. For many years door knobs and hinges, purportedly from Baranov's Castle, were a standard item in the curio stores.<
\Some the things Julia had on sale had been unearthed in the digging of Sitka's first water lines, in 1905 and 1906. She also acquired heirlooms from some of the older Russian families and she gathered anything that appeared to have a Russian connection and found a market in the increasing number of tourists. She may also have sold some Native craft work, although in those years most of the local producers of baskets, moccasins and carvings did their own selling.<
\The Alaska tourist business began in the early 1880s and increased year by year. There were only a couple special cruise ships in early years, and they were unsuccessful. The tourists came on the regular mail-passenger-freight steamers.<
\I have found nothing to indicate how long Julia ran her shop. I remember the sign which extended across the wooden sidewalk, its outer end supported by a rotting post. The lettering and totem symbols were badly weathered. That was probably about 1916 and the shop was closed, some of the windows broken, the door nailed shut. <
\After Julia closed her curio store she was for several years engaged in caring for her aging mother until she died in 1921. After that she worked with her brothers, Thomas and Charles, in promoting gold mines and even in doing some mining, as will be related later. <
\Back in the early years of this century Sitka had a number of people who were classified by the general public as ``strange'' or at least ``different.'' Julia Haley may have been both, and not only because she went into the woods and staked mining claims. The clothing she wore was out of date, so far as fashion went, and her hats were large and wondrous. She was Roman Catholic by upbringing but most of the time Sitka did not have a resident priest. After the Community Presbyterian Church was completed in 1925 she attended the Sunday evening services there. She never mingled with the congregation but crept in after the service had started and sat in the very back pew, then left again before the last notes of the final hymn had died away.<
\It was not on Sunday but on Saturday nights, however, that Julia put on her most notable performances. The weekly mail boat from Juneau customarily arrived sometime between 6 and 8 o'clock on Saturday evenings and the mail was distributed to the boxes as soon as it reached the post office. A sizable portion of Sitka's population gathered in the post office lobby, hoping for letters. One who didn't need to hope was Julia. There was always a letter in her mail box, one that she had mailed to herself a day or two earlier. She did not read the letter aloud, but did offer a string of vocal comments: ``Oh, dear, the poor thing,'' ``What a terrible thing to happen,'' ``I'm not a bit surprised at that,'' and so forth, on and on. Nobody except complete strangers paid any attention; it was just that strange Julia Haley.<
\Of Julia's two brothers remaining in Sitka, she appears to have been most closely associated with Charles and sometimes accompanied him on his trips to the states to sell stock in their mining claims. Charles Augustus Haley, the youngest of the children of Nicholas and Ellen Haley, was born in Sitka. There are conflicting records as to when he was born. His own story was that he was born on his father's homestead at Indian River on Christmas Day 1875. A problem with that story is that his father did not file that homestead claim until June 1, 1882. One federal census gives his birth date as December 1878 and another one has it December 1876. The latter is probably correct and agrees with the Navy's census of April 1881 in which he is listed as age 4.<
\It was not until January 1886 that Dr. Sheldon Jackson, the agent of the U.S. Bureau of Education, was able to open a public school in Sitka. Charles had his first schooling at the Sheldon Jackson Institute and was said to have also attended the Russian Seminary where he learned to speak Russian, a language that was still fairly common in Sitka in those years. Like his brother Tom, he also became fluent in Tlinget.<
\Charles apparently inherited some of his father's talent as a salesman and he displayed public relations talent at an early age. When he was in the third grade of the Sitka Public School each member of his class was required to write a short piece about the school. The Alaskan then published what they had written. Charles began his piece: ``We have a good school in Sitka and we have a good teacher. We learn fast in our school because we have a good teacher.''<
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^sf03Haleys & Silver Bay, Part 21 --^sf01 Tom and Julia Haley were rarely mentioned in The Alaskan, but Charles' name appeared every now and then. Examples: May 1897: ``Charles Haley and William Hanlon have discovered a new quartz ledge at Jamestown Bay.'' June 1900: ``Charles Haley is now the janitor at the Custom House. He is a good boy and always keeps busy.'' July 1901: ``Charles Haley's horse and wagon are now transporting tourists to the park and other places of interest.'' November 1901: ``Charles Haley has started a new dray line. He has but one horse and a cart, but he gets there.'' April 1902: ``Charles Haley has his truck farm in fine shape and he says he will have rhubarb on the market by May 1.'' May 1902: Charles Haley has received a new wagon for his Sitka-Eli Transfer Company.'' June 1902: ``Charles Haley has branched out into a new business and now has all facilities for handling funerals.''<
\For his tourist trade, Charles installed three seats in his freight wagon and put a canopy over it, as shown in the picture above. It was undoubtedly he who gave the name ``Blarney Stone'' to a flat rock at the foot of Jeff Davis Street. It had been known for years as Baranov's Rock because the first Chief Manager of the Russian American Company was said to have used it as a seat. Charles unloaded his passengers there, had them march three times around the stone, then kiss it to bring good luck.<
\From the Blarney Stone, Charles probably took them to Indian River Park although there was not much to show them except a narrow road between the trees. By the summer of 1902, however, the tall Son-i-hat totem and the four house posts had been placed in the the park. They were followed four years later by the collection of poles that had been at expositions in St. Louis and in Portland, Oregon. Charles soon developed fascinating interpretations of the poles for his tourist customers. Did he, while they were under his spell, also try to get them to invest in mining claims Silver Bay? Quite possibly he did and he may have had some success despite some official reports that were not exactly glowing.<
\Charles was equipped to take winter as well as summer tours of the town, as shown in the photograph above. The boy holding the horse's head and the two small boys behind the sled are unknown. Those on the sled, left to right: Charles Haley, Flora Mary Stephens, her sister Ethel Stephens, and Julia Haley. In front is Sybil Bridge. The Stephens sisters were living in Sitka with their mother and their step-father, Mathew Bridge, who was the deputy Collector of Customs. Sybil was their half-sister. The building on the right was known as the Old Russian Trading Post, where Julia Haley had her tourist shop.<
\The Customs Service transferred Mathew Bridge to Skagway and his family moved there, too. Then Flora Stephens went to the states and entered nurses training. After she became an RN she and Charles Haley were married in 1911. Their daughter, who was also named Flora, was born in Sitka on October 19, 1913.<
\According to the best available records, Charles Haley operated his drayage and tour business in Sitka at least from 1901 through 1912, although for part of the year 1907 he worked as messenger in the office of the U. S. Surveyor General in Juneau. As reported earlier, Thomas Haley was operating a drayage business in Sitka in the years 1915 to 1917, but whether the brothers were partners is not known.<
\Mrs. Charles Haley and her daughter Flora moved from Sitka to Seattle in 1917. That was at the insistence of Flora's grandmother, Mrs. Ellen Haley. She was set on having Flora become a musician and believed that age 4 was not too early to start, and the training was not available in Sitka. It probably was her wish, too, that Flora learn to play the harp, an appropriate instrument for a girl of Irish ancestry. That was, at any rate, what she studied, and by the time she was 7 she was appearing on the stage of the Blue Mouse Theater in Seattle, billed as the world's youngest harpist.<
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^sf03Haleys and Silver Bay, Part 22 --^sf01 The three Haley children who remained in Sitka -- Thomas, Julia and Charles -- despite some other activities continued to focus much of their attention on mining. After the discovery was made at Klag Bay, Chichagof Island, in 1905, they located claims there, but none of them paid off and they were abandoned. Most of their attention was centered on Silver Bay where their father, Nicholas Haley, had begun staking mining claims and selling interests in them in the 1870s.<
\Following the death of their father in 1914, Tom and Charles did the annual assessment work on some of the Silver Bay claims and relocated others. Julia located two new mining claims in her own name. She named one of them the Big Specimen; the other was an extension of the Haley & Rogers, located by her father. She also claimed a trade and manufacturing site which she called the Silver Bay cannery and sawmill site.<
\After Mrs. Charles Haley and her daughter, Flora, moved to Seattle in 1917, Charles shuttled back and forth between Sitka and Seattle and later extended his travels to Los Angeles where his wife was working as a nurse.<
\It is difficult to determine how much time any of the three devoted to actually extracting gold from the multitude of quartz veins that threaded the Silver Bay area. Tom was undoubtedly the mainstay in whatever mining was done. Until 1921, Julia was tied down with caring for her mother, and Charles hired out in several summers as a tour conductor of the Chambers of Commerce of Seattle, Portland and Los Angeles, and possibly of other tour groups.<
\In August 1919 Charles and Julia Haley and their cousin, William Johnston, located the Dreamland group of claims on the south bank of Salmon Creek and not far above tidewater. Nothing more was heard of that until July 1921 when The Sitka Sun, recently established by W. R. Hanlon, carried a story:<
\``A big mining deal has been put through by C. A. Haley. He returned from Seattle on the SPOKANE and while below interested L. T. Jacobsen and several other Seattle business men in the Dreamland claims, owned by the Haleys. Jacobsen had bonded the claims and also bonded the Seattle-Sitka gold and copper claims owned by W. R. Hanlon and C. A. Haley, at Herring Cove.''<
\The bonding meant that Jacobsen had taken an option on the claims, probably with a small payment. He formed the Haley Gold Mining Company and in the spring of 1922 Tom Haley was at Silver Bay building a two-story 20 by 30 bunkhouse for the mining crew that would soon arrive. On July 7, 1922, a new weekly paper, The Sitka Tribune, reported that the crew from the mine had been in town for the Fourth of July but had hurried back to Silver Bay to resume work on the tunnel. ``The ore is looking better as the tunnel progresses,'' the paper said.<
\About that same time The Sitka Sun reported: ``J. J. Putraw, mining expert of Seattle, has been examining the Rogers ledge, owned by the Haleys. One blast secured samples showing free gold. He returned to Seattle and will place a crew of men on the property this year. The rock found on the Haley property is exactly like that found in the famous Chichagoff mine.''<
\Nicholas Haley had maintained that Silver Bay would turn out to be just like Treadwell, referring the complex of four mines on Gastineau Channel. Then after the Chichagoff mine began to pay out, Silver Bay was going to be just like Chichagoff. The rock may have been the same but the difference was that it held little gold.<
\But both the Haley Gold Mining Company and the Rogers ledge appear to have fizzled out. There were no further reports on them or on either Jacobsen or Putraw. But the Haley properties were not the only mining operation at Silver Bay in the early 1920s. Herman Bauer had three men working on his claims in 1920 and in 1923 he inserted in the Tribune the necessary advertisements for a patent application. Peter Romanoff and Andrew Dixon had staked the Big Chief and Lucky Strike claims at the head of Green Lake and were opening a cut on what was described as a big vein. They built a cabin on the beach close to where the power plant is today. John Kaznakoff was keeping up the annual assessment work on the Lucky Chance, a property that had been the downfall of the Lake Mountain Mining Company and the Providence & Sitka Mining Company. And on the west side of the bay, William Johnston and a partner had built a cabin at the old Eureka claim and were working the outcrop with a small Huntington roller mill.<
\In June 1923 S. H. Loraine, a widely known mining engineer, looked over several Silver Bay properties. He was quoted as saying, ``I saw encouraging surface indications on the Johnston and Green Lake properties.''<
\If the Haleys were dismayed by the failures of Jacobsen and Putraw, it was not for long. First there was a story that ``the Marcus Daly people'' had bonded the Dreamland group of claims for $65,000 and the Haley and Rogers group for $110,000. The story did not say that any money actually changed hands and that deal also disappeared into thin air so far as further information is concerned. The next report after that was in The Sitka Progress in 1927. The story said that Edward F. Preble, a Portland, Oregon, businessman, had taken over the Haley mine and it was now known as the Baranof Mining Company. The story continued, ``Engineers say it has big possibilities. No stock is for sale.''<
\The ``big possibilities'' was pretty much standard in mining stories; the ``no stock for sale'' was unusual and a little startling.<
\A problem with trying to follow developments at Silver Bay after 1927 is that The Sitka Progress folded in the fall of that year and Sitka was substantially without a newspaper or had a paper only intermittently during the next dozen years.<
\What is known is that in 1926 stock was being sold in the Oregon Exploration Company of Portland, Oregon. The company perhaps had taken over the interests of Edward F. Preble, mentioned above. At any rate, it was promoting the development of a mine at Silver Bay. A buyer of several shares of the stock was Conrad Taylor of Denver, Colorado, and in 1930 he initiated an event that substantially affected the lives and fortunes of the Haley family.<
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^sf03Haleys & Silver Bay, Part 23 --^sf01 On March 28, 1906, at Denver, Colorado, a daughter was born to Conrad and Florence Hovey Taylor. She was named Charlotte and as she grew up she attended Denver schools, then went to Los Angeles and to finish her education at Whittier College and the University of California at Los Angeles. She received a teacher's certificate and in the fall of 1929 began teaching in a Pasadena grade school. <
\When vacation time came the following June, Conrad Taylor asked his daughter to go to Sitka and see what she could learn about the Oregon Exploration Company and about B. Van Zeipel, its chief engineerr, and about the mining properties it was proposing to develop. She happily took off for Alaska, and at Sitka she quickly learned that there had been a good deal of squabbling among the people involved in the Oregon Exploration Company and that it was out of the picture so far as the Haley properties were concerned.<
\Charlotte found, too, that Tom, Charles and Julia Haley were eager for a new developer with money to spread around. Wall Street had crashed the previous October and it was a poor time to try to sell stock in anything short of a richly paying gold mine.<
\In later years Charlotte said that she stayed in Sitka because she fell in love with the place, and that may have been a factor. One wonders, however, whether it was Charles who persuaded her that, with her connections in California, she could be the fairy queen who would unlock the untold riches of Silver Bay. <
\However it happened, Charlotte returned to Los Angeles and organized the Edgecumbe Exploration Company, incorporated under the laws of California and authorized to sell up to a million shares of stock at $1 a share. Charlotte was president of the corporation and some of her California friends were the other officers. She engaged Donald A. Odell of the Los Angeles law firm of Tanner, Odell and Taft to handle the legal affairs of the corporation and act as its agent.<
\Charlotte then returned to Sitka where she persuaded the three Haleys to join the corporation. They gave quit claim deeds to all of their mining claims at Silver Bay and each received 1,525 shares of stock in the corporation, as did Charlotte for her work in organizing the corporation.<
\But there was a joker in that deal. It was an irrevocable agreement that said, ``The parties hereto have caused all of the stock of the corporation to which they are entitled to be issued in the name of Charlotte Taylor, and the certificates are to be issued to her.''<
\Charlotte Taylor was president of the corporation and most of the members of the Board of Directors were her California friends. Charles Haley was, however, placed on the board. With the signing of the above agreement Charlotte also controlled all of the outstanding stock of the corporation. She was totally in control of the Edgecumbe Exploration Company. If there was as much gold in the mountains at Silver Bay as the Haley family had always believed, it was a valuable position to be in. On the other hand, a good many thousands of dollars had been sunk into those mountains in unsuccessful attempts to find the gold. If the gold was not there, then the Edgecumbe Exploration Company was just another vehicle for trying to sell mining shares to the unwary. <
\We do not know what qualms Tom, Julia and Charles Haley had about signing over their stock, but years later Charles was reported to have lamented having done so. They had traded their mining claims for stock in the corporation, but they were unable to sell those shares or even offer them as collateral for a loan. The Great Depression was deepening and even in Sitka it was being felt.<
\Despite the Depression, however, there were people willing to invest in an attractive gold mining venture, and everything possible was done to make Silver Bay sound attractive. Charles Haley made one or more trips to the states and managed to sell some stock. Polly Brennan in Pasadena was secretary of the corporation. Whether she actually sold the stock or just issued the certificates is not known, but she did sign a good many certificates. Charlotte Taylor was both president and treasurer. <
\One list of 78 stockholders shows that most of them were in the Los Angeles area, but there were two in New York City, one in Toledo, Ohio, and a few elsewhere in California, including a major general at the Presidio in San Francisco. Many of the stockholders were persuaded to have their certificates issued to Charlotte Taylor. By 1936 a Los Angeles bank was holding 52 certificates, representing 19,891 shares, issued in her name.<
\In 1933, before any other stock had been sold, a Dr. T. L. Dailey made a firm proposal to test the possibilities of the Silver Bay property. His proposal was set forth in a letter from the attorney, Donald Odell, to Charles Haley:<
\``Dr. Dailey wants a 90-day option to purchase 600,000 shares of stock of the corporation for $200,000. He will put no fewer than 15 men to work, with an air compressor, to take out ore to to be shipped to Seattle or Los Angeles for mill run tests. He will pay all expenses of this work, not less than $15,000. If he takes up the option, he will pay the Haleys $200 a month until the mine is producing on a commercial basis. He would then sell 400,000 shares of the stock at 50 cents a share to raise $200,000 to put into the mine, but would not receive the 400,000 shares unless he could sell all of them. The Haleys would have 400,000 shares to keep or sell, and Dr. Dailey would retain 200,000 shares.''<
\On June 26, 1933, Charles Haley replied: ``It appears that Dr. Dailey is very anxious to gain control of the property. In other words, he sees in the ore not only another Chichagoff but a vein ranking in class with the Comstock and the Empire mines of California. If he did not, he would not be so anxious to get us off the property. We do not think it advisable at this time to accept his offer.''<
\The question is, did Charles really, deeply believe Silver Bay would be a fabulous bonanza? Or did he fear that a thorough exploration would prove it valueless and thus eliminate the possibility of future stock sales?<
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^sf03Haleys & Silver Bay, Part 24 --^sf01 After Charles Haley turned down the proposal of Dr. T. L. Dailey for the development of the mining claims of the Edgecumbe Development Company at Silver Bay, it was decided that the company would do the work itself, as funds became available.<
\The company got some help from the federal government. In 1933 the Forest Service assigned a crew of Civilian Conservation Corps men under foreman Ben Ficken to build approximately a mile of trail from the beach toward one of the mining claims. This included three bridges and 762 feet of corduroy. While in the area the CCC also built a trail from the beach to Green Lake where Steve Tuss was at work on the claims previously located by Peter Romanoff and Andrew Dixon.<
\Charles Haley was named General Superintendent of the company and was to take care of the annual assessment work, have charge of all property, contract for any and all labor needed and to make daily written reports which were to be mailed to Pasadena where the company had opened an office. He was to be paid $75 a month. Charlotte Taylor was also to be paid $75 a month to manage the business of the corporation in California and to be responsible for the corporation's money.<
\It was decided that there would be a meeting of the directors each month in the Pasadena office. Charles Haley went down from Sitka to attend at least some of those meetings. His wife, Mrs. Flora Haley, was living in Pasadena at that time.<
\Things did not always go smoothly among the directors. In September 1934 Charlotte at Pasadena wrote to Charles Haley at Sitka: ``Mr. W. has called for his commissions and checks have changed hands and there has been considerable devil to pay as he says you told him he was to collect 20 per cent on all money raised. Pretty tough on Mrs. Haley and me as it is extremely difficult trying to patch up, mend and hold together a group of people who feel they have been cheated, misinformed and lied to. A word to the wise is sufficient. In the future be extremely careful to paint the picture just as it is without any flattering untruths.''<
\About the same time the Edgecumbe Exploration Company hired B. Van Zeipel as geologist and engineer. He had been highly recommended by Dr. William Cavanaugh, president of the Oregon Exploration Company, for which Van Zeipel had worked for eight years. <
\Van Zeipel arrived at Sitka aboard the mail boat KENAI from Juneau on November 16, 1934. It was a poor time of year to begin any kind of work at Silver Bay. In December The Arrowhead, one of the short-lived Sitka papers of that time, reported that Bill Hanlon had a contract to drive 130 feet of tunnel on one of the Haley claims which was a mile and a half from the beach at an elevation of 3000 feet. They were extending the trail and erecting a blacksmith shop and a two-room cabin. The crew included John Osbakken, Ole and Andrew Birkland, Titus Demidoff. Fred Easley, William Johnston and Ike and Victor Hanlon. Julia Haley was doing the cooking. Charles Haley and Van Zeipel were also at the camp. A month later the paper reported that work had been stopped by the weather and the crew had come to town.<
\At a later date Charlotte Taylor wrote to Donald Odell, the company's lawyer: ``Mr. Van Zeipel arrived at Silver Bay about the middle of November. On December 28 his services were determined to be unsatisfactory and he was discharged. He was paid for two months and we do not wish to pay him another cent.''<
\William R. Hanlon, who had contracted to drive a tunnel on the Free Gold claim, was highly regarded by Miss Taylor as a miner and mining advisor. At one point she wrote: ``Mr. Hanlon is the discoverer of the famous Chichagof mine and the miner who struck the first ore in in the Hirst Chichagof mine. Speaking our ore, he told me that this is the finest blue ribbon ore I have ever seen in Silver Bay and exactly like the Hirst Chichagof ore.''<
\Following the discharge of B. Van Zeipel at the end of 1934, Jean Philip Champagne, mining engineer, was hired under contract to supervise and extend the operations to develop the company's lode claims at Silver Bay. In August 1935 Champagne reported that one sample of tellurium ore had showed 40 ounces of gold per ton, value $1400. His final report in September he said: ``I estimate that Bonanza 16, with proper machinery and equipment, could produce $76,500 a year with operating expenses of $56,337.75, leaving a profit of $20,162.25.''<
\Those were exactly the kinds of reports the company's officers loved to show to prospective stock purchasers. A year later, however, J. Clark Sutherland wrote a letter to Charlotte Taylor: ``At your request I have been engaged for the past several months in making a complete geological investigation of your company's property. I have reached certain conclusions which are not entirely favorable. They may be modified when I complete the laboratory work.'' No further letters or reports from Sutherland were found in the correspondence files of the company but the minutes of a directors' meeting mentions that there was a further report, dated in November, 1936. The directors accepted the report but there was no mention of its contents.<
\W. R. Hanlon, sometimes advisor to Miss Taylor, advised her in May 1937 that the Free Gold claim should be developed and that a small Staub mill, manufactured in Oakland, California, be purchased. The gold recovery would be from 75 to 80 per cent, he said, but other equipment could be added later for higher recovery. ``If you should fail to raise the money to purchase the mill, that could be done right here in Sitka,'' Hanlon wrote. He would appear to have been over optimistic on that score.<
\Hanlon also wrote: ``If it will be necessary to have an engineer at a high salary going fishing and hunting and camping on the beach most of the time, I would want to have nothing to do with the project.'' The Staub mill was not purchased at that time.<
\Between 1930 and 1937 Charlotte Taylor was in Sitka a part of the time, but in the latter year she got a job as head of the fan mail department at Universal Pictures and remained there for the next three years. During that time she also served as private secretary to the actress Deanna Durbin. She returned to Sitka in 1940.<
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^sf03Haleys & Silver Bay, Part 25 -- On a snowy Sunday morning, December 20, 1936, three employees of the Edgecumbe Exploration Company were making their way toward one of the company's mines at Silver Bay. Suddenly they became involved in a life-threatening event. The story of what happened was first published as ``Reported Dead'' in Esquire Magazine, April 1939. The author was Fred Easley as told to K. A. Taylor. In June 1943 the article was reprinted by another magazine, The Alaska Sportsman. It is reprinted here with courtesy of Esquire Magazine and the Hearst Corporation.<
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^sf01\We were on our way to the mine. Otto Hill, a miner, J. Clark Sutherland, an engineer, and myself. Blinded by the whirling snow, somehow we got off the trail. It wasn't until the wind suddenly stopped and the air cleared that we realized we had lost our way. Then we saw that instead of being well up the side of the mountain, as we had supposed, we were down in the bottom of the canyon. Realizing the danger of our situation, we about-faced, ready to retreat.<
\When we stopped I was standing opposite a huge boulder. But I wasn't looking at the rock. My eye was caught by a yellowish spot of snow at my feet, which I recognized as a danger signal. Beneath the crust was an air pocket and I was thinking, as I turned away, how lucky I was that I had not taken one step more, or I might have been in snow up to my neck.<
\Then it happened, without any warning. There was only a slight ripple of snow around my ankles, and a quiet WHOOSH, as a part of the mountain seemed to let go and engulf me like a thin dime dropped in a sand dune. One minute I was standing there in the sunlight, talking to Otto and Sutherland. The next I was flat on my face in inky blackness, gasping for air. But there wasn't any air. Only cold, hard snow pressing against my eyes, my nose, and my mouth. I tried to yell but there was only a smothered gulp as I choked on a handful of snow.<
\I couldn't breathe and I was filled with panic. As a swimmer I had learned to hold my breath under water for a minute. The minute was almost up now. My last minute on earth. My lungs were bursting and there was a terrific pounding in my ears. It was like drowning, I imagine; drowning in snow.<
\In desperation I opened my mouth to call again and sucked in a little air. It must have come from that yellowish spot in the snow. I had fallen, apparently, with my face close to it. Or a little air may have been imprisoned around the great rock. That's the only way I can account for not having been suffocated in those awful moments.<
\People ask me what I thought about in that moment of dying. You'll laugh when I tell you. My first thought was, ``Who'll get my stamp collection now?'' My second was even crazier. I remembered a fortuneteller who had said most emphatically that I was going to live to be an old man. ``So this can't be the end,'' I told myself, ``not at 28.'' Face to face with death, I thought about stamps and fortunetelling. I guess that's the way the human mind works. Right up against it, it clings to trivial and familiar things, as a child starting out on a strange journey clutches her doll and storybook to her. Like a child, too, I thought of my mother. The shock of this might kill her. I'd have to get out, someway.<
\Then I began to pray. Some of the boys in Sitka will tell you I'm not much on praying, as a rule, but I did some tall talking to the Lord under all that snow. If faith could really move mountains, I figured there was never a better chance to prove it. I needed one moved off of me - pretty pronto.<
\Next, I took stock of the situation. It didn't look any too hopeful. It was hard to see how either the Lord or the prophet could help me much. If I expected to get out of that fix alive, it looked as if I'd have to get busy and help myself. The force of the slide had thrown me forward on my face, at about a 45-degree angle. My right arm was extended straight out in front of me, my hand barely touching the rock. My left arm was imprisoned at my side, crooked at the elbow. When I tried to move my head, it wouldn't budge. It was as if it had been encased in concrete. I had no idea snow could be so hard. The weight of it on my back was intolerable. I began to wonder if my back was broken and I was paralyzed. That was one of my worst moments. When I discovered that I could flex the fingers of my right hand I almost sobbed in relief. <
\Slowly I managed to free that right hand, and with it I scooped the snow away from around my face. When the slide hit me I vaguely remembered making a grab for my stocking cap as it was knocked from my head. Pawing around now, I found it, and automatically jammed it on by head, so as not to catch cold!<
\When I opened my eyes I was surprised at the darkness. I could make out the dark outline of the rock ahead but I couldn't see my hand in front of my face. Snow I had always thought of as being dazzingly white. Inside an avalanche it's black as a Halloween cat. I could barely make out the outline of my body, yet, curiously enough, I was able to distinguish between night and day.<
\And I wasn't cold. In all the time I was buried I was never cold except my hands and feet, which finally froze. My igloo fitted me like a glove and there was no wind to chill me. Fortunately, too, I was warmly dressed. If I had dressed for the occasion, I couldn't have done better. Over my long woolen underwear I wore a woolen shirt, jeans, and a fisherman's oilskin suit over that. On my feet I had two pair of woolen socks with Arctic socks over these. The shoe pacs I wore were good and stout, the sole and vamps of rubber, with leather from the instep up. Fastened to these were my Norwegian Bear Claws, a homemade snowshoe with long wooden runners. The Bear Claws, incidentally, saved my life. Without them I wouldn't have lasted a day. <
\For headgear I wore a helmet I had made by sewing two woolen socks together, cutting out an opening for my face. This came down to my shoulders, under my coat, keeping my neck warm and dry. Over this I wore a regular stocking cap.<
\As luck would have it, I was carrying the lunch that day for the three of us. Since my load was light, I had picked up the ten-pound lard pail in which we had packed six sardine sandwiches, one dozen cold sourdough pancakes, three chocolate bars and coffee in a small sack, and had slipped it into a pack saddle I wore on my back. In addition I was carrying a heavy blazer in case it was cold in the mine, and a small Swedish stove on which to cook our coffee and beans. In my pocket I carried a watch and a knife. The watch wouldn't do much more than tick off the minutes between me and Eternity, but without my knife I would have gone hungry with all that food on my back.<
\Lying there, like a fish frozen in a slab of ice, I wondered anxiously about Otto and Sutherland. Had they been buried, too, and had they escaped? If they were alive, they must be out there somewhere, looking for me. But if they were dead? The jig would be up. Nobody on earth would know where to look for me and I would slowly freeze to death. In the spring, when the snow melted, our bodies would be found. I didn't like that idea.<
\The avalanche had struck us at the base of Lucky Chance Mountain. The newspapers, later on, made much of that fact, but at the time I wouldn't have given a nickel for my luck. I needed a shovel, and luck wouldn't bring me that. I had no tools to work with, only that right hand which I had finally freed. With it I clawed the snow out from under my body, kicking it behind me with my right leg. My left leg wouldn't move. The oilskin pants had pulled up a little, leaving the jeans exposed. They had frozen fast to the snow. <
\Breathing wasn't so difficult now. I could even spare breath occasionally to call. But no answer came. Away off in the distance I heard a sound, a pack-tamp, pack-tamp, and my spirits rose. Otto and Sutherland must have escaped the slide and were digging for me. I listened intently. But the noise wasn't regular. It came at odd intervals, not as the sound of a shovel should be. Slowly it dawned on me that it wasn't rescuers I was hearing but the snow as it packed more tightly about me. Something relentless in the sound of that packing snow stirred my anger. It might beat me in the end, but, By Glory, I wasn't licked yet. And I set grimly to work once more. <
\As I paused for breath a little later, it seemed all at once as if my prison had grown lighter. A crack of daylight appeared at the edge of the great rock ahead. A foot farther up another hole was opening up, letting in a draught of fresh air. As I watched I caught a glimpse of blue sky. <
\In my excitement I shouted aloud, again and again. Finally there came an answer. To my ``Hell-oo-oo'' there came a faint ``Hell-oo-oo'' in return. With my heart pounding madly, I listened again. It wasn't repeated. I decided I was being fooled again. But stubbornly I kept on calling and this time there was no mistaking Otto's voice. I heard him shout, ``We'll have you out in a little while.''<
\``We''? Sutherland must be all right, too. I drew a shuddering breath of relief. A few minutes more and this horrible nightmare would be over. I stopped digging for a moment and drank in the fresh air as a thirsty man laps up water. I filled my lungs again and again.<
\Then I heard Sutherland's voice for the first time. He must have been standing within ten feet of me for I heard him say, ``Otto, you go get the shovels while I look for Fred.''<
\Those were the only words I heard him speak, for just then there came another WHOOSH, which I felt rather than heard, and my air-holes disappeared forever. A second avalanche had swept down just as rescue was at hand.<
\For a moment I had actually seen the blue sky. I had breathed the fresh air. I had heard the voices of my companions and knew that help was near. Now all that was changed. My air supply was cut off again and I was breathing with difficulty through my mouth. My prison was darker than ever, and off in the distance I could hear that ominous pack-thump, pack-thump beginning again as this fresh snow began settling about me. Yet that momentary contact with the world outside had done much to raise my spirits. I knew that both Otto and Sutherland were alive. They had heard my voice and knew where to look for me. But mercifully I did not know how serious that second slide was, nor that I was to be abandoned for dead. Had I known of the long hours still ahead, and on what a slender thread my chances of life hung, I wonder now whether I could have stuck it out.<
\The first slide occurred at nine o'clock in the morning. The second came at noon. After three hours I was still lying on my face, able to move only half my body. I was exasperated by my helplessness. Digging with one hand was such slow business. And cold, too. Impatiently I kicked with my foot, and remembered the Bear Claws. Those runners, made of sturdy spruce, would furnish a fine tool to dig with. The problem was, how to get at them. Like a contortionist, I doubled up my right leg as close to my body as possible, reached down and wrenched off the snowshoe. Fortunately it had come untied. With my teeth I gnawed and tore at the wood until I had broken off a runner. Using it as a paddle, I made much better progress and soon I had freed all my body except my left arm which was fastened to my side by the straps of the pack saddle. The pack was frozen fast to the ``ceiling'' of my cell.<
\I twisted my head and tried gnawing through the leather thong, but it was like trying to chew through a buffalo hide. I thought of the knife in my pocket, but it was out of reach. Maddeningly enough, I could barely touch it with my fingertips. I began pulling up the lining of my pocket until I could grasp the knife. Holding it in my teeth, I opened the blade. It dropped out of my nervous fingers. In a cold sweat I retrieved it and slashed the strap that held the pack saddle before any other disaster overtook me.<
\It was late afternoon by now and I was hungry. In the darkness I fumbled for the lunch pail and and found it completely telescoped. Everything in it except the top sandwich was pulverized, and well mixed with coffee grounds. But it was food and I was grateful for that. Hungrily I devoured two cold pancakes and a chocolate bar as I waited for rescue. I had no way of knowing, of course, that at that moment Otto and Sutherland, bruised and exhausted, were staggering away from me on frost-bitten feet. They were heading down to the shelter cabin, having given me up for dead.<
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^sf03 Haleys & Silver Bay, Part 26 -- This continues Fred Easley's story of his ordeal after he was buried by a snow slide at Silver Bay in December 1936. The story was first published in Esquire Magazine, April 1939. Reprinted courtesy of Esquire Magazine and the Hearst Corporation.<
^sf03REPORTED DEAD, Part 2=
^sf01\By the increased darkness I could tell that darkness had fallen. I took out my watch to look at the time but couldn't see the dial. I tried to strike a match but there wasn't enough oxygen for it to burn. I held the watch to my ear and discovered it had stopped ticking. By that I knew it was past eight-thirty because that was the time I always wound it. I wound it now from force of habit and returned it to my pocket. There was something companionable about its ticking.<
\My hands were cold as ice. I dropped my knife and one of my paddles and in the darkness never was able to find them. After that, whenever I stopped to rest I stuck the remaining paddle upright in the snow, close to my right knee, where I could reach down and touch it. If I lost that, I lost my one slim chance to pull through.<
\My feet were soaking wet and laboriously I took off my shoe pacs and wrung the water out of my sox. But my hands were so numb I had difficulty getting the sox and pacs back on. I decided not to risk that again.<
\I was suffering, too, from thirst. My lips were chapped and dry. I scraped ahead of me for clean snow and tried chewing it, but that brought little satisfaction. Then I held some of it under my tongue and let it melt slowly. That was better. The lunch I ate slowly, at intervals, whenever I was hungry. I wasn't particularly saving it. I needed energy for digging, and warmth. Besides, I expected help would come long before the food was gone. It wasn't until I had scraped the last crumb from the pail that I was to regret this.<
\In spite of my hopes of rescue, I kept digging, scraping slowly away at those frozen walls, inching my way like a mole, nearer and nearer to the surface. The snow was packed so solidly it made the going difficult. Instead of scooping it out handfuls at a time, as you might suppose, I had to chip it away, particle by particle. It was like the ice which forms in an electric refrigerator. And as I worked I kept hearing, at intervals, that now familiar pack-tamp. I would stop and prick up my ears, thinking that this time it might be the sound of a shovel. It never was.<
\Monday morning came. I had been buried for twenty-four hours and I was still digging. Lying on my stomach, propped up on one elbow, I would scrape the snow away in front of me, pack it down beneath me, and wriggle forward an inch at a time. Never at any time was my cell as large or as commodious as a Pullman berth. There was barely room to turn over, never enough to sit erect. I couldn't spare the strength for a single movement that did not carry me forward and upward. Breathing was too difficult.<
\Monday afternoon dragged by. Sutherland had reached Sitka by then, still suffering from shock and exposure but intent on getting a party organized to recover my body. A siren sounded the alarm and men and women rushed from their homes and shops to learn what had happened. Sutherland told of the snow slide that had taken the life of one and threatened the lives of two others. He told of the first slide in which Otto and I had disappeared completely and he himself had been buried except for two finger tips.<
\Those finger tips saved his life and Otto's. With them he clawed open an air hole just before he was on the point of losing consciousness. Otto's hand was on Sutherland's foot but he was unconscious. Sutherland enlarged the hole and Otto revived when he got air. But it took them nearly three hours to dig themselves out of the packed snow. Then they started looking for me. Otto claimed he heard my voice, but later they were not so sure about that.<
\Just as they began their search another avalanche caught them. It knocked them some distance down the canyon. Sutherland was thrown free but all that showed of Otto was one arm sticking out of the snow. It was dark by the time he was freed. Their feet were frostbitten and unless they got down to the cabin quickly they were in danger of freezing to death. By then they had no hope that I had survived. By the time they reached the cabin, Otto was in bad condition and stayed there. Sutherland, despite his bruises and exhaustion, headed for Sitka to sound the alarm so my body could be recovered and a telegram sent to my mother. That telegram, incidentally, reached Mother as she was trimming the Christmas tree.<
\In Sitka, U. S. Commissioner Henry Bahrt was gathering men and provisions to go to Silver Bay to retrieve the corpse. At the same time the presses in various places were grinding out papers with such headlines as, ``Sitka Man Loses Life in Snow Slide'' and ``Alaskan Buried Alive in Snow; Two Others Escape.'' And the ``body'' was devouring the last unsavory cold pancake, under twenty-one feet of snow.<
\I had been buried now for thirty-six hours. In all, I had tunneled fifteen feet with that scrap of broken wood. But there was six feet to go. Six feet, about the length and depth of a grave. And my strength was beginning to wane. I seemed to tire so easily. Each stroke was so much more of an effort. And my feet were so numb that I had to stop frequently to rub them to restore the sluggish circulation. They became bruised and sore from so much rubbing. My hands were troubling me, too. The cold was creeping up my arm and it would only be a question of time until I could no longer hold the paddle. The elbow I leaned on had a sore from the constant pressure on the packed snow.<
\About that time I became aware of a new danger. I was growing sleepy. The temptation to doze was hard to resist. But I knew the race would be lost the moment I succumbed and slept. There would be no awakening on this earth. Doggedly I kept pecking away with my paddle, and somehow the night passed and Tuesday morning dawned.<
\I had been buried for forty-eight hours, two days and two nights, and the strain was beginning to tell. I began having hallucinations. I closed my eyes for a moment and when I opened them I seemed to be in a large cavern with a domed roof. Excitedly I raised my paddle toward the roof to make sure I wasn't dreaming. It hit the snow a few inches above my head. I couldn't believe it, it was all so clear, even to a crack that straggled across the dome.<
\Wearily I closed my eyes again. I opened them to find the cave still there only larger now and hung with glittering festoons. It was all amazingly beautiful -- only none of it was there! I kept telling myself it wasn't true, that if I closed my eyes and opened them suddenly the vision would vanish. I tried that trick. The dome was still there. I told myself I would not look for that crack, then promptly peered over my shoulder. I groaned when I saw it. Feebly I picked up my paddle and made another stab at the snow.<
\It must have been almost noon on Tuesday when I dropped off to sleep. What was the use, anyway? Otto and Sutherland must have been buried in the last slide or surely they would have found me before this. Freezing to death was a painless end, I had always understood. Trying to keep from freezing was the painful part. Why prolong the struggle? All I need do was close my eyes and drift off to sleep.<
\I opened my eyes for one last look around. Somehow that crack in the ceiling obsessed me. I wondered, crazily, if it was the crack of doom you were always hearing about. I stole a last look over my shoulder. There it was, all right, widening as I watched, inviting my soul into the next world.<
\With a shrug I gave up and settled myself to sleep. The last sound I heard was that far away pack-tamp, pack-t--. No, by Golly, it wasn't tamp. There was a ringing sound this time, the sound a shovel makes when it strikes a rock.<
\For a moment my heart stopped beating. I tried not to believe my ears. Like my eyes, they were playing tricks. Soon I'd be hearing heavenly music. But there it went again. The sound was certainly different. And it came with regularity, too. Instead of a pack it was more of a chunk, like the sound of a shovel being thrust into a drift, followed by a sucking sound when it is withdrawn.<
\I raised my voice in a shout. Even to my own ears it sounded feeble. I wasn't surprised when there was no response. Later I was told it was heard by one of the men in the rescue crew who thought it was another worker calling to him. My heart was thumping with excitement and a new burst of energy seized me. I grabbed my paddle and began to dig like mad, but back now, in the direction from which I had come. Once in my tunneling I had started off to the left, then, thinking better of it, had changed direction. That niche was still there and, by doubling myself up like a jackknife, I was able to turn around and work in the opposite direction. The men I could hear were directly on my trail. They told me later they had come across one of my black hairs in the snow.<
\The sound of digging grew plainer and plainer. I expected daylight to break through at any moment.<
\All at once I ducked back, just as a brown shovel scrunched down a foot in front of my face. When it was withdrawn an opening appeared through which the sunlight streamed. With my stocking cap in one hand and my paddle in the other, I thrust my face through that opening, grinning from ear to ear.<
\``Gee, Fellows,'' I said to the two men standing there, shovels stopped in mid-air, ``I'm sure glad to see you.''<
\For a moment they were frozen in their tracks. You could have knocked them over with a snow flake when I crawled through the opening under my own steam. Then one of them dropped his shovel and yelled, ``My God, men, Fred's alive! Fred's alive.''<
\I can still see the blue of that Alaskan sky, flecked with fleecy white clouds. Off in the distance the sun was shining on Sitka Sound. And I thought, ``What a perfect day for a resurrection.''<
\The men had been digging for four hours before they found me. Sutherland was directing the work. With wooden pegs he had outlined a circle fifty feet in diameter. Somewhere in that circle, he said, they would find me. He was one hundred per cent right, for they found me exactly in the center.<
\I thought I could walk down to the shelter cabin, supported on either arm, but when I tried to stand on my feet my legs buckled under me. I had to be carried down in an Arctic sled. For sixteen hours those men worked over me, in shifts, to restore circulation to my hands and feet. Then they took me to the Pioneers' Home Hospital. I didn't even have a sniffle the first three days. Then I caught a cold from the other patients.<
^sf03\Fred Easley, who had been born in California, came to Sitka in 1934. After his escape he continued to live in Sitka but it is uncertain whether he ever returned to the mine at Silver Bay. He worked as a taxi driver and a fisherman and in the fall of 1965 he was working for the City of Sitka. He became ill and went to Seattle where he died in the Virginia Mason Hospital on December 11, 1965. According to his obituary in The Sitka Sentinel he was born on Sept. 16, 1902, which would have made him 34 when he was buried under the snowslide, rather than the 28 reported in his story, above. His remains were returned to Sitka and a funeral was conducted by the Sitka lodge of the Loyal Order of Moose, of which he had been the Governor. Survivors included his two daughters, Pamela and Paula Easley.<
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^sf03\Haleys & Silver Bay, Part 27 --^sf01 From 1932 until 1937, the president and treasurer of the Edgecumbe Development Company, Miss Charlotte Taylor, divided her time between Sitka and Pasadena, California. She was the chief promoter of the company which had acquired a number of mining claims at Silver Bay from Thomas, Julia and Charles Haley in exchange for stock in the company.<
\But the country was still suffering the Great Depression and buyers of stock in a distant gold mine were getting harder to find. So in 1937 she settled in the Los Angeles area and worked for Universal Studios and as secretary to the actress Deanna Durbin.<
\Sitka, economically, had suffered with the rest of the country, but by 1940 that was changing fast. In 1938 the Navy had begun making improvements on Japonski Island and in 1940 it let a contract to build a major base there. In 1939 Sitka had acquired, for the first time, a telephone system and a bank. In 1940 the new Sitka Hotel was ready to open, the Civilian Conservation Corps was changing the waterfront by filling a section of beach to create Totem Square, and the voters approved the purchase of the local utilities by the city.<
\Miss Taylor had kept in close touch with her Sitka stockholders, the Haleys, and learned of the brightening economic outlook. Her company had several thousand dollars from the sale of stock in California, and there was a possibility that more money could be raised in Sitka. She decided to return north to attempt further development of the Silver Bay property and she arrived back in Sitka about the middle of 1940.<
\A Straub ball mill with crusher, amalgamating plates and concentrating table were purchased for just under $1,800. A small crew put up a mill building and got the equipment in place. W. H. Rowe, who owned the boat ST. LOUIS and a donkey engine, appears to have been the lead man. He not only moved the machinery but logged enough trees to make 25,000 board feet of lumber, which he cut in the Sheldon Jackson School sawmill. That was enough lumber for the 16 by 40 mill building and some other construction. Stumps were blasted out and a foundation for the mill built and by mid-November 1941 the machinery was running.<
\There then proved to be another problem. The specifications of the mill called for from 8 to 16 horsepower to operate it to capacity. Miss Taylor picked the lower figure and bought an 8-horsepower Atlas-Imperial gas engine. It did not produce enough power to run the mill efficiently and she wrote to the company to learn whether there was a way to increase the engine's power. She was told it was impossible, and by the time that exchange had ended the United States was in the war and engines were not available.<
\While working at Universal Studios Miss Taylor had met Glenn Hamilton Morgan who was also employed in the movie industry. He had spent the summer of 1937 in Alaska, working for the Sunshine Mining Company on a placer operation near Haines. He was also a man with the right ideas: the easiest way to make money from mining claims was to sell stock in them. He would devote much of the remainder of his life in that endeavor.<
\Morgan followed Miss Taylor to Sitka and they were married here on June 11, 1942. Her mother, Mrs. Florence Taylor, came north for the wedding and she stayed on at Sitka and at Silver Bay where the Edgecumbe Development Company had its camp. When there was a crew at the camp, Charlotte and her mother did the cooking, but between the draft and the work on Japonski Island it became almost impossible to hire a crew, and operations were shut down for the duration.<
\In town, Charlotte served for a short time as City Clerk, later supervised a child care center, and was active in a number of organizations. Glenn was drafted into the Army in July 1943 and served until October 1945, all of it at Fort Ray on Charcoal Island.<
\One event of the war years was the death of Julia Haley, reportedly of a heart attack, on January 19, 1943. She died in the little house on Lincoln Street, on the site of present St. Gregory's Church, where she lived with her brothers, Thomas and Charles. She was buried a week later from St. Gregory's Chapel on Baranof Street, with Father Patrick J. O'Reilly conducting the service. Depending upon which birth year is accepted, she was between 64 and and 67 years old and except for the time she spent at school in Victoria had lived her entire life in Sitka. A brief obituary in the Sitka Sentinel said she was to be interred in the National Cemetery near her mother. Her grave site, however, has been something of a mystery because her name did not appear on the local list of National Cemetery burials. The mystery was cleared up through the persistent efforts of Julia's niece, Mrs. Margo Britch, with the help of a grand niece, Mrs. E. Marion Sim, who lives in Canada. National Cemeteries are administered by the Veterans Administration and its headquarters reported that Julia had been buried in the same grave with her mother. It is understood that the grave has now been marked with both names.<
\With World War II at an end, the Edgecumbe Development Company resumed the work at Silver Bay. The corporation's balance sheet on December 31, 1945, showed these figures on the Asset side: Cash, $27.24; Property, $26,761.00; Equipment, $4,549.56; Incorporation expense, $1,245.21; Deferred production expense, $15,108.06; Building, $673.19; Deficit, $7,742.49. The ``Property'' category undoubtedly represents the mining claims, but one wonders who did the appraisals.<
\On the debit side the figures were: Advances received, $1,364.85; Notes payable, $1,220.00; Capital stock, $53,522.00.<
\No list of stockholders of either that or a later date has been found. Charlotte and the three Haleys were issued a total of 6,000 shares under the trust agreement of 1934, with all of it issued in Charlotte's name. They may have earned more later and in the 1930's some of the employees were paid partly in stock. But the bulk of the 53,522 shares represented sales to individuals, most of them in California. And the sale of stock continued, so that by July 31, 1949, a total of 131,929 shares were outstanding.<
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^sf03\Haleys & Silver Bay, Part 28 --^sf01 Despite the fact that the Edgecumbe Development Company had, by 1949, disposed of 131,929 shares of its stock with a face value of $1 a share, it was continuously short of funds. A letter went out to the stockholders pointing out that the stock was not assessable, but asking for a contribution of $5 per 100 shares ``to help keep the company going.'' In 1951 Charlotte Morgan, president of the corporation, was trying to borrow $250 on her life insurance, apparently to satisfy the demands of a credit bureau.<
\Charlotte's husband, Glenn Morgan, appears not to have been an officer of the corporation but was one of its main promoters. Long time Sitka residents remember that Glenn put on his best suit, carried a brief case, and met the steamboats at the wharf, buttonholing passengers as they came off, trying to sell them stock in the corporation. And he apparently annoyed more than a few Sitka residents with his attempts to peddle them what they considered to be totally worthless shares in Edgecumbe Exploration Company.<
\There were other annoyances, too. Almost from the time of the American occupation, Silver Bay had been a favorite place for Sitkans to visit. People went there to prospect for gold, to fish in Salmon Lake and its outlet stream, to hunt, or just to climb around in the mountains. After the arrival of Morgan, visitors found many ``No Trespass'' signs posted here and there, some of them on a trail built by the Forest Service. Buildings had signs warning that they had been booby-trapped with dynamite, and sometimes visitors to the head of the bay were met by Morgan, a gun strapped to his hip, who warned them away because of possible dynamite blasts.<
\None of that made the couple overly popular in town. They constantly complained that their mail was being intercepted and that the mayor and city council were ``against'' them. Charlotte ran for the city council in 1948 and fell far short, with only 139 votes. She wrote that Winn Goddard, Harvey Brown, Clithero and Dr. Charteris ``pulled all the tricks they knew to keep me from getting the seat.'' It may have been about then that she began to study law with the LaSalle Extension School, but she apparently never finished the course.<
\But the Morgans, operating as Edgecumbe Exploration, did spend some money at Silver Bay. They hired a small crew, paying them partly in cash and partly in stock in the company. They built a sawmill, a compressor house, an assay office, a bullet-proof powder house, a two-story house with eight rooms and inside bath, wood sheds and a wharf. The sawmill cut some 40,000 feet of lumber, used in the construction. A Buda diesel engine was purchased to run the compressor and they acquired a speed boat for trips to town. A little later, in 1950, they got a larger boat, described as a 25-foot cabin work boat. They were still doing a lot of juggling of finances and late in 1949 paid off a $9,816 note with stock in the company.<
\Charles Haley worked as a member of the Edgecumbe Exploration crew for a time but had to give it up because of his health. He suffered at least one heart attack. Tom Haley, so far as can be determined, did not work for the company, or at least did not get paid by the company. He had been employed by the Army during the war, but was laid off when the Army facilities on Japonski and other islands were turned over the Alaska Native Service after the war ended.<
\After the war Flora Haley, Charles' wife, returned to Sitka for the first time in many years. She had been living in Anchorage with her daughter, Mrs. Margo Britch, but had found the winters there too rigorous. She was a registered nurse and may have worked at that for a time. It is known that she worked as desk clerk at the Sitka Hotel. Mrs. Britch also came down from Anchorage for a visit. During that visit, Charlotte Morgan wrote to her mother in California that Mrs. Britch had mentioned that despite the fact that they were stockholders, her father and her uncle Tom had nothing to live on. ``I said, yes, that was too bad,'' Charlotte wrote. ``But our company couldn't pay either man for doing nothing; our money is for one purpose only and our great purpose in life is to get the mill going, so they will have something coming in.''<
\Charles was still trying to get title to what was known as the Haley homestead, just east of Indian River. His father had staked the claim at an early date but had never fulfilled all of the requirements for receiving a patent to the land. The Land Office turned down Charles' final request in 1950. Charlotte blamed that on ``all the lies that gang has told the Land Office about us.'' She didn't name the gang.<
\Charles, who had spent most of his 80 years promoting the search for the elusive gold of Silver Bay and was the vice president of the Edgecumbe Exploration Company, suffered a stroke on March 3, 1956, and died on March 15. He had made Sitka his home his entire life and had attended the Sitka Training School, the Russian School, and the public school when it was established. He spoke Russian and Tlinget. Charles was especially remembered in Sitka for his magnificent singing voice. He had sung in the choirs of the Catholic, Episcopal and Presbyterian Churches and in many minstrel shows and other entertainments in Sitka. Graveside services at the Pioneer Cemetery were conducted by the Rev. Henry Chapman of the Episcopal Church. Survivors were his brother, Thomas; his wife, Flora Haley, and his daughter, Mrs. Peter Britch.<
\Thomas Colby Haley was the oldest of the three offspring of Nicholas and Ellen Haley who spent their lives in Sitka, and he was the last to go. He had arrived in Sitka at the age of two, had seen Alaska evolve from a possession to a District and then to Territory, and was close to seeing it become a State. Tom spent a lot of his years at Silver Bay and undoubtedly knew that rugged terrain as well as any one person ever did. Ever since the early 1930s he had been a stockholder in the Edgecumbe Exploration Company, but that did him little good and his last years were lived in penury. He entered the Sitka Pioneers' Home on August 7, 1956, and died there on September 29, just a week short of his 90th birthday. There was a requiem mass in the Pioneers' Home Chapel and he was buried in the Pioneer Cemetery.<
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^sf03Haleys & Silver Bay, Part 29 --^sf01 The operations of the Edgecumbe Exploration Company were not the only ones at Silver Bay in the 1930s and 1940s.<
\Back in 1922 Peter Romanoff and Andrew Dixon located a claim they named the Big Chief about a half mile beyond the head of Green Lake. The following year two additional claims were located by Romanoff, Dixon, John Sandman and S. H. Loraine, a mining engineer.<
\The claims were named the Romanoff No. 1 and No. 2. Sandman and Loraine dropped out of the picture and Romanoff and Dixon carried on, grubstaked by Nicholas Bolshanin, the Customs officer at Sitka. Peter Romanoff died in 1924 and Dixon did the annual assessment work for a few year. He died in 1932.<
\Bolshanin then got a longtime miner, Steve Tus, interested in the property. Tus built a cabin on the beach near where the power plant is today and and spent several seasons working on the Green Lake claims. He finally gave up on them and turned his attention to the Lucky Chance and associated claims, first located by Nicholas Haley some 60 years earlier. They had last been under the ownership of the Providence and Sitka Mining Company, which had gone broke. Sitka creditors of that company held onto the claims into the 1920s by doing the annual assessment work on them. After that they were open to anyone who wished to stake them.<
\The Edgecumbe Development Company, perhaps prudently for their purposes, did not touch the Lucky Chance group. Two mining companies, with stockholders scattered from coast to coast, had failed to make them pay and any new firm associated with them might have had difficulty selling stock.<
\Steve Tus didn't seem to be bothered by that. He formed his own corporation, the Lucky Chance Gold Mining Company. Tus was president; Nels Bredvik, a Sitka merchant, was vice president; Nick Bolshanin was secretary; and Nels Drugg and Andrew Tus were directors. Drugg was an operator at the Sawmill Creek power plant, and Andrew was a son of Steve and lived in Butte, Montana. So far as I can learn, they did not attempt to sell stock in the new company. There was talk of installing a small mill, but the war came on and that was postponed. Steve Tus died during or soon after the war but I have not discovered the date and his name is not in the available burial records.<
\Steve's interest in the Lucky Chance Gold Mining Company was inherited by his son, Andrew. Whether Andrew came to Alaska in the 1940s is not known, but he did enter into some correspondence with Glenn Morgan of the Edgecumbe Development Company. He was fearful that someone would ``jump'' the Lucky Chance claims. Morgan reassured him and offered some help.<
\On June 4, 1950, he wrote to Tus: ``Yesterday three of us went on the Redoubt Trail and I got a good look at the south side of Lucky Chance with my glasses. Still covered in deep snow. When that goes, if I can get down to bare earth, a few sticks of dynamite will move yards of material and make a good showing. In two days two or three of us can do several hundred dollars worth of assessment work. In order to jump a property they have to prove the work wasn't done. You don't have to prove you did it; just file an affidavit that you did. I'll do my best to make it thorough and legal for you, Andy, as our presence alone is worth $20 a day each for labor, plus any movement of earth.''<
\It is not known whether Glenn Morgan moved any earth at the Lucky Chance that year but if he did it appears to have been the last work done there in those years.<
\It was in 1983 that the Edgecumbe Development Company last filed notices that assessment work had been done on its mining claims, but just when active development work ceased is unclear. In 1952 Charlotte Morgan, the president of the company since it was organized in the 1930s, went to work for the Public Health Service on Japonski Island. She worked in the medical supply procurement and travel department of that agency until 1975. She was active in a number of civic organizations including the Sitka Historical Society and was a proponent of turning the old Native School on Katlian Street to a museum. She died at the Sitka Community Hospital on November 27, 1983, following a lengthy illness and is buried in the National Cemetery.<
\The death of Charlotte Morgan seems to have been the effective end of the Edgecumbe Exploration Company. The last filing of an intention to hold the claims was filed in 1983. Her husband, Glenn Hamilton Morgan, who worked as a longshoreman for a time, died at Sitka on September 15, 1992, at the age of 82. He also was buried in the National Cemetery.<
\The demise of Edgecumbe Exploration did not bring to an end the interest in Silver Bay. In September 1981 the Phillips Petroleum Company of Denver, Colorado, and Anchorage, filed locations notices on a block of 184 lode mining claims. The firm also leased the subsurface rights to the claims from the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. The block of claims extended from tidewater at the head of the bay up to and over the top of Lucky Chance Mountain. Each claim was named LCM followed by a four digit number. For several years an engineering firm flew men down from Anchorage each summer and did some work on the claims, including core drilling. Evidently the results were unsatisfactory. At any rate, Phillips Petroleum dropped its leases in October 1993.<
\A small block of claims in the area of the former Edgecumbe Exploration Company holdings is owned by John E. and Sandra K. Burgess of Sitka, who hold them more as a hobby than in expectation of great riches. There is, after all these years, only one patented claim in the area. This is the Stewart lode, first developed in 1879 and with most of the machinery still in place. It is owned, at last report, by Sheldon Jackson College.<
\In the 123 years since the first claims were staked at Silver Bay a great deal of money has been sunk into the ground there. It came from Wisconsin and Michigan, Rhode Island and New York, California and other areas, and some of it came from the pockets of Sitka residents. More than a few Sitka men did a lot of prospecting and strenuous development work, nearly all of it fruitless. The inflow of money from other areas did contribute substantially to Sitka's economy. It is difficult to sort out which of the developers had been bitten by the gold bug and truly believed in the futures of their properties, and which were simply running a scam. But none of them got rich.<
\What is the future of mining at Silver Bay? Who knows? Modern transportation, such as helicopters, and modern equipment, such as core drills, have greatly simplified the testing of mineral ground, even in remote areas. Perhaps there is a pot of gold somewhere under all that rock.<
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\^sf03Haleys & Silver Bay, Part 1 --^sf01 At least a couple of dozen families settled in Sitka from outside Alaska between 1867 and 1880. Some of them stayed for a few years, some for more than a few, but it was Nicholas Haley and his offspring who kept the family name alive in Sitka for something on the order of 85 years.<
\It is next to impossible to write about the Haley family at Sitka without telling about their mining activities, and especially about those at Silver Bay. There were, however, a number of other mining developments at Silver Bay in early years, but this series will deal only with those in which the Haleys were directly involved.<
\There are numerous discrepancies in the available records of the Haley family, including the census returns and newspaper stories, so that their story does not always exactly dovetail together. For some of the information I owe much to a great-granddaughter of Nicholas and Ellen Haley. She is Mrs. E. Marion Sim whose home is at St. Albert, Alberta, Canada. She has assiduously pursued her family history and has been generous in sharing such information as she has discovered.<
\Nicholas Haley was born in County Kildare, Ireland, the son of John and Brigida Tesdal Haley. He was born as early as 1836 and as late as 1839, depending upon which document is used. His age was listed as 21 on November 30, 1857, at Rochester, New York, when he enlisted in the United States Army to serve for five years. He was illiterate and signed the enlistment document with ``his x mark.''<
\He was assigned to Battery M of the 3rd Artillery and later transferred to Battery I of the same regiment.<
\It is reported that Haley was with the Army units that built the Mullan Road from Fort Benton in Montana to Fort Walla Walla in Washington in 1860. That was real frontier country and some Indian fighting may have been involved. It also may have been when Haley first became interested in gold mining. Gold had been discovered near Deer Lodge, Montana, in the 1850s.<
\Haley was in the Army until November 13, 1862, so 19 months of his Army service was during the Civil War. According to his statement in a land claim some years later he ``fought in the Civil War in 1861-62,'' but no record has been found of where he fought.<
\He received his discharge as a private at Alcatraz Island, then an Army post, on San Francisco Bay. Less than two weeks later, on November 24, he married Helena Ryan, born in Ireland, the daughter of Michael and Maria Anna Donnigan Ryan. The name Helena appears in the marriage record, which is in Latin; in the Sitka records she was Ellen Mary. She was born on September 14, 1841 (1843 in one census).<
\Ellen Mary was a nurse during the Civil War according to statements made many years later, after her death, by her only daughter, but no other information regarding that has been found.<
\During the next nearly eight years, Haley apparently worked in the gold fields of Northern California and Nevada. The Haleys' first son was born sometime in 1863 and was named John with the initial N. A second son was born to them in Nevada in May 1866 and was named Edward J. In the years before 1870 four more Haley children were born in the Rio Vista/Vallejo area: Annie, Joseph, Frank and Mary. The latter two may have been twins. All died about the same time, but whether the cause was an epidemic or some other catastrophe is not known. The parish records were destroyed when the church burned.<
\As with the other four Haley children who lived to adulthood, there is confusion as to when Thomas Colbert Haley was born. His application for admission to the Pioneers' Home in 1956 lists his birth date as October 5, 1866. The census taken by the Navy early in 1881 lists his age as 12, which would make for a birth year of 1868. The federal census of 1900 says he was born in September 1872 and the census 10 years later gives the date as September 1873. Three of the records agree that he was born in California; the Navy census is silent on that subject. To add to the confusion about the birth dates of his younger sister and brother, the Pioneers' Home record states that he arrived in Alaska in 1868.<
\On September 12, 1870, at San Francisco, Nicholas Haley, age 34, again enlisted in the Army for a term of five years. He again signed the document with ``his x mark'' and he was assigned to Battery H, 2nd Artillery, which had just been ordered transferred from Sitka to the Presidio at San Francisco. In the summer of 1872 Company H. was ordered back to Sitka to relieve Company I and join Company C. So far as is known, Haley came north at that time.<
\It is less possible to guess when Ellen Haley came to Sitka and this is because of the discrepancies in the birth dates of her two youngest children. Julia E. Haley was born in Alaska in July 1876 according to the federal census of 1900, but in July 1875 according to the census of 1910. Charles A. Haley was born in Alaska in December 1878 according to the 1900 census, but in December 1876 according to the 1910 census. His obituary, when he died in 1956, however, said that ``he was born on his father's Indian River homestead on Christmas Day, 1875.'' The Navy census taken in February 1881 lists his age as four years, which doesn't jibe with any of the other dates.<
\To add to the confusion, if any more is needed, is a question that was asked of the people who were being counted in Alaska for the 1900 census. The question was ``What year did you arrive in Alaska and where did you come from?'' Both Nicholas and Ellen Haley answered, ``In 1879, from Virginia City, Nevada.''<
\One conclusion I have reached after examining a great many census returns is that people answering the questions of the census-taker are likely to say the first things that pop into their minds.<
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\^sf03\Haleys & Silver Bay, Part 2 --^sf01 The best available information is that Nicholas Haley arrived in Sitka in the summer of 1872 with three more years to serve of his five-year Army enlistment. Mrs. Ellen Haley and sons John, Edward and Thomas came to Sitka sometime in the 1870s. Two more children, Julia and Charles, were born in Sitka.<
\A census taken by the Navy in the spring of 1881 has this listing of the Haley family, with their ages: Nicholas, 43; Allen (Ellen) M., 40; John, 18; Edward, 16; Thomas, 12; Julia, 7; Charles, 4.<
\At some date after he arrived in Sitka, Nicholas Haley claimed title to a large tract of land on Lincoln Street. He may have claimed it with soldier's script, a land exchange document issued to many veterans of the Civil War. Or he may simply have squatted on it and held it by right of possession. The original claim extended along Lincoln Street from Dog Creek to the Blarney Stone, when that landmark was in its original location. John Brady later claimed the next land to the east as a homestead and donated it to the Presbyterian Mission for what is now the Sheldon Jackson College campus.<
\In 1887 when it became desirable to have a direct route to what is now the National Cemetery, Nicholas Haley and the Presbyterian Mission each donated a strip of land to form Jeff Davis Street. Still later, in 1914, Haley sold a large piece of his claim to the Mission. That land became the part of the college campus that is west of Jeff Davis Street.<
\In June 1882 Nicholas Haley filed another location notice: ``I claim the 160 acres on the edge of town on my discharge as I served in the Army in '61 and '2. It is on Indian River N. bank, all above high tide. It shall be known as Sitka Park and Haley's Homestead. There is a house on the N. bank of the river.'' The claim was on the Jamestown Bay side of the river and included a portion of the present Sitka National Historical Park. The ``house'' actually stood some distance from the river and was built in 1883 and 1884 of upright poles. It measured 12 by 18 feet and had a single room. So far as can be determined the family never lived there but perhaps some members did camp there in the summer and tended a small garden plot. They also owned some cows that were pastured there.<
\Charles Haley claimed to have been born on Christmas Day 1875 on ``my father's Indian River homestead,'' but according to the Navy census he was five years old when the homestead claim was filed. There was a house on the Lincoln Street property, perhaps a log house, but whether Haley built it is not known. In May 1887 The Alaskan reported that he was building a new house ``near the Mission grounds and adjoining the house he now occupies.''<
\Tom Haley, and perhaps the older boys as well, attended the Sheldon Jackson Institute, as it was then called, as day students for a time in the early 1880s. Except for the Russian school it was the only school in town. After 1886, when Dr. Sheldon Jackson established a public school, Tom, Charles and Julia Haley attended it.<
\Nicholas Haley had worked in the mines in California in the years between his Army service, and it may be that the reason he remained in Sitka after his enlistment expired in 1875 was because of what he saw as a potential for mineral development. Some prospecting had been done before he arrived in Sitka. The first discovery of gold in the Sitka area was reportedly by an ex-soldier named Edward Doyle. He first found gold in float ore in Indian River, then discovered a quartz lode at Silver Bay where he was prospecting with William Dunlap and Frank Mahoney. That may have been as early as 1871 although Doyle did not record a mining claim until 1877.<
\In 1872 Dunlap and Mahoney worked together on a small quartz ledge about a mile from town, on Indian River. They sent some ore samples to San Francisco for assay but the results were unsatisfactory. The first gold lode claims to be recorded at Sitka were at Silver Bay and were located by brothers Allen B. and Edward H. Francis. The location notices were filed for record on December 28, 1874. The brothers were the sons of Allen Francis who for many years was the American consul at Victoria, B.C. Edward Francis had a long career in Alaska, as a fur trader, in government service and as a marine pilot.<
\At least one mining claim, and a very important one, was discovered in 1873 but for some reason was not recorded until 1877. Major Joseph Stewart and A. H. Prince, stationed at Sitka with the Army, discovered what became known as the Stewart lode claim, on May 29, 1873. Nicholas Haley was said to have been with them when the discovery was made. The first stamp mill in Alaska would be erected to crush ore from the Stewart lode.<
\On the same day that the Francis brothers recorded their claims on what they called the Francis lode, they sold a one-third interest in them to Herbert Gaston of Victoria, B.C., and another one-third interest to Nicholas Haley. They received $20 apiece from the sales and that was probably the first money anyone made from Silver Bay mining. The two claims appear to have been on what is now known as Lucky Chance Mountain, which in earlier years was known as Lake Mountain. Two of the three lakes on the mountain, shown on today's maps as Lucky Chance Lakes, were first known as West Francis Lake and East Francis Lake.<
\After Nicholas Haley invested $20 in two Silver Bay claims, he at once set about recouping his investment by selling stock in the claims. Standard lode mining claims are 1,500 feet in length and 600 feet wide. In a custom that had been imported from California and Nevada, the miners, when selling portions of their claims, divided them into 1,500 ``shares,'' each of which represented one foot of the length of the lode.<
\Haley began at once to peddle his portion of the two claims, at $2.50 a share. His first sales were 10 shares to Lieutenant A. B. Dyer of the 4th Artillery, 40 shares to Henry C. Clifford, Army hospital steward, and 40 shares to Captain Ed Field, 4th Artillery. Thus, assuming that he collected cash from the sales, he received $225 on his $20 investment and still had four-fifths of his interest in the claims.<
\It is small wonder that Nicholas Haley saw a great future in Sitka. He had begun a lifelong career of selling stock in mining claims.<
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^sf03\Haleys & Silver Bay. Part 3 --^sf01 After Nicholas Haley had, early in 1875, made a clear profit of $205 on his investment of $20 in two Silver Bay mining claims, he began to stake some claims in his own name.<
\On April 17, 1875, he staked two claims on what he named the Haley Discovery lode ``on the left bank of the small creek flowing into Silver Bay known as Slate Creek.'' He named the claims the Haley and the Haley Extension. The claims were a quarter of a mile west of the Stewart lode, whose discovery he had participated in two years earlier. His next location, on September 21, 1875, was the Bald Mountain lode. It was described as four miles from Silver Bay and apparently was on what is now known as Last Chance Mountain.<
\Haley sold one of the two claims on the Haley Discovery lode to Samuel Miletich, a Sitkan of 1867 vintage and the proprietor of Sitka's classiest saloon. The sales price was not disclosed but the two men formed a partnership to develop both claims. On October 6, 1876, they entered into an agreement with a San Francisco mining engineer named Simeon J. Serebrenikoff. In return for a two-thirds interest in the Haley and Miletich claims he was to sink and timber a shaft 20 feet deep. If the showing at that depth warranted further work, he was to be in charge of operations and receive two-thirds of the net proceeds.<
\Serebrenikoff that fall did sink a shaft 14 feet on the Haley discovery claim, the first of many holes in the rock in Silver Bay. He then returned to San Francisco and on December 13 he wrote Haley and Miletich a letter. The letter clearly shows that English was not his first language. He said: ``The contains of gold in ore is gradually disincreasing from the top to the bottom of the shaft. The assay of ore from the bottom of the shaft has proved $7.38 in silver and $10.04 in gold, or a total of $17.42 per ton. To get one ton of this ore you must work your shaft at least three feet deep. This will give you an idea of the amount of expense. I would not denounce your mine to be without any value, but it requires very expensive exploration. If you want my advice, I advise you to let your mine be idle till the time when any of the other Sitka mines is well explored and developed.''<
\What the engineer's advice apparently boils down to was: ``Your mine isn't much good, but if a good mine is developed in the area, perhaps you can sell it.''<
\Six weeks later Serebrenikoff wrote again, this time to Haley alone and with a somewhat different tack. He said he couldn't see much value in the Miletich claim but thought the Haley claim might have some potential. While he couldn't invest any money himself, he said, he suggested that Haley look around for someone to put up the money for further work.<
\Haley followed the suggestion. He worked his own bailiwick first, selling stock in the various claims, most of it to Army men stationed at Sitka, and to their wives and children. An ingenious salesman, he offered a half-rate for children. At a time when he was peddling his Bald Mountain claim at $2 a linear foot, he sold 10 feet to each May and Susanna Brunn, the daughters of Sergeant Robert Brunn, at $1 a foot. This gimmick might have paid handsome returns in a richer and more populous area, but the pickings in Sitka were meager.<
\Aside from the Customs officers and one or two others, the only men on a payroll in Sitka were the soldiers, and one news story indicates that their pay, in addition to being small, was not very regular. Payday one year was on August 17 when a paymaster arrived from San Francisco. It was the first payday since January 1.<
\But Nicholas Haley, although his pickings were miniscule, had demonstrated that there was more than one way to make money out of ribbons of quartz containing a few specks of gold. Others in Sitka took note and began staking mining claims at Silver Bay and elsewhere. Edwin H. Francis, who had been the first to record a mining claim at Sitka, staked a second claim and so did Sam Miletich. Antonio Cozian, who had piloted ships for the Russian American Company and was a Dalmatian like Miletich, staked a claim in the Green Lake area. Others were Edward Doyle who was said to have made the first gold discovery in the area; Thomas Mooney, another ex-soldier and owner of a saloon in Sitka; and Edmund Bean who a few years later would lead the first party of prospectors over the Chilkoot Pass and into the Yukon River country.<
\Nicholas Haley also staked another claim a mile or so from his Bald Mountain claim. He named the new one the Witch lode. It must have become obvious to him by then that he was not going to be able to finance the opening of a lode gold mine with the penny-ante capital available at Sitka. Early in 1877 he went south and got in touch with the former commanding officer of the Sitka post, Major Joseph Stewart, at Fort Vancouver, Washington.<
\As a result, the Alaska Gold and Silver Mining Company was organized at Portland, Oregon, on March 13, 1877. Haley put into the pot his Bald Mountain claim and Stewart put in the Stewart claim which he had staked in 1873 but which had not yet been recorded at Sitka.<
\Others in the company were C. H. Woodward of Portland as president and two Army officers as directors. They were Lt. Colonel E. J. Bailey and Brevet Colonel Henry Clay Wood. Since the president and directors did not have mining claims to contribute, the presumption is that they were to raise the capital for the machinery and development work. That was slow in coming and it was not until 1879 that the company was able to install a stamp mill at Silver Bay, the first in Alaska.<
\After Haley returned to Sitka he and Miletich continued their association and Miletich went to San Francisco to see how he could do as a salesman. He succeeded in interesting seven men and sold them a group of three claims for an undisclosed amount. The seven were Elia Chielovich, William Bryan, Samuel B. Watson, Walter Hoge, Lazarus Radovich, Samuel Martinovich and Giovanni Olivia. Their names are listed here only because they appear to have been the first ``outside'' capitalists to invest in Alaska mining ventures. They seem to have gotten cured of such adventuring in a hurry, too, because they did not remain associated with Alaska mining for very long.<
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^sf03\Haleys & Silver Bay, Part 4 --^sf01 In 1877 Samuel Miletich of Sitka talked seven San Francisco men into investing in three Silver Bay mining claims owned by Nicholas Haley and himself. They formed the Baranoff Island Mining Company but apparently did not incorporate it. They then entered into an agreement by which Haley and Miletich were to work the property for one third of the net proceeds.<
\When Miletich returned to Sitka from his San Francisco trip, he found that Haley was not satisfied with the arrangements he had made. Haley went to San Francisco himself and secured a verbal agreement that he was to be in charge of operations of the Baranoff Island Mining Company and would receive a salary of $50 a month until such time as the mines began to pay.<
\When Haley returned to Sitka, Giovanni Olivia and Walter Hoge accompanied him to see what they had bought. They staked a couple of additional claims on the Haley and Miletich lodes and a mill site. Olivia also staked the Olivia Plumbago lode claim ``located on Sandy Island one mile southeasterly from Sitka and adjoining T. Haltern's claim on the island.''<
\Plumbago is an ancient name for lead. I have not found that Haltern recorded his claim, but for many years Galankin Island was known in Sitka as Haltern's Island. It is a little difficult, however, to imagine it described as Sandy Island.<
\About that time Samuel Miletich, who may have been the shrewdest man in the lot, sold all of his mining interests to E. Gracini of Victoria and pulled out of the organization. No doubt he considered his Sitka saloon a more reliable gold mine than any of the quartz outcrops at Silver Bay.<
\When Olivia returned to San Francisco he also gave up on Silver Bay and sold half of his interest there to Henry Plagemann and Robert Kanzee for $238.19, which may have represented the cost of his Alaska trip. A year later he sold his remaining interest to the same men for $40.<
\As soon as Hoge and Olivia reached home, Nicholas Haley's pay of $50 a month was stopped. Communications being what they were at that time, it was several months before Haley discovered this. When he did, he gave public notice that the whole thing was a swindle and that the deal was off. But after a couple of months he cooled off and on February 17, 1879, he was on the Chielovich doorstep in San Francisco, doing his best to get back in the good graces of the capitalists.<
\It was undoubtedly with this in view that Haley sold 50 feet of his Last Chance claim at Silver Bay to Mary Catharine Chielovich for one dollar and another 50 feet of the same claim to Jane Chielovich for the same consideration. His move was a winner. On the following day Chielovich, along with Samuel B. Sattson, Water Hoge, Lazarus Radovich, Samuel Martinovich, R. Fanzee, Henry Plagemann and William Bryan organized three mining companies and incorporated them under the laws of California.<
\The three were the Witch Gold and Silver Mining Company, the Haley and Miletich Gold and Silver Mining Company, and the Cozian Gold and Silver Mining Company. Each of the three was incorporated with an authorized capitalization of a million dollars, but a couple of thousand dollars seems to have been all the cash that was ever invested in them.<
\Haley exchanged a two-thirds interest in his Witch claim for stock in the Witch Company, and the others received stock in all three companies in exchange for their various undeveloped mineral holdings at Silver Bay.<
\Another man who was attracted to the presumed bonanza at Silver Bay was Alley Radovich. He may have been a brother or son of Lazarus Radovich. He appeared at Sitka, staked a mining claim at Silver Bay and recorded it as the Globe lode claim; then returned to San Francisco.<
\In his efforts to pump up a mining boom at Silver Bay, Nicholas Haley had help from some unexpected quarters. He was a devout Catholic and when the Right Rev. Charles John Seghers, Bishop of Vancouver Island, visited Sitka, Haley hauled him out to Silver Bay for a look at the mines. The bishop obliged with an interview in The British Colonist upon his return to Victoria. Of one claim he said, ``The shaft is down three feet and with every blast the gold comes out glittering. Specimens assay from $246 to $7500 per ton.''<
\Of the Stewart lode he said, ``The outcrop is six and one-eighth feet wide, with gold glittering all over it.'' According to the Colonist, the bishop was ``showing Silver Bay quartz all around town.''<
\The bishop's golden prose did have some consequences for Sitka. It brought an influx of population. By 1879 the placer mines in the Cassiar district, north of the Stikine River in British Columbia, were beginning to play out and a lot of discouraged miners were looking for a new place to light. The Victoria newspaper was probably the one most read by the miners, and in the summer of 1879, 70 or 80 of them headed for Sitka to see what was going on at Silver Bay.<
\In the meantime, while Nicholas Haley was in San Francisco courting favor with the investors, he ran into a man he had known while working at the St. Patrick mine, before he went to Alaska.<
\The man was George E. Pilz, a mining engineer who was born and educated in Germany. Haley showed him some ore samples and painted a glowing word picture of mining prospects in Alaska. He then took him to see Major Joseph Stewart, who by then was stationed at The Presidio in San Francisco.<
\The major also had some ore samples, from the Stewart lode at Silver Bay. Pilz was impressed by them and he and Haley were able to revive Major Stewart's interest in the Alaska Gold and Silver Mining Company. Pilz was hired to make a trip to Silver Bay to look over the ground and determine what machinery would be required to develop a mine.<
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^sf03\Haleys & Silver Bay, Part 5 --^sf01 The German mining engineer, George Pilz, was hired by the Alaska Gold and Silver Mining Company in the spring of 1879 to evaluate its property at Silver Bay. This was the Stewart lode, located by Major Joseph Stewart, U.S. Army, in 1873.<
\Nicholas Haley and Pilz made what appear to be conflicting reports on the condition of the claim. At San Francisco Haley gave an interview which appeared in the first issue of a new paper, the Alaska Appeal, on March 6. There was a 100-foot tunnel in a quartz ledge that was 14 feet wide, Haley said, plus a shaft down 45 feet. He also mentioned a ``mill'' that was in place and ready to operate. He did not explain that this was an arrastra, a rather crude rock grinder invented by Spanish miners.<
\Pilz wrote to the directors of the company on April 8: ``I feel highly elated over the mines and their outlook, although very little toward opening them has been done.'' The 100 feet of tunnel and 45-foot shaft reported by Haley would seem to have been more than ``very little'' and may have been largely Haley hyperbole. The Pilz report continued: ``Your mill will answer the purpose of testing the qualities of your ores, but only more extensive works will pay profits to your stockholders.''<
\That statement seems to indicate that Pilz had brought with him a small prospecting mill for testing the ores. He apparently delivered the report to the Portland stockholders in person. Some years later he wrote that it had been necessary for him to go south to buy provisions, tools and powder because he could buy nothing in Sitka.<
\``The local merchants,'' he wrote, ``were interested only in peddling molasses and dried fruit for the Indians to make into hoochinoo.''<
\When Pilz returned to Sitka in May 1879 he posted a notice calling a meeting to organize a mining district. The meeting was held in the Custom House on May 18. The organization was formed and Nicholas Haley was elected recorder, with M. D. Ball, the Collector of Customs, as his deputy. He needed a deputy because, as was shown earlier, he was illiterate.<
\Pilz put several crews to work at Silver Bay. They built a wharf and a small warehouse at the head of Silver Bay and hacked out a road to the Stewart claim, a mile or so from the beach. At the claim they put a mill building, an office with assay shop, a bunkhouse and messhouse. Up on the Haley and Miletich claims they built a bunkhouse and on the Witch claim they built a bunkhouse, a blacksmith shop, an arrastra and a building to house it, a tool house and a shaft house.<
\A five-acre landing area was staked by Pilz at the wharf, and Ferdinand Alisky, one of the Cassiar men, filed a claim to a 320-acre townsite. He called it Golden City, but it neither became a city nor produced a great deal of gold.<
\If the assay reports that appeared in a San Francisco newspaper early in 1879 were accurate, it should have produced great quantities of gold. According to The Alaska Appeal, published in San Francisco, the secretary of the Alaska Gold and Silver Mining Company reported these values: from the Stewart tunnel, first assay, $29.82 in gold, $3.14 in silver, per ton of ore. A second assay showed $28.25 in gold. $3.15 in silver. From a section of the ledge that was being called Payshute No. 1, an assay showed $733.98 in gold and $35.78 in silver. Payshute No. 2 yielded an assay of $88.77 in gold, $11.28 in silver per ton.<
\Those were wonderful figures, especially for someone who was trying to sell stock in Silver Bay mining claims. But exactly what was assayed? Did the assays represent the values of a full ton of ore? It seems likely that the assays were made on very small samples from each area, perhaps as little as ten pounds. If a ten-pound sample had been carefully selected to contain bits of ore in which gold could be seen with the naked eye, the assay result when multiplied by 200 would be enormously satisfactory. In the light of later results, something of that sort undoubtedly happened.<
\On the strength of those assay reports, however, the directors of the company ordered a stamp mill and accessory machinery shipped to Silver Bay. On the basis of the information available, it is difficult to determine the sequence of events. Some 30 years later, when he was an old man, Pilz wrote that the machinery for the mill was landed at Silver Bay on Thanksgiving Day, 1879, and included two batteries of five stamps each, two hand concentrators with self-feeders, two boilers 12 feet long with 36-inch shells, a 40-inch turbine water wheel, a chlorine apparatus, and some miscellaneous equipment.<
\Other sources seem to indicate that the machinery did not all come at one time and that one battery of stamps may have been on the ground as early as July. On August 30, The Alaska Appeal published a report signed by J.S., perhaps Joseph Stewart, the original locator of the claim:<
\``The Alaska Gold & Silver Mining Co. is prospering, its shares having advanced 50 cents. Fifteen white miners are employed under the superintendence of Mr. Pilz. The long flume and ditch connecting Francis Lake (today's Green Lake) with the mill was completed July 29. The mill was started the next day, but after a run of four days the dam gave way. On the 9th of August the mill was running again, but Mr. Murphy, the amalgamator, broke his collar-bone in a fall and there was no cleanup. The battery and plates, however, showed well with amalgam and there were also 12 or 13 tons of concentrates valued at $250 to $300 per ton.<
\``A cleanup will be made by September 7, in time for the bullion to be shipped by the next steamer. A force of men has been set to work 75 feet above the tunnel, where the ledge is right between walls, six feet of it pay ore. A crosscut is being made in the ledge at the end of the tunnel, 106 feet from the surface, and although they are 15 feet from the hanging wall, there is no appearance of a footwall yet. Seven feet of this is good pay ore, and rich rock is expected to be found on the footwall. The five additional stamps will soon be in position.''<
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^sf03\Haleys & Silver Bay, Part 6 --^sf01 In August 1879 The Alaska Appeal at San Francisco had carried a glowing report on the prospects of the Stewart mine at Silver Bay.<
\Commander Lester A. Beardslee, USN, then joined that chorus. He had arrived in Sitka with the JAMESTOWN in June and he mentioned the Silver Bay mines in a dispatch to the Sectrtary of the Navy on September 8.<
\He wrote: ``During the last month parties representing San Francisco companies have purchased a one-sixth interest in one slightly developed mine from the original locator for $7,500, and an offer of $20,000 has been made and refused for an undeveloped ledge. Every steamer adds to the number of miners. There is, I believe, ore which will pay, if judiciously worked in every one of a dozen ledges in this vicinity. Lumber, water-power, fuel, labor and food are plentiful and cheap. Every one here who has any money is investing in the mines.''<
\The Beardslee letter was probably buried in Navy Department files; had it been available for circulation it would have been a mine promoter's delight.<
\George Pilz may have been influenced more by what he saw than by what anybody wrote, and he showed faith in the future of Silver Bay mining. On June 28 he had paid Nicholas Haley $100 in gold for substantial interests in four lode claims: the Lake Mountain, Brown Bear, Burning Moscow and Edd. He claimed a mill site on Sawmill Creek ``300 yards below the old sawmill.'' He also staked additional lode claims in the Silver Bay area, alone and with others. He located the Saul claim with Joe Juneau, the Tip-Top with John Brady, John Prior and William Stewart, and the Narrow Neck with Nicholas Haley.<
\Others who staked claims at Silver Bay that fall included M. H. Gibbon, F. L. Alisky, C. A. Alisky, F. Burton, Edwin James, Edmund Bean, Alonzo E. Austin, M. Salomenson, M. P. Berry, S. B. Matthews, William M. Donnelly, T. C. Doran, G. W. Reynolds and Thomas Lloyd.<
\To carry on the development work, Pilz needed miners. He arranged with Ed C. Hughes, the purser of the CALIFORNIA, to bring half a dozen men on each monthly trip, either from ``below'' or from Wrangell where there were men who had been in the Cassiar district of British Columbia. After six years of mining, the gold there was getting scarce.<
\Pilz did not have a very high opinion of the Cassiar bunch or, for that matter, of any placer miners. ``I had great difficulty in getting a crew of hard rock miners,'' he wrote. ``I got a few broke Cassiar miners, but except for two or three they were not hard rock men. Nine out of ten of them could not, and most of them would not, punch a hole in soft muck.''<
\On November 10 Commander Beardslee again reported to the Secretary of the Navy: ``Most of the miners have been driven in from the mountains by the snow, and the town is rapidly developing into a mining camp. The Stewart tunnel is the only mine far enough advanced to continue its operations through the winter. The mill of this mine has run but four days during the month, the water supply having been shut off by ice. I am informed by the superintendent that, owing to the remarkable richness of the rock crushed and treated during the four days, the clean-up amounts to $1,800, gold. It goes down by this steamer which on the up trip brought engines, boilers, etc., to be put up at once.''<
\Beardslee added that November had been wet and cold. Walter Pierce, one of the men who worked for Pilz, wrote: ``Our boarding house was at an elevation of 1200 feet above sea level and was made of lumber with the cracks battened up. Often the victuals would freeze on the table while we were having our meals.''<
\Pilz kept a crew working all through the winter of 1879-80 and at times had from 50 to 60 men mining ore, packing ore from the various mines to the mill, and running the mill. The Sitka men who worked for him included James Hollywood, Andrew and Phillip Kashevaroff and Peter Startzoff.<
\Hollywood, born in Ireland in 1822, had come to the United States in time to fight in the Civil War, and arrived in Sitka in the early 1870s. He married a daughter of Chief Katlean, died in Sitka in 1894, and has numerous descendants in this area.<
\Phillip Kashevaroff, the son of a sea captain and age 35 in 1879, spent most of his working life as a mariner. He died in Sitka in 1904. Andrew Kashevaroff, who may have been a cousin of Phillip, was born at Kodiak in 1863. He later became a priest in the Orthodox Church and still later the curator of the Territorial Museum at Juneau. He married Martha Bolshanin of Sitka and also has descendants here.<
\Peter Startzoff and his younger brother Anescim, were born in Sitka and appear to have been the last of their line.<
\Pilz wrote, many years later: ``There was not enough gold for a paying proposition. I ran the mill till April with ores from the different ledges. I concentrated all the tailings in several ways, put up a small reverberatory furnace and a chlorine process, but the ores were too low grade and rich pockets were too scarce and small.<
\``The Stewart widened to 14 feet and I drifted 200 feet on the foot and hanging walls. On the hanging wall there was a strip six to ten inches wide that would pay $15 per ton, and on the foot wall there was a streak of coarse pyrites which would go over $10 per ton after concentration, but the center of the vein was barren quartz with not a trace in it. So I shut everything down, only keeping a few men doing a little more prospecting.''<
\Whether these ``few men'' did any prospecting around Silver Bay is unclear. We do know that he sent out eight prospecting parties to other parts of Southeastern Alaska. Pilz wrote: ``I sent out the men in pairs with some Indians with each pair. I paid my men four dollars a day and furnished a complete outfit of supplies. The Indians I paid one dollar a day with a ration of three hard tacks and one cup of seal oil.''<
\The prospecting party best known to history, because it was the most successful, was headed by Joseph Juneau and Richard Harris. They made a discovery that resulted in the founding of the city of Juneau and the opening of several lode gold mines.<
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^sf03Haleys & Silver Bay, Part 7 --^sf01 George Pilz, the mining engineer, with all of his trying, was unable to develop a paying mine at Silver Bay. But then, in the 116 years since he gave up on the area, nobody else has developed one, either.<
\When Pilz shut down operations at the Stewart mine in April 1880, he did two things that infuriated Nicholas Haley, the chief promoter of Silver Bay mining. For one, he committed the most heinous crime in the book, from the viewpoint of a mine promoter: He told prospective investors, and the public, that a profitable mine would be impossible at Silver Bay.<
\Haley never forgave him, but he must have been terribly frustrated because there was no newspaper in which he could vent his wrath. There was no newspaper then being published in Alaska. So Haley had to wait until November, 1885, when The Alaskan began publication at Sitka. Haley was ready with articles on Silver Bay for the first two issues. Who wrote them is unknown. As related earlier, Haley was illiterate and could not even sign his name on his Army enlistment papers. The articles, however, appeared over his name. The first article said:<
\``That George Pilz purposely and deliberately set about wrecking the Alaska Gold and Silver Company there is no room for doubt; that he plundered his employers and so managed affairs as to cast a grave doubt on the value of the mine is equally certain. He gave the now known to be rich lodes of Silver Bay a black eye from which it has never been able to recover.''<
\Haley implied that had Pilz wished to, he could have done for Silver Bay what John Treadwell did on Douglas Island.<
\``Had the work initiated in 1877 been honestly conducted, there is little doubt that thousands of stamps would be dropping today within 20 miles of Sitka,'' the Haley article said. His specific charges against Pilz were:<
\The mill was poorly constructed and a large part of the gold was allowed to escape into the tailings.<
\His drift ran away from the paychute and into barren rock, and company money was squandered in exploring other lodes.<
\A portion of the bullion extracted at the mill never reached the company's coffers.<
\The purpose of all this chicanery, according to the Haley article, was so Pilz could get hold of the property for himself. The fact that Pilz never attempted to do so was ignored. So far as can be discovered, Pilz never again even looked toward Silver Bay.<
\The second thing that infuriated Haley was that Pilz filed a mechanic's lien against the Witch, Haley and Miletich and Cozian lode claims, in each of which Haley had an interest. Pilz claimed he had expended $3,411.13 for lumber, tools and supplies in developing the three properties and had received only $1,097 from the owners. That amount included his salary of $150 a month. There was at that time no court in Alaska in which Pilz could foreclose the lien, and there is no record that he pursued it after a court was established in 1884 or that he ever collected any of the money he claimed was due him.<
\It is not known whether Haley made any effort to run the mill on the Stewart property after Pilz left. He did, apparently, continue mining on a small scale, and to sell stock, when he could find a buyer, in some of the claims at Silver Bay. A few years later he was making an occasional shipment of selected ore to San Francisco for milling. He owned a mule that he had purchased from the Army when it abandoned Sitka in 1877, but whether he used it in packing ore to the beach at Silver Bay is unknown. Haley and his two older sons may have carried it on their backs. It is also possible that Haley used one of the arrastras that had been built on or near a couple of the claims, and he perhaps used a mortar and hand pestle to recover free gold from bit of very rich quartz.<
\Haley seems to have had less success selling mining stock to Navy men than to Army people at an earlier date, but it wasn't for lack of trying. One Navy commander barred him from his ship after he discovered that Haley was taking whiskey aboard and giving it to the sailors as an inducement to buy. Mrs. Ellen Haley was an imaginative sales lady, too. She was quoted as telling prospective buyers, ``Sure and he put in one shot and it looked like a jewelry shop with all of the gold glittering in the trees.''<
\In addition to themselves, Nicholas and Ellen Haley had five children to care for and feed. In 1881, according to a census taken by the Navy, their ages were: John 18, Edward 16, Thomas 12, Julia 7 and Charles 4. How much schooling the older ones got is questionable. It is possible some of them attended the day school opened by Alonzo Austin for white children in the fall of 1879. And in the fall of 1882, soon after the Sheldon Jackson Institute was opened in a new building on the present campus, Austin wrote to Dr. Sheldon Jackson that the Haley boys had contracted scarlet fever and that as a result the Navy doctor had advised him to close the school. That would seem to indicate that one or more of the Haley children was attending the school as day pupils, as were others from the town and Native village.<
\On June 1, 1882, Nicholas Haley claimed a 160-acre homestead on the east side of Indian River, including a part of what is now the Sitka National Historical Park. He recorded the claim on February 19, 1883. In the claim notice he said that he was entering it ``on my discharge as I served in the army in 61 and 62.'' From this it sounds as though he planned to get the land by using soldiers' script. This script was issued to some Civil War veterans and could be exchanged for homestead land without any of the regular requirements for homesteading. So far as is known, however, Haley did not have any script. And he never met the requirements for gaining title to the land.<
\In 1890 by proclamation President Harrison set aside a part of the Haley claim as a park reserve. The Haley claim was examined by a representative of the Forest Service in 1908. On the property, he reported, was a pole house measuring 18 by 20 feet, one room, uninhabitable. There was a garden plot that had not been used for three years, and much of the ground was swampy.<
\Haley apparently believed, according to the forester, that the government owed him $1,000 for the part of his claim it had taken for park purposes. But he got neither the $1,000 nor title to the remainder of the land.<
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^sf03\The Haleys & Silver Bay. Part 8 --^sf01 As noted earlier, Nicholas Haley was not nearly as successful in selling mining stock to Navy personnel as he had been with Army men. But in 1884 Congress provided him a new and continuing line of potential prospects. The Alaska Organic Act, enacted on May 17, created the Civil and Judicial District of Alaska with five salaried officials to be stationed at Sitka. They were a Governor, U. S. District Judge, U. S. Marshal, U. S. Attorney and Clerk of the Court.<
\Salaried positions and regular payrolls were scarce in Sitka at that time. There were the Navy people aboard the little gunboat PINTA. There were paid positions at the Presbyterian Mission, but the pay was low. The same was true of the Russian Orthodox Church which had a priest and a deacon or two. The Army Signal Corps had one weather observer stationed here, and there was the Collector of Customs and two deputies. The only other government official was the Postmaster, who was paid on a fee basis.<
\Except for the Clerk of the Court, the first officials of the new government lasted only a year, but the second round of appointees showed more promise so far as the development of the country's resources was concerned. The second governor was Alfred P. Swineford, who hailed from the mining district of Michigan where he had published a newspaper, The Mining Journal, at Marquette. At Sitka he was the sparkplug for starting The Alaskan, Sitka's first newspaper in eight years. Nicholas Haley made use of the paper both to vent his ire at George Pilz, as reported earlier, and to promote his own mining properties.<
\In the first issue of The Alaskan, on November 7, 1885, an article appeared over Haley's name describing the Silver Bay District. This is a somewhat condensed version of that article, but it contains all of the physical details:<
\^sf02From the head of Silver Bay, where a pier has been built, it is about a mile to the first mine in the range, the Haley and Roger. There the ledge is about nine and a half feet wide at a depth of 48 feet, to which depth a shaft has been sunk, covering the entire width. A drift was made on top of the ledge for a distance of 41 feet. The quartz is known as blue ribbon and has red and rose colors. It shows free gold to the naked eye, some very large nuggets having been thrown out by the blasts. There is an abundance of wood and water for all purposes.<
\Next is the Stewart, about half a mile to the northeast of the Haley and Rogers. There the quartz vein is 14 feet wide. A drift has been driven about 140 feet on the quartz and from that a shaft sunk to a depth of 30 feet.<
\Next in order is the Wicked Falls, a quartz lode four feet wide. The quartz is a dark blue color and carries free gold and sulphurets. Then comes the Eureka ledge with six feet of blue ribbon quartz carrying black sulphurets and free gold. The Pinta lode has a width of over eight feet. The quartz is porphyry heavily charged with minerals. From it nuggets of free gold worth from from $2.50 to $20 have been taken.<
\The Nickle lode discloses free gold to the naked eye and has a width of about five feet. The quartz is red and rose colored. Next to it is the Porphyry lode which has about the same characteristics as the Nickle. The Lucky Chance claim, at the top of the mountain, has a shaft 25 feet deep from which a drift has been driven 30 feet in quartz rich in free gold. The Cleveland lode shows some fine nuggets of free gold. The Free Gold ledge is six feet wide. The Shamrogue is a vein of red and rose quartz, rich in free gold. The Bullion lode is from one to eight feet wide on the surface and has outcrops for over 700 feet.<
^sf01\Nicholas Haley and his two older sons, John and Edward, also had a placer claim extending southeast from the Lucky Chance lode.<
\After he reviewed all of the lodes at the head of Silver Bay, Haley was quoted as saying, ``These are high grade ores. This will be the richest gold mining area of Alaska.'' Haley may have believed his own rhetoric and, although he was a failure as a prophet, he had remarkable powers as a salesman. He put them to work on Alaska's new governor.<
\A. P. Swineford arrived in Sitka on September 15, 1885, to take over as governor. He was accompanied by a man named B. K. Cowles who was looking for an opportunity. It did not take Nicholas Haley long to show him one. He returned south and before the end of the year the Lake Mountain Mining Company was incorporated in the State of Wisconsin with a capitalization of a million dollars, represented by 100,000 shares at $10 each. C. A. Swineford of Baraboo, Wisconsin, a brother of Governor Swineford, was president of the corporation. J. Garfield Fuller was vice president and general manager, and B. K. Cowles was secretary and treasurer. M. C. Clark of Madison, Wisconsin, and Nicholas Haley of Sitka were directors.<
\Governor Swineford was a stockholder, but the extent of his holdings is not known and probably was not large. In fact, it does not appear that anybody put up any great amount of cash money. The corporation bought the Lucky Chance, Porphyry, Cleveland and Nickle claims and the Haley & Sons placer ground. All were on what was then called Lake Mountain, but which shows on modern maps as Lucky Chance Mountain. As nearly as can be determined now, Haley was to receive $100,000 for the claims. But he received only a small down payment, with the balance to be paid from the earnings of the mines.<
\In the meanwhile, in that fall of 1885, Nicholas Haley was continuing his own mineral activity. In 1872, together with Patrick Burns, a Sitka saloon keeper, and a young Russian blacksmith, Henry Herman, he had located three lode claims close to Sawmill Creek. The claims were named the Pinafore, the Mariana and the Henrietta. In November 1885 Haley, with Reuben Albertstone and Simeon Lindquist, relocated the three claims, which were renamed the Reuben, the Serebrenikoff and the Pride of Silver Bay. The Round Mountain Mining Company was formed with Albertstone as its president. Beyond that it appears that little was ever done with the three claims.<
\With the beginning of the year 1886 Haley was eagerly awaiting the arrival of the other officers of the Lake Mountain Mining Company and a new beginning at Silver Bay.<
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\^sf03The Haleys & Silver Bay, Part 9 --^sf01 The high temperature at Sitka on New Year's Day 1886 was 41 degrees, according to the Army weather observer who was stationed here. With the exception of a few short cold spells, the mild weather continued through January and February, with very light precipitation. It seemed ideal for the Lake Mountain Mining Company to make an early start at developing its properties.<
\The mail steamer IDAHO, making its regular monthly trip, arrived from Portland, Oregon, on February 19. Aboard were J. Garfield Fuller, the general manager, and B. K. Cowles, the company treasurer, and his wife and two children. There was also a Lafe Cowles who was probably a younger brother. The children were Laura and Byron, who entered the public school. Lafe began working for Governor Swineford as a clerk but later worked at the mining property.<
\The Cowles family moved to the second floor of Building 29, today known as the Staton Building. A small store building next door, on the site of The Cellar, was rented as an office. One of the first things installed in the office was a mineral display, probably furnished by Haley, with some of the gaudier samples of Silver Bay quartz. Fuller and Cowles made a trip to the head of Silver Bay in the PINTA'S steam launch to examine the wharf and warehouse. They found that the wharf needed only minor repairs. The Navy men took soundings and determined that the water was deep enough for the IDAHO to tie up at the wharf. She did so on March 14 and unloaded supplies and perhaps some machinery for the company.<
\The company purchased the steam launch KATY for transportation between town and the head of Silver Bay.<
\The next task was to get the supplies the three and a half miles, by trail, to the Lucky Chance property. Fuller offered Indian packers two dollars a day, but they demanded three, which was going wage at Juneau for experienced hard rock miners. Chief AnnaHootz urged them to accept the lower pay, but they were obdurate. Before that was resolved there was a heavy fall of snow that delayed the operation. Fuller was then able to recruit several white packers and four of the huskiest boys from the Presbyterian Mission. Superintendent W. A. Kelly gave them a ``vacation'' so they could earn two dollars a day.<
\On April 3 The Alaskan reported: ``Several Indians have gone to Silver Bay. They are beginning to see which side their bread is buttered on.'' The supplies were taken to the Stewart mine and stored in the buildings there while the rest of the trail was being partly cleared of snow. Up at the Lucky Chance it was reported that the basin was full of snow and that only the tip of the stovepipe on the cabin could be seen. Some of that was cleared away and a crew of men was sent up to begin work in the drift under the direction of H. E. Heppner, who had the title of superintendent. Bad weather continued, including both snow and wind. On some days the KATY could not get to Silver Bay because of the wind. On May 1 there was snowfall at sea level and it continued to fall at the Lucky Chance as late as May 20 when it was reported there was more snow on the ground there than there had been on April 1. That did not bother the underground work. The first blast in the drift was on May 7 and the tunnel was driven 15 feet in the next eight days. Fuller began showing samples, sparkling with gold, around town and said the assay was $1,760 to the ton. He did not say how much ore had been assayed.<
\In the June 12, 1886, issue of The Alaskan there was a legal advertisement offering the property of the Alaska Gold & Silver Mining Company at Silver Bay for sale to the highest bidder. It consisted of a mill building, office, assay office, mess house, bunk house, blacksmith shop, wharf and warehouse, two 5-stamp mills and associated machinery, a 90-horsepower steam engine, a 20-inch turbine water wheel, two boilers measuring 36 inches in diameter and 12 feet long, and assorted mining equipment and tools. This was the mining property George Pilz had tried to develop in 1878 and 1879. There were no bidders.<
\The heavy late fall of snow continued to handicap the operation. It had been planned to work the placer ground for some possible quick returns, but this was late in starting because of the snow. There appear to have been other problems, too. J. G. Fuller, the general manager, left in May and did not return. That was not mentioned in The Alaskan until several months later and there was no explanation.<
\M. C. Clark, one of the directors of the Lake Mountain Mining Company, arrived from Wisconsin at the end of September and soon after that the operations at Silver Bay shut down for the winter. This, said The Alaskan, was for ``reasons which in the minds of the directors seemed good.'' There would be more details in another issue, the paper said, but these failed to appear. The paper did say that work would resume ``early in the spring.''<
\In the meanwhile, Nicholas Haley had not been idle and in September it was announced that he and his sons had sold the Haley and Rogers lode claim to a group composed of Governor Swineford, Captain P. T. Tracy and W. B. Stone, who represented a number of eastern capitalists. Captain Tracy, described as ``a mining man of much experience,'' was to be in charge of work on the property.<
\The Alaskan, in a review of the history of Silver Bay mining, estimated that $175,000 had been expended there since the beginning. That is not much in today's terms, but it was a lot of money back in 1886. For example, the appropriation by Congress for the salaries of the civil officials in Alaska -- governor, judge, marshal and deputies, attorney and clerk of the court -- for the year 1887 was $20,600.<
\At the beginning of 1887 The Alaskan reported: ``There has been much local criticism of the management of the Lake Mountain Mining Company for its early shutdown last fall, and it is charged that much of the work done last year was unnecessary and unproductive. One of the critics is Nicholas Haley, the original owner and one of the directors. He recently went to the mine, put in one shot at the bottom of his original shaft, and brought out about 150 pounds of beautiful ore samples, gleaming with specks of gold. He says he will send a sample to each of the eastern stockholders to convince them of the worth of the mine.''<
\Apparently Haley did not send the samples but delivered them in person. He and his wife, Ellen, left Sitka early in 1877 for a trip to the eastern states.<
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^sf03\The Haleys & Silver Bay, Part 10 --^sf01 Nicholas Haley, his wife Ellen and their two youngest children, Julia and Charles, left Sitka on the December 1886 mail steamer for a lengthy visit in the states. He carried with him some ore samples he had taken from the bottom of the Lucky Chance mine after it had closed down early in the fall. He planned to show the samples to some of the stockholders, who appear mostly to have been residents of Wisconsin.<
\The samples plus Haley's sales pitch were persuasive. At a meeting of stockholders at Madison, Wisconsin, on January 30, 1887, there was some reorganization of the company and arrangements were made to ship a five-stamp mill to Sitka. M. C. Clark, who was a director, was made secretary and treasurer in place of B. K. Cowles, who was still in Sitka. And Nicholas Haley, who was also a director, was made superintendent of the work on the company's properties at Silver Bay. Charles Swineford, a brother of Governor Swineford, continued as president of the company.<
\Not long after that The Alaskan said: ``B. K. Cowles, a treacherous scoundrel, has fled to Victoria.'' There was no delineation of his treachery.<
\Haley had other successes, too, during his trip. He confirmed the conditional sale of the Haley & Rogers claim to Governor Swineford, Captain P. T. Tracy, L. Q. Olcott and W. B. Stone. And he made a conditional sale of the Free Gold claim to another group whose names were not reported. The news story in The Alaskan said the Haleys would be visiting their former home, but where that was is not known. They returned to Sitka about the middle of April and it seems doubtful that they would have had time to visit Ireland.<
\The Haley family returned home on the mail steamer ANCON, on which Governor and Mrs. Swineford were also passengers. Also aboard was L. Q. Olcott, who represented Governor Swineford and others who had purchased the Haley & Rogers claim on the condition that it would prove worth developing. He at once went to Silver Bay, gathered samples from the property and sent them south for assays.<
\The paper had several items about the Haleys that spring of 1887 that had nothing to do with mining. Nicholas Haley was having a picket fence placed around his property, which was next to the Presbyterian Mission on Lincoln Street. Later that year he built a two-story dwelling on the property. Mrs. Ellen Haley bought the James Schmeig dwelling, which was farther west on Lincoln Street. This was a small, square one-story house with a pyramid roof and, in its later years at least, was shingled and painted or stained brown. It stood on the site now occupied by St. Gregory's Church. It remained in the family until after the death of Thomas Haley in 1956. The third news item was that John, Edward and Thomas Haley joined the Sons of the Northwest when it was organized that spring.<
\Nicholas Haley began the season by having the company's steam launch, the KATY, overhauled and painted. He announced that he would build a log cabin on the beach at Silver Bay and as soon as the snow permitted would provide a foundation for the five-stamp mill that had been ordered from the Frazer & Chalmers Company of Chicago. The first machinery to arrive, however, was a sawmill. Arriving with the sawmill were Mr. and Mrs. Monroe Jaycox. He was a millwright and sawyer and, according to the paper, would erect the sawmill and operate it. For some reason, however, the sawmill was not erected until the following year.<
\By May 7 Haley had packers and trail-builders at work and by the end of June he had men at work in the tunnel. ``As soon as the tunnel is completed,'' he announced, ``I expect developments which will astound the people of Alaska.''<
\The mail steamer IDAHO unloaded the stamp mill, 20 tons in all but broken down into smaller pieces, at Silver Bay on July 21. Also arriving on that trip of the IDAHO was Charles A. Swineford, president of the Lake Mountain Mining Company. He had recently retired as superintendent of the Madison Division of the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad and announced that he would become the general manager of the mining company but that Haley would continue as superintendent.<
\Obviously, however, Swineford was in charge. Soon after he arrived the men working in the tunnel demanded a wage increase. He laid them off but kept a crew of Indians at work packing lumber up to the mine and building a bunkhouse there. A little later they built a mill building at another location.<
\On its September trip the IDAHO brought the company a span of mules and three burros. They were taken to Silver Bay and work was commenced at once on a four-mile road from the beach to the upper falls of Salmon Creek, where the mill was to be placed. That put it about a mile from the mine. Work on the road was in charge of a long-time Sitka resident, Stephen Gee, and it was continued through the winter despite rain and snow. By January 1888 the mules and burros were reported packing the mill machinery to the mill site, although the road was by no means finished. Steve Gee went off to mine placer gold at Yakutat and M. J. Drown, a stockholder, arrived from Baraboo, Wisconsin, and finished the road job. Just as it was finished, in April, there was a four-foot fall of snow, the heaviest of the winter.<
\Swineford went south early that spring and returned with 13 men to work for the Lake Mountain Mining Company. They included John C. Jackson, millman; James Waters, foreman; Samuel Nielsen, machinist and blacksmith; Jess Winsted, carpenter; Ben Paddock, who would run the sawmill; and eight miners and mill workers.<
\Both the stamp mill and the sawmill were assembled and it was then discovered that there was less water in the creek than Haley had estimated and that the Leffel wheel, which ran on a head of 50 feet, did not supply enough power to run both mills, and if the creek was low it would barely run the sawmill alone. That mill could handle 37-foot logs and turn out 7,000 board feet of a lumber a day. M. J. Drown sent an order to California, by slow mail, for an impact wheel and iron pipe to give a head of 225 feet. The stamp mill began crushing rock on July 23. M. J. Drown then left for his home in Wisconsin.<
\Ore was packed from the mine down a steep trail to the mill, but at that time there was no indication whether men or animals did the packing. It was stated, however, that Nicholas Haley and two of his sons were at work on their properties, the Wicked Falls and the lower claim at the Haley & Rogers.<
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\^sf03The Haleys & Silver Bay, Part 11 -- ^sf01By the late summer of 1888 the Lake Mountain Mining Company was running smoothly on ore packed down the trail from the mine by burros.<
\Stockholders and directors of the company arrived from Kalamazoo, Michigan, and Madison, Wisconsin, to inspect the operation and gave it their approval. They talked of buying a larger mill, with 20 to 25 stamps, but did not actually order its purchase. The mill continued to run into October, then shut down for the winter.<
\C. A. Swineford left for the south but said he was convinced that the property was worth developing. Nicholas Haley, although he remained a director in the mining company, was not active in its operation. He was a confirmed prospector and a first class promoter but seems not to have had the skills to be a mine manager. He and his son John worked that summer on other properties, but neither of the boys inherited their father's fascination with mining.<
\In June Edward joined the Customs Service and was appointed inspector afloat aboard the steamer GEORGE W. ELDER. Later he was in charge of the Mills store at Yakutat for a year or two. John Haley, too, soon left Sitka. He was skipper of the tug LUCY for the Treadwell Mining Company for a time, then went south and became a civilian employee of the Navy at Bremerton. Three Haley children, Thomas, Julia and Charles, remained at home. According to the Navy census of 1881, their ages in 1888 were 19, 14 and 11.<
\C. A. Swineford and M. J. Drown both returned to Sitka in the spring of 1889. Drown was to be the active manager of the Lake Mountain Mining Company. Swineford reported that an aerial tramway was being ordered and when built would be able to carry six tons of ore an hour from the mine to the mill. He also announced that the previous season the mill had produced $28 per ton of ore plus another $9 to $10 in the tailings if they were saved and shipped to a smelter.<
\The mining company borrowed $75,000 in Chicago that spring. Of that, $10,000 was to discharge all debts, the balance to be used for working capital. The interest was 10 percent, payable annually.<
\A concentrator was installed at the mill before it began the season's operations on August 19. The new machinery worked well, but it was a short season. Operations were suspended in mid-September when all of the miners walked off the job. The reason was not stated, and Swineford said it was too late in the season to send for replacements. That may have been merely an excuse for shutting down the operations, however, as they were not resumed in the spring or for several years afterward.<
\Nicholas Haley had an accident while prospecting in 1889 that nearly cost him his life. On either June 29 or 30 a .44 caliber revolver he was carrying accidentally discharged, wounding him in the calf of his left leg and he nearly died before he was discovered by one of his sons. It must have been a bad wound because it was two months before he could return to town. What medical attention, if any, he had was not reported. He was a tough Irishman. Several years before that he had had a close enounter with a brown bear and carried some scars to show for it. His own explanation of the affair was said to have been, ``Sure, and I stood up to him and pounded him on the snoot until he'd had enough.''<
\The term of A. P. Swineford as governor ended in June 1889 and he was replaced by Lyman E. Knapp from Vermont and left Sitka. He would return some years later to spend the rest of his life in Alaska. His brother, C. A. Swineford, left Sitka in the fall of 1889 and neither he nor any of the principal officers of the Lake Mountain Mining Company returned in 1890 to operate the mine. The Alaskan offered no report on this failure, and in fact never printed anything negative about mining in this area. The supposition can only be that mining was not resumed at the Lucky Chance mine because it was not paying. So far as can be learned C. A. Swineford never returned to Alaska.<
\During the years 1890 to 1895, while work on the Lucky Chance and other claims of the Lake Mountain Mining Company was at a standstill, there was an attempt to revive Silver Bay's first mine, the Stewart Lode. That attempt ended in tragedy.<
\So far as can be determined, after George Pilz gave up on the Stewart in 1879 no work was done there until 1892. In that year T. C. Doran of Sitka went to Portland, Oregon, and acquired the property from the stockholders of the Alaska Gold and Silver Mining Company.<
\Doran, a veteran of four years in the Civil War, had come to Sitka around 1880. He became a partner with John Brady and Amos Whitford in the little steamboat ROSE and operated her for several years. In partnership with Brady he then built a sawmill and operated it for a time. After he acquired the mining property at Silver Bay he renamed it the Cash mine and began to work alone there to rehabilitate the ten-stamp mill and get it into operation. By August 1893 he was about ready to hire a crew and begin mining.<
\On August 24 W. P. Mills, John Burns and Dr. C. S. Ingersoll, the Navy doctor, made a trip to Silver Bay. Burns owned a claim there and Mills may have been going to inspect it although he was one of the few Sitka people with money who did not sink some of it in Silver Bay. At any rate, they decided to visit Doran at the Cash mine and there they found his lifeless body at the mill. The evidence was that he had accidentally ingested some cyanide while testing ore samples. The body was brought to Sitka the following day, there was a large funeral and he was buried in what is now the Sitka National Cemetery. That was the end of work on that first mine; the remains of the mill are still on the site.<
\There were dozens of mining claims scattered around Silver Bay in the early 1890s, and there was work on some of them. Claim owners included Reuben Albertstone, John G. Brady, John Burns, H. L. Bahrt, Sr., the Startzoff brothers, Nicholas Haley, and various public officials and Navy officers. The mining law, then as now, required $100 worth of work on a claim each year in order to hold it. That represented the best part of a month's work at prevailing wages in those years. Very often, instead of doing the annual assessment work the claim was simply restaked with a different name. Because of that it is difficult to determine how many separate pieces of mining ground there were.<
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^sf03\The Haleys & Silver Bay, Part 12 -- ^sf01In December 1894 C. A. Swineford, president of the Lake Mountain Mining Company, wrote to friends in Sitka that he would return in the spring and that work at the company's mine at Silver Bay would resume. He died, however, at his home in Wisconsin on January 14, 1895.<
\Then in April word was received from A. P. Swineford, the former governor, that he had raised all the capital necessary and would soon return to Sitka to operate the Lucky Chance mine.<
\Nicholas Haley immediately proclaimed that the Lucky Chance would be the world's richest mine. Presumably he was still a stockholder and a director in the company. How active he was in actual mining at that time is unclear. His son John was running a tug boat out of Treadwell; Edward had quit the Mills store at Yakutat and was beach mining at Kayak Island, and Thomas had gone to Westward on the mail steamer DORA to work for the North American Commercial Company at one of its trading stations. He soon changed his mind and returned to Sitka. Ed also returned having found beach mining hard work with small returns.<
\At about the same time the news came from A. P. Swineford, The Alaskan reported: ``Many negotiations are being carried on for the sale of mining property in this area, but very little actual mining is going on.'' Most of the mining claim owners were trying to sell their claims rather than do the development themselves. Every now and then The Alaskan would announce that a claim owner had bonded his claim for $100,000 or for some other figure. That meant that he had given an option to buy the claim but usually had received no actual cash. Soon a mining engineer would arrive, spend weeks or a month investigating the claim, then disappear. The Alaskan never reported that an option had been dropped; its editors were nearly as up-beat about Silver Bay mining as was Nicholas Haley.<
\A. P. Swineford returned to Sitka on June 1, 1895, aboard the steamer CITY OF TOPEKA. He hired Ronald Becker, who had some mining experience, as foreman for the mine. On June 17 the steamer WILLAPA, making her first trip for the newly organized Alaska Steamship Company, brought John A. Shortall, ``a mining expert'' from Colorado, to inspect the property. He left at once for Silver Bay in Percy Hope's sailboat, accompanied by Becker, Peter Trierschield, E. Otis Smith and J. D. Rhoades. They found that heavy snow had crushed the roof of the bunkhouse at the mill but that the mill building was in good shape. Because of the depth of snow they did not push on to the mine.<
\During June and July William Maydenbauer, William Millmore, Hugh Patton, Peter Startzoff, E. Otis Smith, John Davis and J. A.Becker all filed lode mining claims in the Silver Bay area. And that summer the Sitka Mining Bureau was organized with William Millmore as president, Reuben Albertstone as vice-president and E. Otis Smith as secretary-treasurer. Other members included John Brady, Owen Roberts, Major M. P. Berry, Otto Nelson, Captain Smith, M. E. Magee, F. E. Frobese, H. L. Bahrt, Charles Anderson, Harold Longjord, Peter Romanoff, Charles Anders, F. Thompson, Peter Startzoff and Percy Hope.<
\The mill of the Lake Mountain Mining Company was started up about the middle of August and at the end of that month a clean-up was reported to return $8 to $10 per ton of ore. Roland Becker was making a survey for an aerial tramway.<
\In August Shorthall, the mining expert, was reported examining the claims of William Maydenbauer and Percy Hope. These were the Tyee, Alameda, P. I. and Demurph, all at Silver Bay and, reported The Alaskan, ``were said to be among the richest in the district.'' Ore samples from the claims were to be shipped south for mill tests. The Liberty mine was one of those being developed at Silver Bay by the owner, W. F. Turner, but he died on February 19, 1896, at his residence in Sitka at the age of 65.<
\In March Percy Hope, Herman Bauer and William Maydenbauer organized the Alameda Mining Company and ordered a Briggs reduction mill, to be placed on the Alameda claim at Silver Bay. Herman Bauer would spend most of his remaining years attempting to make it into a paying mine. Mr. and Mrs. E. Otis Smith made a trip to Rhode Island during the winter and upon their return in April he announced that he had raised some capital for the development of his mining property.<
\Raising capital for gold mines in Alaska had been made easier by the Cook Inlet gold rush which had started in 1895 and continued in 1896. It was by no means a Klondike rush but news of it spread across the country and increased the interest in Alaska gold. Ships loaded with gold seekers headed for the Cook Inlet country stopped at Sitka on their way north, and a few Sitka men joined the crowd. One of them was James Brightman who returned after a few weeks and reported that all of the good placer ground had been claimed before he got there.<
\Sitka did benefit from the mining at Cook Inlet, however, as many of the miners who had found good pay spent the following winter here.<
\Mr. and Mrs. A. P. Swineford and their daughter Agnes, who had spent the winter in Wisconsin, returned to Sitka in July 1896. He reported that he was having difficulty hiring miners because so many of them had gone to Cook Inlet. He hired 30 men in Sitka and sent them to Silver Bay to repair the road and the mill bunkhouse, haul lumber and supplies and generally to get the mine in shape for operation. Roland Becker was in charge of the work. Swineford said miners would be hired when they could be found, to work on the Last Chance and Porphyry lodes.<
\At the end of July The Alaskan reported that ``it has leaked out that mill tests of the Last Chance and Porphyry lodes are much richer than at first believed, running $16 for the former and $60 for the latter.'' It sounds like a leak designed to snare investors.<
\At the beginning of August R. W. Rodgers of Ashland, Wisconsin, arrived to be the business manager of the operation. Becker would be in charge of running the mine and mill. Swineford had returned south. Whether he had taken his brother's place as president of the corporation is not known. Becker had an ore flume built from the mine to the mill. Presumably the ore was washed down the flume with water from one of the high lakes. The Alaskan said, ``the flume beats all other methods for conveying ore from the mine to the mill.''<
\Early in November 1896 the Lake Mountain Mining Company made a clean-up at the mill, then shut down for the winter, according to The Alaskan. There was no report of the clean-up's value.<
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^sf03\The Haley's & Silver Bay, Part 13^sf01 ^sf01Despite the 1896 report of $16 per ton ore from the Lucky Chance and $60 ore from the Porphyry, the Lake Mountain Mining Company did not resume operations in 1897.<
\It seems apparent that either the value of the ore had been exaggerated or the cost of mining and milling it exceeded its value. Although there must have been local speculation about the company's failure to resume operations, The Alaskan simply ignored that failure. The company was not mentioned in the paper during the entire year 1897.<
\There was, in fact, very little actual mining at Silver Bay that year. Following the death of W. F. Turner in February 1896, Mrs. Turner maintained ownership of the Liberty mine by having the annual assessment work done. In the fall of 1896 she hired Percy Hope to do the work. He went to Silver Bay with his wife, Refenia, who was the step-daughter of Deputy Marshal John Hanlon. It was Hope's last mining work in this area; in 1897 he went to the Klondike and never returned to Sitka. Mrs. Turner continued to hire the assessment work done in subsequent years while she tried to find a buyer for the claim.<
\The first lawsuit over a Silver Bay mining claim, so far as I've discovered, came at the beginning of 1897. William C. Maydenbauer asserted he was the original locator of the P.I. claim and that Peter Romanoff and H. Stevens had moved his claims stakes and altered his original location notice. A jury heard the case in U.S. District Court and took only 15 minutes to decide in favor of Maydenbauer.<
\The spring and summer of 1897 brought the beginning of the Klondike Gold Rush which drained a few people away from Sitka. Silver Bay was being abandoned. William C. Maydenbauer and Herman Bauer went to Skagway to open a store; Percy Hope and others went to Dawson and The Alaskan lost the foreman of its print shop. All the mules and burros were taken to Dyea and Skagway and many Sitka Natives went to Dyea to work as packers on the Chilkoot Trail. It was reported that any Indian with a big canoe could make from $60 to $80 a day freighting from tidewater up the Taiya River as far as the canoe would go.<
\Prospects for the future of Silver Bay mining began to brighten in 1898. Former Governor A. P. Swineford returned to Sitka in June. ``He still has mining interests in this area,'' said The Alaskan, and he was no doubt pestered with questions about the mine and when it would open. It was next announced that the Lucky Chance property had been bonded to Rhode Island parties in a deal workedout between Governor Swineford and E. Otis Smith.<
\Smith, a small, energetic man, and his wife, Martha, had come to Sitka in 1892. He was 50 years old in 1898, had been born in Ohio and was a printer by trade. Martha was a couple of years older than her husband and had been born in Massachusetts. It may have been The Alaskan that brought him to Sitka; at any rate he edited the paper for two different periods during the early 1890s. He became interested in mining and, like half the white residents of Sitka at that time, located or otherwise acquired a couple of lode claims. They were the Osprey at Sawmill Creek and the St. Charles on Mount Verstovia, and in 1897 he hired J. H. Lee to get out some ore for tests. The claims proved worthless and Lee went south for the winter. Exactly what connections Smith had in Rhode Island is not known but he evidently had them.<
\The Providence & Sitka Gold Mining Company was organized in Rhode Island early in 1898 and was incorporated in Maine with a capitalization of $30,000. That was a good conservative figure and may have indicated that the incorporators actually intended to do some mining. Mining companies of that day often incorporated for a million dollars and appear to have been more interested in selling stock than in mining. Smith was president of the new corporation and those were the ``parties'' that took the option on the properties of the Lake Mountain Mining Company. Among the papers of Governor Swineford is a Proof of Labor affidavit signed by Smith and dated December 31, 1898. It certifies that $100 worth of labor or improvements had been done at the expense of the Providence & Sitka Mining Company, lessee, on the mining claims owned by the Lake Mountain Mining Company: the Lucky Chance, Nickel, Porphyry and Cleveland lode claims and the Haley and Rogers placer claim.<
\J. H. Lee returned to Sitka in July 1898 with the title of superintendent of the Sitka & Providence Company. He advised Smith that the company had purchased a steam launch and that it was being shipped to Sitka from the Atlantic coast. Nothing further on this boat was reported in The Alaskan but a couple of years later it did report that the company was getting a larger boat.<
\Lee took a crew of men to the Lucky Chance and began doing the assessment work mentioned above. Said The Alaskan: ``At last it looks as though the Lucky Chance property will be put in good shape and successfully operated. Preliminary work is now being done and it is hoped to continue it all winter. Probably no mining property in Alaska has been so woefully mismanaged. Thousands of dollars have been wasted. No doubt it will prove lucrative if properly managed.''<
\It is unknown whether work was continued all winter but apparently no ore was milled that year. The Alaskan reported nothing further on the company until the following summer.<
\William Maydenbauer, who had accompanied Herman Bauer to Skagway at the beginning of the Klondike Rush, returned to Sitka in May 1899 and put a crew to work on what was called the Bauer property at Silver Bay. The property included the Alameda, P.I. and Tyee lode claims. Bauer would soon return to Sitka, too, bringing with him the merchandise inventory of the Skagway store. He disposed of the goods in a special sale at his Sitka Trading Company, then closed that business and devoted his time and efforts to mining.<
\In September 1899 The Alaskan announced that what it called the Sitka & Providence Gold Mining Company had purchased the property of the Lake Mountain Mining Company at Silver Bay. This was evidently the company it had previously called the Providence & Sitka.<
\``About $10,000 is being expended at once and an aerial tram will be erected,'' the paper said. ``It will be 4090 feet in length and will be operated by water power. Mr. Smith says the ore from the mine is running about $25 to the ton.''<
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^sf03\Silver Bay, Part 14^sf01 -- ^sf01Late in December 1899 The Alaskan announced that Mrs. Turner had sold the Liberty mine at Silver Bay ``to Eastern capitalists who will soon commence development work.''<
\Apparently, however, it was an option rather than a sale, and she may or may not have received any payment. No reports of development work were reported in the paper, and six years later Mrs. Turner was still advertising it for sale.<
\In January 1900 work was reported progressing on the Bauer property, with William Maydenbauer in charge. Bauer had organized the Chicago Sitka Mining and Milling Company and there were plans to put 100 men to work. Among other things they would build a deep water wharf at the head of the bay, a house for the superintendent near the wharf, and would improve the road from the wharf site to the mine.<
\Herman and Mrs. Bauer arrived in Sitka in July and brought with them Sitka's first gas boat. This was the 30-foot metal-hulled SILVER BAY. On her maiden voyage in Sitka she was said to have gone to the head of Silver Bay in an hour and a half. The main problem with the vessel in those years was that gasoline was a scarce commodity in Sitka. Bauer made at least one trip to Juneau in her to buy gasoline and dynamite. The SILVER BAY had a long life but probably spent more time in a cradle on the beach where Totem Square is today than she did on the water.<
\In the early 1930s she was used for commercial trolling but by then electrolysis had eaten pin holes in her hull and she was abandoned.<
\As the year 1900 opened, E. Otis Smith was in New York but was expected to return soon to open the Lucky Chance property. When he did return he announced that George Garside of Juneau had been awarded a contract to construct the aerial tramway from the mine to the mill. The mine would reopen as soon as the snow permitted, Smith said. The tramway, it turned out, would not be built at once. It was not until late December that the mail steamer COTTAGE CITY delivered 35 tons of machinery and equipment, including the tramway material. At that time 25 men were working at the mine and mill and Smith said he would hire 50 more if he had accommodations for them. He was building another bunkhouse.<
\On December 5, 1900, Reuben Albertstone, H. L. Bahrt, Sr., Thomas Mooney and John Clement formed a partnership as the Capital Mining Company. They had four lode claims near the entrance to Silver Bay: the Henrietta, Crown, Baranof Queen and the Silver Bay. They did the annual assessment work and hoped for a buyer.<
\In May 1901, when enough of the snow had disappeared that they could begin work on the Providence & Sitka Mining Co. tram, it was not Garside but a Mr. Semple from the Sumdum mine, south of Juneau, who was in charge of the work. Nine of the 12 towers were up by the end of September and a month later the tram carried the first load of ore from the mine to the mill. In November Smith reported that the tram was carrying lumber up to the mine as fast as the sawmill could cut it. A shed was being built over the upper terminal of the tram. A bunkhouse was to be built beside the terminal shed and a covered passageway from the bunkhouse to the mine audit so they could work all winter.<
\A Mr. Dearden, from Brockton, Massachusetts, was superintendent of the operation in 1901 and until near the end of 1902. Mrs. Dearden was with him and lived at the camp with an occasional trip to town.<
\The mill ran only a part of the time, apparently because of a power problem. A Pelton wheel was laboriously transported from Billy's Basin, up Indian River, to the Lucky Chance property, but that would have helped only if there was adequate water to turn it. Despite that handicap, the company made two shipments of bullion to the mint and had several tons of concentrates ready to send to a smelter. But if it was going to run all winter, it was stated, steam power would be necessary.<
\Meanwhile, The Alaskan was doing its part to boost things along. In April it said, ``Experts have declared that the outlook for the Lucky Chance is excellent. Local people have not hesitated to invest in it.'' And in August it added, ``Rumor has it that the Lucky Chance has made a rich strike. There is great hope for the future.'' Men continued to work at the Bauer mine until late in the year but it was closed down for the winter. W. R. Hanlon was appointed watchman and also had a contract to build the wharf, a float and a corduroy road. His step-father, John Hanlon, was to help him. Herman Bauer, announced early in 1902 that he would put $13,000 worth of machinery on the property and expected to have it in operation by the end of June.<
\The old Stewart mine, first opened in 1879 and later renamed the Cash, got back into the news in 1902. Frank C. Hammond, a widely known mining engineer, visited Sitka and upon his return to Seattle was interviewed by the Post-Intelligencer. Title to the property had been in litigation for 30 years, he said, but if he could get that cleared up, he had some people who wanted to buy it. The title business is something of a mystery because H. C. Doran had been able to get some kind of agreement on it, as related earlier, and then had reached an untimely death. In July 1902 Charles Davidson, who later became Surveyor General of Alaska, arrived in Sitka and hired four local men to help him survey the Stewart claim. Who he was working for is not known but it was possibly Governor John Brady, who had once been a partner with Doran. At any rate, a crew of men was working on the Stewart under the direction of Hugh Patton who was Brady's father-in-law. In the end, however, nothing came of any of that activity.<
\Mr. and Mrs. E. Otis Smith returned to Sitka in the summer of 1902 after a winter in the East, and he had purchased additional stamps for the Providence & Sitka mill. The machinery arrived in September and was laboriously hauled over the trail to the mill site. There is no mention of horses or mules in the process. The moving was under the direction of C. H. Carleton and it required more than 11 days to move the mortar, the heaviest part of the machinery, from the beach to the mill.<
\That task had just been completed when a heavy wind storm in November 1902 knocked a dozen large trees and many smaller ones across the trail. The roof of the shed at the upper site and the blacksmith shop were blown away and there was substantial damage at the stamp mill. Developing a mine at Silver Bay was not easy.<
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^sm2500^sf03^ps100^sl100^fl0008This house was built by Nicholas Haley in 1887 and remained in the Haley family until 1922. It was razed after being gutted by fire in 1942.<
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\^sf03Haleys & Silver Bay, Part 15^sf01 -- ^sf01Not long after he came to Sitka in 1872 as a soldier, Nicholas Haley claimed a homestead on the eastern edge of town. It extended along Lincoln Street from the middle of present Jeff Davis Street, westward to and including all of present Finn Alley.<
\The family lived in a house that may have been of Russian origin and already on the property. Presumably it was the house to the left of the new house in the picture above. Construction of that house was started in May 1887, soon after the family returned from their trip ``below,'' as the expression was in those years. The date of the picture is unknown but to judge by the clothing worn by Miss Julia Haley, standing on the sidewalk, it was early. In time spruce trees grew up around the house, almost shutting it from view.<
\For many years it was the home of all of the Haleys who were living in Sitka, and Nicholas Haley may have been confined to the house at times during his later years. From the day The Alaskan, Sitka's newspaper, began publication in November 1885, Nicholas Haley and his mining operations were much in the news. That is, until 1894. In that year, when A. P. Swineford announced that he had raised the capital to operate the Lucky Chance mine, Haley was quoted as predicting that it would be the world's richest mine. That was the last time he was mentioned in The Alaskan in connection with mining. The following year the paper reported that he was growing a fine vegetable garden. After that his name was not mentioned in the paper at all. From 1905 until 1912, Polk's Alaska-Yukon Gazateer listed Nicholas Haley as a farmer.<
\Because of this blackout we have no comment from Haley on the failure of the Providence and Sitka Mining Company to resume operations in 1903. After the damage to the mill buildings, reported in last week's column, the operation remained closed. No doubt Haley's comment would have been bitter; he was very anxious to have the Lucky Chance develop into a successful mine, partly to vindicate his own optimistic forecasts and, even more, to get the rest of his money from the original sales agreement. <
\In an earlier column I mentioned that Haley made light of his encounter with a bear. But W. R. Hanlon had a different version of that. Hanlon was born in Sitka, spent virtually his entire life here, and knew Haley. In his newspaper, The Sitka Sun, which began publication in 1920, he wrote that Haley was an invalid for two years after the bear worked him over. In 1889 Haley suffered an accidental gunshot wound in the leg and that may have kept him inactive and confined to his home for a prolonged period.<
\But if Nicholas Haley was not in the news, he was in the record books kept by the U.S. Commissioner who was the ex-officio Recorder for the precinct. Claimants to mining ground are required to do work to the value of $100 each year on each claim in order to hold it. Furthermore, they must put in the records each year an affidavit that the work has been done. Some cynics have contended that those requirements have made liars of a multitude of mining claim owners. Be that as it may, the $100 figure has not been changed since the law was written in 1872 when wages were $2 to $3 a day. Nicholas Haley or one of his sons did the annual assessment work on the claims they owned up until 1904, but that year Tom and Charles may have been otherwise engaged and Nicholas may have been incapacitated. Elbridge W. Merrill filed an affidavit in January 1905 that he had done the assessment work on the Pinta, Swineford, Bullion, Free Gold, Julia, Wicked Falls and Ada Dell lode claims for the year 1904 on behalf of the Haleys, owners of the claims. Merrill was a photographer, an artist in that medium, and had a portrait studio and curio store in downtown Sitka. The mining work was something decidedly out of the ordinary and in view of another record one wonders whether he was considering becoming a member of the Haley family.<
\On December 30, 1903, Merrill and Julia Haley had jointly located the Boston quartz lode three and a half miles from Sitka. The claim was apparently in the Billy's Basin area in the Indian River drainage and the location notice was posted on the door of a cabin on the claim. Neither of them retained ownership of the claim by later meeting the requirments of the mining law. At that time Julia was a clerk in Merrill's curio store, but three years later she quit and opened her own curio store. The local scuttlebutt was that it was a romance that went sour. Both parties were ticketed in Sitka as ``a little strange.''<
\In the years subsequent to 1904 Nicholas Haley filed affidavits that he had done the necessary work himself on some of the claims and his sons took over the job on others. He had, it appears, learned to sign his name. It was previously reported that he had signed his Army enlistment papers with an ``X,'' but by the 1890s the documents he put on record were all signed ``N. Haley.'' This was not, of course, the original document but a copy by the Recorder. Other documents with ``X'' signatures had, however, been entered in the record books with the ``X'' instead of a signature.<
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\^sf03Haleys & Silver Bay, Part 16 -- ^sf01The Providence & Sitka Mining Company's mining property at Silver Bay suffered heavy damage during a windstorm in November 1902, as reported in Part 14 of this series. The company had been capitalized for only $30,000 and most of that had been expended for an additional five stamps in the mill and a tramway, nearly a mile long, to carry ore from the mine to the mill. During the time the company had worked the mine the gold recovered had probably not paid the cost of operations.<
\E. Otis Smith, the president of the company and its chief promoter, no doubt tried to raise funds to make repairs and continue operations, but the Southeastern Alaska mining climate had changed. True, the Treadwell mines on Douglas Island were having great success, but in the same area the Bear's Nest and the Alaska Union mines were failures despite the expenditure of large sums of money. Closer to Sitka, much work had been done at Rodman Bay, including the building of six or seven miles of railroad, with almost nothing to show in the way of returns to stockholders. At Silver Bay a number of mining engineers, some of them with international reputations, had looked over the field and gathered samples for testing. Apparently they had arrived at the conclusion that George Pilz had reached in 1879: that there was not a sufficient ore body to support a paying mine. It was getting more and more difficult to raise the kind of venture capital that E. Otis Smith required for the Providence & Sitka to carry on.<
\The company controlled the Lucky Chance, Porphyry, Cleveland and Nicholas lode claims and the Providence placer claim, but could hold them only by doing the annual assessment work, $100 on each claim. Smith took care of this year after year on behalf of the corporation, either doing the work himself or hiring it done. He also acted as watchman and caretaker of the property. In addition to the mining claims, the company's property consisted of a small wharf, a warehouse and a boat shed at the mouth of Salmon Creek. A short distance from the wharf via a corduroy road was the superintendent's house. From there a wagon road, corduroyed most of the way, ran between five and six miles to the sawmill and stamp mill. At the mill there was a two-story dwelling, a blacksmith shop, powder house, the mill building, manager's office and the lower terminal of the tramway which extended some 4,000 feet up the mountain to the mine.<
\By July 1908 the corporation had five creditors in Sitka. They were E. Otis Smith, $6,500; W. P. Mills Corporation $2,243.93; Bernard Hirst $2,637.24; Edward deGroff $138.66 and John Kaznakoff $925. Four of the creditors assigned their claims to Mills who on August 3 filed suit against the corporation for $12,444.83 plus costs. A judgment in that amount was issued and the U.S. Marshal was directed to sell the property to the highest bidder to satisfy the judgment. The sale was held on September 18 and the property was deeded to Mills on his bid of $4,000.<
\The deed did not include a patent to the mining claims. The best hope of the creditors was a sale of the property and they retained possession of the mining claims by doing the annual assessment work for several years. John Kaznakoff did the work and presumably was paid by the other creditors.<
\The predecessor of the Providence & Sitka on the property had been the Lake Mountain Mining Company, incorporated in Wisconsin. In the transfer to Providence & Sitka, many and perhaps all of the Lake Mountain stockholders had taken stock in the new company. In 1910 they held 50,000 shares, valued at $12,443. Whether there were other stockholders is not stated in the agreement reached by the creditors. They agreed that if the property was sold they would share proportionately but that one-tenth of the proceeds would go to the shareholders. That one-tenth would come out of Smith's share. But no buyer was found for the property or any part of it and eventually the annual work was discontinued and the mining claims reverted to the public domain. Some or all of them were later staked by others, but whether the stamp mill was ever operated again is unclear. And all indications are that neither the creditors nor the stockholders of the Providence & Sitka Mining Company ever recovered a dime. At least two other outfits were hanging on at Silver Bay during the first decade of the new century, performing the required annual labor and hoping for a buyer. The Liberty mine was the one nearest Sitka, on the western side of the bay and not far above the water. William Turner had sunk every dollar he could get hold of in driving tunnels and trying to develop a paying mine. Following his death his widow continued to hold the property by having the required work done each year. Twice it had been examined by mining engineers and options taken, but no sale had resulted. She finally abandoned the property.<
\Nearly opposite the Liberty, near Bear Cove, was what was known as the Mooney mine. Tom Mooney had been puttering around with mining at Silver Bay since the 1870s. With H. L. Bahrt, Reuben Albertstone and John Clement he owned the Baranoff Queen, Henrietta, Crown and Silver Bay lode claims. Several times they announced that they had bonded the claims to a mining company but apparently no money changed hands and the options were never taken up.<
\Over the years W. R. Hanlon engaged in one way or another with mining in the Sitka area. He was employed for a time by Herman Bauer's Chicago and Sitka Mining Company as winter watchman and in wharf and road building. Hanlon and Peter Kaznakoff staked what they called the New York lode near where the Vodopad River plunges into the bay, and in 1906 Hanlon staked the Copper King lode claim at Bear Cove.<
\He was born in Sitka in 1879 to Frederick and Anna Schmakoff Richter. Anna married John Hanlon after Richter's death and her son took the name of his stepfather. He was always enterprising and among other things delivered fresh water from Indian River to Sitka homes, operated the Poplar Tree Bath House and the Sitka Dray and Wood Company. For many years he was also closely associated with members of the Haley family in their mining ventures and he continued to work at times for Herman Bauer.<
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\^sf03Haleys & Silver Bay, Part 17 -- ^sf01Herman A. Bauer was a man bitten by the gold bug, a virulent form of the bug. He wanted to develop a gold mine at Silver Bay and he devoted his energy for more than 20 years, and all the money he could scrape together, toward that end.<
\Bauer was born in Chicago in 1863. When he moved to Seattle is not known, but by the spring of 1884 he was working for the merchandise firm of Toklas and Singerman in that city. A part of that company's business was outfitting schooners for fur seal and sea otter hunting in northern waters. Bauer developed an interest in Alaska and in the spring of 1884 signed on aboard the schooner CHAMPION, Captain Henry McAlmond, which was going on a combined trading and otter hunting voyage. John Amesworthy was in charge of the trading and Bauer was to be his assistant.<
\The schooner stopped at Kodiak and at Pirate Cove and Coal Harbor in the Shumagin Islands. A dispute of some kind developed and Bauer was put ashore at Coal Harbor where there was a small Native village and one white man named Dingley. Bauer had a shotgun and lived on fish and such ducks as he was able to shoot. It was 24 days before another schooner came along and took him to Sand Point where the schooner LEO was at anchor. The LEO was owned by the Sitka Trading Company and was on a trading voyage in charge of John G. Brady, one of the partners in the company. Bauer exchanged his shotgun and other possessions for passage to Sitka.<
\In Sitka Bauer worked for several months in the Sitka Trading Company store, then the largest in town. The LEO made freighting trips to Puget Sound several times each year and Bauer returned to Seattle in her and agreed to become the company's agent there, buying merchandise and shipping it north in the LEO or in one of the Pacific Coast Steamship Company's steamers. It was not a full-time job and Bauer organized the Crescent Manufacturing Company and became its president. The company initially dealt in spices and condiments but soon branched out into the manufacture of baking powder and other products. A chemist who specialized in the production of artificial flavors joined the company and they became one of its important lines. Mapeline, for the production of artificial maple syrup, was one of its best known products.<
\The Sitka Trading Company underwent changes in the 1890s. Brady closed out his interest in 1891 and went into the sawmill business. In 1893 Amos Whitford also retired and sold to Bauer the merchandise company and an interest in several Silver Bay mining claims. Bauer hired a succession of managers for the store but that proved unsatisfactory and eventually he moved to Sitka. Bauer was a partner with Whitford in the Julia claim and with Whitford, Brady and several others in the Second Grip claim. Neither claim proved to have value, but the gold bug got in its first bite.<
\William Maydenbauer, who may have been related to Herman Bauer, arrived in Sitka in the summer of 1895. He and Percy Hope, who was running the store for Bauer, located four claims at Silver Bay and named them the Alameda, Tyee, P. I. and Demurph. John A. Shorthall, who The Alaskan identified as ``the mining expert,'' said the four claims were among the richest in the district. Those words were so common about then that the paper must have kept them in standing type. Ore samples from the four claims were sent south for mill tests. It was reported that values as high as $319 a ton were disclosed by these tests.<
\Maydenbauer and Hope then sold an interest in the claims to Herman Bauer and the three men formed the Alameda Mining Company but did not offer stock in the company for sale to others. They did order a Briggs reduction mill for the property. By the summer of 1896 Bauer had moved to Sitka and he and Hope and Maydenbauer all did some work on the claims. The first case of claim jumping in the Sitka area, or at least the first that went to court, came in the late fall of 1896. As reported in Part 13, Maydenbauer charged that Peter Romanoff and A. Stevens had moved his claim stakes on the P. I. lode claim and posted a new location notice. A jury decided that Maydenbauer was right.<
\News of the Klondike strike reached Sitka in the spring of 1897 and Percy Hope sold his interest in the Silver Bay claims to Bauer and took off for the Yukon. The Sitka Trading Company, once the largest store in Sitka, was now far behind the Mills and deGroff stores in sales, so Bauer closed it and moved the merchandise to the new and booming towns of Skagway and Dyea. Maydenbauer went with him. They maintained their ownership of the Silver Bay claims by hiring the annual assessment work done.<
\In May 1899 Maydenbauer returned to Sitka and put a crew to work on the Silver Bay property. By the end of the year 13 men were at work, machine drills were being installed and ore was being hauled to the beach on what was probably a surface tramway. Maydenbauer and his wife were living on a cabin on the beach at Silver Bay. By then the operation was named the Chicago Sitka Mining and Milling Company but it was locally known as the Bauer mine. Herman Bauer and his wife arrived back in Sitka in July 1900 and brought with them Sitka's first gasboat, the steel-hulled SILVER BAY. Bauer had closed the store at Skagway and brought its remaining merchandise to Sitka where he disposed of it at heavily discounted prices.<
\From then on he devoted his resources and a great deal of his time to developing the claims at Silver Bay. He sold his interest in the thriving Crescent Manufacturing Company and sank the money in the mine. He borrowed money from his family in Chicago and put that into the mine. Maydenbauer worked with him for a few years but evidently became discouraged. At any rate, he disappeared from the scene.<
\One of the men who worked for Bauer was W. R. Hanlon and in 1908 the Skagway Alaskan carried this news item from Sitka, dated January 28: ``Capt. W. R. Hanlon was carrying supplies to the Bauer mines at the head of Silver Bay in an open launch. He spotted a whale near the head of the bay, ran up alongside it and pumped four shots into it with a 30.30 rifle. The whale gave the boat a blow with its tail, turning it clear over and throwing the cargo and crew into the sea. Hanlon was severely injured but Charley Haley managed to keep him afloat until a party of miners came to the rescue from shore. The whale went on about its business.''<
\Sitka's newspaper had ceased publication by then. The Skagway paper was owned by Dr. W. H. Keller, a dentist who visited Sitka regularly and picked up the story during one of those visits.<
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^sf03\Haleys & Silver Bay, Part 18 --^sf01 ^sf01Since I wrote the first part of this series, published on April 10 of this year, some additional information on Nicholas Haley's birthplace and birth date has come to light, thanks to the persistent efforts of a great-granddaughter, Mrs. E. Marion Sims, a resident of Canada.<
\According to information she received from Ireland, Nicholas was the son of John and Bridida Tysdell Haly and was born on April 4, 1836, at Loughanure Commons, County Kildare, Barony Clane. That is in the upper west corner of Kildare, near Meath County. In all probability the spelling of the name was changed to Haley either when Nicholas entered the United States or soon afterward.<
\The last time Nicholas Haley filed a Proof of Labor affidavit with the U.S. Commissioner at Sitka was on March 31, 1914, when he attested that he had done the necessary work on the Wicked Falls, Haley and Rogers and Bullion claims. Not long after that he signed another document, a deed to part of his homestead.<
\Away back in the 1880s Alonzo Austin, the superintendent of the Sheldon Jackson Institute, had written to Dr. Sheldon Jackson that he was trying to buy a piece of the Haley homestead as an addition to the campus but was having no success. The sale finally took place on June 4, 1914, and involved a piece of ground measuring 183 by 432 feet. The price was $1,000 and the land is the portion of the Sheldon Jackson College campus that is west of Jeff Davis Street.<
\By that time Haley was in need of hospitalization. It is possible that for a time he was cared for at the infirmary of the Sheldon Jackson School, the only facility of that kind in Sitka. The money from the land sale made it possible for Haley to be taken to Juneau to enter St. Ann's Hospital. Just before he left Sitka for Juneau, on July 20, Haley executed a quit claim deed giving ``all property owned by me'' to his son Charles. The document does not list the property but it presumably included both the homestead claim in town and the one east of Indian River as well as a number of mining claims. The deed had to be a quit claim because he did not have title to any of the real property. There is no indication why the other children were excluded.<
\He died in Juneau on August 19, 1914, and was buried in Evergreen Cemetery in that city. He was 78 years old.<
\When Nicholas Haley died his widow, Ellen Mary, was still living in the big family home on Lincoln Street. In 1887 she had purchased, in her own name, the Schmeig residence on Lincoln Street, on the present site of St. Gregory's Church. For many years she rented the house but at some date after the death of Nicholas she moved there, as did her daughter, Julia. On October 15, 1921, she deeded that property to Julia. Ellen died in the house a month later and was buried in the National Cemetery. She was 80.<
\The big house and the remainder of the homestead that surrounded it were sold in 1922 to Kalle and Hilda Raatikainen. Thereafter any of the siblings who were in town lived in the little house. John N. Haley, the oldest of the five surviving children, worked at Treadwell as a tugboat captain for several years, then moved south and about 1894 began working as a civilian employee at what became the Bremerton Navy Yard on Puget Sound. On June 4, 1900, he married Miss Annie Knutson of Bremerton. Nothing further has been learned of him, but when Nicholas Haley died in 1914 John was not listed as one of his survivors.<
\Edward J. Haley, the second son, after working at Silver Bay with his father, serving for a short while with the Customs Service and working in several other areas, was married at Juneau on July 7, 1896, to Miss Edna Sprague who was identified in one of the Juneau papers as the niece of Mrs. Matt Laughlin of Juneau. The ceremony was not performed in the Catholic Church but by the Episcopal minister, the Rev. H. Beers. The Edward Haleys had two children, Donald and Dorothy. Donald married a nurse at St. Ann's Hospital, Miss Bertha Ellen Brown who was from Vancouver, B.C. They eventually moved to Canada and Donald was killed in an accident. Three generations of his survivors presently live in Canada.<
\Dorothy, who worked for many years as a newspaper reporter and editor in Alaska, first married Donald Austen, then John Pegues. She had six sons who carry on the name in Alaska.<
\Edward and Edna separated and he returned to Sitka at some date unknown. He may have done some mining. At any rate he got into a squabble with Anesim Startzoff over a mining claim. The two men were about of an age and had grown up in Sitka, so it may have been a continuation of an old quarrel. Startzoff filed a complaint that Haley was insane. There was a hearing in the U.S. Commissioner's court with a jury of six men. Haley was represented by an attorney and there was testimony from a physician, several of Haley's acquaintances and the complainant. The jury found against him and he was committed to an asylum at Morningside, near Portland, Oregon.<
\Less than a year later a Juneau paper carried a wire story that Haley and two other men had walked away from the hospital and had not been seen since. The authorities were not going to look for them because, they said, all three were trusties and were about to be released anyway. I have heard that Edward Haley later returned to Juneau for a time, but I have not been able to verify that.<
\Thomas Colbert Haley, the next younger of the children, was 12 years old in 1881 according to a census made by the U.S. Navy. As was noted in the first part in this series, a number of different birth dates were ascribed to him in various public documents, but the Navy's data is probably as good as any of them. Just how much formal education Tom had is not known. He may have attended the Sheldon Jackson Institute as a day pupil before there was a public school and more than likely he attended the Russian school in what is now the Bishop's House.<
\Tom would have been 16 or 17 by the time Dr. Sheldon Jackson established Sitka's first government-operated public school and probably did not attend it although his younger brother, Charles, was enrolled there. According to Charles Haley's daughter, Mrs. Margo Britch, both boys attended school in Victoria, B.C., for a time, but the date is unknown.<
\One thing that Tom did acquire outside of school was a fair fluency in the Tlinget language. That was not, of course, unusual back in the 1870s and 1880s. To work in a store in Southeastern Alaska in those years, some knowledge of Tlinget was almost obligatory.<
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^sf03\Haleys & Silver Bay, Part 19 --^sf01 ^sf01After Thomas C. Haley returned in 1902 from working in the Treadwell mines, he engaged mostly but not entirely in the mining field.<
\In the years 1915 to 1917 he also operated a drayage business in Sitka. Whether this was something he started himself or whether he took over the enterprise started earlier by his younger brother Charles is not known. There was no newspaper in Sitka at that time and the fact of his drayage business is known only because it is recorded in the books of the Mills Corporation which are now in the archives of the Sitka Historical Society.<
\He regularly hauled freight for the Mills store and building materials for the W. P. Mills dwelling at the end of Maksoutoff Street.<
\For the most part, however, Tom Haley was involved with his sister Julia and his brother Charles in locating mining claims, maintaining both the claims they located and some that had been located earlier by their father, Nicholas Haley. It is difficult to determine how much of the time of any of them was devoted to actually extracting gold from the multitude of quartz veins that are threaded through the country rock of the Silver Bay area. Tom was probably the mainstay in small scale mining of gold and Tom and Julia especially may have lived at times on what gold he was able to extract.<
\The three of them did not confine their efforts to Silver Bay. After the Chichagof Island gold discovery in 1905 Tom and Severin Swanson located the Lucky Strike lode claim and Charles and Julia located a claim they called the Big Speciman. Both claims were in the Klag Bay area where the rich Chichagof mine was developed, but neither of the Haley claims proved to be winners.<
\Julia was the first of the Haley offspring born in Sitka. The Navy census of April 1881 lists her age as seven and says she was attending the ``English school.'' Presumably that was the one taught by Miss Henrietta Austin whose father was at that time establishing a boarding school for boys, the Sheldon Jackson Institute. In September 1885 she was enrolled in St. Ann's Academy at Victoria, B.C. It is not known how long she attended that school.<
\In the early part of 1887 she accompanied her parents on a trip to Chicago and while there she and her parents each had their pictures taken at a professional studio. The portraits are now in the possession of Julia's niece, Mrs. Margo Britch of Sequim, Washington.<
\During the 1890s Julia Haley appears in the news columns of The Alaskan only once. The item appeared on May 30, 1891: ``Miss Julia Haley has an educated pig named Darby. It is now six weeks old, follows her like a dog and responds to its name. In the mornings he goes to the foot of the stairs in the Haley home and keeps up a continual grunting until someone comes to feed him.''<
\The Haleys did keep pigs, as did several other families in Sitka. A difference was that the others penned their livestock; the Haleys let theirs roam at large to forage for themselves. It was not uncommon for the Haley pigs to root for clams on the Crescent Beach, and almost as common to see a raven perched on a pig's shoulders, ready to hop down and make off with any clam or cockle that the hard working pig uncovered.<
\In addition to the pigs and perhaps some chickens, the Haleys had a mule named Jim which Nicholas Haley had purchased from the Army when it pulled out of Sitka in 1877. It, too, roamed the streets with the pigs and occasionally both species did their foraging in someone's vegetable garden. That brought protests but little else. There was no city government to make regulations, and the federal court, after it came to Alaska in 1884, was far less active in regulating the fringes of social conduct than it is today. It is sufficient to say, perhaps, that the Haley family was not the most popular family in Sitka.<
\If the Navy's census is correct, Julia Haley was 17 in 1891 when she was being followed around by her pig, Darby. Jobs for women in Sitka in the 1890s included teaching, cooking, sewing and clerking in a store and housekeeping. Julia did some store clerking and ran a couple of businesses of her own. Almost nothing is known of the first one, in 1900, except that she rented the Cohen building which stood on a part of the site now occupied by the Sitka Bazaar. She paid the rent of $10 a month to W. P. Mills, the agent for the Cohen heirs, but no clues have been found as to the nature of her business.<
\It may have been curios, a growing summer business in Sitka and other Southeastern Alaska towns. Tourists began coming north on the regular mail-passenger-freight steamers in the early 1880s and curios originally called ``Indian curiosities'' became a part of the stock in trade of most merchants.<
\In the 1880's the principal tourist carriers were the ANCON and IDAHO. It was the IDAHO that made the first trip into Glacier Bay with a few tourists, and a travel writer, in 1883. Two experiments with passengers-only cruise ships were tried in the 1880s. The first was the OLYMPIAN, a big side-paddle vessel that had been brought around from the East Coast. She made six or eight trips, including calls at Glacier Bay, in 1887 but the experiment was a financial failure.<
\The Canadians then tried that business with the ISLANDER for a couple of voyages in 1889 and several in 1892, but was then withdrawn from the northern run until the start of the Klondike Rush. The QUEEN, GEORGE W. ELDER and CITY OF TOPEKA carried most of the Alaska tourists, along with their regular freight and passengers, in the 1890s.<
\Sitka had an advantage over Wrangell and Juneau, the other main ports of call, because it was the turn-around point and the ships commonly stayed here at least 24 hours and sometimes longer. The COTTAGE CITY and SPOKANE joined the vessels regularly calling at Sitka after 1900, and the QUEEN continued regular visits here into the 1930s.<
\In Sitka in 1900 there were at least half a dozen merchants who advertised that they sold curios and Julia Haley may have been unable to compete. At any rate, she stopped paying rent on the Cohen building after about a year.<
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^sf03Haleys & Silver Bay, Part 20 -- ^sf01For approximately a year at the turn of the century Julia Haley rented store space on Lincoln Street near the Russian Church. She probably sold curios for the increasing tourist trade but she closed that store early in 1901. Subsequently but at a date unknown she began clerking in E. W. Merrill's photograph studio and curio store. It was previously noted that Julia and Merrill had jointly located a mining claim in 1903 and it is likely she was working in his studio and store at that time. They were on the first floor of the Mills Block, which stood on the present site of The Cellar.<
\Julia worked for Merrill for several years but by 1909 she had opened her own curio and antique shop, The Old Russian Trading Post, in the west end of a long log building on Lincoln Street. Her shop would have been approximately at the site of today's Conway Building, which houses a fur shop during the summers. The shop occupied perhaps one-eighth of the building, but the name soon became the name of the entire building. Thousands of postcard pictures of the old building were published over the years, naming it the Old Russian Trading Post although that had not been its purpose Russian times. At the time Julia Haley opened her shop many leftovers from Russian days remained in Sitka and they were her main stock in trade -- samovars and other utensils of brass and copper, trade beads, Russian coins, trinkets and furniture. For many years door knobs and hinges, purportedly from Baranov's Castle, were a standard item in the curio stores.<
\Some the things Julia had on sale had been unearthed in the digging of Sitka's first water lines, in 1905 and 1906. She also acquired heirlooms from some of the older Russian families and she gathered anything that appeared to have a Russian connection and found a market in the increasing number of tourists. She may also have sold some Native craft work, although in those years most of the local producers of baskets, moccasins and carvings did their own selling.<
\The Alaska tourist business began in the early 1880s and increased year by year. There were only a couple special cruise ships in early years, and they were unsuccessful. The tourists came on the regular mail-passenger-freight steamers.<
\I have found nothing to indicate how long Julia ran her shop. I remember the sign which extended across the wooden sidewalk, its outer end supported by a rotting post. The lettering and totem symbols were badly weathered. That was probably about 1916 and the shop was closed, some of the windows broken, the door nailed shut. <
\After Julia closed her curio store she was for several years engaged in caring for her aging mother until she died in 1921. After that she worked with her brothers, Thomas and Charles, in promoting gold mines and even in doing some mining, as will be related later. <
\Back in the early years of this century Sitka had a number of people who were classified by the general public as ``strange'' or at least ``different.'' Julia Haley may have been both, and not only because she went into the woods and staked mining claims. The clothing she wore was out of date, so far as fashion went, and her hats were large and wondrous. She was Roman Catholic by upbringing but most of the time Sitka did not have a resident priest. After the Community Presbyterian Church was completed in 1925 she attended the Sunday evening services there. She never mingled with the congregation but crept in after the service had started and sat in the very back pew, then left again before the last notes of the final hymn had died away.<
\It was not on Sunday but on Saturday nights, however, that Julia put on her most notable performances. The weekly mail boat from Juneau customarily arrived sometime between 6 and 8 o'clock on Saturday evenings and the mail was distributed to the boxes as soon as it reached the post office. A sizable portion of Sitka's population gathered in the post office lobby, hoping for letters. One who didn't need to hope was Julia. There was always a letter in her mail box, one that she had mailed to herself a day or two earlier. She did not read the letter aloud, but did offer a string of vocal comments: ``Oh, dear, the poor thing,'' ``What a terrible thing to happen,'' ``I'm not a bit surprised at that,'' and so forth, on and on. Nobody except complete strangers paid any attention; it was just that strange Julia Haley.<
\Of Julia's two brothers remaining in Sitka, she appears to have been most closely associated with Charles and sometimes accompanied him on his trips to the states to sell stock in their mining claims. Charles Augustus Haley, the youngest of the children of Nicholas and Ellen Haley, was born in Sitka. There are conflicting records as to when he was born. His own story was that he was born on his father's homestead at Indian River on Christmas Day 1875. A problem with that story is that his father did not file that homestead claim until June 1, 1882. One federal census gives his birth date as December 1878 and another one has it December 1876. The latter is probably correct and agrees with the Navy's census of April 1881 in which he is listed as age 4.<
\It was not until January 1886 that Dr. Sheldon Jackson, the agent of the U.S. Bureau of Education, was able to open a public school in Sitka. Charles had his first schooling at the Sheldon Jackson Institute and was said to have also attended the Russian Seminary where he learned to speak Russian, a language that was still fairly common in Sitka in those years. Like his brother Tom, he also became fluent in Tlinget.<
\Charles apparently inherited some of his father's talent as a salesman and he displayed public relations talent at an early age. When he was in the third grade of the Sitka Public School each member of his class was required to write a short piece about the school. The Alaskan then published what they had written. Charles began his piece: ``We have a good school in Sitka and we have a good teacher. We learn fast in our school because we have a good teacher.''<
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^sf03Haleys & Silver Bay, Part 21 --^sf01 Tom and Julia Haley were rarely mentioned in The Alaskan, but Charles' name appeared every now and then. Examples: May 1897: ``Charles Haley and William Hanlon have discovered a new quartz ledge at Jamestown Bay.'' June 1900: ``Charles Haley is now the janitor at the Custom House. He is a good boy and always keeps busy.'' July 1901: ``Charles Haley's horse and wagon are now transporting tourists to the park and other places of interest.'' November 1901: ``Charles Haley has started a new dray line. He has but one horse and a cart, but he gets there.'' April 1902: ``Charles Haley has his truck farm in fine shape and he says he will have rhubarb on the market by May 1.'' May 1902: Charles Haley has received a new wagon for his Sitka-Eli Transfer Company.'' June 1902: ``Charles Haley has branched out into a new business and now has all facilities for handling funerals.''<
\For his tourist trade, Charles installed three seats in his freight wagon and put a canopy over it, as shown in the picture above. It was undoubtedly he who gave the name ``Blarney Stone'' to a flat rock at the foot of Jeff Davis Street. It had been known for years as Baranov's Rock because the first Chief Manager of the Russian American Company was said to have used it as a seat. Charles unloaded his passengers there, had them march three times around the stone, then kiss it to bring good luck.<
\From the Blarney Stone, Charles probably took them to Indian River Park although there was not much to show them except a narrow road between the trees. By the summer of 1902, however, the tall Son-i-hat totem and the four house posts had been placed in the the park. They were followed four years later by the collection of poles that had been at expositions in St. Louis and in Portland, Oregon. Charles soon developed fascinating interpretations of the poles for his tourist customers. Did he, while they were under his spell, also try to get them to invest in mining claims Silver Bay? Quite possibly he did and he may have had some success despite some official reports that were not exactly glowing.<
\Charles was equipped to take winter as well as summer tours of the town, as shown in the photograph above. The boy holding the horse's head and the two small boys behind the sled are unknown. Those on the sled, left to right: Charles Haley, Flora Mary Stephens, her sister Ethel Stephens, and Julia Haley. In front is Sybil Bridge. The Stephens sisters were living in Sitka with their mother and their step-father, Mathew Bridge, who was the deputy Collector of Customs. Sybil was their half-sister. The building on the right was known as the Old Russian Trading Post, where Julia Haley had her tourist shop.<
\The Customs Service transferred Mathew Bridge to Skagway and his family moved there, too. Then Flora Stephens went to the states and entered nurses training. After she became an RN she and Charles Haley were married in 1911. Their daughter, who was also named Flora, was born in Sitka on October 19, 1913.<
\According to the best available records, Charles Haley operated his drayage and tour business in Sitka at least from 1901 through 1912, although for part of the year 1907 he worked as messenger in the office of the U. S. Surveyor General in Juneau. As reported earlier, Thomas Haley was operating a drayage business in Sitka in the years 1915 to 1917, but whether the brothers were partners is not known.<
\Mrs. Charles Haley and her daughter Flora moved from Sitka to Seattle in 1917. That was at the insistence of Flora's grandmother, Mrs. Ellen Haley. She was set on having Flora become a musician and believed that age 4 was not too early to start, and the training was not available in Sitka. It probably was her wish, too, that Flora learn to play the harp, an appropriate instrument for a girl of Irish ancestry. That was, at any rate, what she studied, and by the time she was 7 she was appearing on the stage of the Blue Mouse Theater in Seattle, billed as the world's youngest harpist.<
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^sf03Haleys and Silver Bay, Part 22 --^sf01 The three Haley children who remained in Sitka -- Thomas, Julia and Charles -- despite some other activities continued to focus much of their attention on mining. After the discovery was made at Klag Bay, Chichagof Island, in 1905, they located claims there, but none of them paid off and they were abandoned. Most of their attention was centered on Silver Bay where their father, Nicholas Haley, had begun staking mining claims and selling interests in them in the 1870s.<
\Following the death of their father in 1914, Tom and Charles did the annual assessment work on some of the Silver Bay claims and relocated others. Julia located two new mining claims in her own name. She named one of them the Big Specimen; the other was an extension of the Haley & Rogers, located by her father. She also claimed a trade and manufacturing site which she called the Silver Bay cannery and sawmill site.<
\After Mrs. Charles Haley and her daughter, Flora, moved to Seattle in 1917, Charles shuttled back and forth between Sitka and Seattle and later extended his travels to Los Angeles where his wife was working as a nurse.<
\It is difficult to determine how much time any of the three devoted to actually extracting gold from the multitude of quartz veins that threaded the Silver Bay area. Tom was undoubtedly the mainstay in whatever mining was done. Until 1921, Julia was tied down with caring for her mother, and Charles hired out in several summers as a tour conductor of the Chambers of Commerce of Seattle, Portland and Los Angeles, and possibly of other tour groups.<
\In August 1919 Charles and Julia Haley and their cousin, William Johnston, located the Dreamland group of claims on the south bank of Salmon Creek and not far above tidewater. Nothing more was heard of that until July 1921 when The Sitka Sun, recently established by W. R. Hanlon, carried a story:<
\``A big mining deal has been put through by C. A. Haley. He returned from Seattle on the SPOKANE and while below interested L. T. Jacobsen and several other Seattle business men in the Dreamland claims, owned by the Haleys. Jacobsen had bonded the claims and also bonded the Seattle-Sitka gold and copper claims owned by W. R. Hanlon and C. A. Haley, at Herring Cove.''<
\The bonding meant that Jacobsen had taken an option on the claims, probably with a small payment. He formed the Haley Gold Mining Company and in the spring of 1922 Tom Haley was at Silver Bay building a two-story 20 by 30 bunkhouse for the mining crew that would soon arrive. On July 7, 1922, a new weekly paper, The Sitka Tribune, reported that the crew from the mine had been in town for the Fourth of July but had hurried back to Silver Bay to resume work on the tunnel. ``The ore is looking better as the tunnel progresses,'' the paper said.<
\About that same time The Sitka Sun reported: ``J. J. Putraw, mining expert of Seattle, has been examining the Rogers ledge, owned by the Haleys. One blast secured samples showing free gold. He returned to Seattle and will place a crew of men on the property this year. The rock found on the Haley property is exactly like that found in the famous Chichagoff mine.''<
\Nicholas Haley had maintained that Silver Bay would turn out to be just like Treadwell, referring the complex of four mines on Gastineau Channel. Then after the Chichagoff mine began to pay out, Silver Bay was going to be just like Chichagoff. The rock may have been the same but the difference was that it held little gold.<
\But both the Haley Gold Mining Company and the Rogers ledge appear to have fizzled out. There were no further reports on them or on either Jacobsen or Putraw. But the Haley properties were not the only mining operation at Silver Bay in the early 1920s. Herman Bauer had three men working on his claims in 1920 and in 1923 he inserted in the Tribune the necessary advertisements for a patent application. Peter Romanoff and Andrew Dixon had staked the Big Chief and Lucky Strike claims at the head of Green Lake and were opening a cut on what was described as a big vein. They built a cabin on the beach close to where the power plant is today. John Kaznakoff was keeping up the annual assessment work on the Lucky Chance, a property that had been the downfall of the Lake Mountain Mining Company and the Providence & Sitka Mining Company. And on the west side of the bay, William Johnston and a partner had built a cabin at the old Eureka claim and were working the outcrop with a small Huntington roller mill.<
\In June 1923 S. H. Loraine, a widely known mining engineer, looked over several Silver Bay properties. He was quoted as saying, ``I saw encouraging surface indications on the Johnston and Green Lake properties.''<
\If the Haleys were dismayed by the failures of Jacobsen and Putraw, it was not for long. First there was a story that ``the Marcus Daly people'' had bonded the Dreamland group of claims for $65,000 and the Haley and Rogers group for $110,000. The story did not say that any money actually changed hands and that deal also disappeared into thin air so far as further information is concerned. The next report after that was in The Sitka Progress in 1927. The story said that Edward F. Preble, a Portland, Oregon, businessman, had taken over the Haley mine and it was now known as the Baranof Mining Company. The story continued, ``Engineers say it has big possibilities. No stock is for sale.''<
\The ``big possibilities'' was pretty much standard in mining stories; the ``no stock for sale'' was unusual and a little startling.<
\A problem with trying to follow developments at Silver Bay after 1927 is that The Sitka Progress folded in the fall of that year and Sitka was substantially without a newspaper or had a paper only intermittently during the next dozen years.<
\What is known is that in 1926 stock was being sold in the Oregon Exploration Company of Portland, Oregon. The company perhaps had taken over the interests of Edward F. Preble, mentioned above. At any rate, it was promoting the development of a mine at Silver Bay. A buyer of several shares of the stock was Conrad Taylor of Denver, Colorado, and in 1930 he initiated an event that substantially affected the lives and fortunes of the Haley family.<
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^sf03Haleys & Silver Bay, Part 23 --^sf01 On March 28, 1906, at Denver, Colorado, a daughter was born to Conrad and Florence Hovey Taylor. She was named Charlotte and as she grew up she attended Denver schools, then went to Los Angeles and to finish her education at Whittier College and the University of California at Los Angeles. She received a teacher's certificate and in the fall of 1929 began teaching in a Pasadena grade school. <
\When vacation time came the following June, Conrad Taylor asked his daughter to go to Sitka and see what she could learn about the Oregon Exploration Company and about B. Van Zeipel, its chief engineerr, and about the mining properties it was proposing to develop. She happily took off for Alaska, and at Sitka she quickly learned that there had been a good deal of squabbling among the people involved in the Oregon Exploration Company and that it was out of the picture so far as the Haley properties were concerned.<
\Charlotte found, too, that Tom, Charles and Julia Haley were eager for a new developer with money to spread around. Wall Street had crashed the previous October and it was a poor time to try to sell stock in anything short of a richly paying gold mine.<
\In later years Charlotte said that she stayed in Sitka because she fell in love with the place, and that may have been a factor. One wonders, however, whether it was Charles who persuaded her that, with her connections in California, she could be the fairy queen who would unlock the untold riches of Silver Bay. <
\However it happened, Charlotte returned to Los Angeles and organized the Edgecumbe Exploration Company, incorporated under the laws of California and authorized to sell up to a million shares of stock at $1 a share. Charlotte was president of the corporation and some of her California friends were the other officers. She engaged Donald A. Odell of the Los Angeles law firm of Tanner, Odell and Taft to handle the legal affairs of the corporation and act as its agent.<
\Charlotte then returned to Sitka where she persuaded the three Haleys to join the corporation. They gave quit claim deeds to all of their mining claims at Silver Bay and each received 1,525 shares of stock in the corporation, as did Charlotte for her work in organizing the corporation.<
\But there was a joker in that deal. It was an irrevocable agreement that said, ``The parties hereto have caused all of the stock of the corporation to which they are entitled to be issued in the name of Charlotte Taylor, and the certificates are to be issued to her.''<
\Charlotte Taylor was president of the corporation and most of the members of the Board of Directors were her California friends. Charles Haley was, however, placed on the board. With the signing of the above agreement Charlotte also controlled all of the outstanding stock of the corporation. She was totally in control of the Edgecumbe Exploration Company. If there was as much gold in the mountains at Silver Bay as the Haley family had always believed, it was a valuable position to be in. On the other hand, a good many thousands of dollars had been sunk into those mountains in unsuccessful attempts to find the gold. If the gold was not there, then the Edgecumbe Exploration Company was just another vehicle for trying to sell mining shares to the unwary. <
\We do not know what qualms Tom, Julia and Charles Haley had about signing over their stock, but years later Charles was reported to have lamented having done so. They had traded their mining claims for stock in the corporation, but they were unable to sell those shares or even offer them as collateral for a loan. The Great Depression was deepening and even in Sitka it was being felt.<
\Despite the Depression, however, there were people willing to invest in an attractive gold mining venture, and everything possible was done to make Silver Bay sound attractive. Charles Haley made one or more trips to the states and managed to sell some stock. Polly Brennan in Pasadena was secretary of the corporation. Whether she actually sold the stock or just issued the certificates is not known, but she did sign a good many certificates. Charlotte Taylor was both president and treasurer. <
\One list of 78 stockholders shows that most of them were in the Los Angeles area, but there were two in New York City, one in Toledo, Ohio, and a few elsewhere in California, including a major general at the Presidio in San Francisco. Many of the stockholders were persuaded to have their certificates issued to Charlotte Taylor. By 1936 a Los Angeles bank was holding 52 certificates, representing 19,891 shares, issued in her name.<
\In 1933, before any other stock had been sold, a Dr. T. L. Dailey made a firm proposal to test the possibilities of the Silver Bay property. His proposal was set forth in a letter from the attorney, Donald Odell, to Charles Haley:<
\``Dr. Dailey wants a 90-day option to purchase 600,000 shares of stock of the corporation for $200,000. He will put no fewer than 15 men to work, with an air compressor, to take out ore to to be shipped to Seattle or Los Angeles for mill run tests. He will pay all expenses of this work, not less than $15,000. If he takes up the option, he will pay the Haleys $200 a month until the mine is producing on a commercial basis. He would then sell 400,000 shares of the stock at 50 cents a share to raise $200,000 to put into the mine, but would not receive the 400,000 shares unless he could sell all of them. The Haleys would have 400,000 shares to keep or sell, and Dr. Dailey would retain 200,000 shares.''<
\On June 26, 1933, Charles Haley replied: ``It appears that Dr. Dailey is very anxious to gain control of the property. In other words, he sees in the ore not only another Chichagoff but a vein ranking in class with the Comstock and the Empire mines of California. If he did not, he would not be so anxious to get us off the property. We do not think it advisable at this time to accept his offer.''<
\The question is, did Charles really, deeply believe Silver Bay would be a fabulous bonanza? Or did he fear that a thorough exploration would prove it valueless and thus eliminate the possibility of future stock sales?<
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^sf03Haleys & Silver Bay, Part 24 --^sf01 After Charles Haley turned down the proposal of Dr. T. L. Dailey for the development of the mining claims of the Edgecumbe Development Company at Silver Bay, it was decided that the company would do the work itself, as funds became available.<
\The company got some help from the federal government. In 1933 the Forest Service assigned a crew of Civilian Conservation Corps men under foreman Ben Ficken to build approximately a mile of trail from the beach toward one of the mining claims. This included three bridges and 762 feet of corduroy. While in the area the CCC also built a trail from the beach to Green Lake where Steve Tuss was at work on the claims previously located by Peter Romanoff and Andrew Dixon.<
\Charles Haley was named General Superintendent of the company and was to take care of the annual assessment work, have charge of all property, contract for any and all labor needed and to make daily written reports which were to be mailed to Pasadena where the company had opened an office. He was to be paid $75 a month. Charlotte Taylor was also to be paid $75 a month to manage the business of the corporation in California and to be responsible for the corporation's money.<
\It was decided that there would be a meeting of the directors each month in the Pasadena office. Charles Haley went down from Sitka to attend at least some of those meetings. His wife, Mrs. Flora Haley, was living in Pasadena at that time.<
\Things did not always go smoothly among the directors. In September 1934 Charlotte at Pasadena wrote to Charles Haley at Sitka: ``Mr. W. has called for his commissions and checks have changed hands and there has been considerable devil to pay as he says you told him he was to collect 20 per cent on all money raised. Pretty tough on Mrs. Haley and me as it is extremely difficult trying to patch up, mend and hold together a group of people who feel they have been cheated, misinformed and lied to. A word to the wise is sufficient. In the future be extremely careful to paint the picture just as it is without any flattering untruths.''<
\About the same time the Edgecumbe Exploration Company hired B. Van Zeipel as geologist and engineer. He had been highly recommended by Dr. William Cavanaugh, president of the Oregon Exploration Company, for which Van Zeipel had worked for eight years. <
\Van Zeipel arrived at Sitka aboard the mail boat KENAI from Juneau on November 16, 1934. It was a poor time of year to begin any kind of work at Silver Bay. In December The Arrowhead, one of the short-lived Sitka papers of that time, reported that Bill Hanlon had a contract to drive 130 feet of tunnel on one of the Haley claims which was a mile and a half from the beach at an elevation of 3000 feet. They were extending the trail and erecting a blacksmith shop and a two-room cabin. The crew included John Osbakken, Ole and Andrew Birkland, Titus Demidoff. Fred Easley, William Johnston and Ike and Victor Hanlon. Julia Haley was doing the cooking. Charles Haley and Van Zeipel were also at the camp. A month later the paper reported that work had been stopped by the weather and the crew had come to town.<
\At a later date Charlotte Taylor wrote to Donald Odell, the company's lawyer: ``Mr. Van Zeipel arrived at Silver Bay about the middle of November. On December 28 his services were determined to be unsatisfactory and he was discharged. He was paid for two months and we do not wish to pay him another cent.''<
\William R. Hanlon, who had contracted to drive a tunnel on the Free Gold claim, was highly regarded by Miss Taylor as a miner and mining advisor. At one point she wrote: ``Mr. Hanlon is the discoverer of the famous Chichagof mine and the miner who struck the first ore in in the Hirst Chichagof mine. Speaking our ore, he told me that this is the finest blue ribbon ore I have ever seen in Silver Bay and exactly like the Hirst Chichagof ore.''<
\Following the discharge of B. Van Zeipel at the end of 1934, Jean Philip Champagne, mining engineer, was hired under contract to supervise and extend the operations to develop the company's lode claims at Silver Bay. In August 1935 Champagne reported that one sample of tellurium ore had showed 40 ounces of gold per ton, value $1400. His final report in September he said: ``I estimate that Bonanza 16, with proper machinery and equipment, could produce $76,500 a year with operating expenses of $56,337.75, leaving a profit of $20,162.25.''<
\Those were exactly the kinds of reports the company's officers loved to show to prospective stock purchasers. A year later, however, J. Clark Sutherland wrote a letter to Charlotte Taylor: ``At your request I have been engaged for the past several months in making a complete geological investigation of your company's property. I have reached certain conclusions which are not entirely favorable. They may be modified when I complete the laboratory work.'' No further letters or reports from Sutherland were found in the correspondence files of the company but the minutes of a directors' meeting mentions that there was a further report, dated in November, 1936. The directors accepted the report but there was no mention of its contents.<
\W. R. Hanlon, sometimes advisor to Miss Taylor, advised her in May 1937 that the Free Gold claim should be developed and that a small Staub mill, manufactured in Oakland, California, be purchased. The gold recovery would be from 75 to 80 per cent, he said, but other equipment could be added later for higher recovery. ``If you should fail to raise the money to purchase the mill, that could be done right here in Sitka,'' Hanlon wrote. He would appear to have been over optimistic on that score.<
\Hanlon also wrote: ``If it will be necessary to have an engineer at a high salary going fishing and hunting and camping on the beach most of the time, I would want to have nothing to do with the project.'' The Staub mill was not purchased at that time.<
\Between 1930 and 1937 Charlotte Taylor was in Sitka a part of the time, but in the latter year she got a job as head of the fan mail department at Universal Pictures and remained there for the next three years. During that time she also served as private secretary to the actress Deanna Durbin. She returned to Sitka in 1940.<
^sf03To be continued=
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^sf03Haleys & Silver Bay, Part 25 -- On a snowy Sunday morning, December 20, 1936, three employees of the Edgecumbe Exploration Company were making their way toward one of the company's mines at Silver Bay. Suddenly they became involved in a life-threatening event. The story of what happened was first published as ``Reported Dead'' in Esquire Magazine, April 1939. The author was Fred Easley as told to K. A. Taylor. In June 1943 the article was reprinted by another magazine, The Alaska Sportsman. It is reprinted here with courtesy of Esquire Magazine and the Hearst Corporation.<
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^sf03Reported Dead=
^sf01\We were on our way to the mine. Otto Hill, a miner, J. Clark Sutherland, an engineer, and myself. Blinded by the whirling snow, somehow we got off the trail. It wasn't until the wind suddenly stopped and the air cleared that we realized we had lost our way. Then we saw that instead of being well up the side of the mountain, as we had supposed, we were down in the bottom of the canyon. Realizing the danger of our situation, we about-faced, ready to retreat.<
\When we stopped I was standing opposite a huge boulder. But I wasn't looking at the rock. My eye was caught by a yellowish spot of snow at my feet, which I recognized as a danger signal. Beneath the crust was an air pocket and I was thinking, as I turned away, how lucky I was that I had not taken one step more, or I might have been in snow up to my neck.<
\Then it happened, without any warning. There was only a slight ripple of snow around my ankles, and a quiet WHOOSH, as a part of the mountain seemed to let go and engulf me like a thin dime dropped in a sand dune. One minute I was standing there in the sunlight, talking to Otto and Sutherland. The next I was flat on my face in inky blackness, gasping for air. But there wasn't any air. Only cold, hard snow pressing against my eyes, my nose, and my mouth. I tried to yell but there was only a smothered gulp as I choked on a handful of snow.<
\I couldn't breathe and I was filled with panic. As a swimmer I had learned to hold my breath under water for a minute. The minute was almost up now. My last minute on earth. My lungs were bursting and there was a terrific pounding in my ears. It was like drowning, I imagine; drowning in snow.<
\In desperation I opened my mouth to call again and sucked in a little air. It must have come from that yellowish spot in the snow. I had fallen, apparently, with my face close to it. Or a little air may have been imprisoned around the great rock. That's the only way I can account for not having been suffocated in those awful moments.<
\People ask me what I thought about in that moment of dying. You'll laugh when I tell you. My first thought was, ``Who'll get my stamp collection now?'' My second was even crazier. I remembered a fortuneteller who had said most emphatically that I was going to live to be an old man. ``So this can't be the end,'' I told myself, ``not at 28.'' Face to face with death, I thought about stamps and fortunetelling. I guess that's the way the human mind works. Right up against it, it clings to trivial and familiar things, as a child starting out on a strange journey clutches her doll and storybook to her. Like a child, too, I thought of my mother. The shock of this might kill her. I'd have to get out, someway.<
\Then I began to pray. Some of the boys in Sitka will tell you I'm not much on praying, as a rule, but I did some tall talking to the Lord under all that snow. If faith could really move mountains, I figured there was never a better chance to prove it. I needed one moved off of me - pretty pronto.<
\Next, I took stock of the situation. It didn't look any too hopeful. It was hard to see how either the Lord or the prophet could help me much. If I expected to get out of that fix alive, it looked as if I'd have to get busy and help myself. The force of the slide had thrown me forward on my face, at about a 45-degree angle. My right arm was extended straight out in front of me, my hand barely touching the rock. My left arm was imprisoned at my side, crooked at the elbow. When I tried to move my head, it wouldn't budge. It was as if it had been encased in concrete. I had no idea snow could be so hard. The weight of it on my back was intolerable. I began to wonder if my back was broken and I was paralyzed. That was one of my worst moments. When I discovered that I could flex the fingers of my right hand I almost sobbed in relief. <
\Slowly I managed to free that right hand, and with it I scooped the snow away from around my face. When the slide hit me I vaguely remembered making a grab for my stocking cap as it was knocked from my head. Pawing around now, I found it, and automatically jammed it on by head, so as not to catch cold!<
\When I opened my eyes I was surprised at the darkness. I could make out the dark outline of the rock ahead but I couldn't see my hand in front of my face. Snow I had always thought of as being dazzingly white. Inside an avalanche it's black as a Halloween cat. I could barely make out the outline of my body, yet, curiously enough, I was able to distinguish between night and day.<
\And I wasn't cold. In all the time I was buried I was never cold except my hands and feet, which finally froze. My igloo fitted me like a glove and there was no wind to chill me. Fortunately, too, I was warmly dressed. If I had dressed for the occasion, I couldn't have done better. Over my long woolen underwear I wore a woolen shirt, jeans, and a fisherman's oilskin suit over that. On my feet I had two pair of woolen socks with Arctic socks over these. The shoe pacs I wore were good and stout, the sole and vamps of rubber, with leather from the instep up. Fastened to these were my Norwegian Bear Claws, a homemade snowshoe with long wooden runners. The Bear Claws, incidentally, saved my life. Without them I wouldn't have lasted a day. <
\For headgear I wore a helmet I had made by sewing two woolen socks together, cutting out an opening for my face. This came down to my shoulders, under my coat, keeping my neck warm and dry. Over this I wore a regular stocking cap.<
\As luck would have it, I was carrying the lunch that day for the three of us. Since my load was light, I had picked up the ten-pound lard pail in which we had packed six sardine sandwiches, one dozen cold sourdough pancakes, three chocolate bars and coffee in a small sack, and had slipped it into a pack saddle I wore on my back. In addition I was carrying a heavy blazer in case it was cold in the mine, and a small Swedish stove on which to cook our coffee and beans. In my pocket I carried a watch and a knife. The watch wouldn't do much more than tick off the minutes between me and Eternity, but without my knife I would have gone hungry with all that food on my back.<
\Lying there, like a fish frozen in a slab of ice, I wondered anxiously about Otto and Sutherland. Had they been buried, too, and had they escaped? If they were alive, they must be out there somewhere, looking for me. But if they were dead? The jig would be up. Nobody on earth would know where to look for me and I would slowly freeze to death. In the spring, when the snow melted, our bodies would be found. I didn't like that idea.<
\The avalanche had struck us at the base of Lucky Chance Mountain. The newspapers, later on, made much of that fact, but at the time I wouldn't have given a nickel for my luck. I needed a shovel, and luck wouldn't bring me that. I had no tools to work with, only that right hand which I had finally freed. With it I clawed the snow out from under my body, kicking it behind me with my right leg. My left leg wouldn't move. The oilskin pants had pulled up a little, leaving the jeans exposed. They had frozen fast to the snow. <
\Breathing wasn't so difficult now. I could even spare breath occasionally to call. But no answer came. Away off in the distance I heard a sound, a pack-tamp, pack-tamp, and my spirits rose. Otto and Sutherland must have escaped the slide and were digging for me. I listened intently. But the noise wasn't regular. It came at odd intervals, not as the sound of a shovel should be. Slowly it dawned on me that it wasn't rescuers I was hearing but the snow as it packed more tightly about me. Something relentless in the sound of that packing snow stirred my anger. It might beat me in the end, but, By Glory, I wasn't licked yet. And I set grimly to work once more. <
\As I paused for breath a little later, it seemed all at once as if my prison had grown lighter. A crack of daylight appeared at the edge of the great rock ahead. A foot farther up another hole was opening up, letting in a draught of fresh air. As I watched I caught a glimpse of blue sky. <
\In my excitement I shouted aloud, again and again. Finally there came an answer. To my ``Hell-oo-oo'' there came a faint ``Hell-oo-oo'' in return. With my heart pounding madly, I listened again. It wasn't repeated. I decided I was being fooled again. But stubbornly I kept on calling and this time there was no mistaking Otto's voice. I heard him shout, ``We'll have you out in a little while.''<
\``We''? Sutherland must be all right, too. I drew a shuddering breath of relief. A few minutes more and this horrible nightmare would be over. I stopped digging for a moment and drank in the fresh air as a thirsty man laps up water. I filled my lungs again and again.<
\Then I heard Sutherland's voice for the first time. He must have been standing within ten feet of me for I heard him say, ``Otto, you go get the shovels while I look for Fred.''<
\Those were the only words I heard him speak, for just then there came another WHOOSH, which I felt rather than heard, and my air-holes disappeared forever. A second avalanche had swept down just as rescue was at hand.<
\For a moment I had actually seen the blue sky. I had breathed the fresh air. I had heard the voices of my companions and knew that help was near. Now all that was changed. My air supply was cut off again and I was breathing with difficulty through my mouth. My prison was darker than ever, and off in the distance I could hear that ominous pack-thump, pack-thump beginning again as this fresh snow began settling about me. Yet that momentary contact with the world outside had done much to raise my spirits. I knew that both Otto and Sutherland were alive. They had heard my voice and knew where to look for me. But mercifully I did not know how serious that second slide was, nor that I was to be abandoned for dead. Had I known of the long hours still ahead, and on what a slender thread my chances of life hung, I wonder now whether I could have stuck it out.<
\The first slide occurred at nine o'clock in the morning. The second came at noon. After three hours I was still lying on my face, able to move only half my body. I was exasperated by my helplessness. Digging with one hand was such slow business. And cold, too. Impatiently I kicked with my foot, and remembered the Bear Claws. Those runners, made of sturdy spruce, would furnish a fine tool to dig with. The problem was, how to get at them. Like a contortionist, I doubled up my right leg as close to my body as possible, reached down and wrenched off the snowshoe. Fortunately it had come untied. With my teeth I gnawed and tore at the wood until I had broken off a runner. Using it as a paddle, I made much better progress and soon I had freed all my body except my left arm which was fastened to my side by the straps of the pack saddle. The pack was frozen fast to the ``ceiling'' of my cell.<
\I twisted my head and tried gnawing through the leather thong, but it was like trying to chew through a buffalo hide. I thought of the knife in my pocket, but it was out of reach. Maddeningly enough, I could barely touch it with my fingertips. I began pulling up the lining of my pocket until I could grasp the knife. Holding it in my teeth, I opened the blade. It dropped out of my nervous fingers. In a cold sweat I retrieved it and slashed the strap that held the pack saddle before any other disaster overtook me.<
\It was late afternoon by now and I was hungry. In the darkness I fumbled for the lunch pail and and found it completely telescoped. Everything in it except the top sandwich was pulverized, and well mixed with coffee grounds. But it was food and I was grateful for that. Hungrily I devoured two cold pancakes and a chocolate bar as I waited for rescue. I had no way of knowing, of course, that at that moment Otto and Sutherland, bruised and exhausted, were staggering away from me on frost-bitten feet. They were heading down to the shelter cabin, having given me up for dead.<
^sf03To be continued=
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^sf03 Haleys & Silver Bay, Part 26 -- This continues Fred Easley's story of his ordeal after he was buried by a snow slide at Silver Bay in December 1936. The story was first published in Esquire Magazine, April 1939. Reprinted courtesy of Esquire Magazine and the Hearst Corporation.<
^sf03REPORTED DEAD, Part 2=
^sf01\By the increased darkness I could tell that darkness had fallen. I took out my watch to look at the time but couldn't see the dial. I tried to strike a match but there wasn't enough oxygen for it to burn. I held the watch to my ear and discovered it had stopped ticking. By that I knew it was past eight-thirty because that was the time I always wound it. I wound it now from force of habit and returned it to my pocket. There was something companionable about its ticking.<
\My hands were cold as ice. I dropped my knife and one of my paddles and in the darkness never was able to find them. After that, whenever I stopped to rest I stuck the remaining paddle upright in the snow, close to my right knee, where I could reach down and touch it. If I lost that, I lost my one slim chance to pull through.<
\My feet were soaking wet and laboriously I took off my shoe pacs and wrung the water out of my sox. But my hands were so numb I had difficulty getting the sox and pacs back on. I decided not to risk that again.<
\I was suffering, too, from thirst. My lips were chapped and dry. I scraped ahead of me for clean snow and tried chewing it, but that brought little satisfaction. Then I held some of it under my tongue and let it melt slowly. That was better. The lunch I ate slowly, at intervals, whenever I was hungry. I wasn't particularly saving it. I needed energy for digging, and warmth. Besides, I expected help would come long before the food was gone. It wasn't until I had scraped the last crumb from the pail that I was to regret this.<
\In spite of my hopes of rescue, I kept digging, scraping slowly away at those frozen walls, inching my way like a mole, nearer and nearer to the surface. The snow was packed so solidly it made the going difficult. Instead of scooping it out handfuls at a time, as you might suppose, I had to chip it away, particle by particle. It was like the ice which forms in an electric refrigerator. And as I worked I kept hearing, at intervals, that now familiar pack-tamp. I would stop and prick up my ears, thinking that this time it might be the sound of a shovel. It never was.<
\Monday morning came. I had been buried for twenty-four hours and I was still digging. Lying on my stomach, propped up on one elbow, I would scrape the snow away in front of me, pack it down beneath me, and wriggle forward an inch at a time. Never at any time was my cell as large or as commodious as a Pullman berth. There was barely room to turn over, never enough to sit erect. I couldn't spare the strength for a single movement that did not carry me forward and upward. Breathing was too difficult.<
\Monday afternoon dragged by. Sutherland had reached Sitka by then, still suffering from shock and exposure but intent on getting a party organized to recover my body. A siren sounded the alarm and men and women rushed from their homes and shops to learn what had happened. Sutherland told of the snow slide that had taken the life of one and threatened the lives of two others. He told of the first slide in which Otto and I had disappeared completely and he himself had been buried except for two finger tips.<
\Those finger tips saved his life and Otto's. With them he clawed open an air hole just before he was on the point of losing consciousness. Otto's hand was on Sutherland's foot but he was unconscious. Sutherland enlarged the hole and Otto revived when he got air. But it took them nearly three hours to dig themselves out of the packed snow. Then they started looking for me. Otto claimed he heard my voice, but later they were not so sure about that.<
\Just as they began their search another avalanche caught them. It knocked them some distance down the canyon. Sutherland was thrown free but all that showed of Otto was one arm sticking out of the snow. It was dark by the time he was freed. Their feet were frostbitten and unless they got down to the cabin quickly they were in danger of freezing to death. By then they had no hope that I had survived. By the time they reached the cabin, Otto was in bad condition and stayed there. Sutherland, despite his bruises and exhaustion, headed for Sitka to sound the alarm so my body could be recovered and a telegram sent to my mother. That telegram, incidentally, reached Mother as she was trimming the Christmas tree.<
\In Sitka, U. S. Commissioner Henry Bahrt was gathering men and provisions to go to Silver Bay to retrieve the corpse. At the same time the presses in various places were grinding out papers with such headlines as, ``Sitka Man Loses Life in Snow Slide'' and ``Alaskan Buried Alive in Snow; Two Others Escape.'' And the ``body'' was devouring the last unsavory cold pancake, under twenty-one feet of snow.<
\I had been buried now for thirty-six hours. In all, I had tunneled fifteen feet with that scrap of broken wood. But there was six feet to go. Six feet, about the length and depth of a grave. And my strength was beginning to wane. I seemed to tire so easily. Each stroke was so much more of an effort. And my feet were so numb that I had to stop frequently to rub them to restore the sluggish circulation. They became bruised and sore from so much rubbing. My hands were troubling me, too. The cold was creeping up my arm and it would only be a question of time until I could no longer hold the paddle. The elbow I leaned on had a sore from the constant pressure on the packed snow.<
\About that time I became aware of a new danger. I was growing sleepy. The temptation to doze was hard to resist. But I knew the race would be lost the moment I succumbed and slept. There would be no awakening on this earth. Doggedly I kept pecking away with my paddle, and somehow the night passed and Tuesday morning dawned.<
\I had been buried for forty-eight hours, two days and two nights, and the strain was beginning to tell. I began having hallucinations. I closed my eyes for a moment and when I opened them I seemed to be in a large cavern with a domed roof. Excitedly I raised my paddle toward the roof to make sure I wasn't dreaming. It hit the snow a few inches above my head. I couldn't believe it, it was all so clear, even to a crack that straggled across the dome.<
\Wearily I closed my eyes again. I opened them to find the cave still there only larger now and hung with glittering festoons. It was all amazingly beautiful -- only none of it was there! I kept telling myself it wasn't true, that if I closed my eyes and opened them suddenly the vision would vanish. I tried that trick. The dome was still there. I told myself I would not look for that crack, then promptly peered over my shoulder. I groaned when I saw it. Feebly I picked up my paddle and made another stab at the snow.<
\It must have been almost noon on Tuesday when I dropped off to sleep. What was the use, anyway? Otto and Sutherland must have been buried in the last slide or surely they would have found me before this. Freezing to death was a painless end, I had always understood. Trying to keep from freezing was the painful part. Why prolong the struggle? All I need do was close my eyes and drift off to sleep.<
\I opened my eyes for one last look around. Somehow that crack in the ceiling obsessed me. I wondered, crazily, if it was the crack of doom you were always hearing about. I stole a last look over my shoulder. There it was, all right, widening as I watched, inviting my soul into the next world.<
\With a shrug I gave up and settled myself to sleep. The last sound I heard was that far away pack-tamp, pack-t--. No, by Golly, it wasn't tamp. There was a ringing sound this time, the sound a shovel makes when it strikes a rock.<
\For a moment my heart stopped beating. I tried not to believe my ears. Like my eyes, they were playing tricks. Soon I'd be hearing heavenly music. But there it went again. The sound was certainly different. And it came with regularity, too. Instead of a pack it was more of a chunk, like the sound of a shovel being thrust into a drift, followed by a sucking sound when it is withdrawn.<
\I raised my voice in a shout. Even to my own ears it sounded feeble. I wasn't surprised when there was no response. Later I was told it was heard by one of the men in the rescue crew who thought it was another worker calling to him. My heart was thumping with excitement and a new burst of energy seized me. I grabbed my paddle and began to dig like mad, but back now, in the direction from which I had come. Once in my tunneling I had started off to the left, then, thinking better of it, had changed direction. That niche was still there and, by doubling myself up like a jackknife, I was able to turn around and work in the opposite direction. The men I could hear were directly on my trail. They told me later they had come across one of my black hairs in the snow.<
\The sound of digging grew plainer and plainer. I expected daylight to break through at any moment.<
\All at once I ducked back, just as a brown shovel scrunched down a foot in front of my face. When it was withdrawn an opening appeared through which the sunlight streamed. With my stocking cap in one hand and my paddle in the other, I thrust my face through that opening, grinning from ear to ear.<
\``Gee, Fellows,'' I said to the two men standing there, shovels stopped in mid-air, ``I'm sure glad to see you.''<
\For a moment they were frozen in their tracks. You could have knocked them over with a snow flake when I crawled through the opening under my own steam. Then one of them dropped his shovel and yelled, ``My God, men, Fred's alive! Fred's alive.''<
\I can still see the blue of that Alaskan sky, flecked with fleecy white clouds. Off in the distance the sun was shining on Sitka Sound. And I thought, ``What a perfect day for a resurrection.''<
\The men had been digging for four hours before they found me. Sutherland was directing the work. With wooden pegs he had outlined a circle fifty feet in diameter. Somewhere in that circle, he said, they would find me. He was one hundred per cent right, for they found me exactly in the center.<
\I thought I could walk down to the shelter cabin, supported on either arm, but when I tried to stand on my feet my legs buckled under me. I had to be carried down in an Arctic sled. For sixteen hours those men worked over me, in shifts, to restore circulation to my hands and feet. Then they took me to the Pioneers' Home Hospital. I didn't even have a sniffle the first three days. Then I caught a cold from the other patients.<
^sf03\Fred Easley, who had been born in California, came to Sitka in 1934. After his escape he continued to live in Sitka but it is uncertain whether he ever returned to the mine at Silver Bay. He worked as a taxi driver and a fisherman and in the fall of 1965 he was working for the City of Sitka. He became ill and went to Seattle where he died in the Virginia Mason Hospital on December 11, 1965. According to his obituary in The Sitka Sentinel he was born on Sept. 16, 1902, which would have made him 34 when he was buried under the snowslide, rather than the 28 reported in his story, above. His remains were returned to Sitka and a funeral was conducted by the Sitka lodge of the Loyal Order of Moose, of which he had been the Governor. Survivors included his two daughters, Pamela and Paula Easley.<
^sf03To be continued=
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^sf03\Haleys & Silver Bay, Part 27 --^sf01 From 1932 until 1937, the president and treasurer of the Edgecumbe Development Company, Miss Charlotte Taylor, divided her time between Sitka and Pasadena, California. She was the chief promoter of the company which had acquired a number of mining claims at Silver Bay from Thomas, Julia and Charles Haley in exchange for stock in the company.<
\But the country was still suffering the Great Depression and buyers of stock in a distant gold mine were getting harder to find. So in 1937 she settled in the Los Angeles area and worked for Universal Studios and as secretary to the actress Deanna Durbin.<
\Sitka, economically, had suffered with the rest of the country, but by 1940 that was changing fast. In 1938 the Navy had begun making improvements on Japonski Island and in 1940 it let a contract to build a major base there. In 1939 Sitka had acquired, for the first time, a telephone system and a bank. In 1940 the new Sitka Hotel was ready to open, the Civilian Conservation Corps was changing the waterfront by filling a section of beach to create Totem Square, and the voters approved the purchase of the local utilities by the city.<
\Miss Taylor had kept in close touch with her Sitka stockholders, the Haleys, and learned of the brightening economic outlook. Her company had several thousand dollars from the sale of stock in California, and there was a possibility that more money could be raised in Sitka. She decided to return north to attempt further development of the Silver Bay property and she arrived back in Sitka about the middle of 1940.<
\A Straub ball mill with crusher, amalgamating plates and concentrating table were purchased for just under $1,800. A small crew put up a mill building and got the equipment in place. W. H. Rowe, who owned the boat ST. LOUIS and a donkey engine, appears to have been the lead man. He not only moved the machinery but logged enough trees to make 25,000 board feet of lumber, which he cut in the Sheldon Jackson School sawmill. That was enough lumber for the 16 by 40 mill building and some other construction. Stumps were blasted out and a foundation for the mill built and by mid-November 1941 the machinery was running.<
\There then proved to be another problem. The specifications of the mill called for from 8 to 16 horsepower to operate it to capacity. Miss Taylor picked the lower figure and bought an 8-horsepower Atlas-Imperial gas engine. It did not produce enough power to run the mill efficiently and she wrote to the company to learn whether there was a way to increase the engine's power. She was told it was impossible, and by the time that exchange had ended the United States was in the war and engines were not available.<
\While working at Universal Studios Miss Taylor had met Glenn Hamilton Morgan who was also employed in the movie industry. He had spent the summer of 1937 in Alaska, working for the Sunshine Mining Company on a placer operation near Haines. He was also a man with the right ideas: the easiest way to make money from mining claims was to sell stock in them. He would devote much of the remainder of his life in that endeavor.<
\Morgan followed Miss Taylor to Sitka and they were married here on June 11, 1942. Her mother, Mrs. Florence Taylor, came north for the wedding and she stayed on at Sitka and at Silver Bay where the Edgecumbe Development Company had its camp. When there was a crew at the camp, Charlotte and her mother did the cooking, but between the draft and the work on Japonski Island it became almost impossible to hire a crew, and operations were shut down for the duration.<
\In town, Charlotte served for a short time as City Clerk, later supervised a child care center, and was active in a number of organizations. Glenn was drafted into the Army in July 1943 and served until October 1945, all of it at Fort Ray on Charcoal Island.<
\One event of the war years was the death of Julia Haley, reportedly of a heart attack, on January 19, 1943. She died in the little house on Lincoln Street, on the site of present St. Gregory's Church, where she lived with her brothers, Thomas and Charles. She was buried a week later from St. Gregory's Chapel on Baranof Street, with Father Patrick J. O'Reilly conducting the service. Depending upon which birth year is accepted, she was between 64 and and 67 years old and except for the time she spent at school in Victoria had lived her entire life in Sitka. A brief obituary in the Sitka Sentinel said she was to be interred in the National Cemetery near her mother. Her grave site, however, has been something of a mystery because her name did not appear on the local list of National Cemetery burials. The mystery was cleared up through the persistent efforts of Julia's niece, Mrs. Margo Britch, with the help of a grand niece, Mrs. E. Marion Sim, who lives in Canada. National Cemeteries are administered by the Veterans Administration and its headquarters reported that Julia had been buried in the same grave with her mother. It is understood that the grave has now been marked with both names.<
\With World War II at an end, the Edgecumbe Development Company resumed the work at Silver Bay. The corporation's balance sheet on December 31, 1945, showed these figures on the Asset side: Cash, $27.24; Property, $26,761.00; Equipment, $4,549.56; Incorporation expense, $1,245.21; Deferred production expense, $15,108.06; Building, $673.19; Deficit, $7,742.49. The ``Property'' category undoubtedly represents the mining claims, but one wonders who did the appraisals.<
\On the debit side the figures were: Advances received, $1,364.85; Notes payable, $1,220.00; Capital stock, $53,522.00.<
\No list of stockholders of either that or a later date has been found. Charlotte and the three Haleys were issued a total of 6,000 shares under the trust agreement of 1934, with all of it issued in Charlotte's name. They may have earned more later and in the 1930's some of the employees were paid partly in stock. But the bulk of the 53,522 shares represented sales to individuals, most of them in California. And the sale of stock continued, so that by July 31, 1949, a total of 131,929 shares were outstanding.<
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^sf03\Haleys & Silver Bay, Part 28 --^sf01 Despite the fact that the Edgecumbe Development Company had, by 1949, disposed of 131,929 shares of its stock with a face value of $1 a share, it was continuously short of funds. A letter went out to the stockholders pointing out that the stock was not assessable, but asking for a contribution of $5 per 100 shares ``to help keep the company going.'' In 1951 Charlotte Morgan, president of the corporation, was trying to borrow $250 on her life insurance, apparently to satisfy the demands of a credit bureau.<
\Charlotte's husband, Glenn Morgan, appears not to have been an officer of the corporation but was one of its main promoters. Long time Sitka residents remember that Glenn put on his best suit, carried a brief case, and met the steamboats at the wharf, buttonholing passengers as they came off, trying to sell them stock in the corporation. And he apparently annoyed more than a few Sitka residents with his attempts to peddle them what they considered to be totally worthless shares in Edgecumbe Exploration Company.<
\There were other annoyances, too. Almost from the time of the American occupation, Silver Bay had been a favorite place for Sitkans to visit. People went there to prospect for gold, to fish in Salmon Lake and its outlet stream, to hunt, or just to climb around in the mountains. After the arrival of Morgan, visitors found many ``No Trespass'' signs posted here and there, some of them on a trail built by the Forest Service. Buildings had signs warning that they had been booby-trapped with dynamite, and sometimes visitors to the head of the bay were met by Morgan, a gun strapped to his hip, who warned them away because of possible dynamite blasts.<
\None of that made the couple overly popular in town. They constantly complained that their mail was being intercepted and that the mayor and city council were ``against'' them. Charlotte ran for the city council in 1948 and fell far short, with only 139 votes. She wrote that Winn Goddard, Harvey Brown, Clithero and Dr. Charteris ``pulled all the tricks they knew to keep me from getting the seat.'' It may have been about then that she began to study law with the LaSalle Extension School, but she apparently never finished the course.<
\But the Morgans, operating as Edgecumbe Exploration, did spend some money at Silver Bay. They hired a small crew, paying them partly in cash and partly in stock in the company. They built a sawmill, a compressor house, an assay office, a bullet-proof powder house, a two-story house with eight rooms and inside bath, wood sheds and a wharf. The sawmill cut some 40,000 feet of lumber, used in the construction. A Buda diesel engine was purchased to run the compressor and they acquired a speed boat for trips to town. A little later, in 1950, they got a larger boat, described as a 25-foot cabin work boat. They were still doing a lot of juggling of finances and late in 1949 paid off a $9,816 note with stock in the company.<
\Charles Haley worked as a member of the Edgecumbe Exploration crew for a time but had to give it up because of his health. He suffered at least one heart attack. Tom Haley, so far as can be determined, did not work for the company, or at least did not get paid by the company. He had been employed by the Army during the war, but was laid off when the Army facilities on Japonski and other islands were turned over the Alaska Native Service after the war ended.<
\After the war Flora Haley, Charles' wife, returned to Sitka for the first time in many years. She had been living in Anchorage with her daughter, Mrs. Margo Britch, but had found the winters there too rigorous. She was a registered nurse and may have worked at that for a time. It is known that she worked as desk clerk at the Sitka Hotel. Mrs. Britch also came down from Anchorage for a visit. During that visit, Charlotte Morgan wrote to her mother in California that Mrs. Britch had mentioned that despite the fact that they were stockholders, her father and her uncle Tom had nothing to live on. ``I said, yes, that was too bad,'' Charlotte wrote. ``But our company couldn't pay either man for doing nothing; our money is for one purpose only and our great purpose in life is to get the mill going, so they will have something coming in.''<
\Charles was still trying to get title to what was known as the Haley homestead, just east of Indian River. His father had staked the claim at an early date but had never fulfilled all of the requirements for receiving a patent to the land. The Land Office turned down Charles' final request in 1950. Charlotte blamed that on ``all the lies that gang has told the Land Office about us.'' She didn't name the gang.<
\Charles, who had spent most of his 80 years promoting the search for the elusive gold of Silver Bay and was the vice president of the Edgecumbe Exploration Company, suffered a stroke on March 3, 1956, and died on March 15. He had made Sitka his home his entire life and had attended the Sitka Training School, the Russian School, and the public school when it was established. He spoke Russian and Tlinget. Charles was especially remembered in Sitka for his magnificent singing voice. He had sung in the choirs of the Catholic, Episcopal and Presbyterian Churches and in many minstrel shows and other entertainments in Sitka. Graveside services at the Pioneer Cemetery were conducted by the Rev. Henry Chapman of the Episcopal Church. Survivors were his brother, Thomas; his wife, Flora Haley, and his daughter, Mrs. Peter Britch.<
\Thomas Colby Haley was the oldest of the three offspring of Nicholas and Ellen Haley who spent their lives in Sitka, and he was the last to go. He had arrived in Sitka at the age of two, had seen Alaska evolve from a possession to a District and then to Territory, and was close to seeing it become a State. Tom spent a lot of his years at Silver Bay and undoubtedly knew that rugged terrain as well as any one person ever did. Ever since the early 1930s he had been a stockholder in the Edgecumbe Exploration Company, but that did him little good and his last years were lived in penury. He entered the Sitka Pioneers' Home on August 7, 1956, and died there on September 29, just a week short of his 90th birthday. There was a requiem mass in the Pioneers' Home Chapel and he was buried in the Pioneer Cemetery.<
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^sf01as the Rev. Dickey, aka ``Dominie.''
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^sf03Haleys & Silver Bay, Part 29 --^sf01 The operations of the Edgecumbe Exploration Company were not the only ones at Silver Bay in the 1930s and 1940s.<
\Back in 1922 Peter Romanoff and Andrew Dixon located a claim they named the Big Chief about a half mile beyond the head of Green Lake. The following year two additional claims were located by Romanoff, Dixon, John Sandman and S. H. Loraine, a mining engineer.<
\The claims were named the Romanoff No. 1 and No. 2. Sandman and Loraine dropped out of the picture and Romanoff and Dixon carried on, grubstaked by Nicholas Bolshanin, the Customs officer at Sitka. Peter Romanoff died in 1924 and Dixon did the annual assessment work for a few year. He died in 1932.<
\Bolshanin then got a longtime miner, Steve Tus, interested in the property. Tus built a cabin on the beach near where the power plant is today and and spent several seasons working on the Green Lake claims. He finally gave up on them and turned his attention to the Lucky Chance and associated claims, first located by Nicholas Haley some 60 years earlier. They had last been under the ownership of the Providence and Sitka Mining Company, which had gone broke. Sitka creditors of that company held onto the claims into the 1920s by doing the annual assessment work on them. After that they were open to anyone who wished to stake them.<
\The Edgecumbe Development Company, perhaps prudently for their purposes, did not touch the Lucky Chance group. Two mining companies, with stockholders scattered from coast to coast, had failed to make them pay and any new firm associated with them might have had difficulty selling stock.<
\Steve Tus didn't seem to be bothered by that. He formed his own corporation, the Lucky Chance Gold Mining Company. Tus was president; Nels Bredvik, a Sitka merchant, was vice president; Nick Bolshanin was secretary; and Nels Drugg and Andrew Tus were directors. Drugg was an operator at the Sawmill Creek power plant, and Andrew was a son of Steve and lived in Butte, Montana. So far as I can learn, they did not attempt to sell stock in the new company. There was talk of installing a small mill, but the war came on and that was postponed. Steve Tus died during or soon after the war but I have not discovered the date and his name is not in the available burial records.<
\Steve's interest in the Lucky Chance Gold Mining Company was inherited by his son, Andrew. Whether Andrew came to Alaska in the 1940s is not known, but he did enter into some correspondence with Glenn Morgan of the Edgecumbe Development Company. He was fearful that someone would ``jump'' the Lucky Chance claims. Morgan reassured him and offered some help.<
\On June 4, 1950, he wrote to Tus: ``Yesterday three of us went on the Redoubt Trail and I got a good look at the south side of Lucky Chance with my glasses. Still covered in deep snow. When that goes, if I can get down to bare earth, a few sticks of dynamite will move yards of material and make a good showing. In two days two or three of us can do several hundred dollars worth of assessment work. In order to jump a property they have to prove the work wasn't done. You don't have to prove you did it; just file an affidavit that you did. I'll do my best to make it thorough and legal for you, Andy, as our presence alone is worth $20 a day each for labor, plus any movement of earth.''<
\It is not known whether Glenn Morgan moved any earth at the Lucky Chance that year but if he did it appears to have been the last work done there in those years.<
\It was in 1983 that the Edgecumbe Development Company last filed notices that assessment work had been done on its mining claims, but just when active development work ceased is unclear. In 1952 Charlotte Morgan, the president of the company since it was organized in the 1930s, went to work for the Public Health Service on Japonski Island. She worked in the medical supply procurement and travel department of that agency until 1975. She was active in a number of civic organizations including the Sitka Historical Society and was a proponent of turning the old Native School on Katlian Street to a museum. She died at the Sitka Community Hospital on November 27, 1983, following a lengthy illness and is buried in the National Cemetery.<
\The death of Charlotte Morgan seems to have been the effective end of the Edgecumbe Exploration Company. The last filing of an intention to hold the claims was filed in 1983. Her husband, Glenn Hamilton Morgan, who worked as a longshoreman for a time, died at Sitka on September 15, 1992, at the age of 82. He also was buried in the National Cemetery.<
\The demise of Edgecumbe Exploration did not bring to an end the interest in Silver Bay. In September 1981 the Phillips Petroleum Company of Denver, Colorado, and Anchorage, filed locations notices on a block of 184 lode mining claims. The firm also leased the subsurface rights to the claims from the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. The block of claims extended from tidewater at the head of the bay up to and over the top of Lucky Chance Mountain. Each claim was named LCM followed by a four digit number. For several years an engineering firm flew men down from Anchorage each summer and did some work on the claims, including core drilling. Evidently the results were unsatisfactory. At any rate, Phillips Petroleum dropped its leases in October 1993.<
\A small block of claims in the area of the former Edgecumbe Exploration Company holdings is owned by John E. and Sandra K. Burgess of Sitka, who hold them more as a hobby than in expectation of great riches. There is, after all these years, only one patented claim in the area. This is the Stewart lode, first developed in 1879 and with most of the machinery still in place. It is owned, at last report, by Sheldon Jackson College.<
\In the 123 years since the first claims were staked at Silver Bay a great deal of money has been sunk into the ground there. It came from Wisconsin and Michigan, Rhode Island and New York, California and other areas, and some of it came from the pockets of Sitka residents. More than a few Sitka men did a lot of prospecting and strenuous development work, nearly all of it fruitless. The inflow of money from other areas did contribute substantially to Sitka's economy. It is difficult to sort out which of the developers had been bitten by the gold bug and truly believed in the futures of their properties, and which were simply running a scam. But none of them got rich.<
\What is the future of mining at Silver Bay? Who knows? Modern transportation, such as helicopters, and modern equipment, such as core drills, have greatly simplified the testing of mineral ground, even in remote areas. Perhaps there is a pot of gold somewhere under all that rock.<
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