On the evening of February 5, 1898, the night the Clara Nevada left Skagway, every possible maritime factor was mitigating against the ship. It was an old, poorly refitted and marginally operational vessel. Its crew was of questionable ability and virtue. It was steaming the turbulent winter waters of Alaska’s Inside Passage, running before a ninety-mile-an-hour wind churning up waves cresting at twelve to fifteen feet. It was also snowing. Such a night, mariners today remark, would have made a “dead fisherman quiver.”
For the first ten miles, the vessel navigated Taiya Inlet, a narrow, glacier-formed passage that ran a shade west of due south. Then she entered the waters of Lutak Inlet, carefully avoiding the shoals at Indian Rock, the only midchannel hazard in the Chilkoot Inlet that runs just a shade east of due south. On the port side—left and, in this case, east—ran the mainland. On the other side was the long arm of the Chilkat Peninsula, which ended at Seduction Point, so named for the “designing nature of the Indians there.” The geomorphic extension of land thrusting out into the Chilkoot Inlet from Seduction Point was known as “Seduction Tongue,” leaving historians to ponder whether this was meant as a double entendre.
Once out of the Chilkoot Inlet, the Clara Nevada entered the Lynn Canal, another glacier-formed corridor that also ran close to due south for fifty miles before emptying into the confluence of Chatham Strait coming from the south and Icy Strait from the west. Eldred Rock, the final resting place of the Clara Nevada, lies midchannel, ten miles south of Seduction Point. To the east of Eldred Rock is the mainland. To the west is Sullivan Island, ironically named for the captain of the Louisa Downs, wrecked on the island in 1867.
Hardly noteworthy in life, in death the Clara Nevada has become immortal. Built in 1872 as a survey vessel for the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey (USCGS), she was named the Hassler in honor of Ferdinand Hassler, the first superintendent of the survey (1807–18 and 1832–43). For twenty-five years, she plied the waters of Alaska as her crew mapped the coastline. In addition to locating and mapping hazards to maritime travel, she was also instrumental in logging many of the names of prominent geographic features along Alaska’s lengthy coast. In 1882, her name was even added to the topography of the northland. Surveyor William Healy Dall, at one time the acting assistant of the U.S. Coast Survey, named Hassler Point on the northeast coast of Dall Island.
In 1897, when the USCGS felt that the Hassler was too old to be considered seaworthy, she was sold for $15,700 to the Pacific & Alaska Transportation Company. Based out of Portland, this was one of the numerous, rapidly formed maritime companies that were taking advantage of the sudden demand for transportation to the Klondike gold fields.
As with many such firms, the Pacific & Alaska Transportation Company had a less than sterling reputation. Prior to owning the Clara Nevada, the company—owned by two McGuire brothers—had been part of another company, the Portland & Alaska Trading & Transportation Company. Under that corporate charter, they had purchased a Columbia River stern-wheeler, the Eugene, which they intended to have towed across the open waters of the north Pacific to St. Michael. From there, the shallow draft vessel would have been used to transport Argonauts up the Yukon River to Dawson. The job of towing the Eugene had been assigned to Captain McIntyre and the Bristol. The captain of the stern-wheeler was C.H. Lewis, later to be the skipper of the Clara Nevada.
The saga of the Eugene was destined to reflect both comedy and drama. It was agreed that the ships would rendezvous in Union Bay, British Columbia. The stern-wheeler arrived ahead of the Bristol and was immediately impounded by British authorities “on various charges.” When the Bristol arrived, it refused to throw the Eugene a tow line until these “customs difficulties” were resolved. This did not please Captain Lewis, who felt Canadian authorities would probably never allow the stern-wheeler out of port—for good reason. Rather than abandon the Eugene, Lewis ordered a “full head of steam, slipped his lines” and headed for St. Michael, alone, across the north Pacific with a full complement of passengers.
(The fastest—and most expensive—route to the Klondike was up the Yukon River. Steamers would leave Seattle and head across the north Pacific to Dutch Harbor in the Aleutian Islands of Alaska. The vessels would then head north across the Bering Sea to St. Michael near the mouth of the Yukon River. Usually the arrival at St. Michael meant that passengers were switching from an ocean-going steamer to a river boat. River boats, like the Eugene, had shallow drafts and were not stable in the ocean. If waves rose, the ships could be flipped.)
Once the British customs agents realized that Lewis and the Eugene had given them the slip, they sent an old steamer, the Hope, in pursuit. But the Hope was no match for the speedy stern-wheeler and the determined Captain Lewis, who swore he would “burn all the bacon aboard before I let [the British authorities] catch us.”
The Bristol also set off in pursuit of the Eugene, primarily because the Eugene was a riverboat that would break apart in a storm on the open sea. Captain McIntyre had good cause for concern: a storm was brewing. The Bristol, however, could hardly have been called seaworthy. It had left Victoria with six hundred horses in two-foot-wide stalls. Passengers were sleeping on plank bunks anchored wherever there was room for a man to stretch out and in many places where a man could not. She was so badly overloaded, she almost turned turtle a short distance out of Seattle.
Even though she was heavily loaded, the Bristol was able to catch the Eugene near Seymour Narrows,5 where she threw a cable to the stern-wheeler. This cable came none too soon. A heavy southeast blow came up shortly, “springing the stern-wheeler’s timbers and causing her to work badly and take in water at an alarming rate.”
While Captain Lewis swore he was going on to St. Michael, his passengers felt otherwise. Understandably frightened, they held a mass meeting and, when assembled, demanded that the Eugene return to port. Lewis was recalcitrant. He said he was going on to St. Michael, even “if all hell broke loose.” It did. Given no other choice, the passengers, mostly miners, took possession of the Eugene and then signaled the Bristol to take them aboard before the Eugene sank.
This was not as easy as simply transferring passengers, however. The captain of the Bristol refused to take any passengers on board until they signed “a release of any cause of action which they might have acquired against the Bristol.” The passengers were reluctant to do so but, with the approaching storm, they felt they had little choice. After a standoff, the passengers relented and almost all signed the releases. One man, E.B. McFarland, the general manager of the Portland & Alaska Trading & Transportation Company, refused to sign. This so enraged the rest of the passengers that they threatened to lynch him. With waves churning violently and the ship in danger of sinking at any moment, few passengers were interested in the niceties of legal phraseology. McFarland was “helped to a determination by a committee of passengers who presented guns at his breast and fired pistols within an inch of his ears.” He signed.
After the passengers were loaded onto the Bristol, the rapidly filling Eugene was hauled to Alert Bay, where British customs agents once again seized the vessel and ordered it towed to Victoria, British Columbia.6 Though his ship was badly damaged, Captain Lewis cut the tow line to the Bristol late that night and, once again, disappeared into the Pacific. When he reappeared, the Eugene was in Port Townsend on Puget Sound, safely on the American side of the border.
The dramatics were all in vain. Though the owners swore that the Eugene would try for St. Michael again, the vessel never got the chance. The fiasco cost the Portland & Alaska Trading & Transportation Company too much money. The company declared bankruptcy, and the Eugene had to be returned to her previous owners. Lewis was sued for his actions and McFarland sued for duress.7
The bankrupt owners of the Eugene, the McGuire Brothers, then purchased the Hassler and hired Lewis to captain their newest flagship. The vessel was refurbished and then renamed the Clara Nevada after a “well-known Western actress of that period.”
&nb
sp; As a historical aside, research has failed to locate any person—real or fictional—named Clara Nevada. The only Nevada that appeared to fit the naming of the ship was Emma Nevada, known as “the world’s greatest coloratura singer,” a woman alleged to have had an affair with Wild Billy Metson, also known as “Hell Fire Bill from Gold Hill,” who later gained the reputation in Alaska as the law “North of 53.”8
(It is also interesting to note, though of dubious authenticity, that “old sailors who live[d] in an atmosphere of superstition” believed that the Clara Nevada was a cursed ship. Worse, she was “doubly hoo-dooed because she had two names ending in A.” This, supposedly, was because there were statistically more ships wrecked whose names ended in the letter “A” than with any other letter.9 A quick check of ships wrecked or sunk in the Pacific Northwest in 1898, oddly, confirmed this superstition. Of the fifty-six such ships listed in McCurdy as having gone to Davy Jones’s Locker, thirteen had names ending in “A.” “D” and “N” had seven apiece, and “E” was the third most numerous with five members. This, the author speculates, is more a matter of orthography than any insinuation by a supernatural power.)
A fairly large ship considering the vessels plying the waters between Seattle and Skagway but small compared to the Queen and other coast liners, the Clara Nevada could carry a crew and two hundred passengers, many in first-class accommodations, along with three hundred tons of cargo. Steam powered, she had a length of 154.0 feet, beam of 24.7 and draft of 11.8.10 It was not a stern- or side-wheeler, so travel across the open ocean was not treacherous, a fact that undoubtedly must have made Captain Lewis breathe easier.
The ship had three masts used for supporting sails. These were, in essence, a back-up power system for the ship. If the engine failed or the ship ran out of coal, the sails could be unfurled.
On her maiden voyage, the Clara Nevada left Seattle in a busy week. Over the previous seven days, eight steamers carrying upward of two thousand stampeders had left for Skagway and Dyea, the twin ports at the upper end of Taiya Inlet. But the voyage north was not without incident. As she backed out of her berth in Seattle, the ship collided with the U.S. Revenue cutter Grant. Upon her arrival in Port Townsend the next day, she rammed the dock and damaged her bowsprit. She fought a ferocious storm as she headed north and landed in Juneau too late to offload her cargo of dynamite.
At Skagway, according to one witness, J.W. Lansing, M.D., she “jammed against the pier and shattered three or four piles badly; after which [she] backed away and made several other efforts to land, but it kept us about two hours to make a satisfactory landing.”11 She offloaded passengers and cargo in Dyea and Skagway and then steamed south, now running with the wind she had been fighting the day before, headed for Seattle.
What happened next is pure conjecture. A witness on shore at Seward City, now known as Comet, eight miles away from the Clara Nevada’s final resting place, reported he saw a ship on fire near Eldred Rock. An orange fireball had sprouted on the water, and “embers were seen to fly into the sky at a great height.”12
In the next instant, the night was pitch-black. He assumed that a ship had exploded and gone to the bottom of the channel. Quickly, he passed the word but there was nothing anyone could do that night. The storm was near hurricane force, and it would have been impossible for any craft to reach the site of the fireball.
Word was passed to Juneau by the steamer Coleman. The deputy collector of the United States Customs in Alaska, Inspector T.A. Marquam, immediately chartered the steamer Rustler to investigate. At Comet, he interviewed witnesses and examined debris found along the beach. He reported finding clothing, photographs, furniture and parts of broken boats, along with the following letters, constituting the name of the boat, “——ada.”13
Other debris included skylights, parts of a deck house and “a lot of 16 foot planks,” which the Clara Nevada had loaded on her deck.14 Also found were life preservers and a hatch cover with the name Hassler printed on them. This led to some confusion. Since the McGuires stated that the name Hassler had been eliminated from all locations on the ship and new life preservers taken onboard, there was speculation that the Clara Nevada was not the boat that had gone down. This suggestion was given more substance when it was reported that a passenger on another steamer had spotted the Clara Nevada “lying to under the shelter of Douglas Island” on the night the vessel was supposed to have gone down. This sighting clearly proved to have been in error.15
When Marquam came to Eldred Rock, he discovered the corpse of a steamer. He reported the “hull was lying in about four fathoms [24 feet] of water, and her outline could be seen distinctly.” But, as only the spars could be seen above the water at low tide, there was no way to positively identify the wreck.
A diver sent overboard reported a “great black hole in the hull where the boiler room had been.”16 Marquam then proceeded to “coast around Lynn Canal” looking for survivors. He “examined Chilkat Island thoroughly,” as well as “Sullivan Island and the shore of both sides of Lynn Canal, Henry Bay and Shelter Island,” but was “unable to find any trace of any one.” But he did find the footprints of “some animal in the snow, and as there are no wolves about,” he believed that these were the paw prints “of a dog that had swam from the wreck.”
Even if there were any corpses to be found, the Rustler would have been unable to pinpoint the location of the cadavers. The storm that had just passed had dumped “18 inches of snow” on the area. This would have covered any human remains for days, if not weeks.
Perhaps the most persuasive proof that the vessel that had gone down was the Clara Nevada was that the vessel never again made port. Laundry left by the crew in Juneau was never picked up nor was the dynamite destined for the Treadwell Mine in Douglas ever delivered. Combining this evidence with the disappearance of the ship, it was concluded that the wreck was indeed that of the Clara Nevada.
No one knew how many people perished in the disaster—the passenger list had gone down with the ship. There was no backup paperwork, either. In the wreck report, the president of the Pacific & Alaska Transportation Company stated that he had “no knowledge who was on board.” This was hardly unusual. This was the beginning of a gold rush, during which emphasis was on making money and not on keeping records. As a result, passenger records were sparse. It could be assumed that anyone who wanted to head south and had passage money was taken aboard. Only one body associated with the Clara Nevada was ever found.17 In March 1898, divers were sent to Eldred Rock to retrieve bodies. There is no record that any were ever recovered.
Estimates of the dead ran from a low of thirty to well over one hundred, in addition to the crew of thirty. While there is no way to come up with an accurate count, combining the list of the dead from all newspaper articles, there were at least forty-six individuals aboard identifiable by name and one corpse. But several newspapers stated a handful of women were onboard, for whom no names were given, as well as seven Klondikers, again with no names. There is also evidence to support the contention that there were at least three stowaways on board. Probably, the best count would be in the neighborhood of fifty-seven.
It did not take long for recriminations to begin. Every incident in the short life of the Clara Nevada was examined to see if a clue to the ship’s demise could be discovered. Investigators reexamined the incident of January 27, when the Clara Nevada collided with the United States Revenue cutter Grant in Seattle. While at the time this was considered nothing more than an embarrassment to a captain on his maiden voyage, after the Clara Nevada went down, it was assumed to be positive proof of the captain’s incompetence.
Investigation of this incident revealed little. The collision had been “gentle,” and the impact had been so slight it “did not cause any cessation of the waving of adieus.” Of possible greater significance, it was revealed at the hearings that the engine room telegraph cable had been broken prior to leaving Seattle and had not been repaired before the incident at the Port Townsend do
ck.
Passengers on the trip north did not have kind words for either the ship or crew. Some claimed that the crew was incompetent, “intoxicated” or both, and the ship unseaworthy. J.W. Lansing, M.D., reported that, among other indignities, passengers had to furnish their own candles with which to read and that those candles had been stolen by the crew “as soon as we turned our back.” Further, food on board “was not fit for humans to eat. Before reaching Skagway our tea and coffee was made of salt water from the ocean. Part of the time we had no water to drink or to wash in.”
Another passenger, Colonel Fred Wilson, “one of the most popular singers of mistrelsy [sic] in the Eastern States,” was quoted as saying that the trip north had been so bad that “a meeting of the passengers was held on the deck and the prevailing sentiment was in favor of leaving the ship.” Wilson convinced the passengers to stay on board for the remainder of the trip, “but it was a stormy one.”
This story was confirmed by another passenger, Charles Jones of the Dalles, Oregon, who recalled that “a petition was prepared by the passengers and presented to the customs official [in Port Townsend] for the purpose of having the Nevada held so that [the passengers] could be transferred to another boat.” Jones was also quoted as saying that
I was afraid the Clara Nevada would be wrecked from the time she left Seattle until Skagway was reached. We smashed into the revenue cutter Grant when we were backing out of Yesler’s Dock; we rammed into almost every wharf at which we tried to land; we blew out three [boiler] flues; we floundered around in rough waters until all the passengers were scared almost to death; we witnessed intoxication among the officers and heard them cursing each other until it was sickening.
Jones and R.C. Smelcer, another stampeder, both concurred that the voyage up had been one of “excitement and danger.” The crew was not given high marks by the passengers either. Jones stated
Two-thirds of them were drunk. The second mate was put in penance twenty-four hours commencing Friday morning after we left Port Townsend. The first mate was full the night we left Seattle. He drank all the time but was yet able to be around and issue orders. The Steward was drunk all the time…I heard that the engineers were drunk. The freight clerk told me that the first engineer was taken off because he was a mason and not because he was a competent man. The freight clerk told me distinctly that as a matter of fact the engineer was incompetent.
The Clara Nevada: Gold, Greed, Murder and Alaska's Inside Passage Page 2
