High Hopes: Wrangell’s Wrecked Ship That Became a Home
When the steamer Hope was abandoned in Fort Wrangel during the Cassiar Gold Rush in 1875, it became part of the formation of the Wrangell waterfront.
The Fraser River in British Columbia. (image source: Wikipedia)
Hope Floats
The discovery of gold in 1857 on British Columbia’s Fraser River set off a bonanza. Miners and merchants flooded the region hoping to strike it rich. To reach the gold fields, most fortune-seekers took steamships up the long, winding Fraser River.
Hoping to cash in on the rush, Victoria businessman Charles T. Miller commissioned a new stern-wheeler steamship, Hope, named for a settlement along the Fraser River. When Miller launched the steamer Hope in September 1860, it was met with great fanfare. The Daily British Colonist of September 25, 1860 wrote:
“...Just as the boat was gliding from the stocks, Miss Elizabeth Reed, daughter of Capt. James Reed, advanced and performed the usual ceremony of christening the boat, by breaking a bottle of champagne over the bows, and at the same time exclaiming, ‘Success to the Hope.’ The vessel glided off swiftly, amid the cheers of the crowd, and soon rode upon the waters of the bay as gracefully as if they were her natural element… After the launch had been effectuated, several baskets of Cliquot champagne yielded up their contents, and amid the popping of the corks and cheers of congratulation, the future good ‘health’ of the Hope was drank by the multitude.”
In order to ascend the Fraser River, Miller gave the steamer Hope a shallow, flat bottom — only 4 feet deep. Despite its light draught, the Hope measured 95 feet long and 18 feet wide. It would eventually be fitted with eighteen staterooms and extended by 10 feet in length, allowing the ship to carry up to 150 tons of freight.
The steamer Hope became a fixture of the Fraser River, taking eager fortune-seekers up and down the river. While few struck it rich, the ferry service proved profitable. Before the decade was over, the Fraser River Gold Rush would dry up. British Columbia’s gold miner and merchants eagerly awaited the next gold rush.
The view from Mount Glenora looking at the Stikine River. (image source: Wikipedia)
Cassiar Gold Rush
In 1872, prospectors discovered gold far up the Stikine River inside British Columbia’s Cassiar district. For the miners and merchants of the Fraser River, this was the strike they’d been hoping for. Many resettled north to Fort Wrangel, which was an abandoned military post near the mouth of the Stikine River.
Photographs of the owners of the steamer Hope, Captain John Irving (left) and Captain Otis Parsons (right). (Image source: Irving on Wikipedia, Parsons on New Westminster Archives).
The new owner of the steamer Hope, Captain Otis Parsons, hoped to make his fortune mining the miners. In the spring of 1874, the Hope arrived in Fort Wrangel to begin ferrying people up the Stikine River — but the Hope was not alone. Another steamship, the Glenora, owned by Captain John Irving, also plied the Stikine River. Both vessel owners feared this direct competition would drive down prices. To protect their profits, John Irving and Otis Parsons conspired to form a monopoly. John Irving withdrew the Glenora, allowing Otis Parsons’ Hope to take all the business. In exchange, Parsons delivered a portion of the profits to Irving.
This arrangement enraged the gold miners. A reporter for the Victoria Standard complained:
“...The steamer Hope is making bad time, and charging high prices for freight and passage; freight is $80 per ton, and passage $25, and sleep in one’s own blankets, cook for self, pay $1 for inferior grub, and occasionally cut wood, etc., for which not even a man can get ‘thank you.’ Captain John Irving’s absence is greatly regretted.”
With few other options, gold miners paid the price and hoped to recoup their losses in the gold fields. Some gold miners were successful. The August 29, 1874 Oregonian reported that the steamer Hope arrived in Glenora Landing with $20,000 in gold dust.
But on the return voyage to Fort Wrangel, everything would fall apart.
Photo of Fort Wrangel watefront circa 1887. (image source: Alaska Digital’s Archives)
Washed Up
On September 1, 1874, the steamer Hope limped back to Fort Wrangel in bad shape. The British Daily Colonist reported the ship’s engine broke a cylinder head on the trip down the river. The summer was already drawing to an end, meaning most gold-miners were returning from the river to go home for the winter. The damage to the Hope meant it would be out of service until the next year.
The Hope spent the winter of 1874 sitting at Fort Wrangel. In the spring of 1875, Otis Parsons installed new boilers in anticipation of returning the steamer Hope to service. On May 14, 1875, the Daily British Colonist reported that “Capt. Cooper goes North today to test the boilers of the steamer Hope on Stickeen River.” But one month later, the Oregonian of June 18, 1875 reported that “the steamer Hope was laid up.”
For Otis Parsons, the Hope was a wash. In all, the steamer Hope may have only made two trips up and down the Stikine River. Around this time, Otis Parsons sold out his entire steamship business to John Irving. Tragically, before the year was over, Otis Parsons and his family all perished in the sinking of the SS Pacific en route from Victoria to San Francisco.
John Irving cut his losses and sold the steamer Hope. The September 23, 1875 Oregonian reported:
“The steamer Hope, which, during the early part of the season, ran on the Stikine river, was sold a few weeks ago to a colored man for $500, who purposed turning her into a floating hotel. He moored her opposite Wrangel and proceeded to fit her up, but when about half finished she began to fall to pieces, and the project was abandoned. Subsequently her machinery was disposed of to Mr. McKay, (H.B. Co.) for sawmill purposes, at a great sacrifice, however, for her former purchaser.”
An advertisement from the September 14, 1877 British Daily Colonist.
Auctioneers announced the complete sale of the steamer Hope’s machinery. They advertised that the ship’s boilers only had two months of wear, a reminder of the steamer Hope’s failed attempt to rebound for the 1875 season.
Disemboweled and left as a husk at the water’s edge in front of Fort Wrangel, the steamer Hope had uncertain future. But one group would turn it into a home.
A postcard photo purportedly of “China Joe.” (image source: Wikipedia)
Chinese Gold Miners
Along the western Pacific coast, gold miners from China emerged as a constant presence. Some were independent while others were contracted by companies. Long after European miners moved on, Chinese gold miners often persisted in searching for gold in less desirable areas.
For these intrepid fortune-seekers, the staterooms of the steamer Hope served as a temporary home. Fort Wrangel was a shanty-town, what John Muir called in 1879 “a rickety falling scatterment of houses, dead and decomposing.” These temporary dwellings were barely able to keep out the near-constant wind, rain, and sea spray that pelted the coast. The steamer Hope was not immune to the conditions, as the Puget Sound Dispatch reported on February 3, 1876:
“A storm raged at Wrangel on the 14th, blowing down houses and demolishing things generally. The old steamer Hope used by a Chinaman as a hotel, was washed from the beach up on the hill side, going through several houses and making the occupants scatter very quickly; Mrs. Davidson barely escaped with her life, saving herself by backing out through the side of a canvas house.”
One name is connected to the steamer Hope that is a legend in southeast Alaska: China Joe. This was most certainly a nickname, and historians have debated what his Chinese name might have been. Some have even suggested that China Joe was the name given to any Chinese man who cooked and prepared food at mining camps.
There are many stories about China Joe, most of them told long after the fact, making it difficult to know exactly what happened. On February 20, 1912, the Daily Alaska Dispatch interviewed China Joe and wrote:
“Landing in Victoria, B.C., in 1864, he went to Boise, Idaho mining camp in the same year. We next locate him at Wrangell, Alaska, in 1874, the year of the great stampede to the ‘Cassiar,’ where he remained until 1879, returning to Wrangell, where he purchased the old stern wheel steamer ‘Hope’ and opened up the first hotel ever conducted at Wrangell, the dining room being below deck and using the state rooms for sleeping quarters...”
China Joe’s restaurant and bakery served to feed the hungry gold miners. As the Cassiar Gold Rush dried up, China Joe left Fort Wrangel for the new frenzied gold rush in Juneau. In 1886, a white mob rounded up 76 Chinese gold miners in the area of Juneau and Douglas and packed them onto two small schooners bound for Fort Wrangel. China Joe, who had earned a positive reputation in the mining camps, was spared from this expulsion and stayed until Juneau until passing away in 1917.
Fort Wrangel waterfront, photographed in the 1880s. The steamer Hope sits near the middle of the photo, surrounded by buildings.
Hope Fades
For decades, the steamer Hope served as an unmistakable landmark along Fort Wrangel’s expanding waterfront. Just as the community grew up around the abandoned buildings of the Fort Wrangel garrison, so too did the abandoned steamer Hope help the town to grow. On October 24, 1886, a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle described seeing it:
“An old stern-wheel steamboat, beached in the edge of the village, was used as an hotel during the decline of the gold fever, but while the fever was at its height the boat is said to have cleared $135,000 per season. The coolie has bored into its hollow shell and washes there, clad in a semi-Boyton suit of waterproof.”
Photograph of Fort Wrangel from A Woman’s Trip to Alaska by Septima M. Collis (1890).
By the end of the 1880s, the Cassiar Gold Rush was a distant memory, and the steamer Hope approached 30 years old. The ravages of time, weather, and the sea finally made it unlivable. Septima M. Collis, writing in A Woman’s Trip to Alaska, remarked seeing the ship sitting vacantly on Fort Wrangel’s waterfront:
“Perhaps the most curious thing to be seen in the village is the hull of an old steamboat, high and dry in the main street, whose decks are boarded and roofed in and divided off into apartments for use as a hotel, and although there was little vestige of human life about it upon my visit, I was told that during the mining boom up the Stickeen River it had been a very popular holstery.”
Just as unexpectedly as the steamer Hope arrived, so too did it disappear. There may be no record of what became of the ship, but it’s likely that it simply deteriorated until there was nothing left. It does not appear in many of the photos taken during the Klondike Gold Rush of 1898 - 1902.
Like a hermit crab, Wrangell has frequently used abandoned structures to grow, ensuring that nothing goes to waste. As buildings went up on pilings alongside the steamer Hope, it was the beginning of what would become Front Street and would usher in a new era.