Rooted in Community: Merchants Wharf, Part II — An historic moment captured in one photo in 1935

While Merchants Wharfs’ interior photos show early airplanes and their pilots, a notable 1935 hangar portrait is absent. It represents one of the most enduring stories of Alaskan aviation history.

The Ordway Studio photo shows five men: relaxed, congenial, comfortable with each other. They are standing shoulder to shoulder on the deck of the floating hangar below the dock. All five men are famous. They are at the height of their careers. And their lives are intertwined in spectacular ways.

It was a rainy day in August of 1935. Juneau was abuzz with anticipation of the arrival of the single-engine red airplane with shiny silver stripes on its flanks. On hand to meet the floatplane was Juneau’s Mayor Izzy Goldstein. As is still true today, the mayor greets famous visitors. Often a photo documents the occasion. Such was the case in August 1935. Mayor Goldstein is on the far left in the photo of five men.

The Goldstein family first staked a claim in 1885 in Juneau shortly after the mining camp was established. Several Goldstein generations have contributed to the town’s strong business community, most visibly — even today — in the five-story concrete Goldstein Building on Seward and Second Streets. It was built in 1914. In 1935, when the mayor was Izzy Goldstein his brother Charles Goldstein was selling furs and Alaska Native art objects in his big store with “Emporium” painted on the upper exterior. The Goldstein family is still active in Juneau business in 2023.

Will Rogers and Wiley Post entertain Juneau

The docks were lined with eager locals on August 7 as the red seaplane emerged from clouds at 4:30 p.m., flew over Juneau and Douglas then landed on the harbor water and taxied up to the floating hangar. Cheers rang out when the two passengers emerged. The pilot, with a distinctive white patch over his left eye, was well known having been the first person to fly solo around the world a few years earlier. He was Wiley Post. He stands in the photo beside Mayor Goldstein. Post was flying his hybrid floatplane north from Seattle to investigate a possible route for United States airmail delivery to Russia. Wiley Post was a heroic figure in aviation. He and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt are seen greeting shaking hands in another photo moment.

On board Post’s seaplane was internationally renowned humorist Will Rogers, seen on the far right in the five-man picture. By 1935, Rogers was a fantastically popular movie star (in over 70 films), a folksy lasso-twirling cowboy and a kindly political commentator who wrote a popular column featured in hundreds of newspapers. Rogers liked to glean his content from common folk, listening to their stories and extracting unique details that make his readers smile. He was not a biting raconteur making jokes at others’ expense. He found a gentle way to portray dilemmas without harm. He was looking for new material on his trip to Alaska.

Escorted around downtown by enthusiastic admirers, Wiley Post and Will Rogers toured the town and stayed at the Gastineau Hotel. They dined as guests with Governor Troy at the Governor’s House. Later they gave a live on-air radio interview with KINY. The next day Rogers entertained a full house at the Chamber of Commerce noon luncheon. In typically amusing Will Rogers fashion, he described his local shopping experience. When asked by an observer why he was buying two sets of rubber rain gear Rogers answered, “That’s because I am going somewhere else. If I was staying in Juneau I’d buy three sets.”

The Daily Alaska Empire on Aug. 8, 1935, covered the arrival of Post and Rogers with eight front-page articles. The headline reads “C.C. [Chamber of Commerce] Members Laugh with Rogers.” But the only photo on page one is of a “famous novelist” who arrived in time to join the adventurers on the floatplane hangar ramp for their portrait.

Standing in the center of the photo is nationally famous novelist Rex Beach. He was good friends with Will Rogers who starred in a film adaption of one of Beach’s novels. Rex Beach arrived in Juneau to visit a friend with whom he had been on a hunting trip 25 years earlier. Joe Ibach lived with his wife Muz on Lemesurier Island near Glacier Bay. Joe and Rex had maintained a close relationship through the mail over the years and hoped to renew their friendship.

Rex Beach had first come north to Dawson City with the flood of Klondike stampeders in 1897. He moved on to Nome when the gold strike there drew miners westward. Rex Beach was in Nome in 1900 to witness one of America’s most notorious legal scandals. He wrote about it in his first novel “The Spoilers,” a romanticized tale based on factual events.

The story is complicated. Shortly after gold was discovered in Nome a plot was hatched to jump the rich placer claims of the original discoverers who were not American citizens. That was the ploy: to say only U.S. citizens could legally stake mining claims, contrary to an 1884 Act that said people of all nationalities could stake. This attempt at tomfoolery failed in Congress, but the conspirators didn’t give up. They turned to legal trickery.

The quiet corruption and conspiracy were all planned and perpetrated far from Alaska by a powerful political king-maker from North Dakota named Alex McKenzie. He arranged for his favored choice of judge to be appointed in Nome in 1900. The plan was to steal the gold mines from their rightful owners on Anvil Creek by political and judicial maneuvering.

Judge Noyes and his manipulator McKenzie colluded to oust the three “Lucky Swedes” who discovered gold on Anvil Creek. The rich placers went into the hands of McKenzie in a fake receivership. With the help of corrupt Judge Noyes, a band of thieves operated with the blessing of the court. They took over the claims, installed their own “claim jumpers” who worked the paydirt, keeping the gold while the frustrated miners stood by helpless and impoverished.

Amidst the chaos, another judge was called in to straighten out the tangled mess. Judge James Wickersham came from his assigned post in Alaska’s Interior. A few days earlier corrupt Judge Noyes had slinked away with the spoils of his misdeeds hidden in pokes of gold as he boarded the ship to leave Nome. Wickersham cleared up long-stalled cases, returned the contested mining claims to their discoverers and swept collusion and corruption from Nome. But retribution was in store for Wickersham. Years later the crooks tried to prevent Wickersham from being confirmed as Alaska’s delegate to Congress. The fair judge became fair game for the gold thieves for years to come.

The true story was wild. Novelist Rex Beach embellished the facts by changing the names and adding a romantic connection with a moral message. It was just right for the times. The Spoilers was published in 1905. Eventually it was made into movies three different times over decades. One version starred John Wayne and Marlene Dietrich.

In the five-man photo Will Rogers stands on the far right. His hand is casually draped on the shoulder of Fairbanks pilot Joe Crosson. Like Wiley Post, Crosson had saved lives by flying mercy missions of medicines to remote Alaska villages. His emergency flight carrying diphtheria medicine to Point Barrow was celebrated on page one of the New York Times in 1931. He had searched and located the lost aircraft near Siberia that claimed the lives of Carl Ben Eielson and Earl Borland in 1930. Joe Crosson was a hero pilot in his own right.

Post and Rogers fly north

The famous flying duo was in Juneau for only two days. Their plans to fly north to Skagway — so Will Rogers could view Chilkoot Pass and White Pass en route to Whitehorse — were scuttled due to heavy weather there. Instead, they flew south and east following the natural valley corridor created by Taku River. That inland route gave them better flying conditions. By nightfall, they were in Dawson City in Canada’s Yukon Territory. That city — home of the infamous Klondike Gold Rush in 1898 — erupted in an enthusiastic welcome for Post and Rogers. Over the next week, the two met up again with Joe Crosson and flew to Fairbanks, around Mount McKinley (Denali), Anchorage, the Matanuska Colony. Leaving Crosson in Fairbanks, Wiley Post and Will Rogers headed farther north in the red plane toward Point Barrow. There they planned to meet Charles Brower, known as “the king of the Arctic.”

Meanwhile in Juneau

While the famous pilot and his passenger flew north, author Rex Beach spent a week in Juneau visiting with the real-life honest judge from Nome James Wickersham who lived seven blocks up Seward Street from the waterfront. Beach reviewed a draft of Wickersham’s memoir “Old Yukon.” In the book, the judge recounts the mess in Nome. But Beach would not make it to Joe Ibach’s Icy Strait home.

When the mayor, the one-eyed flier, the novelist, the heroic pilot and the nation’s most beloved storyteller stood on the hangar deck, professional photographer Ordway snapped the photo that captured five men in a moment of congeniality and mutual admiration. The image would be their last photo together.

Everything changes suddenly

On August 15, 1935, a week after the pleasant encounter together in Juneau, Wiley Post and Will Rogers were dead. Post’s plane crashed a few miles south of Barrow when it ran out of fuel after landing briefly at a small lake and asking Alaska Natives for directions in the fog. When he took off, the Native men reported, the engine sputtered to silence then nosedived into the earth. Both Post and Rogers were killed instantly.

One of the Native men ran 15 miles to Barrow to report what they had witnessed and the fatal outcome. Charles Brower followed the man back, driving a motor boat that was towing a skin boat umiak to the crash site. The men retrieved the bodies from the wreckage. They were wrapped in white sheets and the boats slowly returned to Barrow. The Native men sang a funeral song the whole way. The bodies were placed in the Barrow Hospital.

Joe Crosson was in Fairbanks. He immediately departed in his own plane to claim his dear friends’ bodies and carry them back to Fairbanks for proper preparations in coffins. Rex Beach left Juneau to join Crosson in Fairbanks as soon as he heard the news. Newspaper reports quote Rex Beach as saying the accident was “a staggering blow, incredible.”

Crosson with two assistants and the caskets landed quietly in Victoria, British Columbia to avoid the massive crowds waiting in Seattle. He turned over the coffins to a larger airline but he stayed with his friends’ bodies all the way to California. Police escorts were needed in cities. Greedy photographers jockeyed for photos and clashed with police outside the hangars to get photos of the plane that was transporting the bodies south.

On August 16, the Empire’s bold headline wraps across the page: “POST, ROGERS DIE AS PLANE CRASHES; KILLED IN TAKEOFF NEAR PT. BARROW.” An article reports, “Alaska is heartbroken.” And “two new American flags” flew from the summit of Mount Juneau in tribute to the two favorite recent visitors, “visible with the naked eye.” For days, the Empire covered the news on its front page.

The fatal news flashed across the world. The New York Times ran front page stories for three consecutive days about the tragic loss. In Los Angeles where Rogers lived ten thousand mourners filled the Hollywood Bowl for a memorial service. Condolences poured in. Within a few days photos of the crushed red airplane had been flown to newspapers for publication.

Both Post and Rogers were from Oklahoma. The Oklahoma Historical Society maintains records and photos of the men’s lives. At the time of his death, Wiley Post’s casket rested in the state capitol for mourners to pay their respects.

Every year since 1938, Will Rogers’ hometown of Claremore, Oklahoma hosts a memorial Motion Picture Festival to show his films. In 2023, the commemoration was held Nov. 1-3 in honor of Rogers’ Nov. 2 birthday. He was called “The Cherokee Kid” during his Wild West show days because of his Cherokee heritage. In one of his popular quotes about that topic Will Rogers says, “My ancestors didn’t come over on the Mayflower, but they met the boat.” Also known as “the Cowboy Philosopher,” he began his weekly column in 1922. While in Juneau, Rogers sent one of his dispatches to 650 subscriber newspapers.

Juneau played a small role in the lives of five famous men who stood together for a photo. But the lives of the men played a huge role in Juneau.

Author’s Note

A debt is owed to the Daily Alaska Empire for tracking this important event and filling the paper’s pages with numerous articles describing the excitement shown by residents. Likewise, the Alaska Historical Library is appreciated for archiving the editions, preserving them on microfilm and making the material available to researchers. Without the commitment of newspaper reporters of the past century and librarians of this century, a writer would not have the authentic resources as foundation for telling stories about Juneau’s history.

• Laurie Craig is an artist, advocate and avid researcher of Juneau’s historical treasures. Rooted in Community is a series of articles, published in the Empire on the third weekend of each month, focusing on unique buildings in Juneau’s Downtown Historic District and the present-day businesses (and people) that occupy them. This work is supported by the Downtown Business Association. This article has been moved in front of the Empire’s paywall.