William Werner Shorthill was a charter member of the Juneau Men's Igloo.

Shorthill was born October 6, 1870 in Rockford Illinois to Thomas Andrew Shorthill and Sarah Elizabeth Werner.

He operated the Olympic News Company on Main Street in Dyea, Alaska and was Secretary of the White Pass and Yukon Railway in Skagway.

He also served as Secretary to Governor Walter E. Clark from 1909 to 1913, and John F.A. Strong from 1913 to 1918.

Shorthill died on July 26, 1948.

http://www.ccl.lib.ak.us/uhtbin/cgisirsi.exe/x/x/0/5?searchdata1=ocm57319050

Governor John Strong was a charter member of the Juneau Men's Igloo.

Strong was born in Salmon Creek, New Brunswick, Canada on October 15, 1856. He graduated from the New Brunswick Normal School in 1874. After graduation he spent the next fourteen years working as a store owner and teacher throughout the province.

On December 31, 1879 he married Elizabeth A. Aitkens of Fredericton, New Brunswick. The marriage produced three children.

Major Strong was a newspaper man by profession. He had been identified with newspapers in Spokane, Bellingham, Seattle, and Tacoma for many years.

In 1896 he married Miss Anna Hall of Seattle, and the next year, 1897, the couple went north to Skagway, the gateway to the Klondike goldfields.

His objective point was the Klondike, but Skagway was booming in those days and he was soon engaged in writing editorials for an embryo newspaper that had been started there.

“Soapy” Smith and his gang reigned supreme at that time, and the law-abiding citizens were beginning to make a noise like they intended to do something to remedy the evils then rampant. What was needed was editorial support on the part of a newspaper. With Major Strong at the helm, that need was adequately supplied.

An emissary of “Soapy” called on the Major and made a proposition. He said that if the Major would “lay off” he
was authorized to say that a hundred dollar bill would be found on the Major’s editorial desk each and every morning. But nothing doing. The editorial attack on the Smith gang only increased in vigor. The result is well known to all old-timers.

In 1899, Major and Mrs. Strong headed for the Klondike. The Major tried prospecting for a while but had no luck. He was soon in newspaper work again, on the Dawson News.

In 1899, he went to Nome, where in the early spring of 1900, he established the Nome Nugget which he ran
successfully for many years.

Leaving Nome, the Major established a newspaper in Iditarod; then went to Katalla and started a newspaper there, and later came outside and established a paper in a mining camp in Arizona.

The call of the North soon found him back in Alaska, where he founded the Alaska Daily Empire in November 1912. He sold this newspaper when he was appointed governor under the Wilson administration.

President Woodrow Wilson nominated Strong to become Governor of Alaska Territory on April 17, 1913. The nomination was in keeping with a 1912 Democratic plank calling for territorial governors to be area residents. The new governor was sworn into office on May 21, 1913.

Soon after becoming governor, Strong was faced with a financial crisis. The territory's salmon canneries, claiming the recently enacted tax on canned salmon was illegal, refused to pay. The tax was a major source of income for the territory and the lack of funds thus created severely limited Strong's ability to implement development projects. This issue continued until after the governor left office.

Significant legislation signed into law by Governor Strong included the granting of United States citizenship to members of the indigenous population that gave up tribal life, implementation of workers' compensation, and the United States' first old age pension, authorization of a territorial university, and creation of a Board of Education.

Additionally, in 1917, the voters in the territory approved a prohibition referendum. Other changes affecting the territory were the authorization for construction of the Alaska Railroad in October 1914, loosening of federal controls on road building and coal mining, and creation of Mount McKinley National Park in 1917.

President Wilson declined to reappoint Strong to a second term as governor and his final day in office came in April 1918. According to U.S. Senator, and Alaskan history expert, Ernest Gruening this was because the President has been given information indicating the Canadian-born Strong had never been naturalized as a United States Citizen.

J.F.A. Strong died in Seattle, Washington, July 27, 1929.

Biographies of Alaska-Yukon Pioneers 1850-1950, Volume 2 p 309-310, by Ed Ferrell (May 1, 2009
Biographies of Alaska-Yukon Pioneers 1850-1950, Volume 3 p 282-283, by Ed Ferrell (May 1, 2009

John Franklin Alexander Strong (October 15, 1856 – July 27, 1929) was a British North America-born journalist who was the second governor of Alaska Territory from 1913 to 1918.

John Franklin Alexander Strong was born in Salmon Creek,^{[citation needed]} a small farming community in Queens County, New Brunswick, British North America on October 15, 1856, the son of Adam Robert and Janet (Nicholl) Strong. He graduated from the New Brunswick Normal School in 1874. After graduation he spent the next fourteen years working as a store owner and teacher throughout the province. On December 31, 1879, he married Elizabeth A. Aitkens of Fredericton, New Brunswick. The marriage produced three children: Jane, Elizabeth, and Robert. He committed bigamy^[1] in 1896 when he wed Anna Hall of Tacoma, Washington.^[2]

The Governor's Mansion was designed by James Knox Taylor. He was a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects, then serving as the first Supervisory Architect for the U.S. Treasury Department.

Taylor utilized design premises which had succeeded in Eighteenth Century English and American Colonial country houses.

These houses were designed to produce the most usable space for the cost, with facilities to perform the formal institutional functions required, and spaces amenable to formal and informal living under the same roof.

The examples he appeared to have followed had succeeded in performing these functions. The modifications he designed into this building succeeded admirably. An additional virtue of his design is that it permitted the basic building to be constructed and pressed into full service, with additional finishing construction, furnishing and decorating accomplished over a long period of time, as funds and authorization were provided.

An Act of June 6, 1900, provided that the temporary seat of government for the District of Alaska would be established in Juneau "when suitable grounds and buildings are available." From the passing of this 1900 Act by Congress until the Mansion was completed and occupied in 1913, a series of events—dramatic when considered as a totality moved forward the concept of more self-government for the Territory.

Continued Congressional attention to Alaska resulted in an Act for the Protection of Game, June 7, 1902; an Act Creating Road Districts and Providing for Road Overseers, April 27, 1904; the long-sought Delegate in Congress Act, May 8, 1906. The site of the building had been reserved in 1911 by Executive Order of the President, Number 1331. The Second Organic Act, August 24, 1912 provided that the capital of the Territory ". . .shall be at Juneau."

The Governor's Mansion, already under construction when the Act became law, thus became the first public building constructed for the new permanent capital of the Territory. The Alaska Governor's Mansion was first occupied by the Territorial Governor, Walter E. Clark, and his family, on January 1, 1913.

The Act also created a legislature of twenty-four members—two Senators and four Representatives from each of the four judicial division—to convene "at the capitol at the city of Juneau, Alaska on the first Monday in March in the year nineteen hundred thirteen, and on the first Monday in March every two years there after." The first legislature convened in space rented in the local Elks Club hall.

Juneau was a busy community. It had been founded as a mining camp, and had flourished as a result of the mines on both sides of Gastineau Channel and the marine commerce spawned by traffic between the lower states and the greater Alaska to the north and west.

A. H. Humpheries, an official of one of the mines recalls what Juneau was like in the era when the Governor's Mansion was under construction and the Territorial Government was about to begin full operation in the town, "Juneau in 1912 was alive and booming.

I had gone there from "The Westward" as we called it, out around Cordova and Valdez, after two memorable years in the Kennecott copper and Valdez trail country. ...men were shaved and groomed. Businessmen were in city clothes. A great treat to us was to see women and children on the streets and in the stores. ...the streets were thronged with pedestrians on the sidewalks. Horsedrawn vehicles threaded the centers.

I had spent five years in New York City. It never appeared to me so civilized as Juneau did that first day in 1910. The stores were busy, and displayed good merchandise.

Both the raised sidewalks and the streets in the main part of the city were of planking. They were very clean with streams from fire-hose nozzles. There was an efficient sewer system, ample electricity, and a telephone exchange with "hello girls" who would trace a party for you anywhere they could be reached. ...

The morning following our arrival, after breakfasting..., we sought out the source of the town's activity—the office of the Alaska Gastineau Mining Co., in the Valentine Building . . . and walked out with jobs. My friend was to work with Herman Tripp at Sum Dum Mine. ...Ed Russell published the "Dispatch." . . . "The Juneau Empire"... later, founded by John F. Strong and John W. Troy, . . .They had been associated in Nome with the "Nugget," and much later became governors of the Territory. ...

There was a staff-house with "private mess" down by Gold Creek at the foot of the tram and a big bunkhouse and a mess hall up the hill near the mine.... The mine was in the development and construction stages. Everybody in the organization was new and came from some other place.... ...the Alaska Gastineau mine was being developed for 6.000 tons of ore daily output.

The Alaska Juneau Mine, with an even more modern reduction plant, was planned for 10,000 tons a day, while across the channel the thirty-year-old Treadwell Mine properties were producing enough ore to keep some 2.000 stamps continuously pounding it to pulp 363 days a year. All this activity made the Juneau-Douglas operations for a short time at least, rank as the hard-rock miners' capital of the world....

I was thirty in 1913.... The very recollection of . . . that period fills me with pleasure. We can never recover the feeling we had toward each other in that distant simple age. The nearest I can think of to parallel it, would be a cruise ship that had been long enough at sea for everybody to get acquainted. We had a feeling of being of the world, but separated by time and distance. We were constantly refreshed by the arrival of new people from "below." ... at that period I had never met an adult Caucasian born in Alaska....

In 1912, the only automobile in town was Bart Thane's official Model T. It was chauffeur operated. The streets seemed full of horse-drawn vehicles, buggies, delivery wagons, big Studebaker ranch wagons, a lot of them designed so runners could be substituted for wheels when snow descended on the town. The freighters used "common sense" bob sleds in winter. There was no snow removal at that time. We just tromped it down and wore it out.

There was no radio, and no television in that distant age. But there was plenty of diversion in the big social hall for those off shift. We formed the Ptarmigan Club, and invited the whole town to a house warming dance when the place was opened for business....

It was almost the last stand in Alaska and in the West of the now forgotten art of driving workhorses. . . a string of five or six four-horse or six-horse teams, hitched to heavy Studebaker wagons, loaded high and safety-lashed, teamsters sitting on top or even standing precariously for a better view fore and aft with a handful of lines, would pull out of Willoughby Avenue at a fast walk along Front Street and then, with infinite care make the sharp turn up Seward—hoofs pounding, chains rattling, harness creaking, wheels rumbling, every axle speaking its piece—the leaders prancing proudly with necks arched under their reached manes. One team after another, that was the scene twice a day for several years. . . .

Jay Hayes, Alaska Road Commission superintendent . . . had to keep roads up without money.... By 1915 a few more autos appeared on the streets, plus a few delivery trucks. . . . Cash Cole bought a little red Model T.  Doc Loussac, the druggist, had a black one shipped up....

Juneau was a busy seaport with big cargo and passenger ships docking nearly everyday and sometime three or four...."

National Register of Historic Places Nomination Form