Shorthill, William Werner

Born: October 6, 1870, Rockford, Illinois

Died: July 26, 1948

Parents: Thomas Andrew Shorthill and Sarah Elizabeth Werner

Occupation: Businessman; railway executive; government secretary

Associated places: Dyea, Alaska; Skagway, Alaska; Juneau, Alaska

Association: Charter Member, Pioneers of Alaska Juneau Men's Igloo No. 6

Biography

William Werner Shorthill was a charter member of the Pioneers of Alaska, Juneau Men's Igloo No. 6, and an early Alaska businessman and territorial official.

He was born on October 6, 1870, in Rockford, Illinois, the son of Thomas Andrew Shorthill and Sarah Elizabeth Werner.

During the Klondike gold rush era, Shorthill was active in the commercial life of Southeast Alaska. He operated the Olympic News Company on Main Street in Dyea, Alaska, one of the principal gateway towns to the Klondike gold fields during the late 1890s.

He later served as Secretary of the White Pass and Yukon Railway in Skagway, a key transportation company that connected the Alaska coast with the Yukon interior during the gold rush period.

Shorthill was also involved in territorial government service. He served as Secretary to Alaska Territorial Governor Walter E. Clark from 1909 to 1913, and continued in that role under Governor John F. A. Strong from 1913 to 1918.

Through his business activities and public service, Shorthill was part of the administrative and commercial networks that helped shape Alaska during the territorial period.

William Werner Shorthill died on July 26, 1948.

Sources

• Alaska library historical records
• Biographical materials on early Alaska territorial officials
• Pioneers of Alaska Juneau Men's Igloo records
• http://www.ccl.lib.ak.us/uhtbin/cgisirsi.exe/x/x/0/5?searchdata1=ocm57319050

Primary Name: Strong, John Franklin Alexander

Filed as: Strong, John F. A.

Also known as: John Franklin Alexander Strong; J.F.A. Strong; Governor John Strong; Major Strong

Occupation / Association: Governor of Alaska Territory; newspaper editor and publisher; charter member, Pioneers of Alaska Juneau Men’s Igloo

Associated places: Salmon Creek, New Brunswick, Canada; Fredericton, New Brunswick; Spokane, Washington; Bellingham, Washington; Seattle, Washington; Tacoma, Washington; Skagway, Alaska; Dawson, Yukon Territory; Nome, Alaska; Iditarod, Alaska; Katalla, Alaska; Juneau, Alaska

Keywords: John F A Strong, Governor of Alaska Territory, Alaska Daily Empire founder, Nome Nugget newspaper, Skagway Klondike journalism, Soapy Smith opposition, Juneau Men’s Igloo charter members, Alaska territorial politics

Biography

John Franklin Alexander “Major” Strong was a newspaper publisher, territorial leader, and charter member of the Pioneers of Alaska Juneau Men’s Igloo. He served as the tenth Governor of the Territory of Alaska from 1913 to 1918.

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

On December 31, 1879, he married Elizabeth A. Aitken of Fredericton, New Brunswick, and the couple had three children. Strong later married Anna Hall of Seattle in 1896.

A newspaperman by profession, Strong worked with newspapers in Spokane, Bellingham, Seattle, and Tacoma. In 1897, he and his wife traveled north to Skagway during the Klondike gold rush. While planning to continue to the Klondike, the booming town of Skagway provided an opportunity for journalism. Strong soon became editor of a local newspaper and wrote strongly against the criminal activities of “Soapy” Smith and his gang, supporting the efforts of law-abiding citizens to restore order in the town.

In 1899, Strong headed to the Klondike and briefly tried prospecting before returning to newspaper work with the Dawson News. Later that year, he went to Nome, Alaska, where he established the Nome Nugget in 1900 and operated it successfully for many years.

Strong later founded newspapers in Iditarod and Katalla, and even operated a paper in a mining camp in Arizona before returning north once again. In November 1912, he founded the Alaska Daily Empire in Juneau.

President Woodrow Wilson nominated Strong as Governor of the Alaska Territory on April 17, 1913. He was sworn into office on May 21, 1913. His administration faced immediate financial difficulties when salmon canneries refused to pay a territorial tax on canned salmon, a major source of revenue for the young territorial government.

During Strong’s tenure, several important developments occurred in Alaska. Legislation and policies during this period included the implementation of workers’ compensation laws, the establishment of the territory’s first old-age pension system, the creation of a territorial Board of Education, and the authorization of a territorial university. Major events affecting Alaska at the time included the construction of the Alaska Railroad, beginning in 1914, and the creation of Mount McKinley National Park in 1917. Territorial voters also approved a prohibition referendum in 1917.

President Wilson declined to reappoint Strong to a second term, and his final day in office came in April 1918. According to later accounts, the decision may have been influenced by information suggesting that Strong, who had been born in Canada, had never formally completed the United States naturalization process.

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

Sources

Biographies of Alaska-Yukon Pioneers 1850–1950, Vol. 2, pp. 309–310; Vol. 3, pp. 282–283, Ed Ferrell

Wikipedia: John Franklin Alexander Strong

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