by Tara Neilson
Working as loggers to pay their way, they traveled on to Minnesota where Stolsmo had family already established. At the same time, President Warren G. Harding was in the news for deciding to cross the continent by presidential train to vacation in Alaska. Was that when Sinnes first got the idea of heading for Alaska himself?
Left to right: Norwegians Ingebrigt (Ed) Sinnes, his friend Torger Stolsmo, and Stolsmo’s uncle when Sinnes first arrived in America in 1923. (Courtesy of Ove Korsnes)
In the photos, his friend Stolsmo resists the camera and appears nowhere near as forward looking or open natured as Sinnes. Stolsmo looks less committed to or certain of the adventure they’ve embarked on, possibly alienated by what he’d seen of America so far. In one picture, he has his back to Sinnes, turned unmistakably toward the comfort of his already established uncle. Sinnes looks unaware of his friend’s ambivalence. He looks straight ahead, clearly ready and willing to experience whatever America has to offer him.
They parted ways. Sinnes, who had decided to Americanize his first name to Edward (Ed for short), was ready to follow this adventure all the way across the continent while Stolsmo was content to stay behind in the more established Midwest Scandinavian strongholds that had been settled for nearly seventy-five years at that point and still practiced the ways and language of the homeland.
Sinnes was apparently undeterred from following in the President’s tracks to head for Alaska, even when the newspapers revealed that Alaska had been none too good for Harding’s health. The trip had to be cut short and on the way back President Harding died of pneumonia complicated by a heart condition.
Before he reached Alaska, Sinnes worked as a logger (a faller) in the 1930s in Northern Washington. As Europe plunged into a conflict that would escalate into WWII, Sinnes arrived in Ketchikan, Alaska. It was the territory’s largest city and first port of call for the fishing fleets, where totem poles could be seen in front yards alongside wooden streets and stairs that climbed verdant hillsides. Many of the downtown buildings and streets were built on pilings over the water, which had made it easy for Prohibition rum runners, with easily obtained Canadian liquor, to bring their boats in at low tide under the city and lift their illegal cargo through the trapdoors in the red-light district.
Sinnes apparently couldn’t find work in the Ketchikan canneries, so he looked further afield—or perhaps he was drawn to the wilderness from the start. In any event, he wound up working at the isolated Union Bay cannery. (In 1942, Sinnes took a brief break from the cannery to work as a logger on Prince of Wales Island, building rafts of high-grade spruce to send to the mills in Anacortes, Washington. There the spruce would be peeled for plywood for use in constructing British bombers.)
Sinnes wasn’t much of a letter writer, but he dutifully scratched out letters to his parents in Norway. These missives were so sketchy as to frustrate his loved ones who, understandably, wanted to hear all the details of his new life in America. Over the years they became more difficult to read as his Norwegian became more and more Americanized.
In one he writes of the difficulties of getting paid on time and how difficult it was to get or send mail at the Union Bay cannery. (The nearest post office was in Meyers Chuck, only seven miles by water away, but the journey could only be made on a weather-permitting basis.) He marvels at how he’s lost track of time, especially when he hears that his younger brother, who was a little boy when he left, had gotten married. He also writes about getting ready to build a “big house” at the cannery, but doesn’t say for what purpose.
In one letter home, Sinnes tells his parents that he doesn’t think he’ll ever marry because his way of life has nothing to offer a bride. He left out the problem of scarcity: Norwegian men outnumbered Norwegian women in the Pacific Northwest, and particularly the Territory of Alaska, by a good margin. Nevertheless, Sinnes managed to snag the attention of and marry, on December 21, 1941, a clear-eyed, direct, and unaffected young Norwegian woman fifteen years his junior named Signe.
They were unable to have children and at the beginning of World War II, when Sinnes was working as watchman* for the Union Bay cannery, he suffered a catastrophic injury. A steel cable used to brail fish from the boats snapped and struck him in the back of the legs, cutting them severely.
“The thing I feared worst,” one cannery worker is reported to have said, “was that there were no doctors or medical facilities.” The Union Bay cannery was unapproachable by anything but boat or seaplane, weather permitting. It is unknown how long it was before Sinnes was seen by a medical professional, but by the time he was, it was too late. A bad infection had set in and the doctors were forced to amputate both legs.
He and Signe moved south to Seattle, where she worked as a waitress and he worked in a toy store. Ingebrigt “Ed” Sinnes’s Alaskan adventure and cannery days were over, but he had a lifetime of exciting memories to look back on. He died in 1958 at the age of sixty.
* I’m curious about the fact that Sinnes worked as a watchman brailing fish. The main watchman job was a winter/off-season caretaker job which didn’t involve fish, since there were no winter salmon runs.
There was another watchman job. It involved pile-and-net fish traps, which local fishermen hated for the way they rapidly depleted the fish stock. Much pirating of them occurred, and these fish pirates soon became local heroes, but scoundrels to the cannery owners. The canneries hired a round-the-clock watchman for each trap, but often he sided with the fishermen and under cover of darkness, for a fee, would allow the pirates to loot the traps. They promptly sold these pilfered fish back to the cannery. In frustration the owners replaced the watchmen with Pinkertons (professional detectives).
If Ed Sinnes was one of these watchmen, he would have been there when the fish were brailed aboard boats to be taken fresh to the cannery. He could have been both a caretaker and a trap watchman, since in his letters he speaks of working at the cannery in winter. In that case, he would have lived at the cannery year around and experienced it the way we did. If he was a trap watchman, he didn’t live to see them outlawed. A year after Ed Sinnes died, when Alaska attained statehood, fish traps were banned.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I HAVE been amazingly fortunate in having found out so much about three men who worked in such a small Southeast Alaskan cannery. While quite a bit is known about the actual workings of Alaska’s historical canneries, the individual workers and their stories have all too often been lost and forgotten.
Thankfully, Li Gongpu, George Tsutakawa, and Ingebrigt Sinnes will not be forgotten. It has been a privilege getting to know these men, as well as their ideas, beliefs, art, and their families.
My deep gratitude goes to Ove Korsenes of Norway for sharing the story of his grand uncle’s life. In addition to many emails, he sent me photos and translated Ed Sinnes’s letters for my benefit. George Tsutakawa’s family, especially Gerald and Kizamu Tsutakawa, have been generous with their time in emails and phone calls and, most wonderfully, in sharing watercolor paintings of the cannery that George Tsutakawa painted while he worked there. It was beyond thrilling to see the cannery through his eyes, as it was in its heyday.
The librarians working in the rural/mail services department at the Juneau Public Library have been assisting me in my writing career since I was fifteen, and have not slacked off in helping me during the writing of this memoir, with special thanks to Julie Coghill and Maggie Thompson-Johnston.
Lucinda Hogarty shared letters of family members who worked at Alaskan canneries during the time the Union Bay cannery operated in her book Three Salmon Summers. It gave me a lot of insight into everyday cannery life, and I’d like to thank her for kindly giving permission to quote from the book.
Terry Levin of Chicago has been unfailingly supportive, and kindly sent me the movie The Silver Horde (1930) which was filmed on location at a working cannery only thirty miles south of the Union Bay cannery. Many times when I was stuck during the writing of this memoir, I’d put this movie in a
nd be re-inspired.
I would like to thank Bjorn Dihle, author of Haunted Inside Passage and Never Cry Halibut, for encouraging me to write this memoir in the first place and giving me the name of his editor to help make publishing it a reality.
The entire team at West Margin Press has been enthusiastic and adaptable, taking in their stride my remote location which caused occasional hiccups in preparing and marketing this book. Publisher Jen Newens walked me patiently through contract negotiations, editor Olivia Ngai helped refine my manuscript, marketing manager Angela Zbornik never ran out of exciting ideas to promote Raised in Ruins, and Rachel Metzger came up with the fabulous cover and design of the book. I am sure there are more people behind the scenes whose names I don’t know who have worked hard getting this book out there and I thank them too.
Family and friends have been amazing throughout the writing of this book, with special thanks to my uncle Rory and my aunt Marion, my uncle Lance Bifoss, my cousins Shawn Bifoss and Darrell Lee, and close family friend Linda Forbes who all contributed their memories to this book.
I’m especially grateful to my siblings, Jamie Neilson, Megan Duncanson, Robin Neilson, and Chris Neilson; they all helped me in writing this book by sharing their memories, and in other ways.
Megan helped me in ways too numerous to list, everything from always providing a listening ear, to reminiscing for hours, to doing online work when my signal was too weak for me to do it, and more. Chris recorded our lives while we lived at the cannery on cassette and listening to it brought it all back. Robin’s independent research introduced me to Li Gongpu and George Tsutakawa. Jamie brought up details I’d forgotten.
Most of all, I would not have had this adventure and this life to write about if it hadn’t been for Gary and Romi Neilson embracing the idea of bringing up their children in the remote ruins of a burned cannery. I will always be grateful to my parents for giving me Alaska. They’ve supported me through every stage of this book.
I thank my dad for teaching me to never quit (and for helping me map the cannery), and my mom for teaching me that if it can be imagined, it can be made real (and for her amazing photos, including the cover).
And finally, I’d like to thank my younger self for obsessively writing down everything that happened in my remote Alaskan childhood in journals and crumpled notebooks. They were a treasure trove that provided me with entire conversations and details I’d long since forgotten.
I wish I could tell her this book would one day be written.
Most of all, I thank my Creator for giving me the ongoing adventure of life and time.