Once it was revealed that there had been dynamite on board, there was doubt as to what had caused the explosion. There was undeniably a “large hole, blacked and charred in the middle of the hull,” which many would say was mute proof of the “awful tale of the boiler explosion.”
Other mariners were not so certain of this conclusion. Why should the hole in the hull be “black” if there had been a boiler explosion? A blackened hole in the hull was more likely to occur with dynamite ignition. Further, if the witnesses had indeed seen a fireball, then the ship must have been ripped apart by an explosion of fire, not steam. A boiler explosion would not have caused a fireball that was immediately extinguished.
It was also postulated that it was possible that the wood around the boiler had caught on fire “not so much from any overheating of the boilers as from improper protection that should have attracted the inspector’s notice.”25 This, the Seattle Times asserted, was probably the trouble discussed in the dispatch from the Clara Nevada. Two days later, almost as if in rebuttal, the Post-Intelligencer stated that “speculation as to the cause of the fire and of the explosion is unsatisfactory. It is asserted that there was not enough woodwork around the boilers to cause them to explode, even if the woodwork had caught fire.”
Two days later, on February 17, the Seattle Times went after the inspection service again: “Competent and capable men only should be permitted to hold the position of steam vessel inspectors, and however competent the present incumbents of these offices may be to run a canal boat there is no question but that they have forfeited the confidence of a large number of people in this community.”
Hearings on the disaster lasted until August 1898, when the conclusion was reached by the Steamboat Inspection Service that the ship had caught fire, “and during the frantic fight to keep the flames from the place where was stored powder and dynamite the officers lost their bearings and, incidentally, control of the ship.” The storm drove the vessel onto the reef at Eldred Rock, “broadside on,” where the ship split open. The primary evidence for this fire theory was that fire hose was found on the ship’s deck, and the hose was “attached to the hydrants and coupled to the pumps.”
Then the story of the Clara Nevada faded. But not without a last barrage from the Seattle Times. In disgust, Blethen insinuated that “criminals seem to have sufficient ‘pull’ with the powers that be to prevent an investigation until time and the elements have destroyed the last vestige of the evidence of their guilt.” This charge was repeated verbatim on two occasions two days apart. The Post-Intelligencer did not rise to the bait.26
Though scrapping between the two papers continued for years, by April, the Clara Nevada had outlived its journalistic usefulness. Seattle was in the grip of a savage attack of Klondicitis, and the emphasis was on making money, not investigating mishaps.
There was another reason for the Clara Nevada to be forgotten. Ten days after the vessel had gone to the bottom of Lynn Canal, the Maine was sunk in Havana Harbor. War was declared by Spain on April 24 and the United States on the next day. American naval forces annihilated the Spanish force in Manila Bay on May 1. Marines landed at Guantanamo in Cuba on June 11 and repulsed a major Spanish assault on June 15, the same day Hawaii was annexed. The Spanish surrendered Guam on June 21, and the Spanish fleet at Cuba was destroyed on July 3. On July 25, Puerto Rico was invaded by the United States, and a Spanish assault on American troops near Manila was blunted on July 31. The breaking international news swamped the papers, and the saga of the Clara Nevada lost its power to generate headlines.
Additionally, as the flow of stampeders north grew from a trickle to a river to a flood, the number of maritime sinkings rose dramatically. In 1896, there had only been three marine wrecks. There were eight the next year. By the end of 1898, there had been thirty-four. With regard to the ships designed for Yukon River travel, the Scientific American reported, only five were still operating from the forty that had been built.27 When recriminations ceased between the Seattle Times and Post-Intelligencer, the Clara Nevada became just another ship lost at sea.
But what became singular about the Clara Nevada was its revivification. Ten years later, almost to the day, another ferocious storm boiled the waters of the Lynn Canal. Ships scattered for the cover of bays and bights, and on Eldred Rock, the lighthouse keeper could feel the earth shifting beneath the tower. Though it was almost brand new, built in 1902, the structure shook violently. All night long the wind screamed as it powered its way down the channel. Waves rose to staggering heights and threatened to sweep across the small island.
It was not until morning that the wind died and the waves settled. Only then did the lighthouse keeper venture outside. What a sight he saw! There at the northern end of the island was the Clara Nevada, the ship and the cadaverous remains of her crew, sitting on the beach. The ocean had dragged the grisly ship out of its grave and up on the reef. Later that night, the same storm that had brought the ship up took her back to her watery grave.
This is a very fine story and was reported in similar language in Gordon Newell’s book SOS North Pacific. Historical evidence, however, tells the story a bit differently. While the corpse of the Clara Nevada made one last appearance, it did not do so in such a dramatic manner. On February 25, 1908—just about ten years to the day later—M.J. Currie, keeper for the recently constructed lighthouse on Eldred Rock, reported that the Clara Nevada had “appeared in view off the north coast of the reef side of Elder [sic] rock, and that many bones of those who were long on the ill-fated vessel have been picked from the sea.”28 He felt that the “terrific winds” and “an extreme heap [sic] tide” had allowed the wreck to be seen. The sighting, however, was brief. The next morning, the wreck disappeared from sight.
When Gordon Newell was contacted and shown the discrepancy between his script and historical fact, he noted that “SOS North Pacific was written about 35 years ago, when I was a lot younger, more naive and given to accepting the tall tale of old salts at face value. The one provided in the case of the Clara Nevada was, to put it mildly, highly fictionalized.”29
Today, what is left of the Clara Nevada sits in very shallow water to the north of Eldred Rock. Divers who have been on the craft state that at low tide, part of the ship is barely six feet beneath the surface. The superstructure is completely torn apart. James Nelson, a wreck diver out of Juneau, reported in 1991 that the Clara Nevada was “the most destroyed wreck [he] had ever seen,” but it did have one highly visible landmark: the copper drive shaft for the propeller shaft that ran the length of the corpse of the Clara Nevada.30 By 1993, that drive shaft had also disappeared, probably taken by salvage divers.
Chapter 4
“Curiouser and Curiouser”
Though the Clara Nevada settled comfortably into the status of a colorful incident in the history of the Klondike gold rush, there were too many inconsistencies for it to remain unexamined forever. It was a story that could not die and continued, as Alice in Wonderland said, “curiouser and curiouser” as the years went by.
Scrambling the chronology, in June 19l6, eighteen years after the ship went down, Alaskan hard-hat diver C.F. Stagger spent two days on the wreck. In addition to cutting and “farming the kelp” that entombed the vessel in a living shroud, he also salvaged about half a ton of copper and brass. Though he could not have made it below decks, he was “positive from the examination made that the vessel had not caught on fire as was generally supposed and that the wreck was caused by something else, most likely a submerged rock.”31
How accurate his statement was, after the ship had been under water for almost two decades and stripped for salvage at least once earlier, is unknown. But it does raise questions; if the ship had not burned, then why had there been a fireball?
The fireball theory is not without its flaws. It only fits if the witness or witnesses really did see such a phenomenon. For this to be true, a witness would have seen an incident that lasted, at the longest, two or three seconds at a dist
ance of at least seven miles away in a raging storm. That seems a bit farfetched.
Another bit of evidence that also seems farfetched was printed in the Post-Intelligencer. According to the newspaper, even though there was a ninety-knot wind and a blasting snowstorm, “the long wharf at [Comet] was crowded with spectators” who heard a “loud report which resembled the explosion of boilers and nothing more was seen of the ill-fated steamer.” If this story is accurate, the explosion had to have been extremely loud to be heard from seven miles away above the screeching of a ninety-knot wind.
Then, in the same paper on the same day, on the same page, is a story that describes the ferocity of the storm:
A terrible blizzard has been raging along the entire coast, from the head of Lynn canal to Fort Wrangell. So severe was the wind that vessels in a harbor were afraid to venture out. While on her way to Juneau the steamer Chilkat, from San Francisco, was caught in the storm. For ten hours she steamed against the wind, making but four miles…It is generally admitted that the storm was the worst in years. For a time, snow descended, [and] the cold was intense.
A bit closer to the site of the wreck, the Alaska Searchlight in Juneau reported that “the wind was blowing a perfect hurricane from the north.” These conditions were thus those in which “the long wharf at [Comet] was crowded with spectators.” Further, the water off the Comet dock is very deep, so the dock was very short. The only dock in the area long enough to be “crowded with spectators” was at Jualin, in Berners Bay, on the inland side of a peninsula and, thus, out of sight of Eldred Rock.
As a tidbit destined for some book on the ironies of history, the only person identified by name who actually witnessed the fireball was “George Beck.” It is assumed that there is no relationship between this man and the George Foster Beck who died that night on the deck of the Clara Nevada and whose body would be the only one ever recovered.
But there was more evidence supporting the fireball theory. In March 1898, the Dyea Trail reported that an investigator at the site, Sanderson Reed, believed that the Clara Nevada had gone aground, and that fire might have occurred when lamps were tipped over as the Clara Nevada struck Eldred Rock. “The fire evidently started,” he surmised, “in different parts of the vessel, which prevented the crew and passengers from checking it.” This, however, would not account for the large explosion heard as far away as Comet.
Latty Boyce, the Clara Nevada’s carpenter who got off the ship in Alaska confirmed this speculation: “The saloon [of the Clara Nevada] was lighted by four large lamps set loosely on the tables and I saw one roll over and break the shade myself. I thought them very dangerous.” However, since the letter from Boyce appeared a week after the original statement from Sanderson Reed, it could be assumed that Boyce was responding to Reed’s speculation.
Reed also noticed a large hole in the side of the vessel but believed the boilers to be intact. He guessed that the striking of the reef had caused fires to erupt in different parts of the ship, making it impossible for the passengers to fight all of them at the same time. This corroborated testimony by a Lloyds of London surveyor, who stated categorically that there had been no boiler explosion.
Interestingly, Reed noted that there had probably been an attempt to lower the lifeboats, “which was unsuccessful on account of the storm.”32 This last statement is enigmatic, for it opens to the door to speculation as to how many lifeboats were indeed lowered, an issue that would haunt the issue of the last moments of the Clara Nevada.
While there is no question that the Clara Nevada did sink, events postdating the wreck add a strain of the macabre to the story. The Daily Alaska Dispatch reported that a human skull had been found in Auk Bay, just outside of Juneau. The skull, the article claimed, was undoubtedly that of one of the unfortunate passengers of the Clara Nevada, which had “struck a reef outside of Auk Bay in 1898 and afterwards burned to the water’s edge with all hands lost.” This editor was probably new to the job and may not have known that it has been firmly established where the Clara Nevada had gone down but not why.
Of greater interest, however, was a tidbit on the body found by the Rustler, allegedly that of George Foster Beck. According to the Dispatch,
the purser of the steamer [George Foster Beck] was the son of a wealthy family of Portland, Oregon. Thousands of dollars offered for the body eventually recovered what was purported to be the body. However, it has been often claimed to relieve the anxiety of the aged mother a fake body was shipped to the family burying ground at Portland and interred.33
While one news article said there were rumors of other bodies being found, other than the skull that allegedly came from a victim of the wreck, no other recovery of bodies was mentioned in the newspapers. This raises an obvious question: if there were as many as 140 people on board—depending on whose numbers are used—how is it possible that a steamship could find only 1 body, and that 1 body had a reward on its recovery?
Twenty years later, the Princess Sophia went aground on Vanderbilt Reef fifteen miles to the south of Eldred Rock. With a heavy wind and a rising tide, the ship’s keel was scraped open, and the ship sank in water so shallow its spars were above the tide line. More than three hundred passengers and crew went down with the ship, and their bodies littered the shores of Lynn Canal for miles. The owners of the Princess Sophia also offered rewards for the return of bodies, which generated a great deal of small boat activity in the area. With the Clara Nevada, the owners made no such offer, and thus there was not a frenzied search for bodies. Only one body was recovered from the Clara Nevada. It has to be assumed that the rest were entombed in the ship when it went down.
Further muddying the waters of investigation is an article that appeared in the Dyea Trail and Alaska Miner (Juneau) in April 1898. The identical articles reported that the steamer Seaolin34 had spotted a boat on the beach near Comet, several miles south of Eldred Rock. It sent a crew ashore, and they found a boat that was “neither a lifeboat nor a sealing boat.” There was a life preserver from the Clara Nevada on board, as well as a roll of blankets containing clothing, “which a Yukoner would take along with him.”
Another blanket roll with clothing was found about sixty yards away and close by were the remains of a fire. The life preserver was singed, leading the rescue party to conclude that the Clara Nevada had indeed burned.
Opening the blanket rolls, the crew found a light check suit with the name “Geo. Kasey” in the pocket. Other papers found related to the purchase of goods by “William Hemming, Rockport, Ind.” and a memorandum signed “Logsdon.” The accounts further stated that “no trace of the bodies could be found. Everything point[ed] to the loss of two lives.” No reason for this last assumption was given.
Another oddity of the Alaskan papers was the apparent lack of mention of the gold onboard. Considering that a fortune of gold could very well have been sitting in twenty-four feet of water, there were only a few recorded cases in 1898 of anyone attempting to salvage the ship. The first was on June 5. A tug named Scow was reportedly busy at work, trying to retrieve whatever gold was left after the wreck. A week later, there was another diver searching the wreckage. G.W. Stowel made “a great many dips spending several hours under water each time.” He walked from one end of the sunken wreck to the other several times and brought up quite a few artifacts that were subsequently put on exhibition “in Juneau stores.” Later that year, in mid-August, there was a second report of activity. The firm of Beddoe & Nowell was at work, looking for the Clara Nevada’s safe. “From the position of the wreck,” it was reported, “it is plain that the Nevada was split open and it is believed that the safe dropped through the ship into deeper water.” While it was claimed in this article that there had been $300,000 in gold on board, there was never a report of any gold actually being raised.
Could there have been others who did their work secretly? Possibly. But it is important to note that the Clara Nevada sank in the middle of a narrow channel that was being used frequently by s
hips loaded with stampeders, making the run between Seattle and Skagway. It would have been hard to do the work on the sly. However, if anyone saw any salvage operations, it did not make any of the papers along the Lynn Canal or those in Seattle.
What happened to the gold?
Aerial view of Eldred Rock, unknown date. Courtesy of the United States Coast Guard.
Clara Nevada, as the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey vessel Hassler. Courtesy of the Alaska State Library Robert DeArmond Collection 134-288:2.
William H. Evans. Courtesy of the Alaska State Library DeArmond Collection 234-310-2.
The dock at Comet, Alaska, date unknown. Courtesy of the United States Coast Guard.
Traveling shows were the entertainment of the day. Note the variety of offerings at this Skagway theater. Also note that women were not excluded from such entertainment. Courtesy of the Alaska State Library P226-842.
Clara Nevada with two support boats, probably in Skagway. Courtesy of the Alaska State Library PCA-87.
Eldred Rock lighthouse and crew, unknown date. Courtesy of the United States Coast Guard.
Unknown roadhouse in Alaska. Note that all the men have slicked down their hair for the photograph. Also note the heavy boots on the men in the front. These were needed in the spring when the trails turned to mud. Courtesy of the Anchorage Museum of History and Art B 81-19-154.
The shoals of the Lynn Canal were equally dangerous for both cargo and passenger ships. Here, in 1910, the SS Princess May was left high and dry on Sentinel Island when the tide went out. Courtesy of the Alaska State Library Norton Collection 226-614.
The Clara Nevada: Gold, Greed, Murder and Alaska's Inside Passage Page 4