In August 1898, the Yukon was so low that it was reported that few boats were making it into Dawson. For reasons we will never know, thirty miles south of Circle, the Evans finished her maiden voyage stuck high and dry. When the ice went out the next year, she was stuck where she could never move. Thus, when the William H. Evans became grounded near Halfway Island, it was at least with company along the river.
With the Evans on the sand bar, the end was slow in coming. Lewis was able to stave off destruction during breakup in 1900 by filling the Evans’s hold with water. This put an estimated 1,200 pounds of weight in the ship, giving the hull the strength to withstand the “immense force of ice as it piled up on her at break up.”
Yet another irony of the Evans was brought to light by the Seattle Times in February 1899. To profit from every cubic foot of cargo space, the Evans took on pass-through cargo—according to Admiralty court records, 162½ tons of it—for Dawson rather than food for its crew. Then, when the ship became ice locked in the river, Lewis had to buy food at inflated prices to feed himself and his crew.
The crew and passengers apparently remained aboard through the winter and spring, for it was not until the next year that the crew member who sued for back wages left the William H. Evans. By then, July 30, 1899, the steamer had been on the sandbar for almost a year. Prospector Walter R. Curtin saw the ship aground on June 19 and noted that it was “seemingly out of the water. She looked as though she were going to be on dry land all summer.” In the appendix to his book, Yukon Passage, Curtin further noted, saying, “[The Evans] ran aground in the Yukon Flats in her first year; and the falling water left her stranded so high that I do not think she ever got off, at least not while there was any business for her.”
As far as the historical record goes, Curtin was apparently correct. The Evans did not sail again that year. That December, the census taker found Lewis and the Evans iced in on the same sand bar.
Interestingly, according to Captain H.L. Adams, maritime historian, there is a bar on the Yukon River between Fort Yukon and Circle directly across the river from Halfway Island named Evans Bar. This name originated on a chart by Captain Charles Y. Mahnquist, who drew the chart in 1898. It would probably be safe to assume that this bar was named after the William H. Evans.
Being iced in during the winter and grounded during the summer were not Lewis’s only problems. In addition to his crew abandoning the steamer, he was also being sued. When Dungan, one of the crew members suing for back wages, was in the office of the United States consul in Dawson on November 2, 1899, he handed the consul a document that he claimed he had found in the engine room of the steamer. It was a notice that the Alaska Packers Association was suing the Evans for supplies furnished. Lewis’s bad credit had finally caught up with him.
When neither check to the Alaska Packers Association cleared—and after the Evans was finally located almost a year later—the packers filed a libel suit against the steamship on March 22, 1899. The vessel was seized on August 5, which was not hard to do since it had gone aground. A court date was set for December 1, 1899. When the vessel could be floated, it was ordered to proceed to Skagway, where it was to be sold at auction. Wages totaling $13,494.66 were ordered recovered for the crew. The notice was authorized in Circle City on August 5, 1899, by United States marshal James M. Shoup.
But Lewis was not through with the Evans yet. Even though he and his crew claimed on August 1, 1899, that “each and every intervening libelant is a poor person and without means to pay the fees and costs of this suit,” Lewis was able to buy back his own ship. After all, who in Skagway would want to buy a steamer that was stranded on the Yukon River a thousand miles away? On June 23, 1900, when the ship finally went for auction, Lewis, “being the highest and best bidder and the only bidder,” bought the Evans in Skagway for $13,000. That sum would have paid off the crew but apparently not the Alaska packers.
Even after Lewis bought his own ship back, there were problems. The Alaska Exploration Company filed a libel suit against the William H. Evans in August 1899. The suit was still pending in September of the next year when the United States government formed the Second Judicial District and transferred the suit to Nome. Nothing came of the suit, most likely because the William H. Evans no longer existed when the case finally went to court.
In the end, the William H. Evans could not be moved. Fearful that breakup the next spring, 1901, would damage the ship too greatly to be repaired, the vessel was sold again. This time it was scrapped. What could be salvaged was loaded onto a barge and dragged into Dawson by the Alaska Commercial Company’s steamer Bella. There the machinery was bought and used by the Yukon Saw Mill.
With the sale of the Evans, Lewis again disappeared from the historical record. This time, however, I had a handful of leads. As I unraveled Lewis’s life, it became clear that he was as much the epitome of the rough-and-tumble mariner at the end of the nineteenth century as one could find.
Lewis was apparently a born adventurer, perhaps the last of his breed. According to his obituary, he was born in 1834 and was one of the first men to go to the California gold fields by sea, at age fifteen, most likely as a cabin boy. Then, in 1853, as a teenager, he went with the Perry Expedition to Japan. During his twenties, he smuggled guns and ammunition to the Confederacy through the Union naval blockade. Later, ironically, he was “connected with the United States Geodetic Survey” in the surveying of the Gulf of Mexico, the same governmental body that owned the Hassler, which became the Clara Nevada.
Lewis had deep roots in Baltimore. I discovered that even though he was a sea captain on the West Coast, he maintained a home in Baltimore. The Baltimore City Directory for 1888 lists C.H. Lewis, mariner, as living on 1809 Light Street. A George C. Lewis, presumably his brother, was residing at 219 East Hamburg Street in the same city. They were both working as masters on different coasts. C.H. was listed as a first officer on the Idaho in Pacific Northwest waters that year, while G.C. Lewis appears in the historical record as master of the Alsenborn, enrolled in Baltimore on September 18, 1888.52
I also discovered that the information on the wife of C.H. Lewis, as presented in the Seattle press, was in error. C.H. Lewis had a wife, but there are few West Coast references to her. Two were from the Post-Intelligencer, two days apart, and were contradictory. On February 18, she was reported to be in Portland and “very ill.” Two days letter, the same paper placed her in Peru. Supposedly she had accompanied Lewis to Peru when the George W. Elder went south “during the Chilean-Peruvian War.” Though Lewis returned to the United States, his wife did not, as “she found the associations of Peru better to her liking than a trip up the coast.” Considering that her husband was the captain of the steamship at the time, it could have been insinuated that her staying in Peru was tantamount to a divorce.
However, when C.H. Lewis was finally located in the 1900 census in Baltimore, another tidbit in his life came to light. He did have a wife, and in 1900, she was very much alive and not in Peru. Her name was Sara F. Lewis, she was nine years younger than her husband and the couple was living with their son, two daughters, a son-in-law and a grandson. The couple had been married for thirty-five years in 1900 and had produced eight children. The remaining son at home, Robert J. Lewis, age twenty-six, was also listed as a “mariner.” The entire brood lived at 1429 William Street, in South Baltimore near Federal Hill.53
However, late in my investigation, I made contact with the great-great-granddaughter of Lewis. She confirmed that while Lewis was not living in San Francisco in 1900, his family was. The 1900 census lists a large family as “Household,” with a selection of last names as follows (with their age in parenthesis): Mary Lewis (thirty-nine), Alvin Fouratt (sixteen), Rita Fouratt (fourteen), Charles Lewis (seven), Honora Lewis (three), Grace I. Lewis (fourteen), Victor Street (thirty-five), Samuel Uncovich (twenty-two) and Spiro Radovich (twenty-eight). I was told the two Fouratts were from a previous marriage. Because of the ages of Street, Uncovich and Radovich,
I’m inclined to believe they were boarders. And this collection did not include those in Baltimore in the same census. According to census records, the Lewis family was living at 25 Tenth Avenue. The actual house in which they were living was apparently dynamited in 1906 to create a firebreak during the great earthquake and fire. The census in 1900 in San Francisco lists Grace Lewis, the wife, as a widow, so apparently she thought her husband was dead.
The presence of C.H. Lewis in the United States census in June 1900 in Baltimore raised a nagging question: how could C.H. Lewis have been in both Alaska and Maryland at the same time? Was he in two places at the same time? Actually, he wasn’t. On December 6, 1899, he was in Alaska. On June 7, 1900, he was in Baltimore. He was counted by the census twice. Considering that he was back in Skagway on June 21, two weeks later, he was apparently in Baltimore to raise the $13,000 necessary to buy back the Evans.
The deeper I dug, the harder it was to believe that Lewis could have been given command of a ship. Perhaps the only reason was that the gold rush required all types of mariners, regardless of talent or record. When it came to his record, Lewis certainly had one that did not bode well for his employers.
Piece by piece, I put Lewis’s life on paper. Possibly the first boat he skippered was a schooner by the name of Pilot’s Bride. But Lewis did not command it long. It became stranded on Nestucca Bar, Oregon, and was declared a complete loss in August 1881.54
Thereafter, his record did not get any better. On December 21, 1887, Lewis was serving as the captain of the San Vincente. Forty-five miles south of San Francisco, the ship caught fire from an unknown source and burned to the water line; then it sank. Some of the crew managed to get off in a lifeboat, which was subsequently lost at sea.
Six crew members in another lifeboat were successful in escaping the burning ship and were picked up by a passing vessel. They were lucky to have escaped when they did. By the time they were rescued, it was reported that the flames from the burning San Vincente were so high that they appeared as “spires of flame leap[ing] up in the darkness, illuminating the waters for miles around.” The cargo was listed as “general merchandise,” and the ship was uninsured at the time.
Giving credit where credit is due, Lewis apparently stayed on deck until the last possible moment, looking for eleven missing crewmen. According to one account, he stayed on deck so long that he had to escape on a rapidly made raft because both lifeboats were too far away to be reached by swimming. Lewis was also burned badly in the fire and probably carried the scars of that incident for the rest of his life.
The ship that rescued the men was the Queen, the same ship which was to bring the news of the sinking of the Clara Nevada to Seattle eleven years later. Another odd bit of synchronicity, the fire was attributed to “the explosion of a can of oil, which was on top of the boiler.”55
Lewis later served on the Alexander Duncan, which was captained by a man who would cross his path many times in the future: James Carroll. But he could not have served on the ship very long, for it was wrecked on Fort Point in September 1885.56 Lewis also served on the Salinas, which sank in the “heaviest gale known for years” in Monterey Bay.57 Whether Lewis was onboard when these two ships went down is not recorded.
According to the Marine Engineers Beneficial Association, Lewis was listed as a veteran of twenty years’ service with the ORNC (Oregon Railroad & Navigation Company) and the Pacific Coast Steamship Company, the forerunner of the Admiral Line. During that time, the beneficial association stated, he had served or commanded on a variety of ships, including the Idaho and the Michigan. (Strangely, Cicero Hunt Lewis, the “other” C.H. Lewis, was an incorporator of the ORNC.58)
With regard to the Idaho, on which C.H. Lewis was credited with service, it was seized in 1886 by the U.S. Revenue cutter Oliver Wolcott at the direction of H.F. Beecher, the customs inspector at Port Townsend. Upon examining the cargo, Beecher discovered that the Idaho was carrying $48,000 worth of opium. Customs officials raided a fish cannery in Alaska owned by the Idaho’s master, where they found an additional eleven barrels of opium. Released, the Idaho was seized again, three months later, with another six hundred pounds of opium. The ship was placed under $30,000 bond, but while the case was being appealed, it was wrecked on November 29, 1889. When customs officials examined what was left of the ship shortly thereafter, they discovered several hundred more pounds of opium onboard!
In all fairness, however, it should be stated that opium smuggling was not the crime then that it is now. Anyone could buy and sell the substance. But there was a heavy duty on it. Opium sold for sixteen dollars a pound, but it had a duty of ten dollars a pound. The legal case involving the Idaho was, thus, not about the legality of opium but on the avoidance of duty on that import.59
Interestingly, the final judgment against the Idaho was nominal. In fact, in spite of the confiscated evidence and the obvious proof of ongoing criminal activity, the fine was so low that it did not even compensate the United States government for the $8,000 in fees it had paid to informers. While records do not indicate Lewis’s position on the ship at the time of the initial federal investigation, in September 1888, he was listed as “first officer,” a command position.60
Some newspapers credit Lewis with serving as the captain of the Michigan, but the historical records are lacking. While Gibbs and McCurdy stated that Lewis was the master of the ship, the Daily Astorian refers to the captain of the vessel in its columns as “S.F. Graves,” though the incident is reminiscent of Lewis’s headstrong antics.61
In November 1890, while en route from Puget Sound to Portland, the Michigan caught fire at sea. The captain, Lewis or Graves, fastened down the hatches to smother the fire and made a “wild run” down the coast until the ship reached Astoria. Dockside, the Astoria Fire Department filled her with water as hundreds of spectators lined the docks. “It was veritable volcano,” the Daily Astorian reported, “confined among 500 barrels of lime and 2,300 cases of salmon, with a lot of coal on one side to help it out.” It took seven hours to quench the flames and left “nine or ten feet of water in the hold.” Repaired, the Michigan set out and was shortly thereafter seized by customs for smuggling and put under heavy bond.
The disasters of the Eugene, Clara Nevada and the William H. Evans came thereafter. But this did not end Lewis’s maritime career. Even though he was in his sixties when he returned to Baltimore after the beaching of the William H. Evans, he continued to work in the shipping industry. In the first decade of the twentieth century, Lewis was connected with yet another shipping firm, the Baltimore and Carolina Steamship Company, which offered passenger and freight service between Baltimore and Miami, a four-day trip. The company had four ships, Esther Weems, Mary Weems, Nancy Weems and Georgianna Weems—named, perhaps, after the relatives of the president of the company, Mason L. Weems Williams.
The Baltimore and Carolina Steamship Company was founded in 1905, and Lewis probably worked for the lines as an investor, as he would have been sixty-six when the company was formed, a bit late in life to be a skipper. The last historical reference I could find on the Baltimore and Carolina Steamship Company was in 1923, when the Maritime Index reported that the company raised money through a bond sale.
Lewis died June 7, 1917, and his obituary ran the next day in the Baltimore Sun. Lewis was survived by his wife, Sarah F. Lewis, and four children: Mrs. Mary A. Forsythe, Miss Sadie F. Lewis, Captain Charles F. Lewis and Captain Robert J. Lewis. Though I sent letters to every Lewis and Forsythe listed in the 1988 Baltimore phone book, I did not receive a single positive response.
Chapter 7
The End of the Maritime Frontier
Perhaps the ultimate irony of C.H. Lewis’s life was the beaching of the William H. Evans. Here he was, at the top of his profession in his peak earning years, the captain and owner of his own vessel, midstream in one of the greatest gold rushes in the history of mankind, a stampede that depended primarily upon water transportation—and fate had left him sittin
g high and dry while a flood of steamships passed him going upriver. No doubt he realized that every morning he didn’t travel, he was losing $500 in income—$14,000 today.
But it was also ironic. In the decades between 1880 and 1900, he had skippered five ships, the Pilot’s Bride, San Vincente, Eugene, Clara Nevada and the William H. Evans. Of these, two had been beached, two burned and one sunk. Only the Eugene remained above water when Lewis’s tenure as captain was through, but it had bankrupted its owners and come close to turning turtle as well. Examining his record, one would be hard pressed to call Lewis a competent skipper or successful businessman.
Being responsible for that many ships that met disaster hardly looked good on one’s record. Other captains who had done far less were punished far more severely than Lewis ever was. In February 1899, for instance, Captain Jessen of the Homer had his license suspended for thirty days. Jessen’s transgression was backing into the steamer Al-Ki at a very low speed. Total damage was about $3,000. This was not even pocket change compared to the damage of the Clara Nevada, not to mention loss of life.
But times were changing. Though Lewis may not have known it at the time, the William H. Evans and the rest of the gold rush fleet was doomed. The end of their era was rapidly approaching in two forms.
The first was a railroad: the White Pass & Yukon Railroad, “the road that couldn’t be built.” An organizational hybrid, it was actually three railroads, one incorporated in the United States, another in British Columbia and a third in the Yukon. The first passengers went over White Pass in February 1899, and the first through passengers to Lake Bennet made it in July of that year. By the time Lewis resolved his legal difficulties, the Yukon River route was defunct. It was cheaper to go by steamer to Skagway and then rail. As of August 1899, trains ran regularly between Skagway and White Horse.
The Clara Nevada: Gold, Greed, Murder and Alaska's Inside Passage Page 8