Alaska continued - page 2
A.H. Moore is listed as being on the Nome school board from 1903 to 1905. In an
article written for the Nome Nugget in 1923 discussing the expedition, his wife
is said to have been a long time resident of Nome. So they had lived in Nome
before putting together the company in California. The plan, again according to
the Nugget, was to repair a dredge on Osborn Creek purchased the previous year
by Moore from a Victor Julian. Then they planned to dredge 45 miles along the
creek where Moore had a claim. Moore about the dredging operation later.
I don't have the exact number of share buyers who signed onto the deal. Pop's certificate number is sixty-seven. In some of the other references "almost a hundred" is mentioned as the number on the boat.
The transportation Mr. Moore had purchased was the schooner Fred J. Wood. The
Wood had been built at the turn of the century to haul lumber from the Northwest
timber ports to points on the Pacific. (On a trip to China around 1907, the
Japanese cook stabbed the
Captain. The First Mate dropped off the body and prisoner in Hawaii and pressed
on to Hawaii.) The ship was three masted, 800 tons and could haul 640 tons of
cargo. Good thing, the cargo in addition to the personnel included coal as
ballast in the hold, provisions for the expedition for a year, two milk cows,
five horses, twenty sheep, two automobiles, a Cleveland tractor, and a
dismantled Curtis Jenny airplane. Much of the information about the trip comes
from stories written by Charles LaJotte, an early airmail pilot who took the
plane to Nome for barnstorming.
The schooner, which had no auxiliary power, was towed from the San Francisco harbor (the Golden Gate bridge wasn't built yet) on July 7th. Pop's letter says everyone was sick for a day or two. His first assignment was sacking the loose coal in the hold into burlap bag that could be offloaded at Nome. There was no harbor or pier at Nome, only a shallow bay for anchorage, so a lot of planning went into how the ship would be offloaded. During the trip they built a large liter that was loaded then towed ashore with a small powerboat included in the cargo. The coal-bagging job was probably the least desirable assignment on the ship, so S.E.B. promoted his Animal Husbandry degree and got the job taking care of the livestock.
To sail northwest to Alaska's west coast the schooner headed due west to a point north of the Hawaiian Islands then headed north toward the Aleutians. The prevailing winds dictated that route. The two letters written during the voyage seemed to indicate he enjoyed the trip. He took a quantity of candy onboard that was in demand and sold for twice the cost. Poker and checkers occupied spare time and he made a little money and got some of his candy back gambling at the games.
And then there were the ladies ---
The Fred J. Wood
at dock in
Lucy Moore the promoter’s daughter. Lucy is in the center of the picture of three girls at left.
The expedition included men, women and families.
The only ones identified in the literature are
Pop wrote two letters during the trip that give most of the
personal information we have of his experiences.
The first is an eight-page letter to “the folks” at home written over the
course of four weeks during the voyage.
The folks at Odon at that time would have been his father, two older
brothers and older sister and their families.
The second letter was written to his sister, Alegera, who had followed
him to
continued (page 3)