When podcaster and historian Ronan Rooney came home from college in the summer, he got a job guiding tourists around Wrangell, showing them the island's sights and sharing its stories. When they'd pass Deadmans Island, a small tree-covered piece of land a half mile offshore from the airport, he'd tell his audience about the Chinese cannery workers who were supposedly buried there in the 19th and 20th centuries.
According to Wrangell lore, workers' bodies were preserved in barrels of salt brine and stored on the island until they could be sent back to their homeland.
The most recent episode of Rooney's "Wrangell History Unlocked" podcast explores the fraught history of Deadmans Island, the possible origins of its name and the stories, true or false, that circulate about its past.
"It's something that a lot of us, myself included, firmly believe as part of Wrangell's local lore," he said. However, as he researched this story, he was unable to find any solid evidence to confirm it.
In the mid-1800s, American demand for industrial labor attracted Chinese immigrant workers to the Pacific Northwest. Many were drawn in by tales of "Gold Mountain Men" who'd rocketed to prosperity in the region, but most found themselves working in dangerous conditions for little pay. The conditions in the Alaska Packers Association Cannery, which dominated Wrangell's economy in those days, were no exception.
Many workers died stateside, but had arranged to have their remains sent back to the family cemetery in China, in accordance with traditional burial practices. Bodies were sometimes buried and then exhumed and may have been preserved in salt for shipment.
Rooney did not find any record of cannery worker deaths in Wrangell, but they "may well have happened."
The job was dangerous and the workers "didn't have protections in place," he added. "They were truly at the mercy of their employer, who was responsible for housing and feeding them."
This lack of concrete evidence doesn't mean there's no truth to the story, or that no evidence will be unearthed in the future. "It takes a lot of brass to say, 'absolutely no way this could have ever happened,'" Rooney said. "Wrangell is full of dusty shoeboxes sitting on the top of closets ... photos that would just blow my mind."
He sees the episode as one contribution in a long, ongoing conversation about Wrangell history, not as a definitive statement on the veracity of the community's long-held beliefs. "I hope this gets people talking," he said. "When they see grandpa, they ask him about Deadmans Island."
By sharing and recording their stories, community members can participate in Wrangell's rich historical tradition. Local historians like Bonnie Demerjian, Patricia A. Neal and the late Pat Roppel "carried the ball down the field," he said, but "there's still a lot to be discovered here.
"I take this more as an invitation for those who know this legend to ask, 'where did we hear it? Why do we think it's true,'" he said.
The mystery of Deadmans Island remains, for the most part, intact. But Rooney was able to determine one thing for sure - long before the rumors about Chinese cannery workers got started, the island was a Tlingit burial site. The carved grizzly bear that sits there was commissioned for the grave of an R. Shadesty, a rich Tlingit man who died in 1903 at the age of 61.
Rooney's podcast may have started as a pandemic project, but he has no intention of stopping, even as COVID-19 integrates itself into the catalog of regular seasonal illnesses. "I would love to continue doing this," he said. "It's good for me to always have a project that I'm working on and have a few on the back burner."
In the future, he plans to delve into the founding of the Wrangell Institute and Wrangell's cultural landscape in the 1870s, which was the area's first decade under United States control. "I could do this for the rest of my life and never run out of interesting topics in Wrangell history," he said. "Tlingit culture, Russian emperors, the Hudson Bay Company in Britain, the United States, Asian immigrant communities - it's a very international historical landscape."
Rooney takes pride in tackling difficult historical topics, from the community's mistreatment of immigrant workers to its suppression of Tlingit culture. Only one time period is completely off-limits - the present day. "It's much easier to write about people when they're dead," he quipped. "They can't come after me."
The episode is available on YouTube, the Apple Podcast app, streaming services like Spotify and Pandora and wrangellhistoryunlocked.com.
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