History podcast tells not all was golden in 1874 gold rush

One hundred and fifty years ago, the Stikine beckoned people to its rugged landscape with the promise of wealth. This was the Cassiar gold rush of 1874, a huge moment in Wrangell history, according to Ronan Rooney, historian and creator of the podcast "Wrangell History Unlocked."

Rooney's newest series "Strange Customs" tells the story of the gold rush in Wrangell in three parts. The story, however, is not just about the search for gold on the Stikine. It involves a political corruption ring in Portland, Oregon; a nasty rivalry between a senator and a judge; and, most importantly, it follows John Carr, a fugitive from justice for murder and a professional in bribery and intimidation.

The year 1874 was a transformative time, Rooney said, people were flooding into Wrangell - at the time a sleepy town with an abandoned Army post. There was no U.S. law in Wrangell then except for one person - Carr, the U.S. Treasury's deputy collector of customs.

But Carr abused his position as the only U.S. law and illegally extorted money and alcohol from ships passing through on their way to Canada.

When Rooney decided to tell this history, he realized he needed to focus on this one corrupt character: Carr. Rooney has told multiple stories of Wrangell history on his podcast, of good characters and bad. But this piece of history in particular, he said, was challenging because he personally detested the main character from the start.

The gold rush created a reason for people like Carr to travel to Wrangell. In 1874, steamships began arriving full of people, Rooney said. It was the year that the chaos of the gold rush began under U.S. watch.

Gold had been found in the Dease Lake region of the Cassiar, with Wrangell serving as the starting point for prospectors who traveled up the Stikine River in search of gold in British Columbia.

This series, Rooney said, explains how the United States attempted, succeeded and failed at managing the gold rush in Alaska. It was a time, Rooney noted, that the region needed people with integrity who could be trusted. Instead, Carr, one of the most crooked characters, arrived and took control in Wrangell.

Rooney first learned about Carr from reading one of Patricia A. Neal's books on Wrangell history. Carr was only mentioned in passing, he said, so he decided to pursue the story.

A former Wrangell resident now living in Oregon, Rooney started his history podcasts in 2020 and has produced more than a dozen over the years.

To find out the details of what happened with Carr and the gold rush, Rooney looked at old articles from the Daily Colonist, a Canadian newspaper. He also looked at letters between government officials, which were made public in the years after the events. Work that other Alaska historians have published was also helpful, Rooney found.

The Cassiar gold rush of 1874 was preceded by an economic panic in 1873, as most gold rushes were, Rooney explained. The same thing happened a generation later with the Klondike gold rush of the 1890s that followed an economic panic that occurred in 1893. Klondike prospectors used the Stikine as an alternate route to travel through British Columbia to the gold fields in Canada's Yukon Territory.

The people who came to the Stikine in 1874 in search of gold had no other options, Rooney explained. The only ones who profited off the rush were those who sold goods to miners or rented property to them, he said.

Ultimately, Rooney said he wants to cover all of the 1870s in Wrangell history on his award-winning podcast, which he had started in 2020 with an episode on the 1869 bombardment of Wrangell by U.S. Army soldiers. The Army destroyed several homes in the Native village after killing two Tlingit brothers - all because of an alleged incident at a Christmas party.

The Cassiar gold rush podcast series, he said, was needed to explain the next piece of the Wrangell story - why the Army was back in Wrangell in the 1870s.

The next part of the history series, Rooney said, includes the distillation of alcohol in Alaska, as imports had been banned.

Shady, untrustworthy characters like Carr in Wrangell are not limited to the Cassiar gold rush, Rooney said - Wrangell's checkered past is full of them. History can remind us to be ever vigilant when looking into authority figures' pasts. The past tells us a lot about the present and the future, he said.

To listen to Rooney's podcast, visit http://www.wrangellhistoryunlocked.com.