Historian tells story of controversial businessman

In his most recent work, historian Ronan Rooney published a blog post about Walter C. Waters, a man he calls the Walt Disney of Wrangell.

Waters was a businessman brought to Wrangell during the gold rush, who opened a curio store in 1922 called the Bear Totem Store which sold Native artifacts and attracted tourists from far and wide.

Rooney said this has been his most popular blog post yet, adding, “controversy is always popular.”

Waters, Rooney explained, is a controversial figure. He was a successful businessman who did some great things for Wrangell, but he was also responsible for the loss of a lot of Tlingit heritage. After Waters died, many of the Native artifacts in his possession were sold and are still in museums and private collections around the world, the historian said.

Waters was also responsible in part for the Wrangell Institute: He was on the committee that helped pitch Wrangell as the location for the Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding school. Once the school opened in 1932, Waters had students make artifacts and curios to sell in his store.

Rooney is working on a larger project about the Wrangell Institute that will eventually be published as a podcast. But that project will likely take a couple years, and he realized that his piece about Waters was ready for the public. He hopes that publishing it now will help him gather more information for his eventual project on the institute — part of his goal of the blog post is to reach people who may have more information.

His website is Wrangell History Unlocked.

He also felt the Waters’ story was very topical and timely, since some repatriated clan items recently made their way back to Wrangell.

In 1953, after the businessman’s death, the Bear Totem Store sold roughly 600 items to the Denver Art Museum and Burke Museum in Seattle, Rooney said. In his research, he has found artifacts from Wrangell all over the world.

He said it’s unclear how Waters ended up with so many totem poles and other clan items. Waters allegedly bought the items in his store, but the podcaster said it’s suspicious that one man could have purchased items that belong to clans.

“Waters was clearly intelligent, had brains and a big vision. He made Wrangell a destination,” Rooney said. “But Waters was willing to sell Wrangell’s soul for tourism.”

When Waters first came to Wrangell, he was a nobody, the historian explained. He stumbled his way into the fur trading and then Indian artifacts business. His store came at the cost of killing the culture that made him a somebody, Rooney said.

He wanted to be careful not to capture too negative an image of Waters in his blog post. People may see him as a villain, but he also brought a lot of good things to Wrangell, he said.

Rooney described Waters like Walt Disney, who took European fables and turned them into a theme park. “The Bear Totem Store was really like a small theme park destination,” he said.

In his research, he finds postcards from the store almost every day — a testament to how prevalent Waters’ store was.