U.S. Congress 2019-2020: Bills Introduced (Over 5,000 in the House and over 3,000 in the Senate)
Fish Factor:Alaskans Prepare for Poor to Average Salmon Runs By LAINE WELCH - Alaskans are preparing for another salmon season of poor to average runs to most regions.
The big exception once again is at Bristol Bay where another massive return of more than 51 million sockeyes is expected. Managers predict that surge will produce a harvest of over 36 million reds to fishermen.
Bristol Bay is home to the largest wild sockeye salmon run in the world and typically accounts for 42% of the world’s sockeye harvest. Those fish and all wild salmon compete in a tough worldwide commodities market, where Alaska salmon claims 13% of the global supply.
Drency and Lillian Dudley, December 04, 1953
Photo courtesy JUDY ZENGE
If you ask most people why the field is named after Drency Dudley, they will say it is because Dudley, a local civic leader from the 1940s to the 1960s, owned the land that became Dudley Field, which is the sports area adjacent to Ketchikan High School.
Not surprisingly, that common belief is not true.
While Dudley was a leader in promoting local youth sports and led the Lions Club to build the field on Jackson Street between Fifth and Seventh avenues in the mid-1950s, the land actually belonged to several private property owners, local government and the Ketchikan Pulp Company.
(Drawn by Capt Lisiansky, engraved by I. Clark,via Wikicommons)
Southeast Alaska: Archaeologists Identify Famed Fort Where Indigenous Tlingits Fought Russian Forces By MEGAN GANNON - For thousands of years, the Tlingit people made their home in the islands of Southeast Alaska among other indigenous peoples, including the Haida, but at the turn of the 19th century, they came into contact with a group that would threaten their relationship with the land: Russian traders seeking to establish a footprint on the North American continent.
The colonists had been expanding into Alaska for decades, first exploiting Aleut peoples as they chased access to sea otters and fur seals that would turn profits in the lucrative fur trade. The Russian American Company, a trading monopoly granted a charter by Russian tsar Paul I just as British monarchs had done on the continent’s east coast in the 17th century, arrived in Tlingit territor
By DAVE KIFFER - With future ferry service up in the air and the price of both barge shipping and air travel on the rise, you could certainly forgive Ketchikan residents for wistfully wondering how life would be different in Southern Southeast if a road connected Ketchikan to the rest of the continent.
To be sure, even if there was a road it would be at least a 1,500-mile trip to drive from Ketchikan to Seattle but that s the not the point. You could do it, even if it took several days.
It was during the expansion of the canned salmon industry in the 1920s and early 1930s, that the federal government began considering connecting Alaska to the rest of the country. Thomas MacDonald, who would run the Bureau of Public Roads from 1919 to 1953, first proposed a coastal highway between Seattle and Southeast Alaska in 1925.
U.S. Congress 2019-2020: Bills Introduced (Over 5,000 in the House and over 3,000 in the Senate)
Ketchikan 2020 Year in Review:COVID cancels entire cruise ship season; International pandemic affects all residents, even those that remained healthy By DAVE KIFFER - Like the rest of the world, the biggest news story in Ketchikan was the quarantine caused by the Corona Virus or COVID 19. Most of Ketchikan was shut down from mid-March through the end of April harkening back to the month- long closure of the Ketchikan economy and social world for a month during the Great Flu Pandemic of 1918.
By the end of the year, the COVID 19 virus had infected more than 250 residents and local visitors. One Saxman resident, Julie Wasulli, 56, was medivaced to Bellingham in November and died on December 11.