BuildRoad

STAN BISHOP—A TRUE SOURDOUGH

BUILDING A ROAD TO CANADA

Don: Stan, you mentioned something the other day….You said you surveyed a road up there?
Stan: Not me alone, but a group of us that lived there: Tom McQuillan, who was a Canadian and myself and the people connected with Grand Duc Mining & Smelting. All of us were intent on getting a road up the Unuk at that time, about 1938.

Don: Was the mine considering bringing the ore out that possible road?
Stan: Well, the Unuk River drainage was a miner’s paradise. There’s silver and there’s minerals up at the headwaters of that river that you wouldn’t believe. And the Canadians were interested in getting an outlet...to the salt water, that was the big thing. To be able to get out to salt water, at Stewart and Hyder.

So I worked three years on it for the Canadian Dept of Public Works, building trails and working for Tom McQuillan. McQuillan was the head, the push for it. And those of us that were building trails then eyeballed a route up the left-hand side of the middle fork of the Unuk that would have taken us over the summit with only an 1800-foot elevation. And the only glacier-free, absolutely glacier-free route, at that time, anywhere along the coast here...down at Stewart and Hyder...

It just made me sick when [President] Carter made this into a monument. [Misty Fjords National Monument] It was such a waste of all the effort we’d gone to. Just an absolute waste, just to satisfy a few people down in the Sierra Club. And as far as he[Carter] was concerned, all he did was look at a map, probably, and it was just a little section on the map, but if he could fly over it, like I’ve done, fly clear over that section that we call the monument, he would shake his head. You would shake your head in despair to think that that much country had been tied up into something that would never do any good for anybody. And then there were a few people here in town that paraded around about their Misty Fjords. I told some of those people, “If you’d stop and think a little bit, there are pioneers like myself that just call that the back side of the island. That’s no Misty Fjords to us. It’s all just plain country just like everywhere else. If you want to make something special up there, go up into Walker Cove or Rudyerd Bay and make a park out of that, just that area. But to take in all that area, to tie it up, to me was a shameful waste of our natural resource.

Stan: The development of the Unuk River was a whole history all of its own. It encompassed at least five different men, four big companies, Newmont Mining & Smelting, Grandview Mining & Smelting, Climax Uranium of Denver, Selukwe Sebaka, I can name a few of them. Selukwe Sebaka was a big gold mine in East Africa. It was an English company. That was a subsidiary of Newmont Mining Company of New York.

Anyway, that’s what happened and that cut us off completely from our expectations of making the Unuk River an outlet to the sea, which these big companies wanted and worked for. And we were gradually working toward it. The road would have been just about like the road between Prince Rupert and Prince George. It would have gone up the Unuk, instead of the Skeena. And there would have been a ferry across to Claude Point and a road right straight across the middle of the island here, and you could have driven from Ketchikan right up into the interior.

Misty Fjords National Monument outlined in green on this map. The Unuk River is just within the northern boundary of the Monument.

* * * * * * * * *

1.Introduction	2 Early Years in California	3.Coming to Alaska- Yes Bay	4.Becoming a Disciple of Alaska	5.The Unuk River	6. Keeping the Light On	7.Homestead on the Eulachon River	8. Fur Trapping
9.Home for Thanksgiving	10.Placer Mine on the Unuk	11.Building a Road to Canada	12.Freighting on the Unuk	13.Ketchikan	14.Wartime Work-Ketchikan	15. Port Stewart & Ketchikan Pulp Company	16.Epilogue

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