The salmon brought the outsiders. A saltery went up in the area in 1883, and in 1885 Mike Martin — scouting for an Oregon canning company — bought 160 acres at the creek mouth from the Tlingit leader Chief Kyan. Martin and the Nova Scotian George Clark set up a saltery and a general store, the creek's first salmon cannery followed within two years, and the Klondike stampede of 1896-99 washed thousands of prospectors past the new dock. On August 25, 1900, Ketchikan incorporated — and because the towns that beat it to a charter later dissolved or consolidated, it stands today as the earliest extant incorporated city in Alaska.
The creek had a wilder era, too. From 1903 to 1954, Creek Street — the boardwalk on pilings over the water — was the town's red-light district, home to as many as thirty establishments; sportsmen joked it was the only place where both the fish and the fishermen went upstream to spawn. Dolly Arthur, its most famous madam, worked the green house at Number 24 from 1919 on, and her home survives as Dolly's House Museum. The discreet back path over the hill earned its own enduring name: Married Man's Trail.
Why People Visit Ketchikan Alaska
- Creek Street — the boardwalk on pilings, Dolly's House Museum, the salmon ladder, and Married Man's Trail over the hill.
- The totem circuit — Saxman Totem Park, Totem Bight State Park, Potlatch Totem Park, and the Totem Heritage Center's unrestored 19th-century poles.
- Misty Fjords National Monument — granite fjords, waterfalls, and New Eddystone Rock by floatplane or boat up Behm Canal.
- The Tongass — rainforest trails from Rainbird to the Deer Mountain climb; bears at Herring Cove in late summer; eagles everywhere.
- Town life — the Great Alaskan Lumberjack Show, waterfront seafood, Cape Fox Lodge above downtown, and the summer salmon derby.
