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What's with Ketchikan? Ketchikan is Alaska's First City — its earliest extant incorporated city, the Salmon Capital of the World, and the first Inside Passage port of call. It clings to the shore of Revillagigedo Island where the Tongass rainforest meets Tongass Narrows — a town built on pilings and boardwalks, stitched together by salmon, cedar, and rain. The Tlingit fished this creek for centuries; the canneries turned it into a boomtown; the totem poles made it a world capital of Northwest Coast art. Every version of Alaska starts here.
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.
Why People Visit Ketchikan Alaska
Because it is the concentrated version of Southeast Alaska: a walkable historic waterfront where the totem poles are real, the salmon run through downtown, the rainforest starts at the last streetlight, and the fjords are a floatplane ride away. First port of call, and for many travelers the one they remember longest.
