And through every boom, the poles kept watch. Ketchikan holds the world's largest collection of standing totem poles, spread across four destinations — Saxman Totem Park south of town, Totem Bight State Park to the north, Potlatch Park beside it, and the Totem Heritage Center downtown, which since 1976 has preserved unrestored nineteenth-century poles retrieved from Tlingit and Haida village sites. The carving tradition never stopped: master carvers still raise new poles, and the Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian communities remain the living center of the town's art.
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.
