Historian tells story of Wrangell's expulsion of Mexican laborers in 1915
- David Reamer
- Jul 30
- 9 min read
Late in the afternoon of Sept. 14, 1915, Oscar Carlson was driving his wagon in Wrangell, headed toward the shingle mill. He was passing the power plant when he encountered a group of Mexican cannery workers. Per the admittedly one-sided account in the Wrangell Sentinel, the possibly intoxicated laborers stopped Carlson and told him to either drink or fight with them.
As they talked, one of the laborers slipped around and stabbed at Carlson. The knife entered his right cheek and slid through flesh to the chin. Some other locals arrived at this moment, and perpetrators fled while Carlson was driven home for medical attention.
In and of itself, the attack was a nasty though fleeting moment of Wrangell lore.
The reaction and fallout were all the more dramatic. Amid a time of severe animosity toward Mexico, the Wrangell residents promised to hang every Mexican inhabitant unless they abandoned town.
The 1915 Mexican expulsion from Wrangell was a brief and terrifying incident, particularly for the Mexican laborers, a dark episode whose existence will surprise even some of the more informed Alaska history lovers.
Oscar Carlson (1870-1964) was a respected man about Wrangell, active in all the social clubs that mattered. And as there weren't that many social clubs in 1915 Wrangell, they all mattered.
As of 1915, he was a fire chief and drayman, the latter now an archaic professional title. Simply put, in older England, a dray was a wagon, and the drayman delivered goods via that wagon. Over time, the term evolved to have a more specific meaning: a man who delivered beer from the brewery to the bars and people. Carlson was an example of the older, more general definition of a drayman.
Coincidentally, Carlson was also an immigrant. Indeed, "Oscar Carlson" wasn't his real name, not exactly, not his baptized name or the one he entered the country with. Erik Oskar Karlsson was born in 1870 Finland and immigrated to the United States in or around 1890, when his name was anglicized by choice or not.
That immigrant status was no secret, but there were certainly contemporary avenues of Alaska society where "Oscar Carlson" was somewhat more welcome than "Erik Oskar Karlsson."
Distrust of immigrants is an evergreen American trait. Anti-Finnish discrimination was also not unheard of in America then, when many Finns were stigmatized as labor radicals. Such specific antipathy perhaps peaked in early 20th-century Minnesota, where "No Indians or Finns Allowed" signs proliferated.
In 1915, Wrangell did not possess a town marshal, police force or any other type of devoted local law enforcement. U.S. Deputy Marshal Harry Wallace, typically stationed in Wrangell, was in Ketchikan for scheduled court appearances.
What the town did have was a little jail and its jailer, Thomas Dalgity. Therefore, Jailer Dalgity found himself investigating the stabbing all by himself. A day passed, and Dalgity unsurprisingly failed to bring the culprit to justice.
Carlson was a popular guy in a town with fewer than a thousand permanent residents. The townsfolk knew him almost intimately, knew details about his wife and children. People cared about Carlson. The Wrangell-ese were less attached to the seasonal workforce imported by the local Alaska Packers Association cannery.
That year, in addition to Chinese and Filipino workers, the cannery employed more than 60 Mexican immigrants for the summer. There were also a few Mexican residents not affiliated with the cannery. Most of the cannery laborers headed south at the end of the season, to the states or other warmer climes, but a handful or so often lingered through the winter.
Twenty-four hours after the attack, there had been no arrest, no justice for Carlson specifically or public safety generally. The residents fumed over the lack of results. At 8:30 p.m. Sept. 15, Mayor John G. Grant called a meeting, seeking solutions to rid the town of "the undesirable element."
From the boisterous crowd, six men were selected to form a vigilance committee. Charles O. Benjamin, Hiram D. Campbell, George H. Edson, Ole Johnson, Frank E. Smith and Arnt Sorseet were thus empowered to end the supposed reign of terror.
Vigilance committees are a relic of the old American West, and an overly romanticized aspect at that. Depending on the time and author, they are also known as frontier justice, lynch mobs, miners courts or vigilante posses.
In other words, vigilance committees were an explicit form of private citizens taking the law into their own hands, typically in violent ways. They're raging mobs with pretensions. And it was a uniquely common American phenomenon. No less an observer of humanity than Mark Twain, in a moment of seriousness, called America "The United States of Lyncherdom."
Documented instances of frontier justice in Alaska are rare. The heyday of American civilian vigilantism occurred decades before the Klondike gold rush and the accompanying influx of settlers into the territory.
Among the most notable incidents, Hans Nelson, Hannah Nelson and Sam Christianson hanged murderer Martin Severts at Lituya Bay (about midway between Gustavus and Yakutat) in 1899. That episode inspired a Jack London short story. In 1907, a vigilance committee hanged suspected gold thief Jack Kenney at a roadhouse on the Yentna River. Kenney survived and successfully sued the five members of the mob who held the rope.
For further context, the 1910s were marked by extreme border strife between Mexico and the United States, prompted by several armed revolutions and exacerbated by preexisting racial antipathies.
One of those Mexican revolutionaries, Pancho Villa, raided across the border several times. In his most significant incursion, his force killed several civilians at Columbus, New Mexico, on March 9, 1916. In response, President Woodrow Wilson dispatched a punitive expedition led by General "Black Jack" Pershing into Mexico.
Amid fears spread that Mexico might properly invade or that Mexican immigrants and their descendants would launch an uprising, anti-Mexican racial violence skyrocketed.
Mexicans themselves were widely stereotyped as lawless, subhuman creatures. Lynchings of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans were common in the American Southwest, especially in Texas. In 1914, a 14-year-old Mexican boy, Antonio Gómez, was seized by a Thorndale, Texas, mob and hanged, his body then dragged through the streets. Even in distant Alaska, newspapers were rife with news on the latest "Mexican Outrages."
Back in 1915 Wrangell, the people - the non-Mexican people - played for blood. The committee spread the word: All Mexican individuals thereabout were ordered to clear out within a day, or else.
Signs were placed about the area: "Any Mexican found in Wrangell or vicinity at the expiration of twenty-four hours will be hanged."
The committee marched into the cannery and ordered the manager to expel his Mexican workforce. The committee stood there, watching as the reported 65 Mexican laborers were taken away by the cannery supply ship. This left 13 Mexicans or Mexican-Americans in town. Within a couple of weeks, four of them had left, and five were in jail.
Per the Wrangell Sentinel, "The committee has waited upon all of the Mexicans, asking them to leave or charges of vagrancy would be filed against them."
Further, the man who stabbed Carlson was discovered and arrested, thus all missions accomplished. "So far as Wrangell is concerned, the Mexican war is over," declared the Sentinel.
The 1915 Mexican expulsion from Wrangell was not without precedent in Alaska. In 1886, an angry, armed mob expelled the roughly 80 to 100 Chinese residents of Juneau and Douglas.
As the Mexican crisis was an inciting context in the 1910s, perceptions of unfettered Chinese immigration fanned hatred in the 1880s. Chinese laborers were targeted in several violent incidents, particularly in the American West.
Earlier in 1886, President Grover Cleveland dispatched troops to restore order in Seattle after mob violence drove more than 300 Chinese residents out of the city. Coincidentally, the Chinese residents of Juneau and Douglas were dispatched to Wrangell, where they subsequently disappeared from history.
The steamship Al-Ki passed through Wrangell and carried word of the Mexican expulsion south. The news spread quickly and widely, in every port along the West Coast and as far east as Kansas and Texas.
In their coverage, many of these newspapers carried versions of a line first offered by the Wrangell Sentinel, that there was "no watchful waiting in Alaska" when it came to Mexicans. President Wilson described his longstanding non-interventionist policy regarding the Mexican revolutions as "Watchful Waiting," a much-repeated and ridiculed line.
When the Chinese residents of Juneau and Douglas were expelled, Alaska Gov. Alfred Swineford publicly condemned the incident in a proclamation that rebuked the "evil disposed and lawless persons at Juneau." Privately, he raged at the officials who allowed or aided the expulsion. Deputy Marshal Jack McKenna, present in Juneau at the time, subsequently resigned.
There was minimal public criticism of the Mexican expulsion from Wrangell, not from those who had access and representation in the media of the day.
Alaska Gov. J.F.A. Strong - an immigrant who lied about his country of origin, background and name - made no public comment. The strongest condemnation in Alaska was a simple note in Juneau's Alaska Daily Empire: "We cannot help but feel thankful that we are not a Mexican living at or in the city of Wrangell."
Another newspaper suggested Wrangell citizens "still have a touch of the primitive."
The Mexican laborers themselves surely possessed strong opinions about the expulsion, but with few allies, no access to publication and the inexorable passage of time, those voices have been lost.
More heated or pointed critiques may have circulated through private channels, which would explain why Sentinel editor Paul Stanhope felt a need to defend the town, despite limited public censure.
In the Sentinel's Oct. 7, 1915, edition, Stanhope described the rumors of threatening signs as "the 'hop dream' of some highly imaginary person who in writing it thought he showed journalistic ability."
He attributed some of the blame to the Al-Ki crew: "Part of the story given out in Seattle by the officers of the steamship Al-Ki, and it (is) up to them to correct the wrong impression given."
However, exactly one week earlier, Stanhope wrote, "The citizens of Wrangell adverted to the good old Western custom of posting a notice. It stated that any Mexican remaining within the town on the expiration of twenty-four hours would be hanged." In fact, several newspapers directly copied the Sentinel's previous account of the expulsion, albeit without credit.
As for the Al-Ki, the crew personally witnessed some of the aftermath from the attack on Carlson. Unlike Stanhope, they remembered events from a few days prior.
A young Mexican national named Joe Costa was arrested for the assault on Carlson. He was sentenced to 16 months in prison, served at the McNeil Island federal penitentiary southwest of Tacoma.
For decades, McNeil Island housed many of Alaska's most notorious criminals, including the first Anchorage murderer, Alex Takoff, and other outlaw lowlifes like Charles "Blue Parka Man" Hendrickson, Jacob "Russian Jack" Marunenko and Robert "Birdman of Alcatraz" Stroud.
The case of Antonio Hernandez is more interesting, indeed more illuminating regarding the nature of the grudge held by Wrangell residents toward Mexicans. He was arrested for harboring Costa, seemingly on weak evidence.
A reminder, the assault on Carlson took place on Sept. 14, 1915. The grand jury adjourned for the season without deciding on an indictment, so Hernandez sat in a Juneau jail through October and November.
In early December, Hernandez's lawyer filed for his release on the grounds that his imprisonment was illegal, that he had never been charged with any offense known to the law. In short, the paperwork had been sloppy, the verbiage less precise than desirable.
But a duly empowered magistrate - U.S. Commissioner William G. Thomas of Wrangell - had signed the order, and the grand jury would hear most of the other concerns.
District Judge Robert G. Jennings did acknowledge the obvious injustice, that "there will be no grand jury to indict him until some time next spring, and to hold him in custody for that long, if in reality there was no cause to bind him over, would be to do a great injustice." However, he declined to order his release.
By then, Hernandez had long since burned through his money and entered into debt from his defense efforts. When he finally reached the grand jury, he was represented by an appointed lawyer.
The Sentinel, meanwhile, offered, "Wrangellites are watching with interest the outcome of the legal battle being waged in Juneau in an effort to get Antonio Hernandez released from the federal jail. ... It is the feeling here that the man certainly is guilty and is not deserving of his freedom."
Hernandez sat in that Juneau jail through December, January, February, March and April, deep into 1916. In late May, he was shipped to Ketchikan for the grand jury hearing and, if needed, trial. Oscar Carlson, Marshal Wallace, Jailer Dalgity and two members of the Wrangell vigilance committee made the trip as well, to witness the proceedings and testify as needed.
On May 22, the grand jury returned with an indictment. On May 26, Hernandez was finally tried but quickly acquitted and freed, the trial over and done with in part of an afternoon, more than eight months after the attack on Carlson.
As for Carlson, he lived into his 90s and became a great-grandparent. He and his wife, Ingaborg, were together for over 60 years, more than 50 of which were spent in Wrangell.
After she died in 1961, the elderly Carlson finally moved, joining family in the Lower 48. He died in 1964 Santa Fe, New Mexico, but was buried back in Wrangell next to his wife.
And as for Wrangell, the intensity died. The modicum of shame reflected in Stanhope's denials within the Sentinel pages possibly reflected a growing community interest in allowing the extended incident to be forgotten. Or perhaps not.
Regardless, by the following summer, a new contingent of Mexican laborers was present in town. More likely, the cannery contracted crews as they always had. The dust settled, and people forgot.
• Anchorage resident David Reamer is an Alaskan historian. He posts daily Alaska history on Twitter @ANC_Historian
