Franz X. “Frank” Bach (1861 - 1933)

Franz Bach was born in Germany and came to America around 1879 where he began using the name Frank Bach. He married Ellen Gracious Calhoun in 1889, and they had four children.¹⁾

In 1895, Ed Webster and Frank Bach founded the Juneau-Douglas City Telephone Company in Douglas, Alaska. By 1898, Webster had purchased his partner’s interest in the company and moved the business to Juneau.²⁾ Frank Bach arrived in the Klondike as early as 1897 and was associated with Jack Dalton in some way. On 2 March 1898 he applied for 640 acres near Fort Selkirk for an experimental farm.³⁾

William Swinehart and his party arrived at Fort Selkirk about 15 June 1898 and started clearing bush west of the community of Fort Selkirk. They built a barn and a house and dug an irrigation ditch from a nearby creek.⁴⁾ This was the land first settled by Frank Bach. Swinehart started living on the land on 21 June 1898, and on 18 July 1901 applied for eighty acres three kilometres west of Fort Selkirk in lieu of Bach’s application of 2 March 1898. Swinehart paid the balance of the purchase price for the land to the government, and it was surveyed for him. In November 1902 a land title was issued to Frank Bach. Swinehart never did obtain title to the land he farmed for sixteen years.⁵⁾

Frank Bach was the mayor of Douglas, Alaska in 1903-1904. ⁶⁾