William Polk Gray (1845 - 1929)
William Gray was born in Astoria on the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. His father was William H. Gray, a carpenter and mechanic. William Polk Gray earned his experience as a captain on the Snake and Columbia rivers. When gold was discovered in the Klondike, Captain Gray moved his family to Seattle and he started running boats on the Stikine River. That year, Captain Gray took the sternwheeler Lottie Talbot from Seattle by way of the Inland Passage, by Cook’s Inlet and Kodiak Island, through the Isanooksa Pass instead of Unamak Pass, and up to St. Michael. There they loaded the boat with refrigerated meat for Dawson. Gray changed boats there with Captain Wand of the steamer Ora and took her up the Yukon River to Whitehorse. He was a passenger on another boat to Bennett and then took the railway to Skagway and went out to Seattle by steamship. In the next two years he came into the country driving a horse and sled over the ice from Bennett to Dawson. His wife and son lived in Seattle while he was in the Yukon.1)
In the fall of 1900, Captain William Polk Gray was captain of the Alaska Meat Co. sternwheeler Robert Kerr on the Yukon River. They had 200 tons of cargo on board, the winter supply of meat and vegetables for Dawson. About 350 miles down from Dawson the main shaft of the propelling wheel broke in the middle. Gray’s brother Captain James T. Gray, came along with the officers of the Alaska Exploration Co. (AE Co.) and the crews of three boats that were laid up in Dawson for the winter. William Gray offered the president of the A.E. Co. $50,000 if he would tow the Kerr to Dawson, but the ice was too close, and the crews would have cost the company more than that if they had been stranded in Dawson for the winter. If the Kerr was to freeze in, the cargo would have been brought into Dawson at exorbitant cost, and the sternwheeler may have been wrecked in the spring ice jam. William Gray cut down some trees and, with rods and bolts made from the hog chains, he jury-rigged a shaft repair and made it to Dawson under the Kerr’s own steam. The Alaska Meat Co. presented Gray with a Swiss striking watch for his efforts to save the day.2)
Gray took the last boat out of Dawson and returned in the spring of 1901, driving in on a one-horse sled from Whitehorse. He took the Kerr under her own steam down to St Michael where a new shaft from Seattle was installed. Between 1901 and 1904, Gray was the captain of a Northern Pacific Co. boat on Coeur d’Alene Lake. He retired in 1906 to Pasco, Washington state and was the mayor of the town in 1911.3)