When the Steamer Portland arrived at Schwabacher’s dock on the Seattle Waterfront in 1897 and discharged a hoard of gold miners weighed down with bags of gold, Campbell Church, Sr. was one who caught the gold fever and joined the rush to Skagway and the Klondike.

Like the vast majority of his counterparts, he returned empty handed. Unlike the others, however, Church did become a sudden multi-millionaire when he invented a pneumatic pumping system that dried the flooded lead mines near his native Joplin, Missouri and put the local miners back to work. With plenty of money and an enduring love for the northern wilderness, Church commissioned the celebrated naval architect Ted Geary to build him a yacht fashioned after a salmon cannery tender he admired, and the result was the venerable M/V Westward, an 86-foot excursion vessel launched in 1924 at the Martinolich Shipyard on Maury Island, near Seattle.

Church built her so he could travel the Inside Passage from Seattle along the coast of British Columbia to Alaska for fishing, hunting and camping trips, and today, the old yacht is still carrying passengers along the very same route as she nears her 90th birthday.

Alaska Excursion Trade

The vessel marked the transition in Geary’s career, away from workboats and toward the fantail yachts for which would become so famous. The Westward may have been a private yacht, but she was a rugged vessel capable of all-weather cruising on the storm-tossed North Pacific. Soon Church’s son, Campbell, Jr., took an interest in the Westward and in his father’s beloved north country and conceived the business that would occupy his working life: The Alaska Coast Hunting and Cruising Company. For the next 30 years, with a half-decade hiatus during World War II, Church, his wife Nona and his sons, Scott and Sandy, operated charter yachts in the Alaska excursion trade.

The list of vessels owned or consigned by the Church family includes ledgendary names in the history of Pacific yachting, the motor vessels Westward, Nooya, Deerleap, Caroline, Alarwee, Acania, Onawa, Malibu, Cadrew, Electra, Olympus and Taconite.

Their clientele included rather significant names as well, names like A.C. Gilbert, inventor of the Erector Set, film magnate George Eastman, banker Paul Mellon, beer baron George Pabst, investor E.F. Hutton and his wife, Marjorie Merriweather Post, and show business icons Walt Disney, John Wayne, Phil Harris, Fibber McGee & Molly and Amos & Andy.

Priceless Filmic Record

Cruising was different in the old days, and Campbell Church recorded all of it on film. In fact, the Church Family Films collection represents a priceless and irreplacable record of early yachting and cruising along Pacific Northwest Coast from Seattle to Alaska.

Church’s clientele was a who’s who of the rich and famous. They traveled in style. The guests dressed for dinner served by stewards in uniform. The dishware was china. The flatware was silver. The divide between passenger and crewmember was strict.

Once they reached the wilds, however, Church and his clients became avid outdoorsmen. They exchanged their elegant clothing for knee-high boots and Filson coats and headed for the wilderness.

Glacier Swimming

They didn’t go in much for kayaking in those years, but canoeing was the rage. Hiking was a popular pastime. So was glacier-viewing. For the right tip, a teen-aged Scott Church might entertain the clientele by swimming through the frigid water and clambering onto an iceberg.

If styles were different then, however, the main regard in which Alaska excursions of yesteryear differed from the modern variety lay in the preferred forms of recreation.

The real lure of an Alaskan excursion to the consciousness of 1920s America was blood sport.

Thar she blows!

A 1925 promotional brochure extols the myriad fishing and hunting opportunities available to passengers, everything from big game to very big fish.

Another thrilling sport is made possible by the whaling outfit installed aboard the Westward. “thar she blows”, and keen excitement follows, the chase, the intense moments just before the shot, the harpoon hitting true, splashing and boiling water! The tackle includes a Norwegian whale gun shooting harpoons fitted with time fuse bombs, a 10-horse gasoline winch with thirty-six hundred feet of quarter-inch plow steel cable as a fishing line, and all of the accessories for “scrapping it out” with fifty-ton whales, any one of which can furnish a week's excitement between sunrise and sunset.

1924 Atlas Imperial Engine

Today, after having been pressed into military service during World War II and embarking on a five-year round the world tour in the 1960s, the Westward is still powered by her original engine.

It's a 1923 Atlas Imperial. The boat was launched in ’24 but as you can see, they kind of had to build the boat around it, says present day engineer John Williams.

Keeping the Atlas going is a little different than operating a modern diesel. There are 118 spots on the engine that have to be hand oiled every 2 hours, for example, but Williams is comfortable relying on the old engine even in the Alaska bush.

It's been doing it for 80 years, I figure it's got a couple left in it. It's lasted better than I have. It's at idle now, it idles at 125 and winds out at a screaming 285 but it's good enough to push this boat at 8 knots and only burns about 4 gallons per hour doing it so it's real efficient.


Preserve the Collection

Today, efforts have begun to restore the Church Family Films collection and to create new PBS-style documentary programming utilizing the historic media. The film resource is remarkable: dozens of edited films and reel after reel of raw footage recorded by Church, by professional photographers who volunteered their services in exchange for trips to the last frontier, and by the likes of Hollywood producer Hal Roach who cruised aboard the Westward in 1934.

A joint venture spearheaded by Scott Church, who spent his summers from age 9 to well into his adulthood cruising to Alaska aboard the family yachts and spins wonderfully entertaining yarns about the early years, and documentarian John Sabella, is now seeking the funding necessary to preserve the historic media for posterity, and to create a new program that combines Scott Church's recollections about the early years, with his father's film archive.

The pressing need is to clean and repair the old films and transfer the media before it is lost forever. Once that task has been accomplished, additional monies will be required to produce a documentary that transports the viewer back in time to an era when the Pacific Northwest, the Coast of British Columbia and above all Alaska were distant frontiers, and the Church family pioneered the legendary cruising destinations that still astonish contemporary yachtsmen, cruise ship and ferry passengers.

For further information about this important project, or to make a contribution toward the preservation and production efforts, click here: The Westward Documentary Project

Two historic films created by Campbell Church, Jr. are now available on DVD. To order, click the links below:

Bear Facts
Westward

The February, 1933 issue of The Sportsman carried the following stories by Campbell Church, Jr.

Whales
Grizzlies
Wolves