page_title: Fort Stikine
section_title: Fort Wrangel
hierarchical_section_title: Fort Stikine / Later period / Fort Wrangel
caption_attribution_description: English: Village of Wrangel Alaska (Tlingit: Ḵaachx̱aana.áakʼw) in 1868 - in present day Front Street.
context_page_description: Fort Stikine was a fur trade post and fortification in what is now the Alaska Panhandle, at the site of the present-day of Wrangell, Alaska, United States. Originally built as the Redoubt San Dionisio or Redoubt Saint Dionysius in 1834, the site was transferred to the British-owned Hudson's Bay Company as part of a lease signed in the region in 1838, and renamed Fort Stikine when turned into a Hudson's Bay Company post in 1839. The post was closed and decommissioned by 1843 but the name remained for the large village of the Stikine people which had grown around it, becoming known as Shakesville in reference to its ruling Chief Shakes by the 1860s. With the Alaska Purchase of 1867, the fortification became occupied by the US Army and was renamed Fort Wrangel, a reference to Baron von Wrangel, who had been Governor of Russian America when the fort was founded. The site today is now part of the city of Wrangell.
context_section_description: With Choquette's departure, and the British flag with him, which had flown over his store at Shakesville, American troops took over the old fortification of Fort Stikine, renaming it Fort Wrangel. It was the second US Army post established in Alaska, the first being Fort Tongass on Tongass Island, immediately north of 54°40', but which was abandoned by 1870 as being of little real strategic or commercial value, as it was Fort Wrangel which controlled the main access inland and was therefore more viable as a customs port for the region, and Britain had shown no signs of military support for the claims that British Columbia had been making for its rights to the leased portion of the Panhandle, which had in any case been overtaken by American fishing, cannery and mining operations in the immediate aftermath of the Purchase.
  The Wrangell Bombardment occurred on 25 December 1869 when a Stikine Indian named Lowan bit off Mrs. Jaboc Muller's third right finger, and was killed in an ensuing fight by soldiers who mortally wounded an additional Stikine Indian. The following morning, Scutd-doo, who was the father of the deceased, entered the fort and shot the post trader's partner Leon Smith fourteen times. Smith died some 13 hours later. The US army made an ultimatum demanding Sccutd-doo's surrender, and following bombardment of the Stikine Indian village, the villagers handed Scutd-doo over to the military in the fort, where he was court-martialed and publicly hanged before the garrison and assembled natives on 29 December, stating before he was hanged that he had acted in revenge against the occupants of the fort for the killing of Lowan and not against Smith in particular.
  Fort Wrangel again became a source of tension between American and British authorities in the region when more gold was discovered near Dease Lake in 1870, leading to the Cassiar Gold Rush of 1871. Once again thousands of miners poured into and through Fort Wrangel, and the US authorities attempted to exert control over British-registered shipping heading for the Stikine. A compromise was reached, and the confrontation derailed and prevented from escalating into warfare over the region. After the Cassiar rush was over, Fort Wrangel remained as one of the main US military installations in the region, and was again to play a strategic as well as a commercial role in relation to the Stikine's use as one of the lesser routes to the Klondike from 1897 and the mounting tensions of the Alaska Boundary Dispute, which was resolved by arbitration in 1903.
caption: Village of Wrangel Alaska (Tlingit: Ḵaachx̱aana.áakʼw) in 1868 - in present-day Front Street.
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