Ulysses Sydney Ritchie was born October 1868 in Chester, Pennsylvania into the Quaker family of Ceorge and Eliza Ritchie.
Fred Elvsaas, who was married to “Dad Ritchie’s” stepdaughter, Gladys Simeonoff, remembers:
“His full name was Ulysses Sidney. Uysses Sidney – U. S. S. Ritchie. He had two “s”s in his name so I don’t remember the other name. But his second name is Sidney and my stepson, my wife’s oldest son, his middle name is Sidney. Because of this.
He was very, very correct. He never swore, he never drank, he never smoked. He left Pennsylvania. He had a mule that refused to pull the plow. And his father and mother had given him ten acres of land with the hopes that he’d marry a good Quaker girl and so forth. And – and he also worked their farm. And one day, he had a .22 rifle, which most Quakers didn’t have, and this mule just wouldn’t go. And he tried plowing, and so at noon he went in to eat, and he told the mule, he said, “You know, after lunch you better plow or I’ll have to do something.” And the mule would not plow. So he took a shovel, he dug a hole right there, and he shot the mule and buried it. And his folks had a big fit over that. They lived fairly close to him. And so he said, “Well, I’m going west.” And he told me all this himself.
So he went west and he wound up in Portland, Oregon. And he heard a lot about Alaska and so forth, so he went to Seattle and got on a ship that was going from Seattle clear to Dutch Harbor and on to Nome. With cargo. And he said it cost $25.00 to get on the ship. But you had to work with hauling cargo at every port. Wherever they stopped. So you could get off anywhere. You could get off in Juneau or Nome. It didn’t matter to the ship.
And so he worked. And the ship stopped off at Tyonek, and offloaded, and then they had to go up to Ladd Landing and offload. And he said they were there – there was fish by the thousands going by the ship and the beach and people were just dip-netting them off the beach. There was coal all over the beach. He said it looked like the ideal place.
So he went to shore and talked to Chief Chickalusion, the older Chickalusion. And he said “You can stay here. You got to build your own house.” He had his tools and he built a little log house. And he put a canvas roof over the logs to keep it dry. And he wintered in Tyonek. That was the year before the discovery of gold in Home, about 1897. But anyway. He got the cabin built. He said, by then it’s freezing out. So he decided to put up some fish, but the fish run’s gone. And then he decided he better pack up coal, off the beach, and it’s all froze to the beach. He said, he had one heck of a time. But he made it through the winter by building a few log cabins for some of the people and cutting firewood for them. They had lots of coal in the summertime and so forth, but they never seemed to store ahead.
In the spring, when the ship came, he heard about the gold strike at Hope. And Sunrise. So that ship that stopped at Tyonek that time was going on up into Turnagain Arm. So he got on the ship. And went. And so he worked the goldstrike. But he didn’t mine gold. He always said he mined the miners. He built little seven by seven foot cabins, provided a tarp for a roof, and a Yukon stove with stovepipe, and a bunk with the wire frame on the bunk, for one hundred dollars. Which was an awful lot of money in those days. And he made more money than the miners did. He said that that’s when he saw the real problem with mining is not finding the ore and not keeping the ore. It’s alcohol. Wherever there’s miners, there’s alcohol. And when there’s alcohols, they lose their gold. One way or the other.
He worked in Hope and Sunrise, building cabins for the miners. And he did quite well.
And then he went to Knik. There was a lot of outfitting going on up into the Interior. Knik was the start of the Iditarod trail into the mining district. He teamed up with some other men. There was eight of them altogether, he said. And they went up towards Fairbanks, which was most likely toward the George Parks Highway. In that area. Walking up that way. And they were working for a company that hired them to look for traces of gold in creeks and areas like that to see if they could find – primarily nuggets was what they were looking for. And so that meant that when they found a creek that their foreman thought was a good creek, they’d be wading out in the water. And they would take their clothes off and just work in their long underwear with their shoes because boots were not, you know, wouldn’t work. They were in too deep a water. Very cold, he said.
And as they walked, each man had to pack something. One packed a tent, and one packed a stove and stuff like that. And Dad had to pack a sack of beans, along with some other stuff on his pack. But he said they never stopped long enough to cook the beans.
They walked all the way up to Fairbanks, into that mining areas around Fairbanks, but there was so much competition of people looking for staking claims and so forth, so then they turned and came down what’s now the Richardson Highway. And they went to Valdez, and they were trying to find a lot of gold in the Valdez Creek. They’d heard that there was gold there, but their – they didn’t turn up anything worth staking. So, when they got to Valdez, they got paid off and the – and – the company disbanded. But he still had the sack of beans.
And so he got paid off and he had the sack of beans and he sat and wondered what to do, you know. He didn’t want to stay around Valdez. It seemed to be raining a lot. He said it was wet all the time and the streets were muddy and so forth. And he saw this woman walking along with a kid, and he asked somebody, who is that? And they said, this woman, she’s trying raise enough money to go Outside. Her husband got killed in a mining accident. So he went over and he took the sack of beans to her, and he asked her, “Would you like a sack of beans?” And she said, “Yeah, but I can’t buy nothing. I can’t. He said, no, you can have them. He said, I’ve packed them from Knik to Fairbanks to Valdez. He said, I’m happy to give them to you. So, he said in later years, he would think, he wished he’d remembered her name. You know, because it was such a good thing that – being a good Quaker, he felt he did a good deed.
And so then he got on a ship that went to Seward. And he got to Seward and it was the hub of the railroad and it was a tremendous amount of bars and whorehouses and so forth. And he didn’t think he wanted to be in that atmosphere so a boat was going to Seldovia and Homer, and he got on that boat and he got off in Seldovia.
And that’s how he wound up in the Kachemak Bay country. And then later he started a fox farm on Yukon Island. And he actually got a ninety-nine year lease from the government on Yukon Island. But he said he never did anything with it. He just – you know, in those days, people settled where they wanted to settle. And he said he just wrote to the land office or whatever and they sent him a form. He filled it out and he got a letter back saying that, you know, he had a hundred and sixty acres on Yukon Island. The island’s bigger than that. So he didn’t get the outside where the seal grounds are. Where the Natives hunted the seals. And he was kind of happy about that, because it never bothered them. And other than the area around where the house was down on the spit on Yukon Island, he didn’t go in the back woods. He got beach wood for firewood. He didn’t like to cut down trees needlessly.
And when Dad Ritchie had a fox farm on Yukon Island, he traded with the Natives that lived right in where Anisom Point is, Sunshine Point, Anisom’s old place. There were several barabaras there before Anisom homestead – that Native allotment there. And you know, right in that Eldred Passage, the king crab used to pile up in the spring, you know. The Young crab. And the people would snag them with hooks. And go out in the bidarkas and snag them.
And Dad Ritchie was a pretty good shot. He was a Quaker, from Pennsylvania. And so they liked to take him to the Homer side, where Miller’s Landing now and the airport, and shoot caribou. There was caribou there at the time. And in turn they would give him dried fish. You know, the down side was, when they got there, they wanted to stay there long enough to dry and smoke some of the meat and what-not, and he wanted to go home, cause he had his fox farm. But he always worked something out with them and that’s how he fed his foxes was by – he didn’t feed them caribou meat, he fed them dried fish.
And he lived there and he said, he got to thinking. He had married a woman at the time, and had a son, and he said, you know, I’m out on this island, and the only thing I got is foxes. And he said, if I don’t sell the fur, I don’t make any money. And the market doesn’t look good to him. More and more fox farms were going up in Alaska all over the place. So he sold the fox farm. He sold the whole thing for $3000 to Tollak Ollestadt and he moved into Seldovia then. And decided to build a house for himself, which he did. A log home.
And then, about a year after that, the fox boom bust. And so he got out in time.
And he built his home and Estus was building the Cook Inlet Packing Company. And they had come in and built a dock, and they had some canning equipment on the dock. And they canned some fish. But it was pretty crude. So he made a contract with Mr. Ritchie to build the cannery building. Which was substantial. Was a nice cannery building. And he said, you build it and the mill will cut the lumber. He had a contract with – I don’t know if it was Keller’s mill or the other mills. But one of the mills.
Initially, Mr. Estus wanted the cannery out on the dock where he could dump the fish guts and so forth and have the warehouse next to boardwalk, where he had access to the city dock and so forth. And so the cannery building run out on the dock, right over the dock. But he built the side toward the slough, this side, first and the next year, he built the other half. They moved the machinery into the first half. So the end result was the the machinery was on one half and the warehousing was on the other half. So Dad, Mr. Ritchie, he built that and then he did other contracts for other canneries and building homes and so –
He never worked a day in his life for wages. He was very proud of that. But in turn, he didn’t qualify for Social Security. And so he never got it. He just had his own money.
And then after that, he built himself a nice home, which was covered with shingles. He shingled it. The roof and the walls and everything. It was one of the first shingle homes in Seldovia. And he built the tower on – by this living room. With the pull-down stairs and so forth and up in the tower he had all the windows. All windows around. So he could go up there and sunbathe. And he said he finished the tower and he was so happy, and the next spring they built the BIA school building and the kids could look in his tower. So he never got the use of his tower. And he always laughed about that. He said, I should have went up one more story.”
The family is listed in the 1910 Alaska census records where he is living on Yukon Island, with his wife Annie and sons, GEORGE, Sam, and Jim. Annie was born in Alaska. In 1920, only son George is listed with them. The other children may have succumbed to the influenza in 1918.
In 1921 U.S. applied for a post as US Postmaster in Seldovia, but failed to qualify. U.S. married Mary Toco in 1925. In 1930 U.S. is listed in Seldovia as a widower living with son George, also a widower; he is a carpenter and George is a fisherman. In 1940 both U.S. and George are living together in Seldovia, and both are listed as widowers. U.S.is buried in the Seldovia City Cemetery in plot 14.5.