Ketchikan

Ketchikan Creek was a summer fish camp for the Tlingit for generations before a town grew up beside it. Its name comes from the Tlingit name for the creek, Kitschk-hin, now written Kichx̱áan, whose meaning is uncertain. In 1885 Mike Martin, sent north by an Oregon canning company to look for prospects, set up a saltery and a general store with George Clark, a Nova Scotian. The town was incorporated in 1900, and because consolidations elsewhere dissolved older city governments it is now the oldest incorporated city still existing in Alaska. Its strategic position at the southern tip of the Inside Passage earned it the name "Alaska's first city".

Canneries made the town in the early 20th century, and civic boosters took to calling it the "Salmon Capital of the World". The houses on stilts along Creek Street became a notorious red-light district, and during Prohibition a row of speakeasies. In the 1930s the Civilian Conservation Corps had Native carvers recarve old totem poles from abandoned villages, the origin of the totem parks at Saxman and Totem Bight.

From 1954 a large pulp mill at Ward Cove, just north of town, dominated the economy. It closed in 1997 after timber harvests in the Tongass National Forest were reduced, ending more than 500 year-round jobs, and a federal investigation had found it had polluted the cove's waters. Cruise tourism grew to fill much of the gap: in 2018 more than a million passengers came ashore from over 500 ship calls.

Ketchikan sits where three Alaska Native cultures meet — Tlingit, Haida and Tsimshian — and the totem pole is the town's emblem. It claims the world's largest collection of standing totem poles, found across downtown and in four main places: Saxman Totem Park, Totem Bight, Potlatch Park and the Totem Heritage Center, where 19th-century poles rescued from abandoned villages are preserved. The Chief Kyan pole in Whale Park downtown appears in the background images of most US passports. Several of the town's galleries specialise in Native-design art, and Saxman is the seat of a federally recognised Tlingit tribe.

Beyond Native art, the town has drawn painters and photographers inspired by its forests and water, and local galleries carry their work. A sizeable Filipino community is part of everyday life, and Tagalog is the most common first language after English. Summer brings a lumberjack show near Ketchikan Creek, staged between May and September.

Life runs on boats and weather. People fish for the table as well as for a living, talk about the rain with resigned pride, and take the quiet of winter after a summer of crowds as part of the bargain. A long-running school exchange links the town with Kanayama, now part of the city of Gero in Japan.

The city had about 8,200 people at the 2020 census, and the Ketchikan Gateway Borough around it about 13,900; many residents of the suburbs along the Tongass Highway live outside the city limits but think of themselves as Ketchikan people. The terrain is steep and forested, so the town is long and narrow, with most homes along the waterfront or within a few blocks of it, and Deer Mountain rising straight behind downtown.

The economy rests on government services, tourism and commercial fishing. The Tongass National Forest is run from the Federal Building downtown, the Alaska Marine Highway ferry system has its headquarters here, the Coast Guard keeps a large base south of the centre, and the town's shipyard won a state contract in 2014 to build two new Alaska Marine Highway day ferries. Employment swells in summer and peaks in July, when several cruise ships can be in port at once and downtown is crowded from morning to evening.

Winter is dark, wet and quiet, and life goes on in the West End, the harbours and along the highway. The town depends on planes and ferries for everything, including the short ferry ride to its own airport across the narrows, and on barges and planes for most of its goods.

Seafood is the local food. Salmon is landed in quantity, but many local fishermen prefer halibut, and rockfish, lingcod and Dungeness crab come from nearby waters too. Although the fishing industry is smaller than it once was, large amounts of salmon are still landed, processed and shipped from Southeast Alaska every year. King crab, by contrast, is not fished near Ketchikan — on local menus it has been frozen and flown in from far to the north and west — so the sweet, smaller Dungeness, known locally as "Dungies", is the fresher choice.

Downtown cafés serve chowder, fish and chips and halibut in many forms, and the halibut sandwich from Burger Queen, a take-out on Water Street, is a local institution. Filipino restaurants, some serving Filipino dishes alongside an American menu, reflect the town's large Filipino community, and there are Mexican and Italian kitchens downtown as well.

Wild Alaskan salmon, famous far beyond the state, remains the town's signature fish.