A History of the Welsh Alaskans: A TLIAW

Introduction
A History of the Welsh in Alaska: A TLIAW

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Introduction
The Welsh Alaskans have shaped our state's history over the last 150 years. 2018 marks the 150th year since Love Jones-Parry and Lewis Jones first landed at Porth Madryn, becoming the first Welshmen to set foot in Alaska. Y Wladfa was set up a few years later and the Welsh settlers have been a heavy influence on Alaska from the Klondike Gold Rush to the Revolutionary Period, the World War and the Peaceful Revolution and beyond, all the way to the present day.

We should use the 150th anniversary to celebrate the unique culture and language the settlers brought with them, as well as their crucial role in some of the most important events in Alaskan history. Even today, if I were to take a walk through Porth Madryn, Trelew or Maksutov, then I would be able to hear people talking in Welsh on the street, in the shops or perhaps on the way to chapel, if it was a Sunday.

It is an honour to write the introduction to this booklet by Professor Glyn Williams of St David's University, Porth Madryn. It is a concise guide to the rich history of the Welsh Alaskans, written by a renowned expert on local history and proud Welsh Alaskan. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as me.

12th June 2018
Mike Gravel, Premier of Alaska
 
The Early Years
Chapter One – The Early Years

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Michael D. Jones was a Welsh Nationalist and a Nonconformist Minister from Bala in Gwynedd, Wales. He spent some years in Ohio, where he discovered that Welsh immigrants to America assimilated quicker than those of other ethnicities. Seeking to preserve Welsh language and culture away from the influence of English, he began looking for a ‘little Wales beyond Wales'.

He considered Australia, New Zealand, Palestine and even arid Patagonia before the Russian government made an offer. Tsar Alexander II viewed Alaska as too vulnerable to a British invasion after the Crimean War, and wished to sell it. Lord Palmerston declined in 1859, believing that the British Empire would be too extended and also that Canada had enough barren wilderness, while Seward, the Secretary of State under Lincoln, declined on account of what he saw as Russia's high asking place. Alexander would later be declined by Napoleon III in 1876.

Alaska still had only 700 Russians, and Russia controlled it only in name. Seeking to increase the population, the government offered Jones free land around the Gastineau Strait and Chilkat Inlet in 1867. He sent Captain Love Jones-Parry and Lewis Jones to determine whether the area was suitable for a Welsh colony.

Sailing through the Straits of Magellan, they first went to Nova Archangelsk, the capital, and met with Governor Maksutov. After finalising the deal agreed between Jones and Russia, through their Ambassador, they sailed up the Gastineau Strait and talked to some local Tlingit Indians, who mentioned the abundant Gold near their landing point, which they named Porth Madryn [1], after Jones-Parry's estate.

When they returned to Wales in 1869, they reported the Gold as well as the fertile fishing grounds around Alaska. Jones published a pamphlet in Liverpool, Llawlyfr y Wladfa, to raise awareness.

On May 7th 1871, the tea clipper Mimosa arrived at Porth Madryn with 171 settlers. 118 of the settlers were from the South Wales Coalfield or English cities [2]. The settlers included tailors, cobblers, carpenters, brickmakers, miners, a few farmers and several fishermen.

At Porth Madryn, a village soon developed, sustained primarily on fish, but also some small farming around Porth Madryn and also on Douglas Island, just across the Strait. However, most colonists worked prospering along Nant Aur, or Gold Stream. The prospecting was relatively small scale until news of it travelled to Canada and Seattle. A small scale rush, known as the Porth Madryn Gold Rush occurred. Although it was nowhere near the scale of the Klondike Gold Rush, it did lead to the influx of several thousand Americans and Canadians, and the establishment of numerous large scale mines.

This threw Y Wladfa into crisis. These immigrants dwarfed the Welsh population, and were English speakers, destroying the entire purpose for the colony’s resistance. Lewis Jones began to scout out possible locations for a second settlement, and found a location at the top of the Chilkat Inlet, on the mouth of a river [3]. There was plenty of fish and fresh water, which had begun to grow sparse as Nant Aur became increasingly polluted.

Naming the settlement Trelew, after its discoverer, around three quarters of the Welsh population of Puerto Madryn migrated there in 1874. They created a fishing village, where Welsh language and culture flourished, as Michael D. Jones originally intended. They had friendly relations with the natives, many of whom converted to Methodism and attended chapel in Trelew. Several more boatloads arrived from Wales, increasing Trelew's population to about 700 Welsh and Puerto Madryn's Welsh population to around 250 by 1885. The Russian population in Alaska was even less than the Welsh population, around 900 individuals, in 1885 although Orthodox missionaries had converted many of the local tribes. There were around 7,500 Canadians and 3,400 Americans too, mainly in Porth Madryn but some were elsewhere, so the total non-Native population in 1885 was in the region of 12,750.

In Trelew, a chapel and chapel school were both built, and are still there today, as well as jetties, workshops, storing houses for the fish, a fish market and a town hall. The people there elected the council, which Lewis Jones led, with everyone over 18, both Male and Female, getting the vote. Jones also established a Welsh language newspaper, Y Drafus (the Discussion) which was printed in Porth Madryn.

Porth Madryn was a boom town that never went bust. Due to the huge amounts of gold around the town, which is still being mined today, it never became a ghost town, like numerous places in California and the Klondike. Therefore, the layout was haphazard with wooden shacks all surrounding the harbour and the stream. A small railway was also built to carry gold from the mines to the ships more easily. It was the biggest town in all of Alaska in 1885, but had no local government. It was very much a frontier town, with saloons, vigilantes and even gun fights.

Trelew was at the mouth of Afon Cymraeg (Welsh River), and explorers were sent up the river to explore, often crossing into the Canadian Yukon Territory. On one such journey on 17th August 1887, three men – Welsh Methodist missionary Rev. John James, American prospector, William Hughes, and their Tlingit guide, Oryaan, struck gold. The news travelled to Seattle and San Francisco and by the next summer the Klondike Gold Rush had begun. A new chapter had been opened in the history of the Welsh Alaskans.
...
[1] OTL Juneau
[2] OTL the numbers were 153 settlers with 92 from the Valleys or English cities. ITTL, there is slightly more settlers due to the heightened interest generated by the discovery of gold.
[3] OTL Skagway
 
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The Gold Rush Years
Chapter Two – The Gold Rush Years

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The Klondike Gold Rush is perhaps the most famous gold rush in history, rivalled only by the 1849 California Gold Rush. The gold was located deep inside the Yukon Territory, near the Klondike River, and far from any established rail lines. One of the easiest ways to get from the American West Coast to the Klondike was to sail to Trelew before travelling on land.

Although some in Trelew supported moving again, the community decided to stay put and profit from the gold rush. Trelew boomed in the late 1880s as thousands flooded in, most moving on but many remaining in the town. A railway was build between the boom town of Jamesville [1] and Trelew, known as the Trelew & Klondike Route. It reached Trelew in April 1889.

Trelew's population in January 1889 had swelled to around 37,000, of which 2000 were Welsh (more had left for Y Wladfa after news of gold spread), while the rest were Canadian and American prospectors. The exact split is unclear, but is believed to be around 60-40 in favour of the Canadians, which would leave the totals at roughly 21,000 Canadians and 14,000 Americans.

While most of the Welsh population lived in Trelew and grew wealthy by opening saloons or providing other services, some made the trip to the Klondike. From Trelew, they would have to traverse the Low Pass [2], also known as the ‘dead horse trail' due to the amount of horses who died on it, despite the low altitude of the pass. Once they reached Lake Nicholas [3], they would have to camp until spring before rafting down the Yukon for 500 miles to Hughes [4].

Hughes was founded by Gwilym Thomas, a Welsh missionary-come-explorer-come-prospector-come-entrepreneur. He bought a large tract of land as the rush was just starting, laying out a street plan and bringing in timber to sell to the flood of immigrants. In doing so, he made himself a tidy profit and set up the town that was to be inseparably linked with the Klondike Gold Rush. The population rose to 30,000 in 1888, and the high density of people, wood buildings and oil lamps made the town very prone to fires. Many women, some Welsh, went there to work as dancers and entertainers, but the population remained overwhelmingly male. One thing the inhabitants of Hughes constantly craved was news of the outside world, as the settlement was very isolated. Rhys Llewellyn, an enterprising reporter for Y Drafus made the arduous journey to Hughes with a printing press and set up the Klondike Discussion. He was to become wealthy from the sales of the new newspaper.

As the hordes of prospectors flooded into Trelew, law and order began to break down, similar to what had happened in Porth Madryn fifteen years or so earlier. Among them, on his way to Hughes, was a certain Wyatt Earp. Con men and gangsters who learnt their trade in the Wild West, notably ‘Klondike Kerry’ James and Jesse Bardwell. The two mobsters fought each other for control over the town, until a group of vigilantes, lead by a Welshman named Michael ‘the Wild Welshman' Roberts , killed James in 2nd April 1889 in the Shootout at the Pontypridd Saloon, immortalised in the 1943 Ronald Reagan film The Wild Welshman, at the cost of his own life, while Bardwell was chased out of town.

Order was re-established by these vigilantes, who were reorganised by Lewis Jones, who regained his position as the most powerful man in town, into the Trelew Police, or Heddlu Trelew.

The gold rush came to an end in 1890 and 1891 as Hughes became a more sedate town and the last holdouts from Trelew's brief wild era upped stakes. The end came when Gwilym Thomas, having sold most of Hughes after he got bored and made enough money, discovered gold in Alaska's Interior, south of the Yukon River [5], while Russian sailors discovered yet more gold at Nome. Many of the characters from Trelew and Hughes became bankrupt, such as Rhys Llewellyn, who spent the rest of his life writing for smaller papers in the American West. Thomas managed to make yet more money from gold and property, and died in 1907 as a wealthy man in Trelew.

As the Klondike Gold Rush ended, the populations of Trelew, Jamesville and Hughes dropped dramatically, with most of the prospectors moving on to Nome or Matsukov, named by Thomas after the Russian Governor who let the Welsh settle in Alaska back in 1868. The boom and bust seen in the Klondike was repeated at Nome, but not in Matsukov, where mining continues until today.

The population of Trelew dropped from its gold rush heights, but remained steady at around 5000 (2000 Welsh) throughout the 1890s. Porth Madryn had a population of around 10,000 (500 Welsh) during this period, while Nome rose to 20,000 (150 Welsh) before falling to 2500 (maybe 15-25 Welsh), while Matsukov rose to 6,000 (200 Welsh) before falling to 1,500 (40 Welsh). The only other significant settlement was Nova Archangelsk, the capital, where the population of 1500 was almost entirely Russian, with no Welsh presence.

The Gold Rush Years are agreed to come to an end in 1901. By this time, Nome and Matsukov had died down, while events in Russia were just heating up.
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[1] OTL Whitehorse, here named after John James, the Welsh minister who was part of the group that discovered gold.
[2] OTL White Pass, here named due to its low altitude.
[3] OTL Lake Bennett, here named after Tsar Nicholas II by a Russian explorer in 1884.
[4] OTL Dawson City, here named after William Hughes, who first struck gold in Klondike.
[5] OTL Fairbanks
 
What's Japan up to? Has it gone to war with Russia ITTL?

It will be revealed later on. The next two update focus quite heavily on Russia, as events there affect Alaska.

I'm assuming Germany is different, given Napoleon III is still around in the mid-1870s.

Yep. I don't know enough about German Unification to go into detail, but an alt-Seven Weeks' War sees Austria and France beat Prussia, preventing unification for now.
 
Just want to say that this isn't dead, though I've gone over a week. I was away on the weekend which interrupted progress but I'll try and get a new chapter up soon. As for the questions from @lew_cg and @Belarus-Chan I can't say anything without giving away the next two chapters.
 
Arbenig. Really interesting and thoroughly enjoying this TL so far. I haven’t seen many Welsh alt timelines, so keep the great work.

Diolch
 
The Great Balkan War
Chapter Three – The Great Balkan War
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Russia in the mid 19th Century was a backwards country. When Alexander II came to the throne in 1855, he tried to change that by liberating the serfs, instituting conscription and simplifying the penal code. However, after the disastrous Bulgarian War in 1880, he was shot in the streets of St Petersburg by an angered Nationalist.

His son, Tsar Nicholas II [1] came to power at a crucial time. He managed to calm the rabid crowds baying for Turkish blood, and shifted the blame to Grand Duke Nicholas Nicholaevich, the Commander of the Russian Army, and Nicholas's uncle. The Grand Duke was forced to resign and the mobs were placated for now.

However, the tensions in the Balkans would not go away, and the Great Balkans War erupted in 1898. Austria-Hungary annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina on April 9th, which was still under nominal Ottoman suzerainty. Russia and Serbia protested this, and did not back down despite British, French, Italian and Prussian [2] attempts at diplomacy to solve what is known as the April Crisis. This lead to a war with Russia and Serbia declaring war on May 2nd the Ottomans caught awkwardly in between.

Greece and Romania wished to take Macedonia from the Ottomans and achieve full independence respectively, so declared war on the Ottomans on May 9th and 11th. The Bulgarians also rose in rebellion once more. The Ottomans and Austria were forced to ally against Russia and her allies. The Great Balkan War had begun.

In May 1898 Alaska, although officially Russian, was much more Canadian, American and even Welsh. The only signs of Russian governance were the Governor in Nova Archangelsk and the occasional Orthodox missionary among the Natives. The Russians had no response to the gold rushes, which massively increased Alaska's population. However, when war was declared, the Tsar and the Army under General Kuropatkin, expected Alaska to play its part.

Governor Ferdinand von Wrangel put out a call for volunteers to serve Russia. As barely any Alaskans were Russian citizens, he could not conscript them. As the gold rushes wound down, an impressive number of ex-prospectors answered the call, with 6000 signing up. An Alaskan Division was signed up, which included the Wladfa Battalion [sic].

The soldiers of the division were gathered in Trelew, where the steamship SS Grand Duke Alexander took them to Vladivostok. The 6000 men were packed very tight on the voyage, which lasted almost 9 months. Almost 500 died of disease on the way. They then travelled by train for another month on the Trans-Siberian Express [3]. By this point, the war was going quite badly for Russia, as Austria, after much ineptness on both sides, Austria had decisively beaten Russia at the Battle of Opoczno and were nearing Warsaw. Serbia had successfully defended themselves against Austrian attacks, while Greece had seized Macedonia and most of Thrace from the Ottomans, only to lose disastrously at Adrianople in February 1899, in a harsh battle fought in freezing conditions. Albania had successfully won independence from the Ottomans, at the price of becoming a Greek client state, while the Russians and Romanians got bogged down in Bulgaria due to stretched supply lines and the winter. In April 1899, the war was anyone’s game.

The Alaskan Division spent two weeks training in Moscow, before being assigned to the Second Army, on the Polish Front. They were thrust into the thick of combat quite quickly, as the Battle of Warsaw began with an Austrian offensive in early June 1899. It was the largest battle on European soil since Leipzig, as 400,000 Austrians attacked 500,000 Russians. The result was a massacre.

The Austrian's battle plan called for the encirclement of the city to prevent reinforcement. Their Third and Fourth Armies were assigned to this job, while the First Army was to attack the city itself. The Russian First and Second Army were protecting the flanks, while the Sixth Army defended the city itself. A Ninth Army was partially trained and held in reserve in Bialystok, around 110 miles away. The Alaskan Division had their first taste of battle at the Battle of Okuniew, a subsidiary of the main battle. The Austrian X Corps tried to pass though the forest there, so the Russian 9th Army Corps, which the Alaskan Division was part of were sent to stop them.

The battle waged between June 17th and 19th was an intense introduction to combat for the Alaskans. The forest was difficult terrain to fight in, with co-ordination made more difficult by the lack of vision. June 18th was a day that would go down in both Welsh and Alaskan history. C Company of the Welsh Battalion bore the brunt of a large Austrian attack at midday. Under the command of Lieutenant Colonel William Richards, they held out for as long as possible, delaying the Austrians until they were overwhelmed and perished to the last man. The Austrians did capture a Welsh flag there, which is now in the Military Museum of Austria in Vienna. An Austrian officer said that the Welsh fought more ferociously than the Dragon on their flag. Insoured by this statement, the Welsh Alaskans adopted a new flag – a white dragon (to represent their difference to the Welsh from Wales and the weather if their home) on a red background (to represent the bloodshed of Okuniew). Richards was posthumously given the Order of St. George and many other members of the company were decorated too. C Company’s last stand was immortalised by Okuniew, a song by Lithuanian power metal band Gauntlet. June 18th is Okuniew Day, a public holiday in Alaska.

The Russians managed to stop the Austrian advance at Okuniew, which prevented them from completing the encirclement and led to the battle to devolve into bloody trench warfare, a taste of what was to come later. Eventually, the Austrians were forced to withdraw due to suffering too many losses.

Although the battle was won by Russia, it was a pyrrhic victory. They had lost 200,000 men, compared to the Austrians' 170,000. The catastrophic losses caused by the battle resulted in operations on the Polish Front grinding to a halt as the two sides recovered their losses. 1899 was hardly better for Russia and her allies on other fronts. The Austrians managed to take Belgrade but couldn’t penetrate any further into Serbia, while Bulgaria was still a mess, with various rebel factions fighting each other, the Turks and the Russians/Romanians, while the Greeks and Turks reached a stalemate in Thrace.

The Welsh Battalion suffered 327 casualties, almost half its entire strength, at Okuniew. As the Welsh community in Alaska was only small, it was particularly hard on it. Many there were pacifist, due to their Methodist beliefs and never supported the war in the first place. However, the Welsh Alaskans became one of the first groups to oppose the war in its entirety. As Russia doubled down on conscription in late 1899 and early 1900, they tried to conscript some prospectors which led to the Alaskan Conscription Crisis. They refused to be drafted, and Russia couldn’t spare the troops to send to Alaska, so they dropped the matter. In mainland Russia, the war was getting less and less popular.

The Alaskan Division, which suffered around 2000 casualties at Okuniew, was reinforced by non-Alaskans in the winter of 1899-1900 and sent to Bulgaria, where Kuropatkin was planning a big offensive in the spring. In mid March, around 175,000 Russians, 40,000 Romanians and 25,000 Bulgarian rebels attacked. The plan was a big wheeling movement that would trap most of the Ottoman Army around Varna, which would be destroyed, before pushing on to Constantinople.

However, the attack was doomed to fail. Britain, who had a vested interest in keeping the Ottomans and Austrians around as a counterweight to Russia, intercepted Russian radio traffic, some of which wasn’t even coded [4]. The Ottomans knew about the offensive beforehand and were prepared. The attack met suspiciously little resistance as it advanced, but then the Ottomans struck at Shumen. Cutting the Russian advance right in half, it interrupted the lines of communication and led to the collapse of the Russian offensive. The Greeks, on the other hand, took advantage of the Russian distraction by taking Adrianople and pushing ever closer to Constantinople, which worried the Turkish government immensely, so they promptly fled to Ankara and sent out peace feelers to Greece and Russia via Italy.

By the summer of 1900, it was clear that no one was close to winning the war, and all the nations involved had suffered horrendous losses, with casualties topping one million. In August, all the involved parties were invited to a conference in Naples by Italy and a ceasefire was declared. The negotiations lasted two months but eventually a peace deal was hammered out. The Treaty of Naples stipulated that the Russia-Austria border was to remain the same, Austria would gain Bosnia in exchange for giving Transylvania to Romania, a semi-independent Bulgarian state, tied economically and politically to Russia would be created, with Albania having a similar relationship with Greece. Romania would become fully sovereign, while Macedonia and all of Thrace would be given to Greece. Austria would pay reparations to Serbia.

After over two years of war and a million deaths, the Balkans were at peace. But how long would it last?
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[1] Tsarverich Nicholas Alexandrovich survived his illness here.
[2] Frederick III gave up smoking after a health scare and was also saved from his illness here, ruling as a smarter and more intelligent Kaiser than his son. He is less militaristic and gung-ho, so does not back Austria here.
[3] Russia keeping Alaska means that the route to Vladivostok is completed earlier than OTL, where it was completed in 1916.
[4] IOTL, the Russians sent transmissions that weren’t coded at the beginning of World War I.

It lives! Not much Alaska in this chapter I know, but this and Chapter 4 were originally supposed to be one chapter, but I had to split them because it got too big. Hopefully the wait next time won't be so long.
 
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