Ford Arm is an embayment approximately 0.3 miles (483 m) wide and 4 miles (6.5 km) long on the west coast of Chichagof Island, about 44 miles (71 km) north-northwest of Sitka and 28 miles (44 km) south-southeast of Pelican, Alaska. Ford Arm was named in 1897 by Lieutenant Commander Edwin K. Moore of the U.S. Navy, in honor of Yeoman Harry L. Ford. Both served on the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey ship Carlile P. Patterson. The name first appeared in the 1901 Coast Pilot for Southeast Alaska. Chichagof Island is part of the Alexander Archipelago, with a land area of 1.3 million acres (530,587 ha) and a coastline of 742 miles (1,197 km). The main communities are Hoonah, Pelican, Tenakee Springs, and Elfin Cove. In the late 1800s, thousands of prospectors searched the island’s valleys and mountains for gold. Between the discovery of gold in 1905 and 1938, the mining district produced about $16 million worth of gold and silver, primarily from the Chichagof and Hirst Chichagof mines. The western coast of Chichagof Island is part of the Chugach terrane, also known as the Southern Margin composite terrane. This geological feature began accreting along the western edge of North America during the Late Cretaceous period, approximately 100 million years ago. The accretionary wedge is highly fractured by fault shears and intensely metamorphosed by magma intrusions from the Triassic and possibly the Early Cretaceous periods. The rocks on the eastern shore of Ford Arm are primarily volcanic and metavolcanic, including gold-bearing greenstone, greenschist, graywacke, marble, and chert. Glaciation has significantly shaped the landscape of Chichagof Island, though only a few small cirque glaciers remain today. During the Pleistocene epoch, from about 2.5 million to 12,000 years ago, an ice sheet from the north and northeast covered all but the highest elevations of the islands. This glaciation is evident in the present-day landscape, with features such as cirques, horns, and aretes.

The earliest archaeological evidence of human habitation in this area dates back to a people who lived from about 10,000 to 4,500 years ago. They traveled among the islands by boat and focused their food-gathering efforts on intertidal and near-shore resources, with fishing and shellfish harvesting as their subsistence mainstays. Around 4,500 years ago, a new culture or adaptation emerged, utilizing salmon as a principal food source. They employed fish weirs and woven nets or baskets to catch fish in large quantities. By approximately 2,000 years ago, this culture had developed a complex social structure of tribal clans consisting of family houses. These clans and houses controlled territories and rights to game, fish, berries, timber, water, trade routes, house sites, as well as songs, dances, stories, totemic crests, and associated privileges. Clan leaders assigned fishing spots, regulated hunting seasons, adjudicated laws, and oversaw ceremonies. The western coast of Chichagof Island is the traditional territory of the Sheet’ká Kwáan, or Sitka Tlingit, who, like other Pacific Northwest peoples, followed an annual cycle of subsistence activities. In the spring, people remained in their winter villages but ventured out to hunt brown bears and small fur-bearing mammals, and fish for halibut, cod, red snapper, and king salmon in deeper waters. With the onset of summer, clan and house groups moved to seasonal fish camps throughout their traditional territory, staying until about September to catch and cure salmon and gather a variety of berries and other plants. This season was also traditionally for travel, trade, warfare, and slave raids. In the fall, people returned to the winter village. Before returning, some went to the mountains to hunt bears and deer, as these animals were at their fattest. This way of life changed with the arrival of Europeans, the maritime fur trade, and industrial-scale fishing to supply canneries that proliferated immediately following the Alaska Purchase in 1867.

The first cannery in Alaska was built at Klawock in 1878, followed by another in Sitka later that season. By 1889, southeastern Alaska had 13 canneries. Fish traps and purse seines were the primary methods for catching fish for canning. Early seining involved large rowboats, usually supplied by the canneries, with fish transported to the cannery on small steam-powered vessels. These early seine boats were large, flat-bottomed, open vessels propelled by oars, and nets were pulled by hand. Engines were introduced to seine boats soon after the turn of the century, allowing for more efficient fishing. As a result, all seiners were soon equipped with engines. In 1912, T.C. McHugh of Wrangell, affiliated with the Pillar Bay Packing Company, partnered with August Buschmann to build a cannery in Ford Arm. The Deep Sea Salmon Company operated it, using only seines, and packed about 20,000 cases of salmon, each containing 48 one-pound (0.45 kg) cans. The period before and during World War I saw a rapid expansion in the salmon industry, with 36 new canneries built between 1915 and 1918. Buschmann and McHugh incorporated the Deep Sea Salmon Company in 1918 and established another cannery at Port Althorp. In 1921, the company leased the Ford Arm cannery to the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, which operated it until 1924, when the lease was not renewed. The cannery was then sold to the Pyramid Packing Company in Sitka. It was dismantled, and today only remnants of the dock piles remain. Read more here and here. Explore more of Ford Arm and Chichagof Island here: