The Eskimo Singles Bulletin Board
Eskimo ladies shopping aboard the Expansion or a similar trading vessel, circa 1930. University of Washington Special Collections.
In the 1950s, the only outside contact for 19 isolated native villages on the Alaska Peninsula and Aleutian Islands was the 114-foot mailboat Expansion, which made regular round trips from Seward, skippered by owner Niels “Cap” Thomsen, one of those entrepreneurs that Alaska seems to attract. About the first thing “Cap” noticed on his stops was how some native villages seemed to have a lot of single young men, and another village, maybe a hundred miles away, single women, but neither group of singles was aware of the others
Captain Niels Thomsen was one of those creative entrepreneurs that Alaska seems full of.
The Expansion off the dock at False Pass, around 1935.
“So I bought a Polaroid camera and took pictures of the unmarried natives. I’d write their names and towns on them: ‘Nona Popalook from Gambrel Bay,’ etc. I put the pictures up on two bulletin boards, one for single women and another for single men. Pretty soon after that the word was out, and any time we’d round a point to come into a harbor where a native village was, the singles would be jumping into their boats and rowing out as fast as they could to meet us even before we got the anchor down! They’d come aboard and head right for the singles bulletin boards. Also back in those days, to be legally married, the natives had to go to Cold Bay, a long way away. So I got a Justice of the Peace license, so I could marry them right aboard the boat!”
— “Cap” Niels Peter Thomsen