Elizabeth Pullen Ellett, who died June 5 in Denver at age 95, spent her youth in Juneau, Alaska, a new settlement crouching in the shadow of the feral territory described in Robert Service’s poems.
She was born Sept. 12, 1910, four years after Juneau became the territory capital. Her father, Winfield S. Pullen, ran Alaska Electric Light & Power after traveling to Alaska from Maine, via the Isthmus of Panama, in 1904.
Her mother, Valeria Bachman Martin, was a licensed nurse whose “family thought her very unwise” to take a job at a Juneau physician’s office, as Ellett wrote in a 2004 book published by the Gastineau Channel Historical Society.
Juneau’s population – well under 2,000 when Ellett was born – began swelling when Eastern Europeans immigrated there after the 1917 Russian revolution.
Citizens read the city’s daily newspaper, The Alaska Empire, less for the snippets of wire-service news than for stories about the local halibut and salmon catch, the tide tables and the passenger lists of boats arriving “from down below,” as Juneau residents referred to the rest of the world.
“Meeting the boat was a delight when one was expecting a family member or friend – waving at those aboard, and looking over the tourists and returning travelers to get an idea of the latest fashions,” Ellett wrote in her memoir.
The entire town turned out when President Harding visited Juneau on July 23, 1923.
“The streets were decorated with bunting,” Ellett wrote. “We children gathered wildflowers to distribute in his wake. And then it rained. The buntings faded, Father’s new hat shrunk, and we were all soaked.”
Harding endeared himself to Ellett and everyone else by remarking that the rain felt refreshing after he had been in California’s searing summer heat.
Her friends included the children of the Alaska governor, miners, captains and a man who cut ice from the Mendenhall Glacier. Juneau was so small that local catastrophes – a mining accident, a ship’s sinking – left the whole town in mourning.
The worst involved a stranded captain who turned away local boatmen offering to rescue more than 300 passengers, most of them Yukon Territory workers, on a ship that had run aground. Everyone aboard drowned when a storm struck before the tide could rise and free the ship.
“It was a terrible time for our town,” Ellett wrote. “Coffins were laid out on Juneau streets.”
After Ellett married in 1936, she spent the rest of her life in Denver, where she volunteered for the Red Cross and other charities.
Survivors include son Emerson Ellett of Ocean, N.J.; daughter Mary Stern of Allenspark; eight grandchildren; and seven great-grandchildren. Her husband, Emerson Skinner Ellett, and one daughter preceded her in death.
At her funeral, at 2 p.m. Thursday at St. John’s Cathedral, 1350 Washington St., the family will sing her favorite hymn, “At the Cross,” in the Tlingit dialect Ellett learned from members of the Juneau area’s native tribe.
Staff writer Claire Martin can be reached at 303-820-1477 or cmartin@denverpost.com.
