Richard Blackmer Holbrook

Steamboat master. He first went to Cook Inlet, Alaska, in April 1896, the year of its gold rush. For sixteen years he ran steamers between Seattle and the Hood Canal ports. In 1915 he and Capt. J. W. Mangan bought the stern-wheeler Tyconda; he was president of their company and her master, first on the Stikine River between Wrangell and Telegraph Creek, then in the Cook Inlet trade, until she “burned to the water’s edge” at Anchorage at the turn of September and October 1915 (the papers disagree on whether she was insured). In 1916 and 1917 he was a master on the Alaskan Engineering Commission’s boats, the tug Roscoe and the river boats B. & B. No. 2 and No. 3 on the Susitna, between Talkeetna and Croto, while the Alaska Railroad was being built. He spent the seasons in Alaska and the winters in Seattle, travelling alone on every passenger list, and in 1917 joined the Pioneers of Alaska at Anchorage (newspapers-alaska-holbrook-1915-1918). In the winter of 1917-18 he was skipper of the Tourist between Seattle and Bremerton. His draft card of Sept 1918 has him a steamship master on the “Navy Yard Boats” [?], living at 560 Mercer Street with Jessie, and his mother died at his house there that November (research/collins-reed/Molata-Addendum-Laws-Riddle-Bruner.md, Part Five).

A Canadian entry card stamped at Seattle on 14 March 1918 (or 1919: his age, 46, fits 1919) has him bound for Fort McMurray, Alberta, “to make a home,” with $270: six foot one, blue eyes, grey hair, a crooked finger on his left hand.

He then leaves the Seattle records. The 1920 directory lists only “Jessie Mrs h 560 Mercer,” not as a widow, and the January 1920 census finds Jessie heading her own household, recorded as married, without him. In November 1922 the Seattle Times calls her a widow; the directories first list her as “wid Richd B” in 1925.

By then he had a second family. A family account posted in 1998 says he met Maud in Seattle, where she worked in a coffee shop near the ferry slips, and that they went to a 600-acre wheat farm in the Glenavon area north of Pollock, South Dakota (online-genforum-holbrook-1998). She was Maud Elizabeth Noel, a Seattle optician’s daughter, born in Illinois in 1888, who had married John R. Morilon in 1910 and had two sons by him, Donald (born 1911) and Douglas (born 1916), but by 1918 was living apart from him. Richard became stepfather to the boys; no marriage of Richard and Maud has been found, and neither seems to have been divorced. None of the four is in the U.S. census of 1920 or the Canadian census of 1921, and Douglas later remembered a childhood partly in Canada, so Richard’s journey to Fort McMurray “to make a home” may have been the start of it. By 1923 he was “a prominent farmer of the Pollock neighborhood.” He entered the hospital at Bismarck, North Dakota, about 65 miles to the north, on or about 21 Sept 1923, and died there the next evening of typhoid fever, aged 51. Maud gave the particulars for his death certificate: born “Sept 16” in Washington, his mother a “Phillips” born in Maine, as he had given her name himself in 1900. After a service in the Presbyterian church at Pollock he was buried there, in Spring Valley Cemetery, where Find a Grave’s photograph shows no readable stone (obituary-richard-holbrook-1923, findagrave-richard-holbrook). Within months Maud married a neighbour, Hiram M. Wallace.

This death was first set aside as another man’s (2 Oct 2026). His sister Mollie’s typescript, which gives it twice to the day, and then the death certificate showed it was his (7 Oct 2026; research/decisions.md). The whole case, with the documents, is laid out in the research thread.

His brothers and sisters: Horace Greeley (1863-1939), carpenter and engineer at Coupeville; Josephine (1865-1870); and Mollie Frances (1870-1954), who married Emil Charles Pfeiffer in 1898 and compiled the family typescript.

Open questions

• His second family. Settled who Maud was (9 Oct 2026). Still open: whether they married, and whether he was divorced from Jessie or she only called herself a widow. Followed as a research thread (the trail).
• Fort McMurray and Canada. Was the entry card of 1918 or 1919, and what took a steamboat master to northern Alberta “to make a home”? Did he go, did Maud and the boys follow, and where were they from 1919 to 1922, when none of them is in any census found? Searched on 9 Oct 2026 without result: the Canadian immigration and border entry indexes, crossings back into the U.S., the Alberta Homestead Index, British Columbia marriages and the 1926 Prairie census. Those indexes are incomplete (his own entry card is in none of them), so the question stays open; Ancestry’s U.S.-to-Canada border crossings, 1908-1935, are still to search.
• Why South Dakota? What drew a Puget Sound steamboat master and Maud to a wheat farm at Pollock: her family, kin of his own, land, or work? The 1915 North Dakota census has a Holbrook family in Williams County (Albert, Olive, Richard, Gay and Belmont), about 250 miles from Pollock; no tie to Richard is known, and Maud’s family was in Washington.
• The farm. When did he come to Pollock, and was the 600-acre wheat farm his? Campbell County deeds, and the Campbell County Progress of 28 Sept 1923.
• His grave, in Spring Valley Cemetery, Pollock, unmarked as far as is known.
• Still to search: the 1921 Seattle directory; the license application for Jessie’s 1928 marriage, which may say whether she was widowed or divorced.