The place called Radioville in UNTAMED COAST was real. In the 1920s and ‘30s, a retired U.S. Army Signal Corps sergeant named Joseph T. Bauer (fictionalized in the book as Joe Baxter) ran a small communications outpost on a rocky island off the west coast of Chichagof, maintaining the only radio link between the remote Hirst-Chichagof and Chichagof mining camps and the outside world.
The mines themselves were dramatic enterprises. Gold had been discovered at Klag Bay in 1905 by Ralph Young, Frank Newell, and later at Kimshan Cove by Bernard Hirst and his colorful prospectors Romanoff and Dixon. By the 1920s, the Hirst-Chichagof Mining Company, backed by prominent Chinese American financier Goon Dip, was producing thousands of ounces of gold. Engineers blasted shafts deep into Doolth Mountain, processed ore through a ten-stamp mill, and sent gold bricks out by registered mail. The mines operated until 1943, producing millions of dollars’ worth of bullion before closing during World War II.
Here’s a fascinating video from the Alaska Libraries Archives Museums with the history of the mining operations there:
Bauer’s Radioville stood just offshore as an odd little kingdom: a shack with antennas, livestock, and gardens. He is remembered in oral histories, not as a prospector, but as the radio man — essential, eccentric, and eventually a ghost of Alaska’s mining past.
Walking among the ruins, I felt an uncanny curiosity about the place — once central to an industry and a community, now abandoned to the wind and weather. Why had Joe Bauer built this outpost on this remote island, commuting back and forth to the mines through treacherous waters in a wooden rowboat, rather than setting up at the gold mines themselves? My fascination with that mystery was my inspiration for this book.
The mystery was solved for me – but not before I’d finished the novel. All of the oral history I’d heard indicated that Joe Bauer lived alone at Radioville. It turns out that he and his partner John Soini lived there with their goats, ducks, and chickens. They fished, grew vegetables and flowers, and brewed beer and wine during Prohibition. As one miner recalled, “very seldom any of it got in the bottles, it got drank up before it got into the bottles, you see.”
Living with a male partner in the 1930s and brewing contraband during Prohibition provided ample justification for Joe seeking some privacy on a small, isolated island, rather than operating at a mine camp with hundreds of workers.
No trace of Radioville remains today. The current owners have cleared the radio shack ruins and built a wonderful home on the site that honors the island’s fascinating history. Untamed Coast is not Bauer’s story, and Joe Baxter is not Joseph Bauer. The characters and events in the book are inventions. But Radioville—the idea that in a wild, remote archipelago, one man with a radio could become the axis around which fortunes, secrets, and myths turn—that part is real.