Isaac Hayes Loomis

1860s

Born in July 1866 — the records disagree between Ohio and Des Moines, Iowa.

1870s–1880s

Grew up in Linn County, Iowa, and then Ellsworth County, Kansas, where the family had a farm and his father kept a hardware store. Isaac took part in the local literary and Farmers' Alliance societies. In September 1887 he left the store counter at Geneseo to prospect for gold in Arizona Territory and New Mexico.

1890s

Ranged cattle on the Queets River in Washington and built streets in Olympia; married Augusta Swanson at Shelton on 17 December 1896. From 1897 he ran pack trains on the Skagway–White Pass trail during the Klondike rush, supplied the railway survey parties heading for Whitehorse, and carried mail between Log Cabin and Atlin, B.C. His son Edward was born in Skagway in 1899.

1900s

The marriage ended in divorce in 1904.

1920s

Died on 11 May 1926 at a real-estate office in Vancouver, Washington.

A Restless Frontier Youth

Isaac Hayes “Ike” Loomis was born in July 1866 — the records disagree on whether in Ohio or Des Moines, Iowa — and grew up on his family's farms in Iowa and then Kansas, working behind the counter of his father's hardware store in Geneseo, Kansas, in the mid-1880s. In September 1887 he left for Arizona Territory to prospect for gold, and over the following decade drifted through a series of frontier occupations — keeping free-range cattle on the Queets River in Washington, contracting on street work in Olympia — before the Klondike gold rush pulled him north for good.

Alaska: Pack Trains and the Klondike Rush

Ike married Augusta Swanson at Shelton, Washington, on December 17, 1896, and by 1897 was running a pack train on the Skagway–White Pass trail, supplying the railway survey crews pushing toward Whitehorse. He and a partner won a mail contract between Log Cabin and Atlin, British Columbia, in 1899, and by 1901 Ike had made his way to Valdez, Alaska, to work new mining strikes at Chistochina. From September 1901 he ran the Loomis Roadhouse at the Tonsina River crossing — Augusta and her sister managed it with him, and travelers passing through singled it out as “the best along the line,” praising the cooking, the garden vegetables pushing up through the Alaska soil, and evening concerts by “two splendid vocalists.” Ike expanded into freight and mail hauling across the Alaska interior, founding the Loomis Transportation Company in December 1902 with fifty pack animals and trading posts at Tonsina and Nizina, and for the next several years ran mail, freight, and machinery over hundreds of miles of wilderness trail between Valdez, Fairbanks, and the Yukon boundary — in January 1904 leading a ten-man party hauling ten tons of provisions 395 miles to Fairbanks. That same winter he suffered severe frostbite to his face, hands, and feet, so severe that it was feared he might be crippled for life.

Divorce and Later Ventures

In January 1904 Augusta filed for divorce, testifying that Ike had failed to support her and their son and had been “drunk and dissolute for most of their married life,” gambling away the family's money and using cruel language when drunk; the divorce was granted that April with Augusta receiving custody of their son Ed. Ike stayed in the north for years afterward, continuing to freight goods and stake mining claims around Fairbanks and Iditarod into the 1910s — winning roughly $1,000 betting on the Iditarod dog races in January 1911 — before eventually returning south. He tried ranching in Saskatchewan around 1918, then homesteaded and farmed in the Oregon high desert around Millican from 1922, where he successfully proved out wheat on land his neighbors insisted couldn't grow it, harvesting thirty bushels to the acre from an experimental seven-acre plot.

Death

By early 1926 Ike's finances had collapsed. On the morning of May 11, 1926, he went to a Vancouver, Washington real-estate office where he had been trying to list his ranch, asked to borrow an office to write letters, and there wrote a final note to his brother Nelson: he was despondent, he said, having failed in his business dealings, lost his ambition, and brought disappointment on those he loved; he regretted being unable to repay his brother, and that he had only that morning been able to give his wife any money. He took his own life shortly after. He was fifty-nine.