Richard \u201cDick\u201d Willoughby was the kind of person to gaze into a raincloud and see the sun.<\/p>\n
One of the most colorful characters in Juneau\u2019s early days, Willoughby liked to tell tall tales and was especially fond of entertaining visitors. His obituary<\/a> in the Yukon Sun from May 18, 1902, described one way he interacted with tourists.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen they complained of the rain in Juneau he would stand in the worst downpours and declare, as he looked up to the clouds, that it was the driest place on earth, and he never knew it to rain there in thirty years,\u201d the obituary read.<\/p>\n Willoughby, the namesake of Willoughby Avenue, didn\u2019t limit his unnatural observations to quick jokes on the street. In the late 1880s, Willoughby pulled off his grandest of pranks: the tale of the \u201cSilent City.\u201d<\/p>\n The mirage<\/span><\/p>\n Willoughby was already a middle-aged man by the time he arrived in Juneau in 1880. Born in the early 1830s in Missouri, Willoughby ended up in Alaska in search of gold.<\/p>\n Thomas Arthur Rickard\u2019s 1909 book \u201cThrough the Yukon and Alaska\u201d<\/a> says Willoughby arrived in Juneau (which was called Harrisburg at the time) just after Tlingit Chief Cowee guided Richard Harris and Joe Juneau to gold in 1880.<\/p>\n The smooth-talking Willoughby quickly earned friends and admirers in town, earning the nickname \u201cUncle Dick.\u201d Rickard described Willoughby as a lovable type with \u201ca long white beard and a resonant voice.\u201d Some eventually referred to Willoughby as \u201cthe Professor.\u201d<\/p>\n An article in the June 1897 issue<\/a> of \u201cPopular Science\u201d details the way Willoughby tricked his way into Alaska\u2019s history. The article, written by David Starr Jordan, states that Willoughby came to friends in Juneau in midsummer 1888 with a story so unbelievable that it had to be true.<\/p>\n He had been to the Muir Glacier at Glacier Bay on the longest day of the year, June 21, and he had seen a mirage. The hazy image of an entire city was floating above the glacier, Willoughby claimed, complete with brick and stone houses, elm trees, a tower with scaffolding around it and even a river in the background.<\/p>\n The bearded trickster referred to this as the \u201cSilent City,\u201d and believed it to be from some far-off place.<\/p>\n Willoughby had seen the mirage of the city before, he said, always in late June, but this time he was fortunate enough to get a photograph. He produced the negative of the photograph, and people rushed to make copies of the picture.<\/p>\n Willoughby refused to reveal much about his photography process, saying that he had to use a very long exposure and that he developed the negative using a \u201csecret process\u201d that somehow involved sunlight.<\/p>\n Even those who were skeptical of Willoughby\u2019s story knew this could be an opportunity to get visitors from down south to visit Southeast.<\/p>\n \u201cAn association of local men was formed at Juneau for the purpose of exploiting the discovery and of selling the prints struck of Willoughby\u2019s wonderful negative,\u201d Rickard wrote.<\/p>\n The small copies of the photograph were sold for 75 cents each, Jordan wrote, and were distributed far and wide. Jordan himself bought one in Sitka in 1896, he wrote.<\/p>\n On the back of the photos, a long passage described Willoughby as an innovative explorer, giving him credit of being the first American to find gold in Alaska\u2019s icy peaks and \u201ctearing from the glacier\u2019s chilly bosom the \u2018mirages\u2019 of cities from distant climes.\u201d<\/p>\n The farce of the Silent City had only just begun, as a bizarre expedition the next summer only furthered the legend of the mirage.<\/p>\n The expedition<\/span><\/p>\n Minor W. Bruce was the Alaska correspondent for the Omaha Bee, or so the paper referred to him in its pages. In a time when many journalists were well versed in exaggeration, Bruce was borderline dishonest in his reporting.<\/p>\n \u201cHe was an enterprising journalist of the irresponsible kind and made an excellent second to Willoughby,\u201d Rickard wrote.<\/p>\n The two were co-conspirators of sorts, and according to Willoughby\u2019s obituary, it was Bruce who gave Willoughby the nickname of \u201cProfessor.\u201d As buzz spread of Willoughby\u2019s Silent City and the summer solstice of 1889 was approaching, the two of them hatched a plan.<\/p>\n They, along with a few others, went on an expedition to Muir Glacier in order to get another photo of the floating city and have other witnesses confirm the site. They set sail for the glacier, going around the south end of Douglas Island, up the Chatham Strait and up to Glacier Bay.<\/p>\n Nobody in Juneau heard of them for a few weeks, Rickard wrote, until people aboard a steamer called the George W. Elder came into port with an update.<\/p>\n A man from Willoughby\u2019s expedition had come aboard in Glacier Bay, they said, telling a harrowing tale of Bruce\u2019s disappearance and possible death. Bruce had walked into the fog that hung above the glacier, the man said, and when members of the expedition went out a while later to find Bruce, all they found was his camera.<\/p>\n Near the camera, the man said, was a large crevasse. They feared the worst, and the man asked the crew of the George W. Elder for ropes to help search for Bruce. They gave him some, and the man headed back out to the treacherous glacier. This is all according to Rickard\u2019s account.<\/p>\n Almost a month later, Willoughby and his companions arrived back in Juneau, with good news. Bruce had been found, or as the New York Times headline read, \u201cCorrespondent Bruce Not Dead.\u201d<\/a> According to the brief Times report, Bruce had been lost on the glacier for three days before Natives found him and returned him to his party.<\/p>\n During the trip, Bruce claimed, he had caught a glimpse of the Silent City. Of course, he had left his camera back by the crevasse, so there was no photographic proof. This apparent brush with death stoked excitement even more about the floating mirage, and sales of the photo spiked.<\/p>\n The source of the farce<\/span><\/p>\n It all began on Vancouver Island in 1887, Rickard wrote, when Willoughby happened upon a young tourist from Bristol, England on the docks there. The tourist was selling a box of photographic negatives for $10, and Willoughby purchased them.<\/p>\n Among the negatives was an over-exposed picture of Bristol, Rickard wrote. From here, Willoughby\u2019s imagination took off. Before he knew it, the hoax had spread all around the country, with newspapers picking it up and publicizing the miraculous mirage.<\/p>\n Most people didn\u2019t notice \u2014 either by ignorance or because they wanted to believe \u2014 that the elm trees present in Willoughby\u2019s photograph were bare, without leaves in the middle of the summer.<\/p>\n \u201cA more transparent fraud could hardly be devised,\u201d Jordan wrote, \u201cbut its very imbecility assures its success.\u201d<\/p>\n Stanford University Professor William H. Hudson, who had lived in Bristol for a time, is credited with figuring out the farce. Hudson saw the picture and immediately recognized it, Jordan wrote in \u201cPopular Science,\u201d and said the photo must have been about 20 years old. The building that had the scaffolding around it, he said, had long been repaired.<\/p>\n