Part of a continuing weekly series on Alaska history by local historian David Reamer. Have a question about Anchorage or Alaska history or an idea for a future article? Go to the form at the bottom of this story.
Dear reader, do you happen to be of Hungarian descent? Czech? Romanian? Slovakian? Serbian? Bulgarian? Were your parents or elder ancestors from Greece, Ukraine, Russia, Poland or almost anywhere in Eastern Europe? Then you or your family members might have been called “bohunks” and not allowed to live in early Anchorage. Though you would have been welcome to work for the Alaska Railroad in exchange for low wages in trying conditions.
“Bohunk” is a now largely archaic American pejorative for Eastern European immigrants, particularly men employed for unskilled labor. “Bo” is from Bohemian, meaning the erstwhile country of Bohemia, now a region of the Czech Republic. “Hunk” is from Hungarian, for people from Hungary. The term was most popular in the United States from the late 19th century into the 1920s. It was sometimes shortened to “hunkie” or “hunky.”
“Honky,” referring to white people more generally, likely derived from “bohunk,” and understandably so. While many white Americans discerned material differences between themselves and Eastern Europeans, other populations might not have seen the distinction. To some people, they were all honkies.
As seen from its etymology, “bohunk” originated as a way to describe central Europeans. In practice, many Americans weren’t skilled at spotting the differences between, say, a Ukrainian from an Albanian from a Hungarian. So, anyone from Poland to Greece to Russia could be and were frequently referred to as bohunks. Logic and consistency are, of course, not components of prejudice.
In January 1916, the San Francisco Bulletin conveniently offered a definition roughly contemporaneous with the founding of Anchorage. Per the newspaper, “What is a bohunk? You won’t find him in the dictionary, but you will find him in the language of contractors who employ large quantities of unskilled immigrant labor. A bohunk, as many of them would define him, is a flesh-and-blood machine, which may have a soul but probably has not, and which as for a function in life to work a pick and shovel for the profit of contractors and the greater glory of the United States.”
If that explanation seems tongue-in-cheek, that’s because, for its user, the term was rife with humorous connotations. Bohunks were often perceived as bumbling, if muscular, idiots, almost inhumanely so. In the early decades of American cinema, bohunk stereotypes were relatively common. These bohunk characters could be sweet or good-looking but had to be strong and dumb to meet the requirements. The 1951 film adaptation of “A Streetcar Named Desire” includes a more dramatic example. Therein, Blanche du Bois describes the Polish character Stanley Kowalski: “He acts like an animal, has an animal’s habits! Eats like one, moves like one, talks like one!”
In the heyday of its usage, “bohunk” and its derivatives were very much dehumanizing slurs, prompted by waves of Eastern European immigrants. Historian Herman Feldman, in his pioneering 1931 text, “Racial Factors in American Industry,” recounts an anecdote about fatal industrial accidents at a particular factory. The foreman there replied that the deaths included “five men and twelve hunkies.” After 14 Hungarian workers died in an incident at another factory, the leadership there effectively declared, “Never mind! There are many more Hungarians that will replace you!”
After the editor of the Weekly Alaskan — a newspaper published in Anchorage from 1915 to 1917 — repeatedly disparaged the Alaska Railroad’s immigrant labor force as bohunks, representatives from these laborers visited the newspaper’s office. They threatened the editor, suggesting the tone of his local coverage might need to evolve. Or else. The editor bravely and intelligently talked them out of assault. At least, that’s how the said editor told the story.
As frequent participants in the gold rushes, non-American immigrants comprised a significant portion of the Alaska settler population in those early years of the 20th century. When Canadian Robert Strang visited Juneau in 1914, he left abruptly. He wrote in the Dawson Daily News, “And such a Juneau! There’s a bohunk town. Mighty few of the people there speak English. They speak everything else. They’re not the kind that populate the Yukon hills and vales. Seeing in Juneau a sample of what the cheechaco world must be, and which I have not seen in fourteen years, I turned my back on the whole proposition and hurried for Dawson.”
In this American era, bohunks frequently lived, traveled, and worked together, maintaining their bonds, languages, and cultures. These traits are directly linked with the American prejudice toward them, as there was a belief that such immigrants should abandon their former cultures in favor of blending in. Indeed, the American fear was that these supposed bohunk cultures would, by their fecundity, overwhelm the existing national culture and install their own, an entirely unsubstantiated replacement theory. That same Weekly Alaskan editor demanded that bohunks “Leave your customs behind to fertilize the soil you cannot bring with you.”
As for Anchorage specifically, the 1914 Alaska Railroad Act created the Alaska Engineering Commission, or AEC, which was authorized to construct and oversee a new railroad into the Alaska interior. The AEC selected Ship Creek as their base of operations, thus prompting the creation of a new town, Anchorage. When AEC leadership arrived in the spring of 1915, they found a throng of opportunists already camped along the creek, including a large contingent of Eastern Europeans hoping for work.
Rumors of railroad construction opportunities had spread like wildfire, including far outside the territory. The boom of the various gold rushes had long since faded. Steady work, even as rough as railroad construction, was enticing for many. The AEC, in turn, was not situated to turn down laborers, at least in part due to the known high attrition rate of railroad work.
That said, AEC officials didn’t necessarily want to live next door to some of those workers. Housing preferences tend to reveal prejudices, a historical constant. On July 10, 1915, the first lot auction was held for the original Anchorage townsite. Those Eastern European laborers in the crowds — those bohunks — were among the groups not permitted to participate. Instead, the bohunks were allowed, perhaps even encouraged, to establish their own camp outside town limits. Locals called it the bohunk village. From the scanty descriptions, it might have been located just east of the townsite and south of the park strip.
Rough timber abounded, but processed building materials were in high demand. While some in the bohunk village lived in tents, more of them lived in crude shelters quickly constructed with fresh-felled trees around a dirt floor. The Library of Congress possesses a few pictures of these homes. In one image, five pairs of boots are lined up outside an earthen mound, suggesting cramped conditions.
August Cohn, an engineer and surveyor with the railroad, took those pictures. His notes use the term “bohunks” repeatedly. In one photograph, Cohn captured his own campsite outside town. For the inscription, he noted, “Camp just before moving to new site because of Bohunk encroachments.” In other words, he could not bear living so close to Eastern Europeans, a feeling many other early Anchorage residents shared.
Valdez businessman and territorial legislator Charles Day visited Anchorage in 1915 and wrote, “There is another ‘city’ just outside of the town limits, that is called the ‘Bohunk Village,’ and it is inhabited largely by people who work for the commission, and who, after payday, go to the post office and buy a money order and send their earnings to their homes in Europe or some other country.” He concluded, “Why does the commission employ such men?”
The easy answer is that the AEC pay was so low and working conditions so dire that few others would take the work. From 1915 into 1916, railroad labor paid 37 and a half cents an hour, roughly $12 in 2025. But, a third of that pay went back to the railroad for expenses in the construction camps, which were frequently supplied with rotting meat. For that wage, they worked through mosquitoes and the changeable Alaska weather. As one observer declared, “these men had to do two men’s work each in order to be able to make common wages.” Workplace safety was a legend from another place at another time. Laborer injuries were poorly treated when treated at all.
Moreover, many longer-term Alaskans believed the AEC preferred to hire bohunks. In September 1915, a Cordova Daily Times correspondent wrote, “A Sourdough from Hope recently asked Commissioner (Frederick) Mears why, in giving men employment here, Alaskans were discriminated against and favors were shown aliens — Canadians and ‘bohunks.’ The pertinent part of the answer was in substance: ‘We’re going to show the Sourdoughs that we can build this road without their assistance.’” A later Cordova article decried “’bohunks’ at Anchorage, who are working on the government railroad at a lower rate of wages than will sustain a white man.”
Lena Morrow Lewis was a teacher, journalist, union organizer, and politician in Alaska during this period, the first Alaska woman to run for federal office. In early 1916, she wrote, “Much dissatisfaction prevailed in Anchorage last summer over the fact that Lieut. Mears seemed to discriminate against Alaskans and gave preference to foreigners.” Said Lewis, “It was reported on good authority that one man got a contract on condition that he does not hire any Alaskans, but employs only ‘bohunks.’”
She continued, “If the government had been farsighted enough to give Alaskans the preference on the railroad work, and had paid better wages, many a prospector would have taken the chance to get a few dollars ahead, and then gone back to the hills to prospect some more, as a result of the chances are that many discoveries might be made.”
Some Anchorage businesses were more willing than others to engage with the bohunk community or to at least take their money. As of 1916, the Bank of Alaska and the Bank of Anchorage were locked in a spirited fight for survival. A common belief was that Anchorage could not support both banks. And of the two, the Bank of Anchorage was the one not only willing to accept Eastern European accounts but to court their trade. They placed several advertisements in the local newspaper that were translated into different European languages.
Sourdough attitudes toward the bohunks improved when the latter became prominent leaders in union actions. The Cordova Daily Times, previously a harsh critic of bohunk employment as seen above, said in March 1916, “It is to the credit of these aliens and so-called ‘bohunks’ that the great majority of them are among the most earnest yet conservative advocates of better working conditions and wages here. Those having the greatest representation here are Russians, Austrians and Greeks.”
A union-friendly newspaper in Nome, the Daily Nome Industrial Worker, offered a more backhanded take on this evolution. In an April 1916 article on labor conditions in Anchorage, the paper declared, “Besides there is no reason why the bohunks should be so despised.” As that editor saw it, “The latter are not so foolish as they look. It takes a good intelligent slave to be willing to kill himself for a boss’s smile and to perform an additional ten dollars worth of work for a dime increase in pay. You can’t fool the bohunks this way.”
Labor conditions did slightly improve, though only after much effort was expended on intimidating the workforce. Railroad leadership reportedly organized a rifle club with some conspicuously visible target practice. And the Alaska Labor Union Hall, Anchorage’s largest log building at the time, burned to the ground during the night of Oct. 15-16, 1916, almost certainly arson by local anti-union elements.
Of course, Eastern Europeans were just one of many populations discriminated against in early Anchorage. The Dena’ina residents were initially ignored, then pressed out of the area of the original townsite, including from their fishing camp at the mouth of Ship Creek. They were so effectively excluded from early Anchorage society, from business and politics, that they are almost absent from the historical record of the town proper, a visceral absence.
That same throng along Ship Creek in early 1915 also included several prostitutes, sex workers who were not allowed to live or operate within city limits. So, they also made a little community for themselves south of town. AEC officials eventually bent to popular demand and used railroad equipment to build a road out to their tiny redlight district.
Other minorities were allowed to exist so far as they fit within societal expectations, and so long as there weren’t too many of them. There were Japanese immigrants, like the Kimura family, but they ran a restaurant and a laundromat. There were a few Black residents in those days, but they worked as laborers or, in one notable case, shining shoes. Ed Walker was Black, a literal bootblack, and the first local to die when the Spanish flu hit Anchorage in 1918. Zachariah Loussac, the library namesake, was Jewish and ran a successful pharmacy. However, other stores in town ran advertisements saying their goods never passed through Jewish hands. There was freedom and opportunity in frontier Anchorage, but there were undoubtedly limits.
As for the bohunk village, it’s not clear what happened to it and when. It likely faded away as construction camps moved farther into the interior and Kenai Peninsula. By late 1916, most of the work in the immediate Anchorage area was complete. Meager possessions would have been moved. Any materials suitable for building work would have been reused elsewhere.
World War I enflamed many prejudices against immigrants. During a 1919 trial for assault in Fairbanks, the defendant was asked if his victim had used any obscene language, whether there had been any literal fighting words. The defendant replied, “Yes; he called me a German.” Canada notably placed several thousand immigrants, many of them of Ukrainian descent, into internment camps for the duration of the war.
Prejudices against Eastern Europeans faded slowly as the years passed. By even the 1920s, the word “bohunk” began to disappear from the Alaska vocabulary, mirroring the decline in usage elsewhere. The bohunk village portion of Anchorage history became a relatively forgotten piece of local lore, mentioned in passing, if at all. Yet, it is a revelatory anecdote, not only for what it says about the eternally contentious intersections of immigration and labor but the ever-evolving nature of discrimination.