The biography of the town’s namesake had made for an entertaining read. George Blewes had been the third lieutenant on HMS Endeavour when Captain Cook sailed into the now eponymous Cook Inlet. In 1896 his descendant, Albert Owen Blewes, of whom report held that he never walked a straight line where a crooked one was available to him, began his career in his native land with multiple petty thefts while he was still at school. Returned forthwith to his appalled parents, he continued with the selling of legal documents proprietary to the London solicitor to whom he was apprenticed, embezzlement of the shipping firm where he was later, albeit briefly, employed, and an illegitimate child. This last had evidently been the proverbial straw, as immediately thereafter his family handed him a one-way ticket to New York and did not wave their tear-stained handkerchiefs from the shore as he sailed from Southampton, off to make his fortune in the New World. Wy wondered what had happened to the child.

In New York City, Blewes spent his first year in America leasing land in Wyoming to which he held no title. Fortuitously for Blewes, right about then gold was discovered in the Yukon and like all good confidence men of that day Albert yielded to its siren song and lit out for the territory of Alaska, by all accounts one step ahead of the bloodhounds. In Dawson City, sticking to what worked for him, he made a fair bit of money leasing gold prospects he did not own. As was his invariable habit, he beat feet out of Dawson one step ahead of the law, arrived in Nome to spend just enough time for Wyatt Earp to issue him a blue ticket south, and rode Alaska Steam down and around the west coast to the Kenai Peninsula, where in 1910 he was put forcibly ashore in Chungasqak Bay for nonpayment of gambling debts. Later he claimed that the voice of his lauded ancestor had called out to him from the very shores.

Always a charmer, as grifters invariably are, he managed to raise enough of a stake to buy most of the land at the head of the spit and much of the spit itself, after which he created a real estate prospectus filled with beautiful pictures and exclamatory phrases like “Thick stands of virgin timber as far as the eye can see!” and “Land so fertile it will support any crop!” He talked himself aboard the next Alaska Steam ship bound for Seattle and took a train back to New York City where, against the better judgment of all the people who remembered him from his last visit, he sold everything he held even partial title to in Blewestown and much that he didn’t. The only thing he left behind was his name on the town, because certainly he never saw it again.

For the next hundred years the prospectors and fox farmers and the cattle ranchers came and went, while the fishermen came and some of them stayed, but Blewestown remained the Bay’s stepchild, no more than a fuel stop for the steamships who put into the one dock, where the tracks of the little railroad which began in the coal seams of the bluffs ended.