Floyd Hunt

GEDCOM Note

A 1960 Tacoma Sunday Ledger-News Tribune, "Active in Making Steamboat History" by Rowena L. and Gordon D. Alcorn: "There is no one living today who knows more about the maritime history of southern Puget Sound than Capt. Floyd Murton Hunt of Fox Island. He spent nearly 40 years skippering Puget Sound boats, and is the last of those energetic Hunt brothers, Emmett, Arthur, Arda and twins, Floyd and Lloyd. These men owned and operated a number of vessels, starting before the turn of the century... "Floyd Hunt's boating days began in 1896, when he worked one year on Capt. Ole Olson's steamtug, Elf, tending fish traps in lower Puget Sound. Gold rush news from the Klondike, however, proved too enticing for the 22-year-old Floyd, and he went North on the Farralon. Thanksgiving Day, 1897, the boat anchored at Dyea. The 26 eager gold-seekers aboard the ship stared in dismay at the austere snow-covered mountains above the narrow flat, and 16 of them immediately booked return passage withoug even going ashore. Floyd, however, was a determined fellow..." He worked as a cook in a hotel, and then cooked at Stone Camp, near Chilkoot Pass, where an aerial tramway was being built, until an April 1898 avalanche buried the work crew, some 300 feet from the camp where Floyd was cooking lunch.
"A few weeks later, Floyd's Alaskan adventure came to an abrupt end when he contracted typhoid fever, and on June 6, 1898, he returned home to recuperate on the family farm at wollochet Bay..."