Dennis’ Museum
Alaska lost a true entrepreneur when Dennis died in 2021, but fortunately the ivory museum that he created in Skagway outlasts him. His Alaska career started just after college when the Missourian got a job teaching at a native school in Nome. As part of his job he traveled around the state, often getting requests from Nome friends and native families to bring back products that were unavailable in remote Nome. Also as he got to know his native Inupiat students and sometimes visiting their families by bush plane, he got to know many of Alaska’s ivory carvers, who asked Dennis to help them market their art. Plus as it turned out, Dennis would find himself often paid in ivory, furs, etc. for the purchases he brought to the villagers.
By then it was a natural for Dennis to open his ”Ivory Trading Post” in Nome in 1970, when the town had a miniscule 9,000 visitors a year. Embracing the Nome lifestyle he also trained 40 husky Siberian dogs and raced in the 1976 Iditarod dogsled race.
But he really came into his own when he moved to Skagway in 1978, established another Ivory Trading Post and in the process becoming that town's leading entrepreneur, remodeling historic buildings, starting a brewpub, and opening several stores, as well as acting in local plays.
He put the brewpub in the Golden North Hotel, which he also purchased and restored. A year later a jewelry store was in its place. “What happened to the brewpub?” I asked Dennis.
“Oh, the jewelry store pays more in rent than the brewpub ever made, and I don’t need employees.” Such is the rental market at the center of Skagway.
It only seemed natural that Dennis would create his own museum, highlighting Alaska history on carved walrus tusks that he had commissioned, plus other unusual pieces that he had picked up over the years. A few of my favorites on the walrus tusks are: The loss of the Princess Sophia, the first Iditarod and the Diphtheria Epidemic, all exquisitely carved as you can see.
Once I was looking for a Yup’ik style mask and noticed that some of the gorgeous masks in Dennis’s Skagway Ivory Trading Post were priced a lot lower than similar masks in Juneau, so I asked Dennis.
“Oh,” said he, ever the entrepreneur, “I just copy a picture of a mask in the American Museum of Natural History book and send it to a carver in the Philipines. You'd be amazed at their quality."
