Harry Badger arrived in Fairbanks, Alaska before it was Fairbanks, when there was little more there than E.T. Barnette’s recently erected trading post, Barnette’s Cache. Newly appointed Territorial Judge James Wickersham described Barnette’s cache:
A rough log structure, with spread-eagle wings [that] looked like a disreputable pig sty, but was in fact, Barnette’s trading post, the only mercantile establishment in the new camp.
Badger and other miners arrived at Barnette’s Cache in response to reports Barnette sent to Dawson in the Klondike via Jujiro Wada. Wada was a Japanese national, a dog musher and about as hardy as anyone in the country. Wada relayed Barnette’s news that there was a big lode discovered just north of Barnette’s venture. When the “big lode” proved to be considerably less, it was Badger that presided over a meeting of unhappy gold rush miners who wanted to lynch Barnette and Wada. Badger is reported to have said of Wada, “He went to trial all right and he was pretty near scared to death. I don’t think they intended to lynch him. I think they intended to scare him and they did.”
That wasn’t Badger’s last adventure with legal systems. Badger was indicted for three charges involving sexual “assault on the person of a little ten-year-old girl.” He plead guilty to all three charges. He was sentenced on March 11, 1916 to pay fines to the extent of $750 (about $21,000 in today’s dollars) and ordered to serve serve six months in the federal jail. That’s an absurdly light sentence by today’s standards. Which takes WC – finally – to the main point of this blog post.
One of the newspapers in Fairbanks in those days was the Alaska Citizen, which published from 1916 to 1920. A week after Badger was sentenced, editor J. H. Caskey ran a pretty remarkable article, somewhere between a news story and an editorial. in the piece, titled “Crime and Punishment,” Editor J. H. Caskey told about two criminal sentences imposed on March 11.
The first case was that of an Indian boy who pleaded guilty to the crime of statutory rape upon the person of a young girl under the age of consent, for which he was given ten years in the penitentiary. This Indian boy committed the offense upon the person of a native girl.
The tribal laws are much more lax in these matters than the laws of the white race and they do not look at the matter in the light of the crime. They confine their attention wholly to their own race, and do no consider they are committing so heinous a crime as the white man would have it.
The other case was that of a man who has lived in the community for a number of years and has had the respect of the majority of the people of the community. He is a man of more or less education and supposed refinement and knows the laws of the country as well as, or better than, the ordinary man of affairs. He has held responsible positions ever since he came to the country. The man in question is Harry Badger.
The crime for which Mr. Badger pleaded guilty was for more serious than that of the case of the Indian, though the laws of the territory are very lax and the punishment very inadequate. The assault on small girls – the mothers of later years – is repulsive to every man with red blood in his veins, and it is the opinion of the majority of the community that imprisonment for six months in the federal jail or a fine of $500, or both fine and imprisonment, is the least punishment that should be meted out to such an offender.
There were three such charges against Mr. Badger, and had he been given the extreme penalty he would have received eighteen months and $1.500. Instead of the extreme penalty, however, he was sentenced on the first count to pay a fine of $250, on the second count to a fine of $500 and on the third count to imprisonment in the federal jail for a period of six months.
WC will grant you that that there’s a fair bit of white privilege and assumed white superiority in there, but it’s a question that wouldn’t have even occurred to most Alaskans at the time. It certainly didn’t occur to Judge Charles Bunnell, the territorial judge who imposed the two sentences. Bunnell has a building at the University of Alaska Fairbanks campus named for him. And then Caskey cut to the chase.
In the light of things was not the sentence of the Indian boy too much and that of Mr. Badger too little?
And then Editor Caskey goes on to answer his own questions, laying out what we today would call white privilege, all but using the phrase.
In imposing sentence upon Mr. Badger, Judge Bunnell stated that a number of influential citizens had seen him and interceded for Mr. Badger on account of his former good reputation. His attorney, Leroy Tozier, made an impassioned plea for his client, and stated that it was a disease with Mr. Badger which no amount of imprisonment or punishment would remedy, but that it would have to be met by science, and the prosecuting attorney was willing to accept the same theory, stating at the time that Mr. Badger was a personal friend of his, and left the matter of arriving at a suitable sentence entirely in the hands of the judge.
The Indian boy, because he did not have influential friends to intercede for him and no paid attorney to present a plea for leniency to the court, was sentenced to McNeil’s Island for ten long years for doing that which his race does not consider particularly out of the way, while Mr Badger, who is thoroughly familiar with the laws of the land and knows the enormity of his crime, is sentenced to six months in the federal jail and find the sum of $750, which fine was immediately paid.
The people of the community cannot help but marvel at the inequality of the sentences and justly.
That’s a pretty remarkable bit of writing in 1916 Alaska. It’s true that the larger newspaper in Fairbanks, the Fairbanks Daily News, owned by W. F. “Wrong Font” Thompson, called the Fairbanks Citizen the “Garden Island Cesspool.” And it’s impossible to imagine Wrong Font saying anything like this. Even before he bought the Fairbanks Citizen in 1920.
Sadly, the problem Caskey identified in 1916 is still present in Alaska’s criminal justice system today.
But still, WC salutes this criticism of the casual racism of the day. In 2016, partially in response to Badger’s sordid history, Badger Road Elementary School was renamed. A point, however belated, too J.H. Caskey.
(WC acknowledges the work of Dermot Cole and the Fairbanks North Star Borough School District in assembling some of the facts behind Harry Badger.)
Wickersham's Conscience 
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