oe Bell and his wife Ida Mae landed on Ship Creek in the summer of 1915, to start life in the booming townsite of Anchorage. Joe was born in Wisconsin in 1877, and very little is known of his early life until he journeyed to the Chilkoot Pass in 1898. He had just turned twenty-one when the gold fever struck him, and he joined the rush to the Klondike. He gained a world of experience, but found no riches in his quest. He left the Klondike country in 1906 and spent a good share of his time hauling freight over the trail between Valdez and Fairbanks.

Ida Mae Corrigan was born in 1889 in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin to a family of loggers who worked in the timber country in various parts of Wisconsin, eventually settling on a homestead in the Mineral Lake area. After several years on the homestead, the lumber mills began to slow down, and the Corrigan family started to look west. When Dee (she was called Dee because of another relative named Ida Mae) was seven years old, the family moved to Buckley, Washington. This did not prove to be a good move, and the family moved from one logging camp to another five times in six years.

When Ida Mae was sixteen, she left school to go to Valdez to live with her aunt and take on the duties of nanny for the aunt’s children. There, she met Joe Bell, and they were married in 1908, when she turned nineteen. In 1915 they sailed for Anchorage, arriving in July. They immediately set out to buy town lots, which were being sold at auction. Ida Mae bought Lot 1, Block 22, located on the southwest corner of 3rd Avenue and A Street, for $115. Joe obtained work right away with the Alaska Railroad on the bridge crew and later with the security division. Each time he returned to Anchorage, he worked on construction of his home, which was completed in 1916.

Joe Bell eventually became the United States deputy marshal in Anchorage, serving under both Marshal Harry Staser and Marshal Frank Hoffman. He was sent to Kenai and Homer during the summer months when the canneries were operating and the fishing was in full swing and was always accompanied by his family.

The Bells had a son and two daughters, Joseph, Bonnie and Jean. Joseph, the oldest, was attending the University of Santa Clara in California when he died from a ruptured appendix in 1923. Tragedy seemed to follow the family after his death. Tuberculosis was prevalent in Alaska during those years, and many people became victims of the ravaging disease. Bonnie contracted it and died at the age of twenty-six, two years after she and Stanley Parsons were married. Jean died only a few months later, almost on her twentieth birthday

When the daughters became ill, Joe and Ida Mae decided to move south for the girls’ sake. They settled in San Fernando, California, where Joe Bell died in 1953. Ida Mae then moved to Oakdale, California where she was cared for by a dedicated cousin, Ms. Pat Graham, until her death in 1971.