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Here at LSOZI, we take a break every Wednesday to explore the old steam/diesel navies of the 1833-1954 period, profiling a different ship each week. These ships have a life, a tale all their own, which sometimes takes them to the strangest places.- Christopher Eger

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Warship Wednesday 21 January 2026: Interdiction Trendsetter

Above we see a great period shot of the two-gunned U.S. Revenue Cutter Wolcott in the Bay area circa 1884, with a good view of the flag established by her namesake. A fine steamer with the lines of a yacht, she made history some 140 years ago this week when she made the service’s first large drug bust.

How large? Like 3,000 pounds of opium hidden in barrels at a salmon cannery in southern Alaska kind of large. And her crew did that after a 736-mile race through a storm to secure the stash.

All in a day’s work.

Meet Wolcott

Our subject was the second cutter to carry the name of Oliver Wolcott Jr., a Yale-educated Continental Army veteran who replaced Alexander Hamilton as Secretary of the Treasury in 1795 after serving as the department’s auditor and Comptroller for several years.

It was while in the office that Wolcott, with the approval of President Adams, selected a design for the Revenue Marine’s Cutter ensign and pennant that he described in a letter to his collectors in 1799 as “consisting of sixteen perpendicular stripes, alternate red and white, the Union of the Ensign to be the Arms of the U.S. in dark blue on a white field .” The stripes stood for the States that comprised the Nation at that time. The original 13 States were commemorated by an arch of 13 blue stars in a white field. The flag was also flown over U.S. Customs Houses until the 1900s and, in 1916, was modified into the USCG flag with the addition of that service’s distinctive insignia. Oddly enough, the only two surviving pre-Civil War Revenue Cutter flags both have 13 stripes. 

The first cutter named for Wolcott was a light and fast 4-gun Morris-Taney-class topsail schooner of some 73 feet that entered service in 1831. She was one of 11 U.S. Revenue cutters assigned to cooperate with the Army and Navy in the Mexican-American War, but foundered shortly after.

Our subject was built in 1873 for use on the West Coast (which was inherited after the war with Mexico) and was constructed at the Risdon Iron and Locomotive Works in San Francisco.

A 155-foot steamer built of white oak and yellow fir from Oregon and Washington, with bilge keels and iron-wire standing rigging and a sheathed hull, she had a standing (vertical cylinder) surface condensing steam engine with a 34-inch stoke and matching 34-inch diameter.

With a beam of 22 feet and a draft of just over 9, the graceful 235-ton cutter could make an average of nine knots under canvas in fair seas with a good breeze or 9.5 with her engine chugging away.

She was built to replace the smaller Civil War-era cutter Wayanda, which had served in Alaskan waters since 1868. As such, when Wolcott was commissioned in the summer of 1873, it was the crew of the laid-up and soon-to-be decommissioned Wayanda that cross-decked, bringing much of their equipment with them, to bring the new cutter to life.

Intended for the often lawless stomping grounds of the Bering Sea Patrol, where she would typically be the only government vessel in any direction for several days steaming, she carried a stand of small arms and cutlasses as well as two mounted guns, which the Coast Guard Historian describes as “of unknown type and caliber.”

It should be noted that during this period in the Territory’s history, the USRCS served largely the same role as the Army’s horse cavalry during the settlement of the Old West, being typically the only armed federal force in most of the region.

While I can find no source that details the two guns Wolcott carried, they may have been brought over from her first crew’s last cutter. Wayanda, famous for what may be a 1863 photo of Lincoln aboard with Seward, was armed with several bronze 12-pounder 4.6-inch smoothbore Dahlgren boat howitzers on slide carriages.

Ranges for the 12 pdr heavy (at just 5 degrees elevation) were 1,150 yards with shrapnel and 1,085 yards with solid shell, the latter of which was practical for shots across the bow.

As those handy 772-pound muzzleloader percussion-fired guns had a history of being swapped among Navy warships and Revenue cutters as late as the 1890s, it is more than likely that Wolcott shipped out with a couple of those– which may, in turn, have had a connection to the famed President in the stovepipe hat.

Her crew was generally eight officers and 31 enlisted, with an August 1877 list of USRM officers listing the cutter with seven filled billets for a captain, first, second, and third lieutenants; a first and second assistant engineer, as well as an acting second assistant engineer– only missing a chief engineer for the eighth chair in her wardroom.

Walking the beat

Homeported to Port Townsend, Washington Territory, at the northeast tip of the Olympic Peninsula at the gate of Puget Sound and just shy of Vancouver, Wolcott settled into a routine of keeping tabs on the passage of goods and timber from that region in the winter, while sorting north to Alaska in the summer months.

The strategic location was the maritime key to the region, and Wolcott, with her two guns, predated the Army’s Fort Worden coast defense complex, which wouldn’t be built to protect Puget Sound from invasion by sea until the 1890s, as well as the Navy’s Indian Island Magazine.

In August 1881, the cutter was placed at the disposal of a detachment of officers from the 21st Infantry Regiment under one Capt. S.P. Jocelyn to make a reconnaissance for the military telegraph line to be built between Port Townsend and Cape Flattery.

Little is in the CG Historian’s files on Wolcott but a few interesting tidbits are known, such as the fact that her whole crew deserted in 1882 “for unknown reasons although it was probably due to low wages as her commanding officer at the time, Revenue Captain L. N. Stodder, was then ordered ‘to ship crew at port’ with wages not to exceed $40.00 per month.”

Wolcott was, in August 1883, briefly placed at the disposal of General William Tecumseh Sherman, who, accompanied by Colonel Richard Irving Dodge, his former aide-de-camp, was on a 10,000-mile inspection tour of the West. This included a trip around the Sound and across to Victoria.

The same year, at the request of the British Columbia authorities, as no British man-of-war was available in the Pacific, Wolcott was rushed north of the border to Port Simpson with two magistrates aboard, to prevent an “Indian outbreak” near Metlakahtla, which later turned out to be a false alarm.

Opium buster

In the 1880s, the unlicensed smuggling of opium imported from Canada to the Pacific Northwest was a serious matter– and Wolcott wound up in the thick of it.

As detailed by Captain Daniel A. Laliberte, U.S. Coast Guard (Retired) in a 2016 Proceedings piece, by 1887, 13 factories in Victoria were producing more than 90,000 pounds of the drug per year for legal use, but it was being trafficked across the line into Washington without paying the 1883 Tariff Act fees. The Port Townsend collector of customs, Herbert Beecher, worked hand-in-hand with the Wolcott to seize such illegal shipments.

On 26 December 1885, Beecher and 13 officers and men from Wolcott were waiting for the steamer Idaho to make port, acting on a tip from a confidential informant that the ship was packed to the gills with undeclared opium. After much searching, just 30 pounds were found. A bit of a whomp whomp moment that, once addressed, allowed Idaho to soon weigh anchor and continue about her business, headed to Alaska.

Shortly after, an aggrieved and unpaid crewman who had missed the Idaho’s movements came to Beecher and ratted out the whole operation, upset that he was being cut out of his share of the deal. He advised Idaho had stashed 14 barrels of opium in tins at the Kaasan Bay Salmon Fishery, in Alaska, on the freighter’s last trip north, and he could show them exactly where.

Beecher cabled Washington for permission to dispatch Wolcott in pursuit of the drug stash, with all speed, as Idaho may be headed that way.

With permission received and Wolcott steaming north on 10 January 1886 with a bone in her teeth, the little cutter had to fight out gale-force winds that required her to heave to in Metlakatlah Bay for eight hours.

Finally, on the morning of 14 January, Wolcott arrived at Kaasan Bay and anchored, sending Beecher, accompanied by Lieutenant Rhodes and eight men from the cutter, ashore to the cannery. Soon enough, the 14 barrels were located, and 3,012 pounds of tinned Canadian opium were recovered on U.S. territory, without the taxes paid.

Yes, it sounds piddly, but keep in mind the seamanship involved in racing over 700 miles north through the waters of British Columbia and Alaska that were still relatively ill-charted, in the face of a storm in winter, for a ton and a half drug bust.

Wolcott arrived back in Port Townsend on the 18th, with the drugs aboard, a scene no doubt familiar to Coast Guard cutter crews today.

Article clipped from the Daily Alta, California,19 January 1886:

As detailed by Laliberte:

The total of 3,600 pounds of opium confiscated during the case brought in $45,000 when auctioned on 20 April [1886] by the U.S. Marshal’s Service. This was the first seizure of opium by a U.S. revenue cutter and at the time the largest seizure of the drug in U.S. history, both in terms of amount of opium captured and in value of cargo forfeited. As a result of his further investigation, Beecher was able to present sufficient evidence that the U.S. District Court ordered the Idaho forfeited in December.

Wolcott would later go on to seize the steamer SS George E Starr in 1890, after “Two Chinese subjects, together with a quantity of opium, were discovered secreted on board.”

She also made at least one other record-setting bust, as detailed by the National Coast Guard Museum:

Wolcott would make the service’s first at-sea interdiction that included seizure of both opium and the vessel smuggling it, and the arrest of its crew. Prompted by intelligence from customs agents in Victoria, on Jan. 10, 1889, the Wolcott steamed from Port Townsend to nearby Port Discovery Bay. Once there, the cutter hid behind Clallam Spit, just inside the entrance to the bay. That evening, when the British sloop Emerald entered, one of Wolcott’s boats shot out to intercept it. The Emerald’s master and crew immediately began tossing packages overboard, but the Wolcott’s boarding party quickly scrambled aboard and took control. They found nearly 400 pounds of opium on deck.  A subsequent search of the vessel also revealed 12 undocumented Chinese migrants hidden aboard.

Wolcott was also a savior when needed. In 1895, she rescued the survivors of the schooner Elwood, marooned at Killisnoo in Southeast Alaska, and transported Captain E. E. Wyman and his remaining crew to Sitka.

Then, as time does, it marched on and things changed.

Washington became a state in 1889.

Wolcott changed with the times as well, picking up an all-white scheme, with a buff stack and black masts and cap, late in her career.

With the service moving on to newer, larger, and more capable steel-hulled gunboats, Wolcott was disposed of, sold on 19 February 1897 to Joshua Green of Seattle, Washington, for $3,050. Her spot was replaced by the cutter Corwin, and her crew dispersed among the service.

Epilogue

Wolcott would go on to serve briefly in commercial service during the Klondike rush, even being hired by an Army mapping expedition in 1898. 

She cracked open her hull in January 1900 on a submerged reef now named after her on the windswept West coast of Kodiak Island, and was abandoned.

In 1909, the importation and use of opium for other than medicinal purposes was outlawed, thus ending the war on drugs (right?)

A third Wolcott, a Defoe-built 100-foot steel-hulled patrol cutter, entered service in 1926 to fight rum-runners. She gained a bit of notoriety out of Pascagoula during the sinking of the defiant bootlegger schooner I’m Alone in 1929. The cutter, which was sold at auction in 1936, is still around as a houseboat in California. 

As for drug busts, hot pursuit, and the vertical striped Cutter flag, those very much remain in vogue.

Meminisse est ad Vivificandum – To Remember is to Keep Alive

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