First off, Yes, I am the Eric Knapp who is involved with the Northwest Federation.  People keep finding jobs for me to do and I keep saying yes.  It is fun, even with the occasional problem.

I can tell you some about the RPOs in Alaska.  Most of the "RPOs" in Alaska were in fact on ships.  The Seattle & Seward RPO is the most common one seen.  This was used on various Alaska Steamship Company ships that came out of Seattle and made their way to Seward in Southcentral.  

The one you have there, the Seward & Unalaska, was the shipping route between Seward and the town of Unalaska in the Aleutian islands.  Unalaska was a coaling station at the time, and it was and still is a major fishing port.  And yes, the SS Starr was on this route.  the Starr was an Alaska Steamship Company ship that served the area.

https://vilda.alaska.edu/digital/collection/cdmg11/id/3740/

Hi Myron,

Very interesting documents. The letters are not using the Russian language, nor any of the languages (such as Ukrainian, etc in western Russia). In fact, it appears to me to be in Aleut or Unangam Tunuu, the language spoken by the Aleut living in the Aleutian, Pribilof, Commander Islands. My research online regarding Aleut orthography noted that the historic Aleut (Cyrillic) alphabet found in both Alaska and Russia has the standard pre-1918 Russian orthography as its basis, although a number of Russian letters were used only in loanwords. In addition, the extended Cyrillic letters г̑ (г with inverted breve), ҟ, ҥ, ў, х̑ (х with inverted breve) were used to represent distinctly Aleut sounds. You can (especially with a magnifying glass) see the diacritic marks above various letters. Russian (Ukrainian, etc) does not use diacritics.

Did you notice the few words written in English, like “Seattle” (in the letter, not address). In any case, I could not decipher any words to determine if Russian words might be included.

You should receive much more information from the Alaskan Native Language Archive. 

I would love to know what is revealed!

Regards,

Leslie

This is one

And this should be 2

And finally three