To prepare for the crowds -- which roll in at a rate of one ship a week and could increase in coming years to five a week -- a derelict cannery was refurbished as a museum-mall.
"We never could have pulled it off without the cooperation of all the people in the village," said Johan Dybdahl, who grew up in a cabin beside Hoonah's salmon cannery and is now president of the company that runs the destination.
Don and Louise Albin of Michigan, on a cruise to celebrate Don's 80th birthday, have their picture taken in Hoonah, Alaska, a new port of call.
(Blaine Harden -- The Washington Post)
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Old machines once used to lop the heads off salmon have been painted, polished and bedizened with headless salmon and severed salmon heads (made of real-looking, odorless plastic.) There's a theater for Tlingit cultural performances. Nearby, you can use a credit card to attend a salmon bake or buy necklaces made of fishing hook swivels.
To the delight of people in this village -- where unemployment has been running at about 60 percent, the school has been hemorrhaging students and the municipal budget has been mired in red ink -- sales have been phenomenally brisk.
"There are very few places where you actually have a captive audience that wants to buy what you have for sale," Dybdahl said. "But here it is pretty much guaranteed that, when a ship is in port, 800 to 1,000 people will walk into your shop."
The town expects sales tax revenue to triple this year and to rise even more steeply as more ships arrive in coming years, said Jerry Medina, the town administrator. He said Hoonah will use the money to pay long-overdue bills, pave roads, extend water and sewer lines and buy a new firetruck.
The money has made a believer out of Kathy Mills Marvin, 45, a Tlingit craftswoman who lives in the village and whose first reaction when she heard about the coming of the cruise ships was disgust.
"I didn't want anything to do with it," she said. "I had seen all the tourists in Juneau, and I was worried that they would overrun us."
To mitigate this concern, a decision was made to impose a limit on cruise ships: no more than one a day (excluding weekends) during an 18-week season.
Marvin said she and most people in town now "feel pretty protected" from the influx, even as they make more money off it than they had thought possible. She said she cannot make baby bootie moccasins ($75) fast enough to keep up with demand.
In this village that has seen little in recent years but a rise in unemployment, there was widespread cynicism -- even as the cannery was refurbished as a cruise-ship destination -- that tourists would come.
"They didn't believe it until May 23, when the first ship came," Dybdahl said.
Now they believe. To avoid running out of baby bootie moccasins and deerskin gloves, as they have this summer, villagers say they will have to work all winter.
