Otto D. Goetze photographs of Nome, Alaska, approximately 1900-1908

Otto Daniel Goetze was born in Missouri in 1871 to a German immigrant family of twelve children. He moved to Walla Walla, Washington as a young man, then to Oregon and later to Seattle. Goetze went to Alaska around 1898 as the Gold Rush began and established a photography studio in Nome. He often worked as an itinerant photographer and photographed throughout southeast Alaska, the Yukon and Siberia with his base in Nome. He also photographed at the St. Louis World's Fair in 1904. He sold his business in Nome to the Lomen Brothers in 1908 and moved to Seattle where he operated the Alaska Photo Studio from 1909 to 1912. He was among a number of photographers who made photographic postcards at Seattle's 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition. Goetze got married in 1911 and had a daughter, Dorothy, in 1912. In 1914, the family moved to a farm in Cedar Valley. Goetze sold the farm in the 1930s as a consequence of financial difficulties related to the Depression; afterwards Goetze may have moved to Monroe, Washington.