Launched 1866 | ||
Politkofsky was a small Russian-built Imperial Russian Navy sidewheel gunboat that patrolled the Alaskan Panhandle in the 1860s.
Politkofsky was built of yellow cedar in Russian America at New Archangel (now Sitka, Alaska), in the 1850s and was 120 feet (37 m) in length and of 152 tons displacement. She had early copper boilers and a crosshead steam engine taken from the Imperial Russian Navy ship Imperator Nikolai I. When Tsar Alexander II of Russia sold Russian Alaska to the United States in 1867, Politkofsky was included in the deal. The gunboat was then sold into civilian service as a tugboat.
As the tug Polly, the ship worked along the northwest coast of North America. During the Klondike Gold Rush of the late 1890s, she operated on the Yukon River, where she sank in 1906.