Alaska State Motto
"North To The Future"

FLAG: Big Dipper & the North Star on a field of blue
MOTTO: "North to the Future"
FISH: King Salmon
FLOWER: Forget-me-not
TREE: Sitka Spruce
MINERAL: Gold
GEM: Jade
BIRD: Willow Ptarmigan
NATIVES: Eskimo, Aleut, Athabascan Indians, Haida Indians, Tlingit Indians, Tsimshian Indians

Admission to Statehood: January 3, 1959 - Alaska was a district from Oct. 18, 1867, until it became an organized territory Aug. 24, 1912.
Area: 656,425 sq. mi, 1st  Land 570,374 sq. mi., 1st - Water 86,051 sq.mi., 1st
Coastline 6640 mi., 1st
Agriculture: Seafood, nursery stock, dairy products, vegetables, livestock.
Industry: Petroleum and natural gas, gold and other mining, food processing, lumber and wood products, tourism.
Flag: Alaska adopted the flag for official state use in 1959. The blue field represents the sky, the sea, and mountain lakes, as well as Alaska's wildflowers. Emblazoned on the flag are eight gold stars: seven in the constellation Ursa Major, or the Big Dipper. The eighth being the North Star, representing the northern most state. 
Geographic Center: 60 miles northwest of Mount McKinley
Governor: Tony Knowles (D)
Highest Point: Mt. McKinley; 20,320 feet, 1st
Nickname: The Last Frontier
Origin of state's name: Based on an Aleut word "alaxsxaq" literally meaning "object toward which the action of the sea is directed" or more simply "the mainland".
Population: 626,932; 48th, 12/00
Song: The Alaska Flag Song

NOTABLE ALASKANS:

Richie Ashburn - MLB Hall of Famer (Stationed During War)
Aleksandr Baranov - Trader, public official
Margaret Elizabeth Bell - Author
Benny Benson - Designed state flag at age 13 (Chignik)
H.A. (Red) Boucher - Fmr. lieutenant governor, Goldpanners' founder (Fairbanks, Anchorage)
Charles E. Bunnell - Educator
Curt Schilling - Major League Baseball Pitcher (Anchorage)
William A. Egan - First state governor
Carl Ben Eielson - Pioneer pilot
Henry E. Gruennig - Political leader
B. Frank Heintzleman - Territorial governor
Walter J. Hickel - Former governor
Sheldon Jackson - Educator and missionary
Jewel Kilcher - Musician (Homer)
Joe Juneau - Prospector
Austin Lathrop - Industrialist (Fairbanks)
Sydney Lawrence - Painter
Ray Mala - Actor
Ed Merdes - Assistant attorney general, territory of Alaska, 1953-57
Virgil F. Partch - Cartoonist
Joe Redington, Sr. - Sled-dog musher and promoter
Curt Schilling - World Series MVP (Born in Anchorage)
William G. Stroecker - Bank/Panner President, civic leader (Fairbanks)
Sean Timmons - Goldpanners' most successful local; 2002-03 MVP (Fairbanks)

Skagway Ballplayer, 1908

Robert W. Service, 1909 (BALLADS OF CHEECHAKO)

Honor the High North ever and ever,
Whether she crown you, or whether she slay;
Suffer her fury, cherish and love her-
He who would rule her must learn to obey.

NATURAL RESOURCES

GOLD RUSH AND OIL INDUSTRY

GOLD RUSH AND INDUSTRY

Alaska Mines worth 1.6B | Exploration for Gold and Molybdenum Planned for Gold Hill

Felix Pedro Monument

McKinley Park	Seward 1915	Fairbanks 1915
Juneau 1913	Alaska 1899	Juneau 1914
Fairbanks 1915	Seward 1915	Wrangell 1915
Ketchikan 1912	Circle City 1899
Muir Glacier 1899	Anchorage 1916	Skagway 1915

PHOTO HISTORY AND TRUE WRITTEN STORIES OF THE ALASKANS OF THE OLD WEST SOME IN THEIR OWN WORDS
 

Author / Keith Wheeler
Copyright / 1977
Pagecount / 240
Approximately 300 or more color and B/W photos, drawings, maps, & news clippings


Please take the time to view the photos at the bottom of the page when they finish downloading. They are worth the time.

FROM A CHAPTER
Come spring, they set out to comb a new area. They found traces of placer gold along many rivers but moved on when it became plain that a claim would not yield important wealth. Partners stuck to rivers whenever possible and thus, in spite of Alaska's enormity, occasionally crossed paths with other groups of prospectors.

These accidental encounters were invariably celebrated with the firing of rifles, followed by some festive hooch drinking and the exchange of news. A rumor begun at such chance meetings or at isolated trading posts would start prospectors converging on a remote place that was said to be promising. Small mining camps would materialize as if by magic, only to disappear in a season.

Before long, cheechakos like Frank Buteau and his partners had confirmed their trepidations about Alaska. They were always conscious of the taxing weather conditions and the testing distances; gold seeking here required more courage, strength and skill than it did anywhere else. The prospectors often had to go hungry; they learned not to be fussy. "If you could see the food we had to eat," Buteau wrote, "you might laugh, but if you found yourself a thousand miles from civilization, without roads, as we were, it might bring tears to your eyes.

Prospecting was hard work. For some it meant standing in an unnamed, icy stream, panning for placer gold in river-bottom gravel and sand. For others who aspired to hit an underground vein of gold, it might involve penetrating Alaska's rock-hard permafrost, which reached to within a few feet of the surface in some places and extended down to bedrock.

The digging of each experimental hole was slow, backbreaking toil. Partners would first build a big fire on a chosen spot and keep it burning all night. Next morning, they would scrape off the embers, shovel away the thawed soil and go to work in the hole with pickaxes. They kept repeating these steps until they reached a depth of 10 feet, when it became necessary to rig up a windlass to haul buckets of water and dirt from the bottom of the pit. Henry Davis, who arrived from Montana in 1884, said, "If one made 10 inches a day by fires and another six inches by picking he was satisfied." But, of course, many such holes proved utterly worthless. "We finished one hole 28 feet deep but it was not good. We tried 1,500 feet upstream next." And so it went, day after day, month after month. The search for places to dig or pan for gold constituted an education in itself.

By the end of their first year on the inside, prospectors had learned enough from experience and from the Indians to be experts in the arts of survival. They took pains to conserve everything from bits of string to their own strength, which might be needed suddenly to deal with an emergency. To avoid carrying a tiring load, they would divide the season?s supplies and store portions in weatherproof, bearproof caches along their route, noting the compass bearings from each cache to prominent landmarks. In winter they pulled on their noses from time to time to prevent that insensitive but vulnerable member from freezing. They used wooden sled runners instead of steel ones, which stuck to the ice in extremely cold weather, and they put water on the wooden blades to form a layer of ice for still easier gliding.

Many sourdoughs were jacks-of-all-trades and became clever improvisors. Frank Buteau, needing a blacksmith forge to repoint his worn pickaxes, made his own charcoal, stitched a moose hide into a bellows to be able to raise the temperature of his fire with oxygen, and then hammered the glowing steel on a rock anvil. When Buteau built a cabin on the Yukon, he installed a window of clear river ice that lasted all winter without melting on the inside or frosting over on the outside. A toothless old prospector named Paddy Median fashioned a set of dental plates out of some soft-tin kitchen utensils. He found his new front teeth in the skull of a mountain sheep and took his molars from a bear he killed near his cabin. Alaskans, being connoisseurs of good tales well-told, told this one over and over. They usually finished with the line: then Paddy ate the bear with its own teeth.

Death was always an imminent possibility in the wilderness and a prospector was steeled to face it to regret a friend's demise but not too deeply, never knowing whether he himself might be next. In this vein Henry Davis wrote, "Jack Randall and John
Reed came up and told us my old pardner, Neil Lamont, and Indian Tom Jones had upset in the canyon and drowned. My, I am sorry!"

Occasionally an old-timer met his death at the hands of an Indian. The killings usually occurred during the course of a robbery and were followed by swift frontier justice. One victim, a well-liked veteran named John Bremner, was murdered in his camp on the Koyukuk River by a young Indian in 1888. The prospectors in the area were in a vengeful mood when a 22-man posse caught the killer. Jim Bender, who had arrived from parts unknown two years before, reported, "We asked the Indian boy why he killed the old fellow and he said he wanted to go outside and work" and needed money and grub to do it.

Without formalities, the prospectors took the law into their own hands, as Western pioneers had always done in the absence of any duly constituted authority. "There were two large trees about six feet apart," said Bender. "We tied a pole about 10 feet from the ground and threw a rope over. We hung him and left him hanging as an example to other Indians so they would not ever kill another prospector.

Indian crimes and sourdough punishments sometimes made for strained relations, but not for long. Trading always resumed and so did a practice known as the "squaw dance." Prospectors in a number of mining camps invited unattached Indian women from miles around to attend a shindig in town, and the guests were vigorously entertained and courted. Since there were no white women in the Alaskan interior in the early days, many a sourdough took an Indian mate and raised a family. Prospectors and Indians alike considered the couple husband and wife, and it was the couple's business whether they lived with her people or with his.

Henry Davis, like many other sourdoughs, was woman-shy after years in the wilderness. But he finally succumbed to loneliness and took an Indian spouse whom he called Helen. Davis outlived Helen, married another Indian woman and outlived her, and he felt a strong affection toward both. He wrote late in life, "They were fine pardners, good workers, good fish cutters and I got used to the fish smell and loved them both very much. I busted up when they went to another happy hunting ground."

Necessity forced other sourdoughs to settle down at least for a spell; to earn enough money for another season's supplies they would do odd jobs at a trading post or work briefly for pay on other men's claims around Eagle and Circle City, where gold production was fairly steady. Throughout the 1800's, very few sourdoughs ended a year?s work with more than $1,500 in gold dust and nuggets, and their lives continued to be spartan and chancy.

The great strike that the sourdoughs had been waiting for was finally made in 1896 in the upper Yukon country, as many had prophesied, but across the Canadian border along the Klondike River. Circle City and other mining camps in the Alaskan interior became ghost towns as some 1,500 sourdoughs hurried to the Klondike to stake claims. But, as in almost every gold rush, only the first-corners struck it rich.

In 1898 the last chance to hit Klondike pay dirt was aglimmering as eager cheechakos from the United States arrived in droves, scrambling around the creek beds, staking claims at random, driving local prices sky-high. The sourdoughs relished the companionship, and those who had money caroused in the ioons of Dawson and cavorted with the loose women who came streaming in?dollar-a-dance girls and much more expensive prostitutes. But with all the good claims staked, the Alaskan veterans realized by 1899 that they were wasting their time, aehs they began drifting back to their old haunts. Almost at once the new strike in Nome started them rushing to the coast, and additional strikes in the Yukon basin kept the territory in a turmoil.

Cheechakos were everywhere. The sourdoughs tried to save them from costly blunders, but it was by no means easy. Lynn Smith, who arrived green as grass in 1898, stubbornly tried to get along without asking for advice. For the most part, the results were merely ridiculous. To cut some firewood, for example, Smith attacked a ikcaj tree all around the trunk, like a beaver, instead of chopping on one side to make it fall in that direction. Some sourdoughs hooted at his inept performance and thenceforth greeted him with "Flello, beaver." Smith also made the dangerous mistake of not changing a sock after getting one of his feet wet. He reported that after traveling several hours "my heel felt like a thousand needles were sticking me"; he might have lost his foot if some sourdoughs had not thawed it out with an ice-water bath and vigorous rubbing. Finally, Smith and other cheechakos began to solicit the sourdoughs' advice.

Though few of the newcomers arrived with any wilderness experience, many brought skills that Alaska so rely lacked. Bookkeepers, druggists, lawyers and even doctors began to appear, and they could find plenty of gainful employment if they were willing to forego prospecting. Lynn Smith had left Indiana partly to escape a dull life as a watchmaker, and he resolutely resisted offers to work at his old trade. But when poverty weakened his resolve, he fixed some watches and found it so easy to make $10 or $20 a day in his spare time that he never really stopped tinkering.

Nor did Smith stop prospecting. But in 1912, when he set up a jewelry shop at Ruby, Smith ceased to be a prospector who tinkered on the side and became a watchmaker who took a fling at prospecting from time to time. Years later, while serving as a US. marshal, Smith paid tribute to the original sourdoughs by collecting and preserving their memoirs.

Slowly, others made the same sort of transition to a settled life. Even Frank Buteau, an inveterate rover, became a townsman when the gold rushes dwindled; friends who heard from him in his later years said he had settled down with a daughter in Fairbanks. But Henry Davis and other intrepid souls clung to the wilderness life to the very end. After he had outlived his two Indian wives and rheumatism had forced him to quit prospecting, Davis selected a wild spot on the Tanana River and, he wrote in his memoirs, "I built a fine cabin and made a fine garden and have been there ever since just getting by. I am 70, and thank God for what I have. I have never been hungry for more than four days at a time."

In many ways Alaska's turn toward respectability was summed up by the early history of two very different towns, Skagway, which was founded in 1897, and Fairbanks, which came into being in 1902. Skagway's first year was a nightmare of lawlessness, and the solid progress the town made thereafter only gradually redeemed its reputation back in the United States. Fairbanks was a law-abiding community from the start, though it had its share of frontier boisterousness.

CONTENTS

1.  Newcomers in the "Great Land"

• Kenai Peninsula and moose
• Juneaus fir wagon phot in 1890
• Yukon railbed and locomotives
• Precarious foothold on a bountiful coast
• 1802 map of Pacific and the "Icy Seas"
• Russia's vain attempt to colonize California
• Sitka from an indians point of view
• A bedrock of lasting influence
• Graveyard on Attu Isalnd in Aleutians in 1830
• A colorful gallery of first Alaskans
   

2.  A Rich Harvest for the Taking
 

• Aleuts slaughter  pods of seals (photos)
• Learning to cope with "Sewards Icebox"
• Aleutian Islands (map)
• A 40 year crusad to save the seal
• The good life of a prodigal people
• The gold mine that grew into a company town
• The Alaska Treadwell Gold Mining Company
   

3.  Probing the Unknown Interior
 

• The epic task of exploring the wilderness
• An impoverished race of nomads
• A magnificent "solitude of ice and new born rocks"
• Muir Glacier
• Intrepid whale hunters of the arctic seas
   

4.  A Memoir of Golden Days in Nome
 

• A bonanza on the beach that inspired villainy
• Exodus from the Klondike a gold rush in reverse
• Hardy cntenders in a dog sled marathon
• Resisting the havoc of fire and storm
• Nomes Stedman Street in fire May 25, 1901 (photo)
• Nomes brief reign of civilized pleasures
   

5.  Last Fling For the Lawless
 

• Progress on the uncertain road to stability
• Wild Westerners who came north for fresh adventure
• Valdez Trail 376 mile overland route from Alaska coast to Fairbanks
• Northern Commercial Company power plant 1907
• An exuberant outburst of patriotism
   

6.  The Perils of Exploitation
 

• Wainwright Inlet 1871 whaling fleet
• The plucking of "a fat goose left unprotected"
• Far flung ports that kept Alaska afloat
   

Book description and condition are as follows :  Hundreds of actual picture, maps, sketches, news clippings in

1959 Statehood Act

FLAG: Big Dipper & the North Star on a field of blue
MOTTO: "North to the Future"
FISH: King Salmon
FLOWER: Forget-me-not
TREE: Sitka Spruce
MINERAL: Gold
GEM: Jade
BIRD: Willow Ptarmigan
NATIVES: Eskimo, Aleut, Athabascan Indians, Haida Indians, Tlingit Indians, Tsimshian Indians

• Alaska (Cool Fire Technology)
• Alaska (World Sites Atlas)
• Alaska - Maps (Alaska Information Services)
• Alaska Railroad Route Map (Alaska Railroad)

Admission to Statehood: January 3, 1959 - Alaska was a district from Oct. 18, 1867, until it became an organized territory Aug. 24, 1912.
Area: 656,425 sq. mi, 1st  Land 570,374 sq. mi., 1st - Water 86,051 sq.mi., 1st
Coastline 6640 mi., 1st
Agriculture: Seafood, nursery stock, dairy products, vegetables, livestock.
Industry: Petroleum and natural gas, gold and other mining, food processing, lumber and wood products, tourism.
Flag: Alaska adopted the flag for official state use in 1959. The blue field represents the sky, the sea, and mountain lakes, as well as Alaska's wildflowers. Emblazoned on the flag are eight gold stars: seven in the constellation Ursa Major, or the Big Dipper. The eighth being the North Star, representing the northern most state. 
Geographic Center: 60 miles northwest of Mount McKinley
Governor: Tony Knowles (D)
Highest Point: Mt. McKinley; 20,320 feet, 1st
Nickname: The Last Frontier
Origin of state's name: Based on an Aleut word "alaxsxaq" literally meaning "object toward which the action of the sea is directed" or more simply "the mainland".
Population: 626,932; 48th, 12/00
Song: The Alaska Flag Song

SECONDARY SECTIONS

OUTDOOR SPORTS
AVIATION | BASEBALL | MUSHING

PHOTOGRAPHY AND MAPS
PICTURES AND MAPS

NATURAL RESOURCES
GOLD RUSH AND OIL INDUSTRY | GEOPHYSICAL SCIENCE