Denali Historic Resource Study

The toils, character, and relentless energy of the miners inspired many descriptions. Robert Dunn, in 1903, captured the spirit of those embarked on a gold rush:

Prospectors are coming into this valley for the first time. No strike has been made, no, but it's the last valley in Alaska still untouched. They have spent the late summer boating up their year's supplies from the head of the Inlet. Some have dogs, some hope to get them from somewhere before winter. They are the bedrock Alaskan article, the men to be first on the claims if an Eldorado is struck. They start their stampede the winter before, not in the spring, which is the tenderfoot way. Each has just waked from failure—in a rush camp, or looking for daily wages in Valdez. Again they take up the . . . trail to riches through the desolate and uncertain North. . . . Now the Eldorado is at hand, in this Sushitna valley, here is the place. [13]

Three years later Doctor Cook caught the ephemeral nature of the mining camps as prospectors swarmed the creeks and moved on if they didn't pay:

Youngstown, a kind of mythical miners' camp, the supposed head of navigation, was our ultimate destination. But we were a long time locating the town. Indeed the town was unable to locate itself, for it drifted with a shifting population of miners. At about ten o'clock we saw a big dory drifting down the stream. A corpulent miner with all kinds of things was in the boat. To our question, "How far to Youngstown?" he answered: "It used to be twenty miles above, but it just moved. I have the town in the dory and am taking it down the stream." [14]

A camp that stuck, the Kantishna, hosted Belmore Browne and Doctor Parker on the backtrail from their 1912 climb. Browne's relation of encounters with the durables of that community provides a cameo of them and their way of life.

Seeing the first strangers for months, the climbers at first were shy. But the welcome they received broke their sense of strangeness instantly. On Moose Creek they met two miners named Clark and Fink. They were working a lay, a claim owned by another miner who received a percentage of the pay. While the visitors learned how to eat at a table again, their hosts—"the best type of the Alaska pioneer"—told of the yearly round:

During the short mountain summer they worked constantly, sluicing the golden sand. In the winter they whip-sawed lumber, trapped, and hunted meat. Clark was an expert hunter of big game, and for a season he had killed the mountain sheep for the market. . . .

[The next day] we looked at Clark and Fink's ground. By digging a ditch they had brought water to the head of their claims. The water then ran through sluice boxes into which the gravel was thrown. At the lower end of the boxes the riffles caught the gold that had been separated from the gravel by the water, while the gravel, being lighter, continued onward with the water into Moose Creek. It is in this simple way that most of the gold in this part of Alaska is secured.

Miners whipsawing logs, a tough and thankless task. L.M. Prindle Collection, USGS

Later Browne and Parker passed through Joe Dalton's discovery claim on the way to his current diggings farther up Eureka Creek. There, they had been told, Dalton had cached some dog feed for them. From Dalton and others they learned of the Katmai eruption, which explained the distant boomings they had heard on the mountain, and the earthquake whose worst effects they had narrowly escaped. They reflected on these denizens of the far creeks:

Here were men from many different lands, but the hard life in the open, the search for gold, and the separation from civilization had stamped each with a certain undefinable air that gave them a personality of their own.

In nature's stamp mill they had been polished down until they represented a type.

Another Eureka Creek miner, Fred Hauselman, a Swiss, now guided them to Glacier Creek, where they were welcomed "to the palatial home" of Fanny and Joe Quigley. Fanny, originally from a Bohemian settlement in Nebraska, was known in Kantishna's early days as "Mother McKenzie." She was still the only woman in camp, providing that touch of home that the miners missed so much. Joining the Ninety-Eight rush to the Klondike, she had since migrated from camp to camp—cooking, and prospecting and mining in her own right. At Kantishna she met and in 1906 married Joe Quigley—first staker of Glacier Creek—a pre-gold rush prospector who had crossed the Chilkoot Pass in 1891. Their home was spacious and clean, well lighted and cheerful. Books and magazines bespoke lively intellectual interests. A flourishing garden, with flowers and vegetables, fed soul and stomach. Their permafrost cellar kept meat frozen, and their cooler kept vegetables fresh.

Quigley Hill from across Friday Creek, near Kantishna, shows Quigley's mine on Red Top Claim, early 1930s. Fanny Quigley Collection, UAF

Though small of stature, Fanny was strong and rugged:

She lived the wild life as the men did, and was as much at home in the open with a rifle as a city woman is on a city avenue, and she could not only follow and hunt successfully the wild game of the region, but could do a man's share in packing the meat to camp. From a physical standpoint she was a living example of what nature had intended a woman to be, and, furthermore, while having the ability to do a man's work, she also enjoyed the life as a man does. No man could catch more grayling in a day than she, the miners said, and at the day's end she would shoulder her heavy catch and tramp homeward as happy as a boy.

Moose hunt, November 1919. Fanny Quigley is a extreme left; Joe Quigley is second from right. Fanny Quigley Collection, UAF

Browne compared the meals she cooked to Roman feasts: meats, breads, vegetables, jellies, pies, and a wild rhubarb sauce that beat any tame rhubarb Browne had eaten. All was washed down with ice-cold potato beer, of which Fanny was master brewer. After dinner, their hosts—and Sourdough climber Charley McGonagall, who had also joined them—told of mountains, hunting, the habits of animals, and the many adventures of wilderness life.

All too soon this visit ended and the surfeited mountaineers proceeded to Glacier City, some 12 miles away. Just before they began the trek, Pete Anderson, another of the Sourdoughs, passed by Quigley's and invited them to drop in at his cabin when they reached the old supply town.

The hike was long and it rained. They came upon the remains of a decrepit bridge over a slough, "a wonderful structure" in that wild, out-of-the-way place, a harbinger of civilization. Rain-soaked and tired, they finally discovered a line of moss-covered cabins, now overgrown with alders. Fronting them was the dim trail, also being recaptured by Nature, that led to Glacier City. A clearing and more lines of empty cabins marked the center of the town. Smoke from one of them, and a hail from Anderson, brought them to another stupendous meal, after a change to dry clothes that were relics of the stampede.

From Glacier City, they loaded their duffle on packhorses belonging to Sourdough Billy Taylor and quick-stepped the last leg of their march to the head of navigation on Moose Creek. Here, as urged by a miner named Greiss (whom they had met on Eureka Creek), they partook of his cabin and grub, including fresh garden greens, then they reconditioned an abandoned stampeder's boat, salvaged by Greiss, for the drift down the rivers to the Yukon. [15]

Miners and government men at the Quigley cabin, August 30, 1931. Shown (left to right) are Mr. Edmonds (ARC), Fanny Quigley, Mrs. Edmonds, Philip Smith (USGS), and Joe Quigley. Fanny Quigley Collection, UAF

Another traveler of the same period, Lee R. Dice, a government fur warden, left us a picture of the prospector-fur trapper way of life in the Lake Minchumina area. Ben Anderson and James Johnson had located their cabin and prospects on a small creek draining a high dome between the lake and the upper North Fork of Kuskokwim River. They were working on one of several prospect holes that reached to bedrock when Dice called upon them in the winter of 1911. He had met them earlier at the Tanana trading station and was following up on their invitation to visit.

Anderson and Johnson were thawing the frozen ground with hot rocks heated in a wood fire. The rocks were lowered to the bottom of the shaft, covered with moss, and then after several hours, retrieved. The resulting foot or so of thawed muck was shoveled into a bucket by the man in the shaft; the man on top used a hand windlass to hoist the bucket loads to the surface. Then the whole process was repeated. The holes at this prospect, which had yet to show colors, averaged 70 feet deep.

Dice learned from these men that the fur bearers around Lake Minchumina had been pretty well trapped out by the Indians who lived in a small village on the lake. His hosts, nearly done with their prospecting, invited Dice to move with them down the Kuskokwim to their trapping cabin. Dice accepted this proposition with alacrity and great appreciation, for they knew that part of his work involved trapping fur animals for scientific purposes, which would make him not only a guest but also a competitor of sorts.

They arrived in good country for fur: low hills covered with spruce and patches of birch, and plenty of creeks, lakes, and swamps. Marten and weasel were common. Abundant hares attracted lynx. Otter, beaver, and muskrat frequented lakes and streams.

Dice noted that in 1911-12, many prospectors and miners had shifted to trapping in the winter, even though this pursuit interfered with their search for gold and their accumulation of winter "dumps," the piles of pay dirt hauled out of the frozen ground in anticipation of spring sluicing. The furs would buy the grubstakes for the next season of mining.

John, Einar, and Emil Hanson trapped Kantishna River at Roosevelt from 1916 to 1950. Fabian Carey Collection, UAF

In contrast was the seasonal round of the full-time trapper:

The man who planned to devote the major part of his time to trapping would probably select a locality far remote from civilization, because the more accessible regions had already been trapped out. It would probably take him most of the summer for him to get in his winter's supplies from the nearest trading post, travelling by poling boat up some river. The autumn would be spent in building a main cabin and perhaps several relay cabins and in cutting trap-line trails. If deadfalls were to be used, these must be built. By about November 15 the meager harvest would begin. From that time on the trapper must go over his trap-line twice a week if possible; dig out the traps that had drifted full of snow; reset those traps sprung by jays or other animals; change the location of traps where necessary; and skin such animals as he had taken. To walk ten to fifteen miles a day on snowshoes and do all the necessary work of trapping, cooking, and keeping up his camp is hard work for a strong and vigorous man.

The average season's catch of fur by an Alaskan trapper in 1912 was probably worth less than five hundred dollars. This amount would, at the high prices charged for supplies at the trading posts, just about buy the actual necessities for another winter of trapping. The trapper, therefore, unless he was unusually vigorous or very fortunate, made only a bare living. There were reported to be a few exceptions, but with the sparse distribution of fur-bearing animals in Alaska at that time, no great fortune was in prospect for most trappers. [16]

Sluicing in the Kantishna area in the early 1920s. John M. Brooks Collection, UAF

Dice admired the ingenuity of his generous companions, who, with nothing but a few hand tools, some line, and very few nails could fashion cabins, boats, buckets, furniture, winches, sluice boxes, and just about anything else from the trees that grew around them. Their improvisational genius is illustrated by this passage from Dice's manuscript:

These men had an old single-barrelled shotgun, very rusty and with several dents in the barrel. They called it the "gas-pipe" and it did look much like a piece of rusty iron pipe fastened to a broken wooden stock. The breech-lock would not fasten, so they had rigged a rope bandage, which for each shot was driven tight with a wooden wedge. The trigger would not work, so the hammer was held back with the thumb and let go when ready to fire. Their old brass shells had expanded and stuck tightly in the barrel. After being fired, each empty shell consequently had to be driven out of the barrel with a ramrod and a back of an ax. For powder they were using the poorest grade of black powder, which makes a terrific report and gives off a dense cloud of black smoke. The wads for their shells were cut with a pocket knife from birch bark and from the leaves of an old copy of Stevensons "Treasure Island." All their lead shot had been used up, but they made a substitute by chopping wire and iron nails into short lengths with the ax. Thus equipped, the two men roamed the woods, one carrying the gun and the other the ramrod, ax, and extra shells. Amazingly, they secured a considerable quantity of game. [17]

The coming of World War I accelerated a general decline of mining in Alaska, and led to the exodus of many miners who joined the armed forces or sought wartime wages in the States. Those who serviced the miners in towns and camps also gravitated to wartime economic opportunities Outside.

A hardcore of miners did remain. In the Kantishna, Joe Quigley and the Sourdoughs-Lloyd, Taylor, McGonagall, and Anderson—along with Charles A. Trundy and a few others continued lode prospecting, mainly for gold. These and earlier prospecting efforts had discovered antimony deposits on Slate, Caribou, and Stampede creeks, and some ore was extracted. But depressed market prices foiled the miners and the ore piles remained at the sites, too expensive to ship.

Lillian Crosson, Fanny Quigley and Joe Crosson (left to right) at Kantishna in the early 1930s. Joe Crosson was the first pilot to land at the mining camp. Fanny Quigley Collection, UAF

This lode prospecting for gold and other minerals opened up the possibility of a bright future—again, good, all-weather transportation could be developed. Not until after the war would the Alaska Railroad and the spur roads and trails that it spawned bring this hope to any pitch of immediacy. But even then the isolation of the Kantishna and its neighboring districts would continue to inhibit large-scale development. Fluctuating market prices for metals other than gold added to the marginality of these distant prospects and mines, despite promising quantities and assay values. [18]

Until 1924, with the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act, Denali region Indians seldom engaged in mining as claim owners and operators. There were instances, as in the Valdez Creek district, where Indians leased or worked shares on white-owned claims. [19] But the legal status of Alaska Natives, set by the 1867 Treaty of Cession, forbad all but those totally assimilated to the dominant culture (i.e., "citizens") from owning claims. Given the biases of those times, few people of Native heritage qualified as citizens. [20]

Denali-region Natives worked as wage laborers, sometimes at the mines, more often in the transportation, and supply systems that supported mining. The exceptional Native entrepreneurial period of roadhouse, transportation, and hunting-fishing supply services in the Kantishna-Minchumina Lake area (cited in Chapter 2) was largely a function of isolation and a low level of economic activity, which was unattractive to non-Native enterprisers.

The philosophy of the Natives' subsistence way of life was to get enough meat and other necessities for comfortable living. When wage-labor opportunities came with mining into their areas, the Indians tended to adhere to that philosophy of moderation. Money was useful to a point. But subjecting oneself to wage labor for cash beyond necessity—that is, the year's store-bought supplies—made little sense. In fact it was nonsensical, because one had to hunt and fish for the family's true necessities, and wage-work shortened time on the land for those activities. Trapping, a more congenial way of earning cash than working for someone else, also took time. The complaints of mine operators about the Indians' poor work attendance took little account of this logic. Such complaints and such logic still contend today when Native Alaskans respond to traditional calls back to the land.

That Natives often successfully incorporated the new economic opportunities into the larger subsistence life-way was a positive adaptation. But some other effects of the breakdown of isolation and the weakening of traditional patterns led to disaster: addiction to liquor (used by unscrupulous traders to bilk the Natives of their furs); the spread of diseases (some with catastrophic effect); and - because of time taken for trapping furs, thus neglecting hunting and fishing - over-dependence on inferior store-bought foods. These, and much else in the baggage of "civilization," led to decline of physical health, which, combined with imported epidemics, caused die-offs of entire bands. Traditional social patterns of hunting, fishing, and sharing the harvest of the land were wrenched if not destroyed by these tribulations and the insidious workings of the cash economy. As elders died or their counsel was neglected, traditional knowledge for competent life on the land lapsed. This process accelerated as children went to schools (both mission and government), which, with few exceptions, worked to eliminate Native beliefs and modes of life.

In the more isolated areas, and in those places where the boom and bust of mining and all that came in its train was short-lived, the elders and the rudiments of tradition survived. Then, if there was a pause in the march of progress, and if non-Native hunters and trappers were not too numerous, Native families and bands could regroup to fashion a more balanced accommodation between modern and traditional influences. These struggles still go on. [21]

At the end of the early mining period the Denali region was still an isolated backwash—a few small mining camps and trading stations, connected with each other and the outer world by tenuous trails of transport and communication. These trails were marked by the occasional roadhouse and scattered Native settlements. As the railroad approached, it spawned construction camps that would become modem towns. It would open the way for big-time coal mining on Healy Creek, just north of a new national park established by Congress in 1917 in the most remote part of the American land.