YUKON-CHARLEY RIVERS The World Turned Upside Down: A History of Mining on Coal Creek and Woodchopper Creek, Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve, Alaska

The human quest for gold predates written history. It has been considered a precious metal since ancient times and has stimulated world exploration, conquest and trade for nearly six millennia. Although the European search for gold in the Western Hemisphere dates to the fifteenth century, it was not until the early nineteenth-century when gold mining began actively in North America. Discoveries were made first in North Carolina, followed by Georgia in 1829, Alabama about 1830, then Virginia, Tennessee and eventually New Mexico. The most significant discovery, simply because of its profound impact on developing the western United States, occurred at Sutter's Mill in California in 1848. Other western territories (later states), Australia, Russia and South Africa saw subsequent discoveries throughout the middle- and late-nineteenth century. Finally, the Canadian Yukon and Alaska saw the last major gold strikes made just before the turn-of-the-century. [1] Today, gold mining is making a resurgence in various locations around the world owing primarily to two factors. First, vastly improved exploration and recovery techniques allow miners to work profitably areas with lower gold concentrations. Second, increased values associated with gold that make working these areas profitable. Mines such as the Fort Knox operation north of Fairbanks, Alaska, are using techniques and technologies that were not only unknown to the early prospectors working the creeks, but were more than likely beyond their wildest dreams.

Today, most gold is fabricated. [2] It is used in making jewelry. However, there is a growing market for gold in various industries including electronics, telecommunications equipment, computers and spacecraft due to its excellent conductive capabilities, resistance to corrosion, and other desirable physical and chemical properties. Although gold is important to industry and the arts, it retains its unique status among all commodities as a long-term store of wealth. Because of this, most of the gold bullion produced throughout the world went into vaults of government treasuries until late in the twentieth century when private investors began to purchase and trade in it. [3]

The Price of Gold

For nearly two centuries the value assessed to a troy ounce [4] of gold, also referred to as the "price" of gold, has varied only slightly. The US government set the price of gold at $19.393939 in 1786, it was raised in 1834 to $20.689656. Three years later it declined ever so slightly to $20.671835. The Gold Standard Act established this price in 1900 when it set the value of the U.S. dollar at 0.05 troy ounce. It remained constant until 1934 when President Franklin D. Roosevelt lowered the value of the dollar from 0.05 troy ounce to 0.0286 troy ounce of gold. This executive action effectively raised the value of gold to $35.00 an ounce. [5]

After World War II, the U.S. dollar replaced the British pound sterling as the leading reserve currency. The value of gold held steady until 1968 when foreign governments realized that the United States did not have sufficient gold reserves to convert all of their dollars into gold, thus weakening international confidence in the U.S. dollar. For the next several years, the U.S. and other industrial nations sought unsuccessfully to maintain a gold standard.

In August 1971, the U.S. suspended converting dollars into gold at a fixed exchange rate. This action weakened the influence previously held by the U.S. government on gold prices on the London gold market, and it thus resulted in prices dropping. In the Smithsonian Agreement of December 1971, the U.S. Treasury raised the official U.S. gold price from $35 to $38 an ounce. In 1972, daily prices quoted in London ranged from a low of $44 to a high of $70. The U.S. government again raised its official price from $38 to $42 per ounce on October 18, 1973. This was hoped to aid in settling the international price of gold but proved a total failure. London prices continued to vary widely through 1973 ranging from $63.90 to $127.00. [6]

That year, most of the industrial nations allowed their currencies to float — in other words, they no longer backed them with gold reserves. Consequently U.S. prices ceased to be meaningful. On December 31, 1974, the United States deregulated the price of gold, allowing it to be bought and sold on the open market. [7] International gold prices had been rising from 1970 through 1975; they then dropped in 1976 and rose steadily from 1977 through 1980, breaking the $800 mark in 1979. [8] Recent history has shown the value of gold fluctuating widely reaching highs near $700 an ounce. [9] Today the price averages between $325 and $350 an ounce.

Gold Mining In Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve

Gold mining is an important part of the cultural and natural history of Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve. The Preserve's enabling legislation specifically identifies it as one of the reasons Congress deemed the area worthy of protection as a national preserve. [10]

Early exploration and discoveries in the vicinity predate those made in the Klondike by as much as a decade or more. For many years, early miners confined their operations to working small placer deposits. Here they used a variety of means, including drift mining (digging a shaft down to bedrock then following the "pay streak" horizontally), open cut methods (working a cut laterally) and hydraulicking (using water, under pressure, to wash gold bearing gravels through a sluice).

Because they lacked the capital to bring in the equipment necessary to exploit their claims to their fullest extent, many simply continued working their claims with fairly simple tools, scratching out enough money to pay for a grubstake that allowed them to keep mining the following season. In some cases, solitary miners worked over the winter, stockpiling the "pay dirt" until the following summer, when water again flowed, allowing them to run it through a sluice recovering the gold.

With the exception of activities around Dawson on the Canadian side of the border, and on Mastodon and Deadwood Creeks, south of Circle, mining on the upper Yukon River basin continued in this manner until the early 1930s. Small operators, working several claims by hand, season after season.

Figure 1: Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve is located in interior Alaska, along the US-Canadian Border. (click on image for a PDF version)