Gates of the Arctic Gaunt Beauty ... Tenuous Life Historic Resource Study for Gates of the Arctic National Park & Preserve

[NOTE: It appears that there is a problem with the footnote numbering sequence.. The original document has two notes with the number "28." It is entirely possible that the notes from 28 through the end of the chapter are off by one. (DB 8-18-03)]

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In autumn 1899 the Revenue Steamer Nunivak took station on the Yukon River. After wintering at the mouth of Dall River 1,000 miles up the Yukon, the steamboat's commander, 1st Lt. J.C. Cantwell of Kobuk fame, began the Revenue Marine Yukon River patrols that marked a growing governmental presence in Interior Alaska caused by the gold rush.

During that summer of 1900 the lingering momentum of the Klondike rush helped swell the rush to Nome, which now became a torrent. Down the Yukon came hundreds of boats, scows, and rafts loaded with people, equipment, horses, and beef cattle, "... bound for that distant land of promise and prospective wealth."¹

Cantwell made constant stops to help travelers, mend boats and equipment, and resolve disputes. He noted that some boats had been cut in half, the new ends then patched, so that erstwhile partners could sail separately after altercations.²

At Fort Hamlin, an Alaska Commercial Company post above Rampart, he inspected steamboats for proper marine documents and compliance with customs laws. Three steamers, the Canadian Florence S, and the Alaska Commercial Company's Victoria and Leah carried parties of miners and provisions from Dawson, bound for the Koyukuk mining camps, which reportedly were in distress. To discover the facts, Cantwell sent 2d Lt. B.H. Camden up the Koyukuk on Leah in early June 1900.³

Camden found Arctic City deserted, "its departed and prosperous days" attested only by 14 abandoned cabins. At Bergman, metropolis of the Koyukuk, a fluctuating population of some 15 whites and 100 Indians patronized the Pickarts and Bettles store. Near the South Fork junction, Union City stood silent, its sawmill rusting. Peavy, 50 miles above Bergman, hosted only Mr. Rose, the land commissioner; otherwise its 15 or 20 cabins were empty.

Twenty-eight miles above Peavy was Leah's objective, the new station of Bettles. Here the latest Pickarts and Bettles store supplied the upper Koyukuk camps, which were yet another 50 or 75 miles up Koyukuk forks and tributaries. Small, shallow-draft steamers could get as far as Bettles during times of high water. But Leah, drawing 5 feet, and even the 20-inch-draft Victoria sent ahead as a scout, grounded a few miles above Peavy when the water abruptly dropped on June 13.

Captain Young of Leah unloaded his l60-ton cargo and 110 passengers and waited for a surge of water to carry him back down the river.

Meanwhile, Gordon Bettles confirmed that the Bettles post and the camps were critically short of supplies, which he asserted would lead to an exodus within two weeks lacking resupply. He requested and received special permission from Lieutenant Camden to activate the abandoned, light-draft steamer Dorothy so he could relay Leah's off-loaded cargo to Bettles, whence pole boats could get supplies to the scattered camps.⁴

This grounding of steamboats short of objectives, followed by piecemeal relaying and hauling of supplies up ever shallower and swifter streams was repeated each year on the fluctuating Koyukuk. At Bettles, some 400 river-miles from the Koyukuk's mouth, the costs of goods and transport began to overtake the gains from mining. Every mile of additional haulage by pole boat, dog team, and later horse-drawn scows and freight sledges further whittled away the net value of gold extracted. Thus did this and neighboring far-north mining districts become a separate province of Alaska mining, hovering always on margin. Compared to their peers in more southerly districts along the major rivers, far-north miners led spartan lives, developed simplified versions of mining equipment and technology, depended less on store-bought goods, and salvaged for reuse everything that could be possibly adapted to future utility.

Camden summarized his impressions of the Koyukuk with an essay on the enormous costs and distances that had to be overcome if this district were ever to rank with the more fortunate gold fields of Alaska. Surprisingly, he estimated that as many as 360 miners might be scattered through the fan-shaped district north of Bergman, bounded by the Arctic Divide and the Alatna and South Fork (Koyukuk) rivers. Most of them centered on the Middle Fork at the Myrtle and Slate creek diggings, where a cluster of cabins called Slate Creek was about to become Coldfoot, in ironic tribute to green stampeders who got cold feet and left the country. Yet more miners were on the way, traveling overland from Fort Yukon via the Chandalar route.⁵ Residual overflow from the Klondike still lapped against the northern mountains, but with smaller waves composed mainly of experienced men.

Camden estimated that 300 Indians occupied the Koyukuk drainage that June of 1900. This number dropped in late summer as epidemics of measles and influenza compounded by pneumonia swept up the Yukon and its tributaries, laying waste whole villages. Cantwell's Nunivak, the Army at St. Michael, and missionaries, traders, and agents at Yukon River stations rendered aid and supplies to the sick and starving Natives. But disease was on a rampage, with sick, dying, and dead everywhere. Nunivak's surgeon, Dr. J.T. White, lamented that "Though we went everywhere, distributing food and medicine and doing the best we could," the Natives "...lay about waiting for death to relieve them."⁶

Surgeon White found relief from the Native tragedy during a visit to Fort Gibbon, the new Army post at Tanana. Freshly assigned West Pointers hosted the Revenue Marine officers to drinks and dinner, dress uniforms and all. Cantwell remarked that Fort Gibbon had "...an air of civilization somewhat out of keeping with its wild surroundings." Its well-made frame structures overlooked graded streets, and the hum of machinery echoed from bordering woods.⁷

Fort Gibbon was the largest of the recently established Army posts serving the Yukon, including Fort St. Michael, Fort Egbert at Eagle, and temporary camps at Rampart, Circle, and other points. What a change from 1897-98, when Captain Ray and Lieutenant Richardson provided the only United States authority along the entire Yukon frontier! In summer 1899 Patrick Henry Ray, now a major and commander of the Military District of North Alaska, had the satisfaction of distributing whole companies and battalions of troops at the posts he had recommended in 1898 to regulate and assist the miners flooding the country.⁸

In addition to the Revenue Marine and the Army, the U.S. Geological Survey began the series of expeditions that would probe the range soon to bear the name of the Survey's chief Alaska trailblazer, Alfred Hulse Brooks.⁹ The U.S. Congress had provided authority and wherewithal for all these initiatives. More important, as the century turned, it passed a body of laws that gave remote Alaska improved civil government and a smattering of administrative and judicial functionaries to carry it out, even to the fringes of the arctic mountains. These developments and others resulted from the phenomenon called "Klondicitis." The gold rush first, then glimmerings of copper, coal, and oil suddenly changed the territory's accustomed slow pace to full speed ahead. Business interests around the Nation smelled wealth in the natural resources of Alaska, and in the trade that would be generated by their extraction. Congress was responding to these interests and to the plight of both unprepared newcomers and a Native population reeling from the negative effects of Klondicitis.¹⁰

For Alaskans, it had been a long time coming, this Congressional shift from disdain and neglect of the worthless possession, Seward's Icebox. Alaska was the first noncontiguous territory administered by the United States. In his essay on its early governance, Alfred Hulse Brooks dwelt on the Nation's seeming unfitness to cope with problems of colonial administration. For 17 years, he demonstrated, Alaska had had no civil government at all. Passage of the 1884 Organic Act finally provided a semblance of civil government. Alaska became a civil and judicial district, but was governed under the laws of Oregon. This expedient relieved Congress of the task of drawing up a new code, but saddled the northern stepchild with laws only marginally applicable to Alaskan conditions. A governor and various judicial and adminstrative officials appointed by the President were based in the Southeastern Panhandle and for a time at the Aleutian port of Unalaska, leaving mainland Alaska void of any authority. provision was made for representative government. Though general land laws were excluded, thus disallowing homesteading, the mining laws of the United States came into effect. The rights of citizenship now followed the flag to Alaska, and a criminal code allowed selective law enforcement where there had been virtual anarchy. In remote areas, however, and that meant all of Alaska north of Pacific waters, the code meant little; judicial officers had no travel budgets, nor were there established travel routes into the unmapped Interior. The only sign of District Government in all inland Alaska was a roving revenue officer on the prowl for intoxicating liquors, prohibited by the act.¹¹

Ernest Gruening judged that the most significant benefits of the 1884 act were extension to Alaska of the mining laws, thereby making mining possible, and of the principle of public education through a small appropriation for that purpose. The governor, largely a figurehead, did have a voice to the Nation through his annual report to the Secretary of the Interior. But for four successive administrations, the governors' recommendations and pleas for Alaska "...were in varying degrees crying in the wilderness. "¹²

In the far reaches of this district not-yet-a-territory, the small communities and placer camps forged ahead anyway. They rigged their own governments, most of them under the Miners' Code clause of the mining statutes. They adopted mining claim regulations and enforced their own decrees. Lacking any other authority, the codes comprehended all essential elements of community life, with a majority vote in the miners' meetings the mode of policy and judgment. In criminal cases, imprisonment being impractical, three punishments sufficed: hanging, banishment, or a fine. An elected recorder was the only permanent official. For a set fee he recorded claims, minutes of meetings, and the disposition of civil and criminal cases. He also filed homemade certificates of marriage, signed by principals and witnesses, after the simple "I do's" that consummated betrothal in a mainly preacherless realm.¹³

In the far north, the flurry of Congressional enactments between 1898 and 1900--the response to Klondicitis--changed only slightly the tenor of life established during the previous decade. Extension of the homestead laws in 1898 meant little to miners living in unsurveyed, mostly unmapped, regions. Mining claims occupied their interests, and these they filed under mining statutes already in effect. The Criminal Code Act of 1899 provided for impaneling of legal juries in Alaska, heretofore impossible because the patched-on Oregon law required jurors to be local taxpayers, and until 1899 Alaskans paid no local taxes--one of many paradoxes in the Organic Act. In practice the miners' meeting had served the same purpose as juries. In fact, in the smaller settlements typical of the far north, advent of the jury system caused problems during litigious periods, which matched the rhythm of seasonal discontents. If several cases were on the docket the mix of judicial and law enforcement officers, lawyers, jurors, plaintiffs, defendants, and witnesses exhausted and overlapped the population.

The 1899 act recognized the futility of prohibition enforcement; liquor became legal, including home-made hooch, and the taxing of liquor licenses, along with other occupational taxes, was used to fund the district government.

All of these provisions awaited the Civil Government Act of June 1900, which provided the administrative machinery to implement them. For the northern hinterlands the most important parts of this act were those extending and enhancing the administration of justice. Now a judge sat at Eagle, and he could circuit-ride his vast Interior judicial division. The judge in turn appointed commissioners in local precincts. These officers, assisted by marshals and deputies, performed the functions of justices of the peace, recorders, probate judges, and coroners. Except for the most serious cases, which were reserved to the division judge, the commissioners exercised magisterial power, combining judicial, administrative, and enforcement authorities. Given this latitude and the fact that commissioners served without salary, "living off the land" by fees collected, the commissioner system was subject to abuse and generally came under heavy attack. But in remote parts like the upper Koyukuk, the commissioner was usually appointed from the community and subject to its constraining pressures. In its better guise, where temptations were few--as in the Koyukuk precinct--the commissioners system had the advantages of immediacy and proper scale for frontier conditions.¹⁴

*****

The theme of the Nation's neglect of Alaska has been pervasive through its history. As has its opposite theme: the tyrannical meddling of the Federal Government in affairs that only Alaskans can comprehend. Because much that follows in this narrative is illuminated by these arguments and the documentation they produced, an interlude of discussion is useful, for perspective.

Always there have been those who, for economic reasons, opposed Alaska's evolution beyond colonial status. Often representing monied interests from "outside"--Seattle, New York, London--they sought freedom to harvest or extract wealth from this natural storehouse without interference from strong regional or local governments, which would tax and regulate their enterprises and conserve resources for public purposes. At the same time these interests wanted what is today called infrastructure assistance from government--ports, roads, and the like. And they knew how to match their interests with those of local boomers, who also wanted that kind of assistance and little interference. Others, local to the land, wanted freedom from all these forces, governmental and economic. And finally, settlers, missionaries, and community builders simply wanted Alaska to progress from wilderness to civilization along the same path followed in the western territories and states.

Compounding and complementing these strands were others of climate, geography, and extremes of seasonal and cyclic economy. These factors hindered development of stable populations and foiled unitary solutions applicable across the many Alaskas.

Alfred Hulse Brooks and Ernest Gruening, among many others, spoke eloquently to the neglect thesis. Jeannette Paddock Nichols, who watched much history happen as secretary to Judge and later Delegate to Congress James Wickersham, recounted the "complexity and perplexity" of the natural and human combinations during Alaska's first half century under United States rule.

With a bow to all of these, a later historian, Ted C. Hinckley, qualified the neglect thesis by asserting that Congress was probably as well informed and generous respecting Alaska as it had been with the western territories, particularly given the accelerating pace of the Nation's domestic and international affairs as 19th became 20th century. He concludes that until 1940, Alaska, with its remote and tiny population, was simply irrelevant to the Nation's central concerns.

Even the Klondike and subsequent Alaskan gold rushes proved ephemeral in real terms, however enduring as romance. Because Alaska lacks the holding power of agricultural and commercial alternatives to mining, as in California and Colorado, the gold excitement could not remedy the population deficiency. "From this critical deficiency everything else suffered. And because it was basically a problem that could not be remedied by Alaskans, they blamed their government. ..." Nor could pioneer or boomer have expected to subdue Alaska in short order. Even the trans-Mississippi West, with its overland trails and later railroads, its advancing frontiers of settlement, and the attractions of the West Coast and the Pacific trade, had taken generations to transform. The weekly steamship to an Alaska hardly populated except for a cluster of towns in Southeast could not compare.

Hinckley credits military invasion and the application of technological might to military strategy and natural resources for Alaska's arrival in the national consciousness. He suggests that Alaska could not be prematurely unlocked by a few pioneers and symbolic gestures from government. Larger combinations were needed. In the big business combinations of the early 20th Century--the Alaska Commercial Company trading monopoly, the Morgan-Guggenheim copper and transportation syndicate--he glimpses the future that would happen, when ready, whatever the intervening rhetoric or Congressional mood. The combination of modern technology, militant geopolitics, and big oil became that future--overcoming distance, terrain, climate, and all. These things, not tracts and speeches, finally wrenched the door off Seward's Icebox.

If Hinckley is right in terms of structuring forces and trends, then Alaska in its entirety must be viewed as a fringe area until the threat and actuality of Japanese invasion moved it to at least the wings of the national stage. Only then did a critical mass of population, investment, and political concern, extended by post-World War II strategies and oil, begin to counter the dominance of empty distance and high latitude.

Ernest Gruening noted the population problem in his history of neglect. As the number of Alaskans declined after the 1900-era gold rushes, the populations of western states and territories continued to increase. The northern giant was slipping back to dormancy. He attributed this to a national policy designed to thwart Alaska's evolution into the family of states. Neglect of Alaska's constitutional and political aspirations for representative government, locking up of the coal lands, withdrawal of virtually all timbered areas into National Forests, and failure to extend to Alaska railroad subsidies of the sort that opened up the West were critical elements of that thwarting policy. In Gruening's view, neither the 1906 law that recognized Alaska as a Territory and authorized a nonvoting delegate to Congress, nor the Home Rule Act of 1912, providing limited self-government by a Territorial Legislature, could counter that national policy.

Hinckley sees less a designed policy in all this, more a back-burner reality based on geography, demographics, and the economics of resource development. Resource development in Alaska still requires exceptional richness, gigantism, or strategic necessity to warrant the costs of high-latitude exploitation. In this view, national policy, such as it was, did not cause Alaska's condition but merely reflected it.

This thesis, applied with the aid of a microscope, illuminates the history of the far north camps and communities within our study area. Remote, isolated by lack of roads and fluctuating rivers, marginally productive of gold--until recently its only commercially attractive resource--this was an area that could not evolve beyond its frontier beginnings. It was a holdout until just yesterday of the 1900-era Alaska that once raised such howls of national neglect and is now nostalgically yearned for.¹⁵

*****

In the summer of 1903 a Senate subcommittee of the Committee on Territories visited Alaska to assess conditions there and take testimony from its citizens. Of greatest import to the far-north miners were the interrelated problems of attenuated transportation and high costs of supplies. The next most perplexing matter was the unrestricted use of power-of-attorney in locating mining claims. This provision of mining law allowed fast-stepping speculators, "pencil miners," to grab up whole groups of claims, crowding out real miners on the ground. As a side effect of this practice, the thin-spread judicial system staggered under a mounting press of mining litigation.¹⁶

Partly as a result of the subcommittee's visit, which highlighted transportation problems, a limited system of winter pack trails and wagon roads would be developed, beginning in 1905, by the Army-run Alaska Road Commission. But not until 1912 did Congress finally impose restrictions on the number of claims a person could stake on one creek.¹⁷

For many years, Koyukuk and other far-north miners benefited little from the roads and trails program, whose limited funding in a vast territory lacking "... a single public wagon road over which vehicles can be drawn summer or winter"¹⁸ naturally gravitated to richer, more populous mining districts south of the Yukon and around Nome. In time a rudimentary system of winter pack trails and shelter cabins would reach north of the Yukon to the upper Koyukuk and Chandalar districts, and east from Kotzebue Sound. Still later, a short, isolated road system would serve the Koyukuk's Middle Fork communities and camps. But throughout the historic period, and indeed until the 1970s, no road suitable for all-weather transport of bulk goods and heavy equipment connected the far north districts with the outer world. Small-scale steamboating and scows on rivers intermittently navigable, with limited overland transport on winter trails, as reported in the 1903 testimony, remained a fair description of far-north logistics until North Slope oil development began. The airplane would ameliorate personal isolation after 1925. But not until World War II and its aftermath would significant air freighting begin. And when it did, it largely overflew the far-north mining districts en route to North Slope defense installations and oil-exploration camps.

This situation shaped the history of the region. Thus, did the upper rivers and central mountains form an island deep within the mainland. Small in population and lacking any but marginal economic attractions, the region could not swing the political weight to achieve a transportation breakthrough. In due course, after the sequence of localized gold strikes ended about 1916, the region became a sociocultural island as well. Its population slowly eroded as old timers emigrated and died to be replaced only in part by new recruits.

Testimony from a Koyukuk man before the 1903 subcommittee foreshadows these realities in the constant harping on transportation problems. But this was still a time of hope spiced with healthy skepticism, with new discoveries yet to be made. The descriptions of country and people are fresh, as was their history in the making.

Judge D.A. McKenzie, commissioner of the Koyukuk precinct, domiciled at Coldfoot, testified at Rampart on July 20, 1903. He described his precinct as running from the Yukon River to the Arctic Ocean and from the Chandalar River to the Colville, an area larger than the states of New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. In this vast landscape dwelt about 500 whites, most of them around Coldfoot, and an equal number of Natives. Supplies for the camps came up the Koyukuk, via Bettles, at a cost of $337 a ton from Seattle and San Francisco, with 10 to 20 cents a pound added to that for the final relay to the mines. In response to a query from Sen. William P. Dillingham about the need for wagon roads, McKenzie replied: "According to Mr. Frank Schrader, the Geological Survey man, it is 96 miles in a straight line from Coldfoot to the Yukon River. A practical wagon road that could be built there would be about 125 miles in length."¹⁹ He contrasted this with the 600 river-miles from the Yukon to Coldfoot (an estimate more than 100 miles longer than modern measurement).

Given the cost of provisions, only the richer placers could be worked, those paying $115-125 per shovel, which was the amount one man could shovel into a sluice box in a 10-hour day. The low-grade ground, at $8-20 per shovel, could not pay at current costs, but large areas could be worked "... when we are able to get supplies at the prices which prevail ... on the Yukon River."²⁰

He describes his precinct as a country without homes, very different from California, where miners could bring their families and settle down. At Coldfoot miners could not afford to bring families. Only 20 or 30 women shared Coldfoot with nearly 500 men. In these conditions nobody planned to stay on. They wanted to find a stake then get out.

As to claims and their regulation, the Koyukuk precinct had made local laws under the Miners' Code clause. Claims were 1,320 feet long, following the creek, and 660 feet wide. The Koyukukers allowed only one claim per man per creek or bar. Evidently, power-of-attorney claims presented no big problem at Koyukuk camps. Where this was a problem, McKenzie advocated $100 worth of assessment work on such claims before they could be recorded, along with expenditure of at least $500 per year for labor and improvements to hold the claim. Individual miners filing in their own behalf would need to spend only $100 per year. This distinction would hold off the speculators.

Filing the claim entailed going to the recorder, i.e., the commissioner, within 90 days of locating and staking the claim to file the notice of location. This notice described the claim by metes and bounds, and gave the owner's name and the date of location. The first claim on a creek was designated discovery claim, with subsequent claims numbered 1, 2, 3, etc., above and below discovery.

McKenzie estimated that $225,000 in gold came out of the Koyukuk in 1902, but that had been a dry year with little water for sluicing. He forecast three or four times that return in 1903.

McKenzie happened to be at Rampart for the subcommittee visit because he was attending court, convened there by Third Judicial Division Judge James Wickersham. The commissioner had traveled nearly 1,000 river-miles in 27 days to get to Judge Wickersham's roving court. He cited this long journey as evidence that the third division (covering all of Interior Alaska) was so large that it effectively deprived people in remote camps of legal protection. Going further, he stated that until railroads could be built to overcome "these magnificent distances" representative territorial government was out of the question. It would be impossible to get the representatives together. Vast, underpopulated precincts like the Koyukuk could not afford self-government and the taxes to support it. He favored continuation of direct government by Congress or a commission under Congress, "... provided the Government will pay some attention to us." On that score McKenzie recited the usual litany of sad and shameful neglect and the need for adjustment of the laws to meet Alaskan conditions. He lit into the deficiencies of Coldfoot's postal service, which, coming from Fort Yukon by dogteam "shut out" delivery of newspapers, magazines, and books. Then he let fly with a plaint, strangely modern in tone, reflecting the Nation's latest imperial obligations after the war with Spain: "It seems strange that our Government spends so large sums of money in trying to civilize those foreign greasers, while wide-awake and intelligent American-born citizens here in Alaska can hardly receive any recognition whatever."²¹

In contrast to that lapse into bigotry, McKenzie praised highly the Koyukuk and Kobuk Natives, the latter only recently arrived into the country. "They are a very fine class of Indians, of good habits, never drink or use tobacco, and they never were in court with any charges against them." He and others who testified painted a dark picture of the Natives' exploitation and abuse at the hands of unscrupulous white men who undermined their morals with liquor and illicit sex, hunted out their game, and spread disease. He recalled the epidemic of "Russian grippe" of 1901 that killed hundreds, wiping out some large camps. He concluded: "I would like to see some law passed to protect the Indians in the upper country when they can't get game. They are too good a people to starve in that way; they are really industrious Indians; they will work at anything you will give them to do."²²

McKenzie loosed some heavy bolts at the commissioners' fee system. Because his precinct had little money and kept him busy full time, he was practically destitute. Any commissioner would be broke who did not drum up strife and litigation to keep the fees flowing. In fact, McKenzie was wrapping up precinct business at this session of court because, lacking a salary, he was compelled to tender his resignation to Judge Wickersham. He noted that if salaries ever were provided, they should be adjusted to the nature of the precinct. He made this point by quoting the price of a bag of flour in Nome, $1.50, and in Coldfoot, $11.00.²³

These were the main concerns of the upper country in the early years: improved transport, secure mining claims, and a rudimentary form of government for a rudimentary society that wanted a few services without cost or bother. The broader issues that exercised politicians, syndicates, merchants, and missionaries in the more accessible parts of Alaska did not wash on the high creeks--there was hardly enough water for sluicing. The immediate and proximate condition of the "Indians," a generic term then, produced some concern. But short-term miners performing prodigies of back-breaking labor in the most difficult conditions had little time for altruism or amenity. Within a few years a loose community of whites and Natives would evolve, permanently attached to the upper country. They would cohere for the essentials, like a school, but even then the active community-builders contended with a kind of benign anarchy practiced by people who mainly followed their own lights.

Of all the government enterprises flowing from the gold rush, the one most apparent and of greatest interest to the folk of the upper country was the work of the U.S. Geological Survey. Remember, Commissioner McKenzie had mentioned Frank Schrader, "the Geological Survey man" and his assessment of the feasibility of a wagon road to Coldfoot. This kind of helpfulness and knowledge was typical of Survey men. Beginning with its first formal expedition to Alaska in 1895, and emphatically from 1898 on, in response to the gold rush, the Survey adopted the role of the Nation's trailblazer in Alaska. It stressed practical information on geography, routes and conditions of travel, and the realities rather than the hopes and false lures of economic geology. The objectives of this service-oriented mission were two: to help the serious prospectors and miners who were opening up the country and to caution and guide inexperienced stampeders. Alfred Hulse Brooks first came to Alaska in 1898 with these objectives already paramount. Shortly thereafter, appointed head of the Survey's Alaska work, he assembled and supervised a corps of volunteer geologists, topographers, and other scientists that conducted mapping and geological investigations throughout the known and unknown regions of Alaska. Brooks was himself a field scientist of the first order, always encouraging his men to combine practical geology with "... researches which advance the knowledge of basic principles."²⁴

The reports of the Survey men comprise the best early documentation for the upper country. Details of the country abound even in the published USGS Bulletins: the original field notebooks are richer still. Here, among sketch maps and marginal notes, with occasionally the pressed remains of a pesky mosquito dead nearly a century, are the names, places, and exploits of those early days.

The Survey people got on well with the prospectors and miners. Like everyone else before the airplane, they traveled light and tough with dog teams, pack horses, and canoes--often for months, through the whole round of seasons. They all shared information with one another. The prospector knew the local country; the geologist added science to the miner's practical knowledge. The fellowship of far places shines in these notebooks, along with some of the oddities. Usually, prospectors had been there, wherever it was, first. But prospectors did not make maps and geological assessments for other people. The Survey did, producing in aggregate a splendid system of public and scientific knowledge about Alaska's geography and geology.²⁵

In a special publication²⁶ authorized by Congress on March 1, 1899, the USGS summarized existing knowledge of travel routes and mining prospects in Alaska. By providing authentic data and maps, the USGS aimed to counter a burgeoning Gold Rush literature, more often than not inaccurate and promotional, that was luring stampeders to disappointment and disaster.

The section on the Koyukuk River derived from Lt. Henry Allen's 1885 exploration and subsequent scraps of information from prospectors. It warned that above the 67th degree of latitude "no surveys have been made," a reference to Allen's northernmost attainment on the John River. Beyond that point, the sketchy map could not be compared in accuracy"...to the results of even the roughest surveys which have been made elsewhere in the Territory."²⁷ The Kowak or Kobuk River description cited Lt. J.C. Cantwell's explorations and, again, fragmentary data from prospectors and miners. Despite hints of gold throughout the Kobuk drainage, "No well-authenticated finds of gold have been reported." Brief mention of the Noatak River relied on S.B. McLenegan's 1885 exploration and noted that in 1898 a party of prospectors had ascended the river 250 miles in rowboats but found no gold. As the 1899 season began, this pittance was the state of public knowledge about the upper country; the only solid information dated from the original explorations of the 1880s.²⁸

Even as this guide was being assembled for printing the first of the USGS far-north expeditions got underway. In the period 1899-1911, six major USGS reconnaissances traversed the upper country, mapping its topography and general geology and defining the patterns of economic geology so important to prospectors and miners.

In 1899 geologist F.C. Schrader and topographer T.G. Gerdine surveyed up the North Fork of the Chandalar River, portaged across the mountains to Robert Creek, surveyed that creek and Dietrich and Bettles rivers, then descended Middle Fork River and Koyukuk River to Nulato. During the Middle Fork survey, topographer D.C. Witherspoon separated from the main party and portaged from Slate Creek to South Fork River, mapping it to its mouth.

In 1901 after a spring reconnaissance up the Alatna and John rivers, Schrader and topographer W.J. Peters proceeded up John River to its head, crossed the Arctic Divide and floated down the Anaktuvuk and Colville rivers to the Arctic Coast.

That same year W.C. Mendenhall and D.L. Reaburn made a geological and topographical survey up the Dall River, down the Kanuti to the Koyukuk, and then up the Alatna and across the portage to the Kobuk, which was followed to Kotzebue Sound.

A.G. Maddren's 1909 expedition ascended the Dall River to its headwaters, crossed over to the Mosquito Fork and South Fork River, then through Sitkum Pass and down Slate Creek to Coldfoot. The survey continued up Middle Fork River to the Wiseman and Gold creek areas, then crossed over to Chandalar River and out of the country.²⁹

In 1910 Philip S. Smith and H.M. Eakin, geologists, went from the Koyukuk via the Hogatza River trail to the upper Kobuk basin, then followed the Kobuk to its mouth. The next year Smith, with topographer C.E. Griffin, surveyed the Alatna, crossed the mountains and descended the Noatak to its mouth.³⁰

These pioneering expeditions mostly during the "open season" up swift rivers and across endless stretches of soft, wet country, hauling bulky survey and photographic gear, must be viewed with greatest respect. The survey network now extended from the Yukon to the Arctic Ocean, from the Chandalar to Kotzebue Sound. In human terms a tradition of indomitable wilderness endeavor and self reliance had been established. The esprit of the Survey men was legendary. In the amazing heat of arctic summer, alternating with chilling rains and freezing night temperatures, besieged by mosquitoes and attrited by constant setting up and breaking of camp, climbing rugged mountains to investigate exposed formations, they yet produced exquisite maps and finely wrought drawings of geological sections. Sweat and human blood from sated insects blur the old notebooks, but the gathering of data went on unabated.

As the miners discovered, and as the USGS geologists explained, gold mining in the southern foothills of the central Arctic Mountains³¹ traces a belt of gold-bearing schist that forms an arc from the upper Chandalar across the Koyukuk forks and then cuts southwesterly across Wild, John, and Alatna rivers. The schist is bounded on the north by a massive shield of limestone that covers the gold-bearing rocks and cuts off mining. Spotted through this schist belt are domes and mountain masses containing lode gold in quartz lenses and veins. Fractured and glaciated in the past, these mountains are eroded and drained by streams that transport fragments of gold released from the mother quartz down valley, where they are deposited in the rock and gravel of the high gulches and in the sands and silts of the lower valleys. In the higher creeks coarse gold is found: farther downstream the gold gets progressively finer.