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

For the writer, coming to the end of this history after 2-1/2 years of immersion in it, is both a relief and a sad leaving of unforgettable friends and places. My partners in bush-whacking field adventures to the old sites will be missed, as will the pilots and park people who got us out to our base camps. The people who welcomed us to mining camps and far communities, even though we did represent the National Park Service, recall the hospitality and helpfulness of an older Alaska--thank God, not dead yet. And from the writings and anecdotes of those long dead, whose footsteps we had the good fortune to follow for awhile, grew a distant friendship and present admiration that surmounted the Great Divide, over which, in awhile, we will follow them once more.

Memories of people and places crowd the tapestry of these 2-1/2 years:

• A river float from Walker Lake through the canyons of the Kobuk, with Cantwell's notes at hand.
• Our camp on Glacier River under the loom of Blue Cloud Mountain, a score of old cabins nearby.
• The Ernie Creek-North Fork junction, with Marshall's Doonerak and Gates of the Arctic in view.
• Elijah's old eyes scanning Chandler Lake for signs of that last great caribou hunt.
• Arctic John's sod-house ruin in the angle of Nugget Creek and the haul road, trembling with the passage of heavy trucks.
• Vern Watts's discovery claim on Hammond River, the boiler cabin still standing, sunbeams shafting through the broken roof.
• The deserted dance hall at Old Bettles, crowded by willow and alder, its lights and laughter gone, melting into the ground.
• Fourth of July at Wiseman, still calling the folks in for games and food and frolic.

At Wiseman, where we spent some weeks recording the old structures, a special relationship grew:

Harry Leonard showed us his cache of old pictures and documents, his museum of mining machines. It was a trove of history illumined by a memory that reached back half a century in this place.

Walter Johnson, owner with Bill English, Jr., of the old Wiseman store, showed us the old sites and told of his days as ARC foreman in the Forties. When Vern Watts died in 1946, Walter and George Miscovich--then working with a Cat on the Hammond River road--placed their friend in a sluice box and lashed it to the Cat blade for the trip to Wiseman. Before they started back they sat for a moment in Vern's cabin to bid him good-bye with the last of his whiskey. Vern was entirely alone except for his Wiseman friends.

Gentle philosopher Ross Brockman--when we met him, completing his 18th year without leaving Wiseman--had tried prospecting during his early years of residence. He told us that he knew of many places in these mountains where there was no gold.

Charlie Breck, who prospected the North Fork with trader Pat O'Connell in 1947, keeps very cold beer in his permafrost- chilled cellar. He showed us around the Linda Creek drift mining site, telling us how the old system worked, and allowing that he had never fancied underground mining because he would be underground soon enough. When we proposed to Charlie that we should record all decipherable data from the fading markers in the Wiseman Cemetery he acquiesced: "I don't hear many of those stiffs complaining, but go ahead--they won't mind."

*****

And so the tales go on. There is an integrity in these people and places that makes being a historian a joy. Perhaps in no other site did that integrity so strike us as on the upper reaches of Spring Creek off Wild Lake. Here Austin Duffy's old boomer dam and cabin stood untouched except for nearly a century's exposure to the elements. The crafted, salvaged implements, the leaning remains of cabin and dam, the laboriously piled rocks at the side of the creek had brought him no return in gold. Yet one suspects in such a place--alone with the wind and the creek tumbling through slotted mountains to the lake glimpsed far below--that Austin Duffy probably got what he came for.

Recommendations for further work on
Gates of the Arctic NP&P Historic Resources

1. Finish HABS documentation of structures in and near the park. Many of the sketches on file at Alaska Regional Office are reproduced in the site descriptions that follow. Many of the structures so sketched are in jeopardy. Finished documentation on file in the Library of Congress would be a valuable service to students of frontier architecture.

2. Perform selected historical archeology at those sites described as having potential. The judgements in Russell Sackett's site descriptions have great validity in this regard, for Russ was a field archeologist for many years before becoming a historical architect. Of greatest interest, perhaps, would be sufficient archeological work to uncover and identify the progression of tools--homemade, adapted, and manufactured--that trace the evolution of mining technology in this isolated district.

3. Develop cooperative relationships with Doyon, Ltd. and/or claim holders to assure preservation of the Yale Cabin site and the Vincent Knorr Cabin site. In terms of structural remains these are the best sites known in the park, and they both have historical associations worth perpetuating.

4. Develop historical data for and revisit to evaluate the historic mining site and cabin ruins visited by mining assessment and compliance teams (see section on these sites below). These sites were not visited by the history survey team. But descriptions provided by the mining survey teams indicate a potential National Register property at Down River Claim No.2 on the Middle Fork. And the Alder Creek Cabin, because of its unique architectural features, still detectable even in its ruined state, should be recorded by a historical architect.

5. With assistance from Alaska Regional Office cultural resources specialists, the park should develop a position paper on the many lost sites discovered in the park. These are sites too far gone, in ruin, stripped and salvaged, and anonymous. In their deteriorated condition, isolation, and obscurity--as elements of a subordinate theme--they do not warrant public expenditures, though the presumed historic remnants should remain in place for Nature's work. A defined management position on these sites would be evidence of compliance with the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, as amended. Such a position would encourage focus on those few sites worthy of further work and/or preservation.