Goahti
Nome
Nome in 1900
Nome beaches yield gold
The history of Nome would change forever when in the late fall of 1897 a trio of determined prospectors slogged through the muskeg bordering the south banks of Norton Sound, hoping to head to better pickin's for gold farther north. They included a Swede, John Bynteson; Jafet Lineberg, a Lapp reindeer herder turned prospector, and Erin Lindblom, a Swedish sailor who had jumped ship to become a miner. That fall they were caught by freeze-up at the ruins of an old Russian trading post, long abandoned. They didn't want to winter over too soon, and when the weather allowed, they crossed the sound and landed at Golovin Bay, some 70 miles east of what would become Nome. It was the location of the tiny Eskimo village of Chinik, which boasted a nearby Swedish church and school. The prospectors found only a little gold in the region, but it was enough to spark their interest.
In the spring of 1898 the trio set out westward along the shore of Norton Sound, turning inland at the Snake River. Three miles from the coast they made their strike, a rich one, not far inland from today's Nome!
Then one day in 1899, one of the soldiers based at Nome went to get water near the mouth of the Snake River. He found gold in the beach sands. Imagine going for a walk on the beach and finding gold! An Idaho prospector named John Hummel went to work with a gold rocker and recovered $1,200 in gold in 20 days.(in 1899 $1,200 was a small fortune) Frenzied digging on the beach ensued. One observer noted "Every man in Nome, be he physician or carpenter, lawyer or barkeeper, dropped his usual vocation and went to work with a shovel and rocker."
The officer commanding the troops from St. Michael enforced a land office ruling that claims could not be staked in the tidal zone, a 60 foot-wide strip of beach. During the summer of 1899, 2,000 men and women recovered $2 million in gold from the beaches using shovels, rockers, wheelbarrows, and buckets. As news of the beach gold and its easy recovery spread many more people arrived. Nome was easier to reach than the gold fields of Interior Alaska and Canada. There were no mountains to separate the determined from the lazy. Advertisements led many to think they could pick nuggets off the beach with little or no work.
At the height of the Nome gold rush, hundreds of tents extended for 15 miles along the beach to the west of town. When Elizabeth Robins, a British newspapers correspondent and actress, arrived in Nome to join her brother, she described the scene on the beach:
The tents come down the shingle in some cases within a few feet of where surf is breaking. The space remaining is already piled with freight--food supplies barrels of beer and whiskey, bags of beans and flour higher than my head, lumber, acres of it, extending beyond the tents and up on the tundra, furniture, bedding, pots and pans, engines and boilers, Klondike Thawers, centrifugal pumps, pipe and hose-fittings, gold rockers, sides of bacon, blankets, smart portmanteaux and ancient sea chests--as odd a conglomeration as ever an eye rested on.
The rush of people to Nome caused chaos. Gangs roamed the streets, buildings were set on fire to provide cover for looters, and gold claims were jumped and rejumped. Nome became a wild west town.
In 1904 and 1905, old beach lines above tidewater were found to contain gold. The discovery of a second and then a third beach renewed mining close to Nome itself. These gold strikes, however, were short-lived.
After the initial strikes, mining companies organized to recover gold on a large scale. These operations were often financed by wealthy absentee owners. Hydraulic mining with pressurized hoses that could wash larger quantities of rock began. Dredges, too, were introduced. By 1915, 21 dredges worked gulches and streams of the Seward Peninsula.
By 1905 Nome had schools, churches, newspapers, a hospital, saloons, stores, and other businesses. A hothouse on the sand-spit across the Snake River provided fresh vegetables. Some of the first automobiles in Alaska ran on the planks of Front Street. Travelers going to the mines at Council City rode in the warmth and comfort of heated stages. These horse-drawn stages were covered with canvas and equipped with small stoves.
In 1904 the first radio station in the United States to transmit over a distance of more than 100 miles began operating in Nome . Messages could be sent from Nome to St. Michael. From there they traveled by the Washington to Alaska Military Cable and Telegraph System to Seattle. Before Nome's station was established, radio communications had been limited largely to ship-to-shore messages in harbors in the eastern United States.
Fires burned much of Nome's business district in 1905. The community was largely one of frame structures built on lots only 20 feet wide. Water also damaged the town. Fall gales sent sea water across the beaches and flooded the town. Each year, storms ate away at Nome's shoreline.
The results of all this brief but intense activity made a new Alaska city, Nome. While the 1900 population was counted at 12,488, just ten years later the U.S. Census listed only 2,600. Ten years later it would drop to 852, its all-time low. From that time on, however, Nome experienced slow but steady growth. The new city would survive against all odds.
About 1901 a measles epidemic struck all of Alaska, hitting hardest the children, particularly little Native Alaskan children with little or no resistance to this new-to-them disease. Once that crisis was over, Nome was struck by the terrible storm of 1913. Without a sea wall, the raging water washed in with gale force winds, destroying homes and buildings in its wake. Graves were washed open and caskets floated with the debris. It was a sanitation nightmare, with homeless families camped, praying and suffering. Somehow Nome survived that, too.
But then, that's Nome's story - one of the most interesting towns in all of Alaska!
Source courtesy of: akhistorycourse.org/articles/article.php?artID=66, and sitnews.net/JuneAllen/Nome/110603_nome_alaska.html
Images courtesy of:
arcticwebsite.com/goldrushlist2Alska.html, and
sitnews.net/JuneAllen/Nome/110603_nome_alaska.html
