ALASKA: Gold Rush

An airborne missionary brought the feverish tale to Fairbanks: a trapper named Clifton Carrol had found gold nuggets “as big as peas” sticking to a fish wheel he was running in the Yukon River, 20 miles below Fort Yukon. The news licked through the town’s old log cabins like fire, blazed in its neon-trimmed bars, spread to the big Army hangars at Ladd Field. It was carried across the Territory by radio. The Fishwheel Stampede was on.

Single-engined bush planes began heading north across the Brooks Range to the Yukon Flats the next morning. Peering out, passengers saw a frozen and desolate scene: a big black river wandering amid a lacework of sloughs, and empty leagues of snow and spruce. The planes landed on a sandbar, took off hurriedly after the muffled Argonauts had hauled their gear out into the sub-zero Arctic wind. More fares ($90 round trip, $50 one way for 165 miles) were waiting.

No Find. The planes made 20 flights the first day, 50 the next, 60 the next. At times they were stacked five deep over sandbars waiting for landings. Tents, fires, laboring men spread along eight miles of riverbank. A trapper’s wife opened a coffee shop in a tent. A clothing store sprang up in another. Old prospectors, panning methodically after thawing the frozen ground with fires, found traces of gold dust. But they found nothing else.

Disillusionment spread through the camp: many a man had gambled his season’s savings on the stampede, hardly knowing why. The miners demanded that the original nuggets be sent to Fairbanks to be tested. Next day a plane brought copies of the Fairbanks News-Miner with a sad story. All but two of the nuggets were brass. And the two (total worth: $2) were worn, as if they had been carried for a long time in a poke or pocket.

No Surrender. Hotheads along the riverbank cried that the ground had been “salted,” began talking wildly of seeking someone to lynch. But who? Nobody had gained by the strike but the bush pilots, and none of the gold seekers believed a bush pilot was capable of such villainy. Some guessed the brass had come from the fittings of a Yukon River steamer, the worn gold from a forgotten prospector’s cache. But geologists announced that bedrock at Fishwheel was 200 feet down and that all gold was bound to sink. Nobody solved the mystery. The boom collapsed. Disgusted men began flying home.

But not all. Fifty to 75 leathery old prospectors refused to believe the geologists, the calamity howlers or anyone else. This week they were building log foundations for their tents, ordering prospectors’ boilers (for thawing ground) and preparing to drive shafts to bedrock, if necessary, before surrendering.