The Daily Alaska empire., 1951-06-12

mall plcK6Q ndllulul Ul AuSScto out of the American River in Cal fofnia on January 24, l848, he
 ouched off a gold rush that
 iougllt an estimated 9O,000 people into the country in less than two ears.
 And when E. Hargraves hit sold
 own in Australia in February, 1851.
 ne discovery pulled something like .co,CO0 people within a year or so.
 Nc.hing like that happened in .laska with the first discovery or cid, or the first several discover. $.
 First reported discovery of gold II Alaska was near Russian trad .l5 post on the KuskokWim River bout l835 Gold was reported near ne Hudsons Bay trading post at
 ost Yukon few years later. But -othing happened.
 h l943 the Russians sent min ng engineer to look around. He 1oked about on the Kenai River, not far from where the first semb- ance of an Alaskan gold rush talted some years later, but he -ound very little gold and the Rus lans lost interest.
 The Fraser River excitement ten
 cars later and the discoveries on he Stikine, in the Carihoo and in ne Cassiar, were all in Canada md they attracted mostly miners rom other areas and hence were what the miners call "stampedes rather than gold rushes.
 Some of the miners trickled over into Alaska and gold discoveries at Shuck, near Wrangell, and in silver Bow Basin at Juneau, re- ul,ed. In the early 1880's prospec- tors began going into the headwat- CTS of the Yukon and then to the fartymile and Birch Greek, and Alaska's gold production started.
 By 1895 Alaska was producing S860,G00 a year in placer and $l,- 725,090 a year in lode gold, making a respectable total of two and a half million dollars.
 But still there was no gold rush.
 A minor rush that attracted a number of outsiders" did develop in the Cook Inlet country in 1895, but it soon played out and most oi the rushers went home convinced that Alaska had little to offer ex- cept muskeg swamps and mosquitoes
 The Klondike discovery in 1896 really started things humming and even though it was in Canada, it became practically synonymous with Alaska
 But even with that big discovery, Galley Northern Notebook HI there is evidence that a newspaper mans catchy phrase had more to do with starting the Klondike Rush than did the actual gold.
 By the time of the Klondike, AL aska had sent some $l4,000,000 in gold to the States without it cre- ating any undue excitement.
 Then the steamship Portland ar rived at Seattle on July IT, 1897, with what some genius on the waterfront beat described as "a ton of gold"
 Raw geld from the northern plac- CTS probably did not average out at more than $l5 an ounce, and a ton of it would have been worth around $480,000, or only a fraction of the gold that Alaska had been producing for some years. As mat ter of fact, the Portland is said to have carried nearly. .S700,00o worth of the metal.
 But the Ton of Gold" headlines caught the imagination Of people all over the country, people who had never heard of Alaska or thought much about gold, and the big Gold Rush was something like 60 years after the first discovery of Alaskan gold.
 The gold rush doubled Alaska's population in a short while. It brought in a lot of people who have stayed to make their homes and build the country, and whole lot more who pulled out as soon as things began to get rough, ten or a dozen years later.
 With the decline of gold mining, unfortunately, came a decline in the mining of copper, marble and 2ypsum and in almost all of the basic industries.
 Alaska's decline was not checked until Uncle Sam started pouring high octane into the tank few years back, sending the RPM. counter to a dizzy new high in a loom that is as false as was the stock market boom of the late l920's.
 Old-tim Alaskans, fearful of what lies ahead when the supply of artificial fuel is cut off, are more than ever aware of the need for new basic industries to keep the country going under even it's GUS tomary slow bell. '