Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
The Nome Chronicle
, August 11, 1900
Everybody knows about the Klondike Gold Rush in 1897-8, from George Carmack dis-
covering the gold to the first ton of gold arriving on the steamer Portland at the Seattle
docks to the tens of thousands of stampeders heading north to fight their way over the
Chilkoot Pass, hauling a thousand pounds of goods with them, building boats at Lakes
Lindeman and Bennett to take them to the rest of the way to Dawson City and the rivers
of the Klondike that they dreamed were running with gold.
By the time most of the stampeders got to Dawson most of the gold claims were staked,
and by the summer of 1899 many of them had hightailed it down the Yukon River to
Nome, where you could literally scoop gold up off the beach. You could also play faro
with Wyatt Earp, legally settle a quarrel with a public fight, belly up to the bar at the
Behring Sea saloon for a “Snake's Kiss,” or be a victim of one of eighty murders the first
summer alone. According to E.C. Trelawney-Ansell, Nome during the Gold Rush was
“filled with gamblers, cut-throats and murderers of the worst kind.” Then the law arrived
in the form of Judge Arthur H. Noyes, and things got even worse, with the miners afraid
to work their claims for fear that Judge Noyes and his henchmen would hear of it and
jump them.
Downtown Nome is not very prepossessing, a lot of old houses on pilings looking
vaguely Victorian, most of them still lived in. There is a walking tour which takes in,
among other things, Leonhard Seppala's cabin and a plaque commemorating The Stock-
ade, old Nome's red light district. In 1900 Nome was Alaska's largest city, with an un-
stable (in both senses of the word) population of twenty to forty thousand (sources vary).
One of the thing not on the walking tour is the rock safe on Lomen Street that the Three
Lucky Swedes built to house all their gold. Surrounded by modern homes, overgrown
with fireweed, doorless, it stills looks like it would stand up to anything short of dynamite.
By the 1920's the easy gold was gone, and picks and shovels were replaced with
dredges. The population had shrunk to less than a thousand. World War II brought it back,
when Nome was the last American port of call before the Lend-Lease aircraft crossed the
Bering Strait into the Russian Far East. There are almost as many Quonset huts left from
