The first Christian missionaries in Eastern Interior Alaska did not follow the miners who began arriving toward the end of the 1800s. Rather, missionaries preceded the miners, following instead Hudson’s Bay Company as it...
The small frame house shown in the drawing, located in Eagle, Alaska, is where Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen (1872-1928) spent several months during the winter of 1905-06. He had mushed to Eagle, 400 miles...
Chicken dredge in 1999 The Fairbanks Exploration Company’s (FE Co.) Dredge No. 4 (also called the Pedro dredge) in Chicken originally operated along Pedro Creek just north of Fairbanks. Built by the Yuba Manufacturing...
If you have an eye for detail the front door is a give-away. Otherwise, glancing at Eagle’s old Northern Commercial Company (NC Co.) store, shown in the drawing, you might be deceived into thinking...
Ferryman’s cabin at Big Delta When the Alaska Road Commission (ARC) was created in 1905, it undertook the herculean task of building roads and trails throughout the Territory. One of its first projects was...
This past Friday I had a one-evening-only art show at the Morris Thompson Cultural Center here is Fairbanks. Saw some old friends, made some new ones–even sold a few drawings. For some one like...
Rika’s Roadhouse in later winter 2011 Big Delta—so named because of its location at the confluence of the Delta and Tanana Rivers, and to differentiate it from Delta Telegraph Station on the nearby Little...
Old Chicken schoolhouse as it looked in the 1990s The first time we visited Chicken in the 1990s there was little you could see from the Taylor highway. Downtown Chicken (adjacent to the highway)...
The City of Eagle sits beside the Yukon River six miles west of the Canadian border. It was established by disappointed miners returning from the Klondike, but mining is only part of the area’s...
John and Florence Sullivan (veterans of the Klondike, Nome and Fairbanks gold rushes) built a sod-roofed log roadhouse during the winter of 1905-06 midway along the 55-mile-long Donnelly-Washburn Cut-off. The cut-off was a Valdez-Fairbanks...
