Category: 49 History

Fri, August 07, 2015

Perpetual Motion in the North

by Chris Allan Perpetual motion has been a dream of inventors and tinkerers for millennia, and during the 1890s, when gold was discovered in the Klondike and stampeders rushed northward seeking fortunes, this fantasy of a non-stop machine that needed no fuel arrived in the gold fields. Both dreamers and charlatans were drawn to the concept, and the frauds made money selling their designs or luring gullible investors to some larger scheme. While living in Dawson the Czech traveler and adventurer Jan Welzl (widely known... (Read More)

Sat, July 18, 2015

The 1915 Tanana Chiefs Meeting

by William Schneider [caption id="attachment_3816" align="alignright" width="300"] Group portrait at the first Tanana Chiefs Conference, 1915. Seated front, L to R: Chief Alexander of Tolovana, Chief Thomas of Nenana, Chief Evan of Koschakat, Chief Alexander William of Tanana. Standing at rear, L to R: Chief William of Tanana, Paul Williams of Tanana, and Chief Charlie of Minto. Albert Johnson Photograph Collection, University of Alaska Fairbanks.[/caption] One hundred years ago this month (July 5-6, 1915), Native leaders from the Tanana... (Read More)

Fri, May 29, 2015

A Brief History of the Vessel JUNO, 1799-1811

by Tobin Shorey In 1799, shipwrights in Dighton, Massachusetts, completed construction of the Juno. According to ship registries in Rhode Island, where the Juno was registered in 1800, she measured 82.5 feet long, 24 feet wide, and 12 feet deep, and could displace up to 295 tons fully loaded. [1] A three-masted ship with two decks, the Juno was a fast sailing merchant vessel that had a sharp keel lined with copper. Records say that she was fitted with a... (Read More)

Fri, April 24, 2015

From Russia with Love – Celebrating the accomplishments of Russian mining engineer Peter Petrovich Doroshin

by Thomas K. Bundtzen In April, 2014, the Alaska Mining Hall of Fame Foundation (AMHF) inducted Peter Petrovich Doroshin into its organization during a ceremony held at the foundation’s museum in Fairbanks. To many familiar with the late Russian-American period, Doroshin is credited with finding the first, albeit small, concentrations of placer gold on the Kenai Peninsula in 1848, but he was never able to develop a commercial scale mining operation. Some historians have thus concluded that the Russian mining... (Read More)

Fri, April 17, 2015

Book Review: Hawley, A Kennecott Story

Charles Caldwell Hawley, A Kennecott Story—Three Mines, Four Men and One Hundred Years 1897-1997. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2014. Review by Thomas K. Bundtzen Much of the historic mining legacy in Alaska focuses on the search and development of gold. Although copper, a base metal, may seem less glamorous than gold, its discovery and development played an important role in the early development of Alaska. As the world entered the 20th century, copper proved vital to the... (Read More)