How a 1980 Alaska Law Wrote a Gold Rush Into a Preserve’s Purpose

Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve shelters moose, Dall sheep, grizzly bears, wolves and peregrine falcons across 2.5 million acres. But the law that created it gives the preserve a second job: to “protect and interpret historical sites and events associated with the gold rush on the Yukon River” (Title II, Section 201). A National Park Service article argues that these few words matter because they are more targeted than the purposes the same law gave to other lands.

The law is the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA). When President Carter signed it on December 2, 1980, he said the country had never before seized the opportunity to preserve so much of its natural and cultural heritage on so grand a scale. The act created ten new national park units and added to three existing parks, for a total of 43.6 million acres of new parkland. Nearly 54 million acres became new wildlife refuges, and almost 57 million acres of the protected land would become designated wilderness, tripling the size of the National Wilderness System.

History written into the law

According to the article, the president’s main concern was “the living earth” and the damage industrial development can do. Cultural heritage was on the agenda too: the act directed some of the new units to look after history, archeology and the study of Alaska Native cultures, past and present.

The Yukon-Charley wording is aimed at one event, the Klondike-Alaska Gold Rush of 1897-1899. It aligns the preserve closely with Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park, created in 1976, which covers the southern end of the stampeders’ journey, including Skagway’s historic downtown and the Chilkoot and White Pass routes; Yukon-Charley covers the mining that spilled out of the Canadian Klondike and spread across Alaska by way of the Yukon River. The two other Alaska units devoted mainly to history are Sitka National Historical Park, which focuses on Tlingit culture and Alaska’s Russian colonial period, and the Aleutian Islands World War II National Historic Area, based in Unalaska.

The gold behind the mandate

Gold was found along the Fortymile River, which straddles the border with Canada, in 1886, and in 1893 prospectors struck another rich field at Birch Creek, more than 150 miles to the west, where they founded Circle City as a supply depot. All of this was prelude to the news of 1897 that gold on the Klondike River, in Canadian territory, lay, in its discoverer’s words, “between flaky slabs of rock like cheese in a sandwich.” An estimated 100,000 gold-seekers set out over the next two years, though many gave up for lack of money or confidence. Between 30,000 and 40,000 reached Dawson City and various points in Alaska where lesser stampedes were under way. The article says this burst of activity permanently and profoundly changed Alaska.

Paddlewheel steamboats carried gold-seekers along the Yukon, and in winter dog-sled trails ran from the Klondike and Dawson across the border to American camps, among them Fourth of July Creek, Charley River, Coal Creek and Woodchopper Creek, all now inside the preserve. Early mining was arduous and the gold scant, and most people left when gold was found near Nome in 1899 and Fairbanks in 1903. Placer mining carried on, though, and boomed in the 1930s when two gold dredges arrived at Coal Creek and Woodchopper Creek. They could excavate and process 3,000 cubic yards of gravel in a day and kept yielding profits through the 1950s. Later, individuals leased the same claims and used bulldozers, hydraulic pumps and sluice boxes. Because the mining lasted so long, the mandate is read broadly to cover mining before, during and after the short Klondike-Alaska rush.

Documenting, then protecting

Before the act, park planners had to convince Congress and the public that new parks were worthwhile. Historian Melody Webb was one of those hired to make the case for what became Yukon-Charley. With a local trapper as guide she spent a summer combing the 110 miles of the Yukon between Eagle and Circle for historic sites, and recorded roadhouses, trapping cabins, mines, mining machinery, trails, ditches and tailings piles. That research produced Yukon Frontiers (1977) and The Last Frontier (1985), which the article calls the only comprehensive study of the region’s history. Documentation like this is essential, it says, because most Americans will never visit the preserve, and those who do may float past historic sites without knowing.

The law also tells managers to “protect… historical sites,” which the article calls a challenging and forever evolving task. Staff follow the Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for the Treatment of Historic Properties (latest revision, 1995): alter or destroy as little as possible of a building’s original material, its “historic fabric,” and keep the features that make it distinctive. Backcountry buildings are battered by sun, wind, rain and snow and threatened by flooding, erosion, wildfire, insects and even bears, and log cabins, mining camps, roadhouses, elevated log caches and giant dredges on steel pontoons each age differently.

The first efforts followed 1986, when the Park Service took ownership of former mining claims along Coal Creek. They held the camp’s buildings, the company’s gold dredge and a two-story roadhouse built on the riverbank by the old-time miner Frank Slaven. Workers painted camp buildings in colors matching the originals, put a new asphalt-shingle roof on the dredge and improved the roadhouse, whose foundation logs were rotting and sinking. A hazardous-materials crew removed mercury from the ground near the Assay Building and cleared old fuel and lubricant drums, and historians nominated the Coal Creek Historic District to the National Register of Historic Places.

Slaven’s Roadhouse on August 26, 1938 and today. Significant restoration took place in the early 1990s. U.S. Geological Survey, John B. Mertie Collection.

Work has continued. Crews replaced rotting foundation timbers and repaired roofs at Cheese Creek, where the dredge was built in 1936. A small cabin at Sam Creek, thought to be the oldest intact log structure in the preserve, got a larger roof and new spruce beams in its walls. In 2017 a crew spent three weeks replacing the Coal Creek dredge’s leaking roofs and then its rotten stairs, walkways and handrails, inside and out, for visitor safety. Many sites can be reached only by airplane, boat or helicopter, and the summer season is brief.

A cabin near the mouth of Sam Creek, thought to be the oldest intact log structure in the preserve. NPS / Chris Allan.

Other records reach more people. The Historic American Buildings Survey and Historic American Engineering Record (HABS/HAER) make architectural drawings, historical narratives and archival-quality photographs of important properties; their work in the preserve began in 1984 and was expanded in 2015-2016. Newer tools include 360-degree photography, laser scanning and online virtual tours, and oral history interviews, websites, social media, brochures and posters add to the record.

People as well as land

The article argues that ANILCA broke new ground not only by its size but by how it differed from earlier park-making. With a few words its authors made clear that they were not banishing people from the land or ignoring their deep connections to it, as the law’s protection of subsistence opportunities (Title VIII) and its approval of hunting, trapping and other activities in national preserves (Title XIII) show. By directing managers to pursue cultural topics and protect archeological and historical sites, it adds, ANILCA fit the Park Service’s own Organic Act of 1916, which directs the agency to “conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.”

Sources

• Chris Allan, National Park Service, The Power of a Few Words: How ANILCA Preserves the Human History of Alaska’s Public Lands, Alaska Park Science 21(1), 2022 (Commemorating ANILCA at 40); the source says its views are the author’s own and not necessarily the National Park Service’s; the name Historic American Buildings Survey corrects the source’s “Building”; rewritten in hubnx's own words.