5.5 FAIRBANKS AND THE AMERICAN FRONTIER: FROM THE GOLD RUSH TO THE GOLDEN HEART

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Gerlach, S. Craig, Peter M. Bowers, and William H. Adams (1998) 5.5 Fairbanks and the American Frontier: From the Gold Rush to the Golden Heart. In Historical Development of the Chena River Waterfront, Fairbanks, Alaska: An Archaeological Perspective, edited and compiled by Peter M. Bowers and Brian L. Gannon, CD-ROM. Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities, Fairbanks.

When E.T. Barnette landed above the mouth of the Chena to off-load supplies for a trading venture in 1901, he initiated a chain of events that resulted in the founding, settlement, and urbanization of Fairbanks. While Barnette may have been a colorful figure in his own right, profiteers like him were common on the American frontier. A few like Barnette succeeded financially, at least in the short run, and as fleeting as their financial success may have been, their names are part of recorded history; the names of those who had marginal success or failed entirely are lost in obscurity. With the westward American expansion, miners, adventurers, and entrepreneurs followed one mining boom after another until, finally, they reached Dawson, Fairbanks, Nome, and several lesser-known northern boom towns. Although most prospectors returned "home in rags," a lucky few returned home with riches; a few stayed after the initial booms to build homes, settle, and take up the land on a permanent basis. While there is a certain appeal in our image of the fur trapper, trader, and prospector coping with the "raw, uncivilized, and wild," there is an enduring but less often told story in the lives of those who came to stay, who transformed the land and were transformed by it as they built homes and made lives on the Alaskan landscape.

Throughout this report we have used the term "frontier." In this section we look at the concept of the frontier, and examine it from the perspective of the urbanization process that transformed Fairbanks from a wilderness settlement to a major supply center. While the general story of the northern frontier has been well told by Melody Webb,⁶⁸ we focus on changes in Fairbanks as the town developed from 1901 through the late 1920s. In particular, we are interested in the historic archaeological record of how Fairbanks shifted from a locality of relatively minor significance in relation to supply centers such as Skagway, Dawson and St. Michael, to a primary urban supply and service center for interior Alaska.⁶⁹

The material culture, architecture (whether log or frame), transportation technologies and networks, utilities and provisioning systems of Fairbanks reflect larger economic and logistic processes of pioneer colonization. There are, however, some problems that are unique to permanent settlement of the boreal forest, especially in a location so remote from major supply centers to the east and south, and to sustaining human populations not directly engaged in the subsistence economy. This is true despite the fact that the settling of interior Alaska by Euroamericans occurred relatively late in the American experience.

Fairbanks In The Early 20th Century

With the exception of its first two to three years of existence, Fairbanks was an urban center situated in the middle of an economic and cultural frontier, and it boomed from 1903 to 1909 (Section 2.2). It was a place of opportunity and rapid growth, and considerable effort was directed toward developing service and supply lines to facilitate the needs of miners and others working in the hills and along the creeks surrounding town.

From the establishment of Barnette’s Cache in 1901 and the first major recorded strike by Felix Pedro in 1902, the story of Fairbanks is the story of gold and the development of a supply center that arose to make gold mining more effective and more efficient.⁷⁰ In the early period, especially from 1901 to 1903-04, Fairbanks was effectively a satellite of Dawson which was then a core of the northern gold mining frontier. Many residents of the new camp perceived tremendous financial opportunity, and they conspired in every way possible to collect goods, luxuries, and commodities for transport to the booming town of Fairbanks. Many of those who had experienced the gold mining boom in the Klondike knew that the real bonanza was in goods and service rather than in the gold-bearing gravels. By 1904, Dawson was clearly in decline and Fairbanks was on the rise, with an estimated population in the latter of between 1,500 and 1,800 people.⁷¹

Many, if not most of those who appear on the post-Klondike Alaskan mining frontiers had tried their luck in one or more booms from the western American Plains to California and Canada. Many were experienced refugees from one mining boom or another: "In the spring and summer of 1904, the Fairbanks stampede was in full swing. It was a repetition of Dawson and Nome days, except there were no cheechakoes. If any came, they were quickly absorbed and no one noticed them."⁷² Not originating in the Klondike alone, mining hopefuls poured into Fairbanks and the Tanana from Skagway, Nome, Valdez and Seattle as well.⁷³

Within only a few years of its founding, Fairbanks began to develop all of the organizational and structural complexity of any early 20th century North American urban center. The town soon boasted a growing population, a burgeoning waterfront business district, at least three sawmills, a town survey with established streets, a tram line, theaters, telephone lines, the Tanana Valley Railroad, bridges, hotels, breweries, blacksmith shops, a Natatorium, a newspaper, post office, and other fine business establishments and culinary emporia.⁷⁴ To complete the urban scene, saloons, prostitutes, lawyers, bankers, and the same entrepreneurial "shady sorts" who appeared in all North American frontier towns not only had arrived, but were thriving. By 1906, Fairbanks was connected to a larger world via established commercial transportation routes such as the Yukon and Tanana rivers, the Valdez Trail, and overland routes to Canada and elsewhere. The Washington-Alaska Military Cable and Telegraph System (WAMCATS) was constructed between 1900 and 1903, connecting Fairbanks and other localities to the military garrisons at Fort Liscum at Valdez, Fort Egbert at Eagle, and Fort Gibbon near Tanana.⁷⁵

Urban influences are amply documented by the Barnette Project archaeological data. Numerous artifact types excavated from the earliest stratigraphic levels reflect not a rustic peripheral economy, but rather a robust urban center. Material goods were not utilitarian or home-made as one might expect. For example, the types of clothing hardware (e.g. buttons, buckles, and suspender and garter clips) and shoes attest to a populace influenced by urban styles of the period. Health and beauty aids (e.g. shampoo, toothbrushes, perfume, and patent medicines) and purse frames further illustrate cosmopolitan influences. Manufactured toys offer similar evidence of permanence, as children became more numerous in the community. A variety of exotic, elaborate ceramic and glassware reflects non-utilitarian and some foreign sources that one would not associate with a mining frontier. Indeed, during the Steamboat era of Fairbanks’ development, 10.6% of goods with identifiable sources were of foreign manufacture, and 46.5% were from distant east coast sources (Tables 5.12 and 5.13).

A mere four years after it was a wilderness from the Euroamerican point of view, Fairbanks was a growing urban center serving the needs of a vast hinterland. The areas surrounding Fairbanks were not incorporated into this urbanity, but the capital, energy and emphasis clearly shifted from Dawson to Fairbanks between 1901-04, reflecting larger changes in the nature of the northern gold mining frontier.

After the initial gold rush, Fairbanks quickly shifted from the economic margin to full participation in the national market economy. The Barnette archaeological data demonstrate the flow of exotic goods into the community (Section 5.2). As soon as sufficient money was available, either in the form of gold extracted from the mines, or investment money brought from the outside, building materials and other aspects of American material culture were imported. With regular patterns of shipping established, the people of Fairbanks appear to have had access to almost anything that other Americans, rural and urban alike, had at the time (Section 5.2). Given sufficient money for purchase and time for shipping, early residents of Fairbanks could, and did, purchase by mail order the same items that were available in Seattle, San Francisco, or New York through the links of the steamboat and, later, the railroad. In terms of clothing, tools, implements, and other "artifacts" of early 20th century America, Fairbanks residents had access to the world. The artifacts found in the Barnette Street excavations and those revealed in early 20th century photographs and newspapers reflect more than simple factors of necessity or survival, and included considerations of good taste, beauty, and luxury as well.

Like most frontiers described by historians and geographers, the transition from Fairbanks as a marginally important "periphery" of Dawson, to Fairbanks as the "core" of a distinctive region was extremely rapid. Fairbanks did not completely lose its distinctive frontier character after 1904, but it had become a centralized, urban hub serving the needs of a vast interior hinterland. With the passing of the early prospecting phase and the transition from Barnette’s Cache to Fairbanks as incipient urban center, the entire region experienced extensive changes. Fairbanks residents were no longer moving on, but were settling in and were finding more or less permanent ways to live with and in the boreal forest of interior Alaska.

Unlike many other western mining gold rush towns, after the boom phase had passed and people had found other reasons to stay, Fairbanks citizens began to build their city and improve their quality of life. Fairbanks winters were longer and colder than most western boom towns, supplies were subject to periodic shortages or absences, but the emphasis was still on developing an infrastructure to satisfy the real and perceived needs of the urban population, and the economic interests of miners working in the hills and along the creeks around Fairbanks. Fairbanks developed as a town and, like similar frontier towns in other regions, began to provide its citizens with safe and serviceable roads, utilities, and government structure.

Fairbanks was incorporated on December 26, 1903.⁷⁶ Almost immediately, local promoters and developers conducted a survey of town blocks and lots, began laying sidewalks and drains on First Avenue, and attempted to provide fire protection.⁷⁷ Franchises for the supply of telephone service, power, water, heat and light were granted, and these services were quickly available. Archaeological evidence of buried steamlines, electric and telephone wire insulators, telephone batteries, incandescent and arc lighting artifacts, pipes and plumbing fixtures are some of the examples of such an infrastructure visible in the Barnette data. Dimensional lumber used in building construction demonstrates the feasibility of commercial sawmills, which facilitated the transition from log to frame construction, and the NC Co. was also in place by the end of 1903, reflecting at least some perception of opportunity and growth on the part of local and outside business interests.⁷⁸

By 1904 the federal court was established in Fairbanks,⁷⁹ adding both a political and social consciousness to the new community. The urban population had grown from 500-600 in early 1904 to as many as 2,000 by the end of 1904.⁸⁰ The number of saloons, gambling houses and hotels had multiplied and business was thriving. Blacksmiths, tinsmiths and other trade and craftspeople were serving the needs of the miners and others in the local population. "Grocery advertisements listed pate’ de foie gras, crab meat, Russian caviar, and imported anchovies."⁸¹ A tram line was laid along the wharf to facilitate the movement of goods around the riverfront warehouses, and the Tanana Mines and Railway Company served the commercial interests of Fairbanks, as the town increasingly became the hub of economic activity. The railroad was completed July 17, 1905, creating a transportation grid for the distribution of imported and local goods and commodities, and linking Fairbanks to the miners working the creeks and to the smaller, outlying towns that were beginning to emerge within the district (Figure 1.1). The Tanana Valley Railroad was completed as far as Gilmore in 1905 and to Chatanika in 1907.⁸²

Development, stabilization and urbanization characterize much of the first decade of Fairbanks’ growth. By 1908, Fairbanks was referred to as the "metropolis of the North."⁸³ From annual Christmas dinners at the elegant Pioneer Hotel, to "shady doings" at the California Saloon and Tanana Club, Fairbanks had all of the superficial activities of any developed western city. Between 1906 and 1909 the Northern Navigation Company and the North American Trading and Transportation Company controlled most of the commerce along the riverfront and provided an infrastructure with permanence in mind (Section 5.3).⁸⁴ During the Barnette dig archaeological remains of the steamboat dock were found still embedded in the river bank, a hidden reminder of the steamboat days.

By 1909, placer gold production had peaked and begun to decline in the Fairbanks district (Figure 2.1). Prospectors had found most of the deposits that could be easily worked by small, local mine companies. Miners began working lower grade deposits; the work was slow, difficult, and moderately successful. Large-scale hydraulic mining techniques and dredging that appeared as early as 1910-12 did not dominate the mining landscape until the late 1920s and 1930s, when operators began to mine the deeper low-grade deposits. The decline in gold production continued through World War I, reaching a low point in the early 1920s, and then oscillated between conditions of slow growth or decline until 1942 when the federal government closed all gold mining nationwide.⁸⁵

With a developing urban infrastructure and the arrival of settlers who came to Fairbanks with an interest in more than the placer deposits along the creeks, the town made the transition from camp to community. Residents, from mobile male miners occupying ephemeral resource extraction sites to city businessmen to homesteading families, committed to interior Alaska as "home."

Fairbanks and the "Last Frontier"

As Alaskans and as Americans, the idea of the "frontier" continues to shape our image of ourselves as part of an expanding nation, whether eastern, western, or northern, intrusive or indigenous.⁸⁶ For better or worse, the portrayal of the frontier in popular culture, in expressive art and literature, and academic disciplines such as history, geography and anthropology is secure. Alaska bills itself as the "last frontier," possibly with some justification. We celebrate this heritage every year with the Golden Days parade, sourdough rituals dedicated to the frontier, and special tributes paid to the "pioneers" of Alaska. It matters little that the forms of expression and dress seen during the Golden Days festivities often bear little resemblance to turn of the century dress as revealed in early photographs, early mail order catalogs, and archaeological excavations. What matters is that we continue to celebrate the frontier, not that there is at best a vague and ambiguous relationship between the myth of the frontier, the reality of life as it was and as it continues to be lived, who it was that came to settle interior of Alaska, where they came from, and why they stayed or left.

The modern image of "frontier life" is still largely rooted in myths made and propagated by those who never lived in a frontier. Movie producers, pulp novelists, and local development boosters perpetuate the myth because it is good business. The realities of life in early 20th century Alaska were considerably more mundane and complex than we would like to believe, and were rarely as dramatic as portrayed in the popular press. The image that we carry of ourselves as "Alaskan" continues to revolve around our image of Alaska as the last American frontier, regardless of the underlying geographic, social and economic contradictions inherent in the very nature of the frontier and the pioneers who colonized it. While the frontier of the explorer, trapper, trader, and prospector may be a common denominator for all western American frontiers, the Alaskan frontier is northern rather than western. It was shaped by a different history, by competition among its own unique blend of foreign and indigenous ethnic groups, and by different climatic and ecological forces than the American West. For many of the miners and early would-be settlers this was not the first frontier where they had tried their luck, but for some it would be their last.

The scholarly pursuit of frontier studies has a long and controversial history in many fields of social science, and we will do little more here than note that the whole idea of the frontier is fraught with conceptual ambiguity and terminological confusion, and that it is difficult to define from either a cultural or an archaeological perspective.⁸⁷ The idea of the frontier was certainly not invented by Frederick Jackson Turner, but its significance was codified in his various writings as a "place west of the settlements," and as something distinctively American.⁸⁸ Turner’s frontier is somewhat more complex than either his followers or his detractors typically acknowledge,⁸⁹ but in essence he argued for orderly westward migration across the continent through a series of successive physical and geographic frontiers. Waves of distinct occupational and ethnic groups overlapped and competed with one another, until the development of a new social order, the emergence of towns, and the arrival of "civilization" transformed nature of the frontier from "wild" to domesticated.⁹⁰

Turner does not specifically acknowledge Alaska in his original 1893 essay,⁹¹ although toward the end of his career he was clearly intrigued by the idea of Alaska as the "last frontier."⁹² When Turner wrote his first paper on this topic in 1893, the American frontier had been "officially" closed since 1890. The interesting paradox is that E.T. Barnette would not cache his supplies above the mouth of the Chena River until 1901, eleven years after the frontier was arbitrarily declared closed by bureaucrats living east of the Mississippi River. Barnette and the prospectors, miners, and others who moved into the Upper Tanana might have been surprised to learn that the frontier was closed, especially given the inauspicious circumstances of Barnette’s "discovery" of what would eventually become the city of Fairbanks. Alaska certainly presented the perceived economic opportunities and physical difficulties characteristic of most frontiers. Like the falsely-reported death of a famous American novelist, statements that the frontier was closed may have been premature.

Another articulate and prolific frontier historian, Walter Prescott Webb,⁹³ saw in the harsh physical reality of the American west the seeds of cultural innovation and technological change. Changes in architecture, transportation, social institutions, laws, and alteration of a social order (that may have been born in the east but could not flourish west of the 100th Meridian, the approximate boundary dividing the humid, forested, east, from the arid, treeless west) were all part of Webb’s frontier. The frontier was the arid, treeless Great Plains,⁹⁴ the so-called Great American desert, and unique cultural and institutional adjustments were required to facilitate human use of the region. For Webb, and for many of those historians who followed him, the harsh physical reality of life in the American west precipitated innovation in a pioneer culture that had largely disappeared from the eastern seaboard. On the frontier a sectional culture was literally born in place, from the commingling of diverse ethnic groups, distinctive patterns of land use, and the constraints imposed by a harsh physical environment and climate.⁹⁵

Not surprisingly, most westerners, including Alaskans, continue to find Webb’s view of western culture as indigenous and distinctive rather than borrowed and copied, both compelling and appealing. This is the image that is carried by those westerners who live closest to the land, as well as by most Alaskans, who continue to see themselves as "pioneers" on the last frontier regardless of which floor of the office building they work on. In large part, the pioneer image and the frontier myth transcend the fact that Anchorage today looks like a cold Fresno, or any one of a thousand other American cities, and modern day Fairbanks has lost most of the unique cultural and architectural flavor of Fairbanks during the gold rush. Unlike the early 20th century when the hub of Fairbanks was its vibrant waterfront, the city core area today has little clear focus.

The frontier has never been defined to everyone’s satisfaction, whether scholar or layman. Any operational definition of the frontier must be fluid because of the very nature of frontiers as experienced by those who would inhabit or study them. Most students of the American frontier perceive of the phenomenon from a colonialist perspective in terms of core-periphery relationships.⁹⁶ The central theme of study is the infrastructure and core-periphery linkages that tie colonial entities to a larger world system, and that demarcate territorial boundaries between the core immigrant pioneers and the outlying indigenous people. In this sense the concept of frontiers and borders is intricately linked with the idea of cultures in contact. Thus, the "frontier" is simultaneously moving, geographical, territorial, cultural, conceptual, competitive, open, or closed, depending upon the problem and the region being investigated. In recent years, western historians have praised and damned, buried and revived the concept time and again.

The frontier concept has been described by one historian as "ethnocentric" and "vague."⁹⁷ Ideally, the frontier concept should perform the task of describing, explaining, and encapsulating the colonization of North America. The settling of the American west is not easy to understand under any circumstances, and the effort to reduce a tangle of inter-related processes to a simple world defined by a geographical line makes a tough task even tougher.⁹⁸ In Turner’s sense of the term, the frontier is narrowed in scope almost to the point of being useless because it ignores the complexity of conquest, glosses over the impossibility of knowing when a frontier is open and when it is closed, and restricts study to conventional domains such as mining, logging, and cattle ranching, ignoring many essential areas of human interaction.

Howard Lamar and Leonard Thompson⁹⁹ expanded Forbes¹⁰⁰ earlier re-definition of the frontier as an "inter-group contact situation," involving such processes as acculturation, assimilation, miscegenation, race prejudice, conquest, imperialism, and colonialism,¹⁰¹ beyond simply a boundary or line, to refer to a territory or zone of inter-penetration between two previously distinct societies. Although not entirely satisfactory, Lamar and Thompson do explicitly address the problem of the opening and closing of the frontier; the frontier opens when the first representatives of the intrusive society arrive, and closes when a single political authority has established hegemony over the zone. In this context, it is difficult to determine whether the founding of Fairbanks in 1901 initiated or terminated the process of frontier colonization. If we return to Turner’s definition of the frontier as borrowed from the Census Department, as a place where the population is lower than two persons per square mile, Fairbanks exceeded this number with the first mining rush, and the mining frontier was closed virtually the moment that it opened.¹⁰²

The so-called new historiographers of the American West¹⁰³ have done little to sharpen our theoretical understanding of the nature of the American frontier. However, they have done much to show us just how complex the American frontier was in terms of the ethnic, cultural, and even moral diversity of those who came both to exploit and inhabit it, and, they have exposed the inherent weakness in standard western history. The "new historiographers" have given voice to a multiplicity of different ethnic groups, both foreign and indigenous, people who have previously gone unrecognized or at least underrepresented in American histories written for the general public and for the college classroom. From this standpoint, it is clear that the American frontier is something more than the story of the westward expansion of the white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant. It is in fact difficult to define precisely who the "typical" American pioneer immigrant was and from whence they came. While not especially rigorous as formulated by the new American historians, the approach contrasts with previous views of the frontier based solely on a colonialist view of core-periphery relationships involving territorial advancement, boundary maintenance, and relatively homogenous colonial populations.¹⁰⁴

From the standpoint of ethnic complexity, it is perhaps more useful to view the interior Alaskan frontier experience as an interaction zone where encounters take place among peoples from diverse homelands,¹⁰⁵ and within a landscape that is quite different from any other encountered in the western United States.

By definition the interior Alaskan frontier in the first decade of the 20th century was both insular and cosmopolitan (the former oriented both towards long-term settlement and the latter towards classic short-term exploitative colonial enterprise).¹⁰⁶ If, as modern travel brochures would have us believe, Alaska is in fact still a frontier, then it continues to incorporate elements of both these types. There are those who live here because this is their home, and there are those who are here to serve outside financial interests, or as colonial administrators for bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. Those who do consider Alaska home continue to have a psychological commitment to the general notion of the frontier, in spite of the fact that we live in a very urbanized state. Most of Alaska’s residents live in towns and cities rather than in the country, and very few of us engage the environment directly as part of the daily process of making our living. However, our license plates sport the logo "Alaska, The Last Frontier," a phrase that locals (if not western historians) seem to have an intuitive understanding of.

The psychological appeal of the frontier myth may thus override the reality of contemporary Alaskan lifestyles, and one wonders if Alaskans would be as satisfied with the license plate slogan proposed by Patricia Limerick: "Alaska: The Last Zone of Cultural Interpenetration and Contested Hegemony."¹⁰⁷ This version may be more accurate, but it is unlikely to facilitate tourist traffic to the state. The popular understanding of the "frontier," and serious scholarly efforts to reckon with complex patterns and processes of colonization are obviously not of the same order or magnitude.

A key observation which emerged from the Barnette Project is that between 1901 and about 1904-05, Fairbanks changed from the peripheral unit of mining concerns in the Yukon and other parts of Canada, to being an economic and cultural core for mining and major resource extraction interests within Alaska. Although the role of Fairbanks over the years has alternately shifted from core to periphery and periphery to core, one point seems clear: regardless of how independent we perceive ourselves to be in the ideological context of the "last frontier," we continue to be controlled by outside economic and resource extraction interests. In this sense, Alaska is still a frontier. While we may perceive ourselves as independent and individualistic, decisions about land and resource use are generally made outside the state of Alaska, or at least in response to national and international rather than local forces. While we often view these as recent developments, stemming at least in part from the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, development of the Trans-Alaska Oil Pipeline, and other legislation related to resource extraction, many of the resource issues confronted by Alaska today have their origins in the nature of Alaska as a frontier and its relation to a global economic and political system that evolved from the past century through World War II and beyond.

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