Alaska Gold: Life on the New Frontier
The Photographs, Letters & Artifacts of the McDonald Brothers
September 4, 1997 - January 3, 1998

Before the discovery of gold on Alaska's Seward Peninsula, the only outsiders to visit this sparsely populated tundra were whalers, missionaries, traders, and reindeer herders. But, in September 1898, three Scandinavians struck pay dirt on Anvil Creek and word of the discovery spread. The stampede was on. Among the first to arrive were miners already working in the Klondike, but by June 1899 ships from Seattle, San Francisco and beyond were arriving with hordes of gold seekers. This motley group became the inhabitants of Anvil City (later renamed Nome), the rowdy frontier town that sprang up where the tundra meets the Bering Sea.

Alaska Gold: Life on the New Frontier tells the story of two fortune seekers, Wilfred and Edmund McDaniel of San Jose, who traveled to Nome in 1900 to try their luck in this arctic El Dorado. When the McDaniels arrived from San Francisco on the steamship Senator, they found mile after mile of beach covered with tents and thousands of prospectors mining Nome's beaches. After their 3,000 mile voyage, they did not have to travel far to begin mining -- they pitched a tent eight miles north of Nome and began rocking beach sand. This was their first season of prospecting in Alaska. From 1900 through 1903, they sailed back to California each October before the Bering Sea froze, and returned to Nome after the spring thaw; in 1904, they began wintering in Nome and mining year-round. Wilfred memorialized their journeys to and from Alaska and their experiences in the arctic by taking photographs with his view camera. The brothers also corresponded regularly with family and friends in California.

Wilfred and Edmund had grown up on their parents' apricot ranch in temperate San Jose, and the arctic climate challenged them. Winters in Nome were long and brutal, sunlight lasting only four hours at the winter solstice, and the temperature often dropping to fifty or sixty degrees below zero. When outdoors, working or traveling by dogsled, the brothers wore Inupiaq clothing -- muskrat and reindeer hide parkas, hoods trimmed with wolverine fur, and waterproof sealskin boots stuffed with dry grass. But not all was harsh and forbidding. On a trip to Cone Mountain, Wilfred wrote, "The morning is warm and sunny, just like California weather in May. The distant mountains are white with snow and the dark blue Bering Sea makes a grand picture as it sparkles in the sunlight." In the summer, when the gently rolling plain of the Seward Peninsula greened, the McDaniels could travel overland to enjoy the natural beauty of the landscape and to harvest the bounty of wildflowers and berries offered up by the tundra. Anglers also found the streams and rivers generous. Wilfred reported having the best fishing of his life in Otter Creek.

Though initially not interested in his native Alaskan neighbors, Wilfred befriended Seeyauk, a young Inupiaq boy, and the boy's family. It was from Seeyauk that Wilfred learned some of the Inupiaq language. Seeyauk shared native delicacies with the brothers -- a piece of seal liver or a choice cut of seal meat, fish, or berries from the tundra -- and taught them about native life. Later, the McDaniels expanded their travels by crossing the Bering Strait and visiting native Siberian villages.

The brothers' tent at the beach's edge provided little protection against the bitter cold and wind, so in 1901 they bought a 16 x 20 ft. log cabin for twenty dollars. They threw a canvas cover over the roof to prevent leaks, and Wilfred boasted in a letter home, "Our cabin is the best on the beach." Later, they bought cabins at Quartz and Edwards creeks. These became homes-away-from-home for the McDaniels, especially when Edmund's wife Jessie arrived in 1904. She helped create a homey space, replete with wallpaper, curtains, and bric-a-brac on the shelves. After the flimsy, drafty tent that had been their first shelter in Nome, the cabins were a welcome change. The comfort and safety afforded by their cabins also provided a strong counterpoint to the lawless and dangerous Nome, where the amalgam of prospectors, schemers, confidence men, and riffraff mugged, assaulted, brawled, and otherwise caused mayhem regularly. Nome's population had exploded from a few hundred to over twenty thousand in a year, making it the largest and most lawless town in Alaska. Gangs operated freely in the crowded streets -- men sometimes hauled away cabins at night with their owners still in them. Rowdy saloons proliferated along Front Street; in 1900, Nome had fifty saloons, a number that soon doubled. Wilfred wrote in 1900: " We are away from town and glad of it. Don't want to go there. It's full of bums and sure thing men. Lots of men are getting in bad circumstances here. I think the government will have to take them out."

As boys, the McDaniel brothers first prospected near their parents' ranch in San Jose; as grown men, they worked their father's placer mine in Trinity County. This experience helped them greatly in their venture on the Seward Peninsula. Unlike many gold seekers who abandoned Nome frustrated after a single season, the McDaniels patiently and diligently applied their knowledge of sluicing and other mining methods to increase their yield of gold from the beach sand and pay dirt. The brothers expanded the family operation, hiring three men to help with the mining and using a gasoline engine to pump sea water through sluices. During the winter, they also turned to steam-thawing to melt through the permafrost and mine ancient beach lines below the tundra. Their time prospecting in the arctic allowed Wilfred and Edmund to be entrepreneurial, independent, and self-reliant, much as the forty-niners had been during California's Gold Rush. Although the McDaniels did not make any major gold strikes, their steady, persistent work from 1900 to 1906 paid off. Indeed, of the thousands of prospectors who worked the Nome area, they were among the few who succeeded. When they finally left Nome, they had collected enough gold to pay off the mortgage on their parents' San Jose ranch and establish themselves as contractors building homes in the Santa Clara Valley.

The McDaniels traveled thousands of miles to prospect for gold in Nome. Once in Alaska, they did more than simply dig up the land to reveal its hidden treasure -- they grew to appreciate its stark beauty, natural rhythms, and native peoples. The words penned by the McDaniels, Wilfred's photographs, and the items they collected while in the Arctic all serve as trail markers for us today, clues to what life was like for the prospectors who dared to endure hardships in the far north for the sake of finding the precious ore. The McDaniel brothers' legacy is not a poke full of gold dust or a stack of ingots, but rather a trail of experiences and memories revealed to us through their artful photographs, thoughtful letters, and choice artifacts.

• Guest curator: Jeff Kunkel
  
• Brochure text: Jack Hotchkiss
  
• Photographer: Wilfred McDaniel
  
• We gratefully acknowledge the generous owners of the McDaniel family collection: Wilfred Jr. & Lois McDaniel, Robert & Irene Johnson.