Alaska’s earthquake history has been written on its landscape – its riverbeds, glaciers and mountains – in the centuries before and since man set foot on the Great Land. Most of the early earthquake accounts are fragmentary. There are mentions of two in the Aleutians and the Alaska Peninsula as early as 1786 and 1788, […]
Read MoreAunt Phil’s Trunk July 2014 International Blog Tour 1) Inspire to Read blog – South Africa http://lynelleclarkaspiredwriter.blogspot.com/2014/07/introducing-alaska-and-its-treasures.html “A must have for the history junky.” – Lynelle Clark
Read MoreThe White Pass and Yukon Railroad Co. began construction of its narrow-gauge railway to access the Klondike gold fields in May 1898. Along with the challenge of crossing coastal mountains – and a vertical rise of 3,000 feet in 20 miles near Skagway – engineers had to work around a boundary dispute between the United […]
Read MoreA turn-of-the-last-century pioneer set down roots in the Greatland in the early 1900s that are still with us today in a historical Seward landmark, the Brown & Hawkins building. T. W. Hawkins came to Alaska in 1898 via the Chilkoot Pass to Dawson, Yukon Territory. He searched for gold in the Tanana country, and then […]
Read MoreWhen the U. S. Army took over responsibility for administering Alaska in 1867, law enforcement found it had its hands full trying to stem the flow of liquor into America’s newest property. Up until alcohol possession was legalized in 1899, smugglers brought their illegal brew into Alaska via whalers, fishing vessels, American and foreign ships […]
Read MoreThe first post office in Alaska was established in Sitka on July 23, 1867. John H. Kindaid, who later became an Alaskan governor, was named the first postmaster, three months before Alaska was formally transferred from Russian to American rule. “The Russians maintained no postal system in Alaska,” wrote James S. Couch in “Philately Below […]
Read MoreIn the early 1900s, coal was being shipped from as far away as Cardiff, Wales, to the U.S. Navy’s coal station at Sitka. Some thought that the coal deposits at Chickaloon in the Matanuska Valley might meet the Navy’s requirements. Along with federal Bureau of Mines director A.M. Holmes, Jack Dalton went to look the […]
Read MoreSeventy-four days after Appomattox, and almost two months after the Confederate Army stopped fighting on land, the last gun of the U.S. Civil War was fired in the Bering Sea. Not knowing the war had ended, the commander of an English-built Confederate vessel named The Shenandoah fired upon several whalers near Saint Lawrence Island on […]
Read MoreThe remote islands of the Aleutian Chain, home to the Unangan people for more than 8,000 years, endured the first invasion on American soil since the War of 1812. On June 6, 1942, at around 10:30 p.m., 500 Japanese troops came ashore at Kiska. They captured a small American naval weather detachment of 10 men, […]
Read MoreWhen Land Office chief Andrew Christensen opened the auction for the townsite above Ship Creek on July 10, 1915, bidding became so brisk that prospective lot owners couldn’t hold down prices. After sales closed a week later, 655 lots had sold for almost $150,000 (more than $3.5 million in today’s dollars). Christensen claimed the sale […]
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