Digital Bob Archive

The Basin Road and its extension, the Perseverance Trail, give access - when they are usable - to one of Juneau's greatest treasures, the Gold Creek Valley. From this short, steep-sided valley with its turbulent stream came much of the wealth that built the town in the first place, then contributed to its growth for more than fifty years.

In 1890 a Juneau newspaper estimated that up until that time placer miners on Gold Creek had washed out gold valued at around three million dollars. It did not name a figure for the several small lode mines then operating in the valley. Forty years later the U.S. Geological Survey published an estimate that was a good deal smaller, but the newspaper was here in 1890 and the government agency did not show up until many years later.

How much the Tlingit Indians used the valley is unknown but they may have established trails through it and it may have been a regular trade route. As late as 1903 a group of Atlin Indians, coming to Juneau to sell their furs, traveled down the Taku River, then crossed from Taku Inlet to Silver Bow Basin and down the Perseverance Road to town. Was that an ancient trade route? At any rate, they made better time than another bunch who came around from the Taku River by canoe.

Whatever Indian trails may have existed in the summer of 1880, prospectors Joe Juneau and Dick Harris did not find them when they visited Gastineau Channel in mid-August of that year. They gave Gold Creek its name and ascended it for about a mile and a half, and somewhere in the vicinity of Snowslide Gulch they found ten cents to the pan of gravel, the best prospect they had discovered. But, according to Harris, the underbrush and devil club were so thick they could not follow the creek any farther and they returned to Sitka.

The two prospectors were directed by the man who grubstaked them to return to Gold Creek and they were back here by September. This time, on October 4 a local Auk Indian, Cowee, led them up Snowslide Gulch and down the other side to Silver Bow Basin, which Harris named. There they staked the first mining claims in the Juneau area, some of them on the mountainside in what they called Quartz Gulch, some down on the relatively flat floor of Silver Bow Basin.

Snowslide Gulch was bare of snow in October but it lived up to its name in late winter and early spring when tremendous slides often roared down its chute. As a matter of fact, much of the Gold Creek Valley is a dangerous place to fool around in when the snows are deep on the mountainsides and are disinclined to stay there.

The moccasin telegraph or whatever one might call it was a remarkable disseminator of rumor and news in those years when Alaska was completely lacking in communications media. Word of the Juneau-Harris discovery reached Wrangell, Sitka, Windham Bay and other spots where prospectors were working, and before the end of the year 1880 the Gold Creek Valley was swarming with eager men.