Digital Bob Archive

Trails have often been turned into roads in Alaska and elsewhere. In the Juneau area, the Sheep Creek Trail became the Thane Road, the trail to the Mendenhall Bar became the Glacier Highway, and the trail to Silver Bow Basin became the Perseverance Road. In the latter case, however, the Perseverance Road regressed and became the Perseverance Trail, an extension of Upper Basin Road.

Mining in Silver Bow Basin and on the mountainside above it commenced in the spring of 1881, but we know very little about the trails by which the miners traveled between Juneau and the mines, and over which Indian packers carried lumber and tools and supplies. Gustave Hanus surveyed and laid out the streets of Juneau, but he made no surveys of the miners' trails. And if a sketch map of those trails was made, it seems not to have survived.

It is known that one of the trails used by the early miners angled across Starr Hill to approximately the present east end of Sixth Street. It then crossed the ridge between Mount Roberts, on the right, and the rounded knob known to the miners as Mount Maria, on the left. After it crossed the ridge the trail divided. One branch dropped down to Last Chance Basin, crossed the basin and climbed to the top of what we now know as Ebner Falls (the early miners called it Big Falls) where the earliest stamp mill in the valley was built. From the top of the falls, that trail approximately followed the course of Gold Creek to Silver Bow Basin.

The other branch of the trail, instead of dropping down to Last Chance Basin, clung to the side of Mount Roberts and crossed the shoulder of the mountain near the top of Snowslide Gulch. From there it either dropped down into Quartz Gulch or continued along the mountainside to the various gulches where much of the early placer mining was done. That branch of the trail could not be used until early in the summer because of the snow on the mountainside and the danger from slides, but the gulch claims could not be worked either until most of the snow had melted. Those placers were among the first to be worked out and the high trail had probably been abandoned by 1884-85 when what was known as the Johnson Road was built into Last Chance Basin.

Until the Johnson Mill and Mining Company built its road, all material that went into the mining area was packed there on the backs of men, and the men were, for the most part, Alaska Indians. The new camp had scarcely been started when the Indians began to move here from the Auk and Taku villages and from other places throughout Southeastern Alaska. The dollar was beginning to replace the blanket as the standard of value, and although packing was strenuous work, in all kinds of weather, the Tlingits were eager for the dollars. Many of their loads were rough, green boards to make sluice boxes, boards that had been whipsawed out during the time snow covered the mining claims.

More than one Tlingit who later packed on the Chllkoot Trail first strengthened his back and legs packing to Silver Bow Basin.