Digital Bob Archive

Every square foot of the Gold Creek Valley has undoubtedly been staked at least once as a mining claim, lode or placer, and much of it has been restaked several times. Lode claims were always given names and placer claims sometimes were. But of all of the hundreds of mining claim names, some of them very imaginative, that speckle the pages of the record books for that area, only one, perhaps two, appear to have survived in the local lexicon.

In 1881 Walter Pierce, a longtime Alaska prospector and miner, staked the Oil City lode claim high on the mountain above Silver Bow Basin. He did not have the resources to develop it himself and evidently found no buyers, so he abandoned it. Two years later the claim was restaked by John Dix, another oldtimer. He called it the Vermont lode. Dix also abandoned the claim which on June 30, 1885, was again staked by C.D. Paine about whom no information has turned up. He called it the Perseverance lode.

The name was a winner. Not only has there been a Perseverance Mining Company and a Perseverance Road but also a settlement called Perseverance with a Perseverance School and a Perseverance voting precinct, a Perseverance Stage (operated by Ettore Scataglini), the Perseverance Rebekah Lodge No.2, and most recently, the Perseverance Theater. That name is not likely soon to fade away as have Alaska Chief, Legal Tender, Aurora, Mountain King, Excelsior, Providence, Golden Eagle, Hidden Treasure, Plymouth Rock, Pride of Alaska, Cornucopia, Uranus, Ruskora and dozens of other fine names that graced lode claims in the valley of Gold Creek.

Last Chance, in Last Chance Basin and Last Chance Mining Museum, may be a runner-up to Perseverance as a mining claim name that has survived, but its etymology is a little more complex. The Last Chance lode claim was staked by R.T. Harris and Joseph Juneau on October 14, 1880, but the claim was over in the Silver Bow Basin area, more than a mile from the closest part of Last Chance Basin. The name is not an uncommon one in the western mining districts of the country and in fact there are at least sixteen creeks in Alaska named Last Chance.

Last Chance Basin, the lower part of the valley, apparently derived its name from an ephemeral Last Chance Gulch which has been found mentioned in only one placer mining claim notice. On June 27, 1881, William Stewart, Squire Howe and Oscar Cooper claimed 600 feet of placer ground \"running from this notice up the gulch or stream known as Last Chance.\"

The three men were staking creek claims and we know from subsequent mining records that they were in what is now called Last Chance Basin. Each man was entitled to 200 feet along the creek and extending across the basin, \"from rimrock to rimrock,\" as the miners expressed it. But there is not a clue as to whether Last Chance Gulch furrowed Mount Juneau or Mount Roberts. It is not, however, a unique situation: We don't know today the location of Specimen Gulch, Spring Gulch, Summit Gulch, Mountain Gulch or dozens of other gulches named by the miners in their location notices.