Digital Bob Archive

Archives, government and private, often have buried in their vaults information that is seemingly irrelevant to current affairs and events but that can, on occasion, still be of practical use. That could be true of the contents of some 90-year-old documents concerning the Comet Mine, north of Juneau. A friend found them in the Seattle branch of the National Archives and sent some of the information in them to me as a curiosity. But it may be more than a curiosity since the Comet is one of the Kensington group now being examined with a view to a resumption of production.

The Comet and the other mines - Kensington, Horrible, Ophir and Ivanhoe - are on the mainland north of Berners Bay, several miles inland from Lynn Canal in the shadow of Lion Head Mountain. The lodes were discovered in the mid-1880's.
The Comet was staked by six men on August 13, 1886, \"at the head of Maple Creek in what we have called Cow Puncher Gulch.\" I don't know whether anyone else called it that; it does not appear on any map.

The port for the mines, on the shore of Lynn Canal about a mile north of Point Sherman, was at first called Seward City, then for a brief while Nowell City, and finally, Comet. Seward City was, among other things, a railroad town, apparently the second one in Alaska. The first was Treadwell. The tracks ran up the hill from the wharf at Seward City and there was one locomotive, reported to have weighed seven and a half tons. One writer called it the Seward City and Lynn Canal Railroad, but that may have been a joke; the name was almost as long as the tracks.

The name of the port was appropriated by another railroad town farther north so the name was changed first to Nowell City for T.S. Nowell, a mining promoter who worked at developing mines not only in that area but on Douglas Island, on Sheep Creek and in Silver Bow Basin. All in all, Nowell organized at least 13 different mining companies, most of which went into receivership sooner or later and the courts were kept busy with Nowell litigation. That may be why Nowell City became Comet.

In the 1890's the camp at the Comet Mine housed and fed around 125 men, and had about that number in 1898 when the court ordered an inventory of supplies because of an impending receivership. The inventory is one of the many documents relating to the Nowell properties that wound up in the Federal Archives. Prominent in the inventory are these items:

Two 5-lb. cans of cloves; two 5-lb. cans of ginger; six 5-lb. cans of cayenne pepper; six 5-lb. cans of mustard; six 5-lb. cans of cinnamon; twelve 1-lb. cans of curry powder; six and a half pounds of ground black pepper; four 10-gallon kegs of catsup; six 5-lb. and one 50-lb. cans cream of tartar.

With that precedent to do on, the engineers now working to evaluate the properties in the Kensington area surely won't make the mistake of starting up the mine with an insufficient supply of condiments, and cream of tartar, on hand.