Digital Bob Archive

Harris Street in downtown Juneau and the Harris Mining District, covering much of the surrounding area, serve to keep alive the memory of Richard Tighe Harris, one of the two men who first located mining claims in the Gold Creek Valley in 1880. And it is quite possible that the name of the town would still be Harrisburgh instead of Juneau had Richard Harris not been such a good-hearted fellow, with so many friends.

One hard and fast rule that was almost universal among western placer miners was that claims could not be staked by proxy. Each miner had to be physically present to stake his own claim. Despite his long years in the mining areas of Montana, Idaho and British Columbia, Harris was either ignorant of the rule or he chose to ignore it when he reached Gastineau Channel. After he and Joe Juneau made their discovery, Harris staked claims for a number of friends including Navy officers at Sitka, the captain and purser on a steamboat, and others.

That did not set well with the miners who arrived here a short time later. \"Proxy locations did not go in the Cassiar, and they don't go here,\" said John Olds, a leader of the miners. They decided against canceling the 70 or 80 claims that had been recorded by Harris, but they replaced him as mining recorder and they twice voted to rename his town. It has been Juneau since December 1881.

Richard Harris was born in Ohio on October 31, 1933, of parents who had come to the United States a short while before from Ireland. But although he was born in the United States, he was a subject of Great Britain. This anomaly was fairly common before the adoption of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1868. Prior to that, children born in this country to alien parents took the citizenship of the parents. They could become naturalized citizens upon reaching the age of 21, and Harris obtained his citizenship in Pennsylvania in 1854.

In 1874 he came from Helena, Montana, to Wrangell during the rush to the Cassiar District. In the next few years he was mentioned as a storekeeper at Wrangell and at Laketon on Dease Lake, and he may also have done some mining. In 1879 George Pilz was recruiting men for a mine he was trying to develop near Sitka and Harris was one of 70 or 80 men who went to Sitka from Wrangell and the Cassiar.

In 1880 Pilz sent Harris and Joe Juneau to prospect for gold lodes and the Gold Creek discovery followed, The claims they staked for themselves were centered on what became the Alaska Juneau gold mine in 1897. Both men were potentially wealthy but Joe Juneau frittered away his holdings and Harris lost his through litigation that resulted, according to the U.S. District Judge who heard the case, from an abysmal ignorance of American mining law.

From then on it was pretty much a struggle for Dick Harris. He raised a family and worked at a variety of jobs including that of watchman at the failed Alaska Union mine on Douglas Island. His health also began to fail and in 1905 he became blind and went to a Masonic nursing home at Portland, Oregon. He died there on October 11, 1907, and was buried in Evergreen Cemetery, Juneau, on December 28 of that year.