Document 78: Excerpts of Letters Home from Nora Crane
Kepner/Crane microfiche collection, Folder 2-3, Archives, University of Alaska Fairbanks.
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Nora Crane, of Chicago, accompanied her husband John Edward Crane to Circle City, Alaska, in 1897, where he worked as a store manager for the North American Trade & Transportation Co. The NAT&T was a Chicago-based business owned by family friend Portus B. Weare and one of the main supply posts in many Alaska and Yukon mining towns.
Up the Yukon to Circle City by River Steamer.
July 9, 1897
Dear Mother,
This is our fifth day on the river and I must start a letter to you and write a little as we go. I have no private place to write to write on this boat, and now around me is the darndest rabble of kids and mosquitoes—impossible for you to imagine. To begin with the boat is an old fashioned dirty old affair that never had two woman passengers....Dirty miners and no competent officers on the ship to look after things....beside the comfort I have been used to it almost turns my hair gray....
The first part of the river is a low marsh land...a layer of grass and then a layer of mosquitoes and later a layer of deep cuss words from the unhappy seeker for yellow gold....
We make quite a number of stops about every six hours or oftener we must stop and take on wood. It is all drift wood that the Indians cut for them and pile up in cords. They pay 4 dollars a cord to the Indians and they take goods from the storeroom in payment....the wood piles are generally at some little Indian village and it is a sight to see them come on board ship to trade wild ducks, Salmon, a sort of salmon berry, baskets and dried fish for food and clothes. they are the dirtiest, homeliest mess from soup to nuts on earth....Their villages are peculiar things to come upon—they are a half dozen houses, in the background a cache or two, then all along the river front high racks made of poles like a house with no sides—oh say for an eight of a mile will be strings with a long grass hanging down that they make matting of and rows upon rows of the reddest fish (salmon) cut in nicks so that it will dry quickly. It is really a pretty sight makes one think of the Javanese village at the fair but get closer and oh! Lord the filth....
Ed just came and told me a story I will send to you. He was down below Talking to the Indians and was telling them about the steam cars. One asked him "How long go from St. Michaels to Circle City" Ed said two days—and the Indians face lighted up and he said "All same like geese" They say they are bright and pick up and understand slang sooner than they do good English. I think it is because so much of their language is sighns [sic] and the short cut slang makes just suits them. We have the best pilot on the river, a good looking Indian with a pumpkin colored tie that gives me a bilious start every glimpse I get of it. No wonder they give them good money for piloting, sometimes this river will be 5 miles wide and the deepest spot about ten feet and crooked, winds in around the base of great mountains until one thinks it is a lake we are riding on....
From your loving Daughter and sister, Node
Circle City, Alaska.
July 24, 1897.
My dear little Mother,
I am just one week tomorrow in my new home....Circle City is absolutely deserted about 25 people here besides the Indians, and they belong to the stores of the two companies. There is about 300 log houses put down every which way on the bank of the river without regard to streets. You can't imagine how funny a whole town looks built of logs...There is a layer of about one foot of tin cans over the whole place and then for diversement these measly dogs. We get huckle berries just like you used to get in Penn. have fresh moose meat, fresh lettuce and salmon lovely big fish steaks, nicer fish than we ever got at home. Everything else is canned....The living is very good and I can't object there but the Godforsakenness of it is what flattens me out....
Dawson City, Yukon Territory
Aug 12, 1897
....Well I have seen the toughest town in the country (Dawson) it is a wilderness of tents, bog over your rubber tops and log houses, saloons and dance houses until you can't rest and the general paraphernalia that goes with a mining town. We met all our old friends and had a real jubilee—I could think of nothing so much as the Midway—two sawmills buzzing and a faro bank no less than $200 to enter the game and unlimited, they say that fellow reaps about $12,000 a night....This company's store is about as good as a gambling house. They range from 3 to 13 thousand a day and average about $8000.00...
I am Lovingly Your Daughter, Node
Steamer "Heavy" Aug. 12 1897
Circle City, Alaska, Fall 1897
....There are dozens of men in Circle City tonight who have not the price of a meal, everyday there is some sort of begging petition comes into he store for the men to hand over out of their private pockets or get unpopular....
We burn green spruce and it smells like a Christmas tree in the house all the time and maybe you don't think it don't take a back action lever in ones back to wash dishes with one hand and fill that stove always and eternally with the other. I never appreciated a shovel full of coal in the morning and one a night before. This wood business will be the death of me. I know I walk ten thousand miles a day between our three stoves. Ed says I will get used to it in four or five years. God forbid that I have to stay that long in this place....
There was a crowd of Tananah Indians came to down today...I tell you these are Indians, none of your U.S. sneaking half-breeds—Great dark, tall men, with a look that is awesome and majestic—simple minded in a way, yet commanding...
Your devoted daughter, Node
Circle City, Alaska Oct. 31/97
Circle City, February 1898
....There is a lot of disappointed people here, the most of them started for Dawson, but the boats were stranded and they spent the winter spending what little money they had and now don't know which way to turn. This is a great place and no one will be convinced of the foolhardyness of the most of these people until they come and see. Mrs. Kings mother wrote her—"Now if you don't make your fortune it will be your own fault, the gold is there and all you have to do is wash it out." mars, King only made one remark and that was "poor woman."
Circle City, Summer 1898
....Well we have experienced a genuine stampede. A party of prospectors came in and reported gold on a gulch they call Jefferson Creek 12 miles from here across the river...our party scattered like the winds. In a half hour the river was covered with streams of people making for that gulch. Mr. Fishers, Mrs. Kings brother went and Mr. Baugher a man that works for us...And such excitement, some of the women even went, and I had a notion to go too, but I decided snow shoes and a scramble over hill & dale with two hundred men was not exactly in my line. So Mrs. King and I sent a man and paid $50.00 for half of the claim he staked....But came to find out the discovery claim had been salted and they got into an awful squabble for a madder town full of men never existed....
Circle City, July 11, 1898
My dear friend,
Well Caroline how much I would prefer starting this with a big hug and kiss and talk to you for about a week.... I wish, oh I wish you were coming along with the girls for a visit this summer...you could tell me all the news and we would not mention "gold dust" once. I hate the sound of it. everyone who comes here has that same strained staring eyeball look as if they expected to find it in the trees or on top of a shack or some little old place where they only had to lift a leaf or a clod to be worth millions!!!! whereas ordinarily it means work of the hardest kind the like of which most of them never dreamed of doing. At the present writing we have an ex-State Senator from the State of Washington chopping our wood. He as long fine cut whiskers presumably to protect him from the mosquitoes and I heard him quoting Shakespeare on "laziness" to a small Indian boy Friday we have here. It struck me as being a trifle pathetic especially when the young scamp said to me "The old man is talking pious to me so that I will pile up his wood." I guess the Senator would rather live on a farm than chop wood for a living. he says that was the reason he came here was because he hated farming.
Any man can get work here at $12.00 a day in the mines...The work is hard and you must do your own cooking (which is a great drawback for one gets scurvy easily) but if a man wants to stand it why that is his business....