Liquified soil? Tectonic plates? On Good Friday afternoon people in Valdez, Alaska didn’t think about such things, few even knew they existed. People in Valdez thought about dinner. Then came a crunching and a grinding noise and the ground around and under them suddenly rolled and heaved. Great cracks appeared and water spurted up through …
Tag Archives: Valdez
Point of Entry
Point of Entry? The North Pacific, the Bering Sea and the Arctic Ocean surround the unimaginably vast and forbidding territory of Alaska on three sides. The equally vast and forbidding wilderness of Northern Canada borders it to the east. For outsiders, Alaska offered no real point of entry before the turn of the century. Until …
Strikes, Gold Strikes, in the Far North
Small Gold strikes occurred during the last decades of the 19th century in Alaska. Sitka had one. Windham Bay had one. In 1880 Joseph Juneau and Richard Harris made a bigger strike in Juneau. Then Skookum Jim, his friend Tagish Charlie and George Carmack made a massive strike in Canada, at Rabbit Creek in the …
Rika Wallen’s Iconic Roadhouse
Rika followed her brother, Carl, to the United States from Sweden, lived for a time on his farm in Minnesota then moved on to San Francisco where she cooked for the fabulously wealthy Hills Brothers Coffee family. She came to San Francisco as Erica, but an affectionate estate staff shortened her name to Rika. The …
The Scottish Lady
The lady, The Scottish Lady, began her life a graceful clipper ship, ended it a barge in the Gulf of Alaska. With her graceful female figurehead out front, the proud Lady plied the seven seas for decades. Dismasted in a typhoon out of Manilla in 1871, she recovered (with help from shipyards, of course) …
They lose Private Banks Remains
How do you lose the remains of an honorably buried soldier? It’s not easy. Last night I posted about Private Major Banks who, along with thousands of other soldiers, received a contaminated yellow fever vaccine in March 1942. In June Private Banks contracted serum hepatitis and at the end of June he passed away in …
The fate of Private Major Banks.
Private Major Banks, a young black soldier in the 97th Engineering regiment reported for sick call on May 20, 1942. The medics sent him to the little hospital in Valdez, Alaska. Port of Valdez in 1942 Banks grew up in New Canton, Virginia. He didn’t enter the Army until January 1942, so he came late …
The Pass opened on May 20.
Up to the Pass, the soldiers of Company D convoyed between towering cliffs of piled snow, rode benches on either side of a bouncing and sliding canvas covered truck bed, out into the valley beyond the Pass and on 50 miles to Tonsina. Six days later the soldiers of Company C followed them through the …
Young Black Soldiers of the 97th
Young black soldiers from the Carolinas and Georgia who came to Valdez, Alaska with the 97th Engineering Regiment weathered the shock of an Alaska winter. They worked between the snowbanks on Alaska Avenue out to tent cities, bivouacs, thirteen miles out of town on the Richardson Highway and near the crumbling ruins of Wortman’s Roadhouse …
Are We Filthy Rich Yet?
The first step in getting filthy rich on the Klondike in 1898? Getting to the Klondike in 1898. The “All American Route” came through the North Pacific, the Gulf of Alaska to Valdez, Alaska and then over the Valdez Glacier. Good luck with that. The Valdez Glacier Route But let’s say you survived all with …