Coal Creek Dredge

Coal Creek Dredge

NPS Photo by Josh Spice

 

Self-Guided Dredge Tour Brochure (pdf)

Mining History and Techniques (pdf)

Remembering Life at Coal Creek (pdf) 2012

This pdf shares one family's photos and memories of their time at Coal Creek during the early years of dredge operations.

In the 1930s, the world was locked in the throes of the Great Depression. A multimillionaire and member of the Canadian Senate, General A.D. (Alexander Duncan) McRae, searched for investments that would shelter his fortune and at the same time bolster it. Not only was McRae prominent in the business world, but in Canadian politics as well. He rose to the rank of Major General during World War I while assisting Britain's Minister of Information, Lord Beaverbrook. For his services, the British Crown offered him a knighthood which he turned down saying that it "wouldn't do me much good anyway." McRae took an active role in Canadian politics when he helped mastermind the election of MacKenzie King as premier. Shortly after that McRae received a lifetime appointment to the Canadian Senate. Eventually, he was given serious consideration for the Premiership himself. One industry that looked promising to McRae was gold mining, particularly in Alaska because the US tax laws at the time favored the mining industry. McRae hired the services of Dr. Ernest Patty, who was at the time dean of the College of Geology and Mining at the fledgling Alaska Agricultural and Mining College in Fairbanks, Alaska, to help him locate properties in Alaska in which he could profitably invest.

For many years geologists from the United States Geological Survey (USGS) had been extolling the potential for the placers on Coal Creek and Woodchopper Creek. In 1933, when they first started looking for suitable investment properties, McRae concentrated on properties for lode mining - sinking shafts and drifts into the earth to extract mineralized ore, rather than placer mining - where free gold is recovered from alluvial gravels that were deposited over millions of years. Prior to examining the upper Yukon creeks, McRae, Patty and Ira Joralemon, a world renowned hard rock geologist, also looked at four other sites including: (1) the Cliff Mine near Valdez, Alaska; (2) Beauty Bay, 75 miles west of Seward, Alaska on Nuka Bay; (3) Ester Dome, an area near Fairbanks that was used by the college as part of its curriculum; and finally, (4) the Quigley properties at Kantishna, in what is now Denali National Park and Preserve. Beginning early on in his tenure as a professor at the college, Patty started teaching classes directed toward miners who were actively employed working mines rather than simply students who wanted to learn about geology. To accomplishing this task, one of Patty's innovative teaching techniques involved a game of poker using various mineral specimens instead of poker chips. Students were dealt regular playing cards and before upping the ante for their bet, they had to first identify the type of mineral they were "playing." This turned out to be quite popular with the old sourdoughs who were already quite familiar with poker. As each of the areas Patty and McRae examined as potential investment properties were excluded from further consideration for any number of reasons, their choices became more and more limited. Finally, in 1934, after the last of their original four selections was played out, Patty told McRae about some placer ground he heard about on the upper Yukon River, in the Circle Mining District. According to Patty's sources, the ground showed good promise for operating either a dragline or a small dredge.The placer deposits at Coal Creek met McRae and Patty's expectations. Further examination and testing proved they contained a fairly high concentration of gold. Based on this, McRae decided to invest in the properties. The biggest worry on Patty's part however was whether or not they would be able to acquire options on all the claims on the creek. If any of the claimants were unwilling to sell to the newly formed company, Gold Placers Inc., the whole operation would fall through.

One by one the various claimants decided to sell to Gold Placers. In late 1934, the company ordered a bucket line dredge and put out a call for bids from various manufacturers. Several failed to provide all the information requested and were thus dropped from consideration. Of the remaining bids, the Walter W. Johnson Company of San Francisco offered to build a dredge and have the parts delivered onsite to Coal Creek by the end of the Yukon River navigation season in 1935 for a modest $146,425.00. In 1935, Gold Placers Inc. constructed camp facilities and began work clearing the valley and building a hydraulic ditch to carry water from a diversion dam higher up Coal Creek.

During early 1935, Patty informed McRae that he was hearing good reports about the placers in Woodchopper Creek, the next drainage to the west. McRae, who hired only the best people to work for him then let them manage without interference on his part, told Patty "when you're winning, always crowd your luck." With that, Patty began negotiations with the miners on Woodchopper Creek to acquire options on their claims as well. That summer, the company ordered a second dredge, based on the same specifications as the Coal Creek dredge, to put to work on the Woodchopper placers.

In the meantime, a dredging operation requires that the ground be prepared before the dredge could begin work. The placer deposit consists of three basic layers: muck consisting of decayed vegetation, clay and good old dirt makes up the upper most layer. In the case of Coal Creek, this accounted for the upper 5 to 10 feet of depth. The gold is found throughout the frozen gravel that was carried by water action from areas higher up the drainage and deposited in lower lying areas. The depth of these gravels varied from 5 to 15 feet. Below the alluvial gravel layer is the bedrock. The bulk of the gold is found at the contact zone between the gravel and bedrock. As a result, most dredging operations would dig the entire alluvial gravel layer plus the upper 1 or 2 feet of bedrock to make sure they captured all the gold.

In order to strip the muck off the gravel layer, powerful streams of high pressure water were directed onto it. This both thawed the frozen ground and washed it off. The outwash was carried down Coal Creek and into the Yukon River. There are contemporary reports that the Yukon turned black from the load of decayed organic material that was introduced by the stripping operation.

Once the muck was stripped off the land, attention was turned to thawing the alluvial gravel deposits to allow the dredge to cut through it. When frozen, the gravel was as solid as concrete and would stop the dredge cold in its tracks. The process of thawing involved a lot of hard work. Using a long pipe, with a hardened, chisel-like tip on the lower end with slits on either side to allow water to flow out of it, crewmen would pound the point into the ground several inches at a time. To accomplish this, they used a device that clamped onto the body of the "point" and a slide hammer. The hammer was raised and forcibly brought down on the clamp. Work was slow and tedious. A point was driven several inches into the frozen ground then the pointman moved on to the next point and pounded it in several inches. When he reached the end of the row he'd move back to the other side and start the next row. Each pointman was responsible for several hundred points in the thaw field.

One day while visiting the mine, General McRae took a stroll through the point field. Much to his dismay, the surface which appeared solid, was actually only a crust overlying the thawed gravel that was basically supersaturated with water below. The General, a fairly rotund man at the time, broke through and ended up waist deep in the cold, muddy water below. As an example the General's personality, the crew quickly plucked him from his predicament followed by a good laugh all around.

The parts remained on the bank at Slaven's Roadhouse from the time they were offloaded until late winter when they were skidded approximately 6 miles up Coal Creek to a pond that had been excavated for the dredge. The ice provided a perfectly flat surface on which to assemble the boat (Dredges are frequently referred to as "boats" by their crew. They are never called a "ship" however.).

Assembling the dredge was very similar to constructing a large building. The pontoons were laid out and bolted together to form the hull and lower deck. The superstructure consists of beams and girders very similar to a modern building. As the dredge continued to take shape, the various pieces of machinery were installed inside the superstructure as it grew around it until finally the exterior siding was installed.

Construction continued through the spring of 1936 until July when the dredge was completed and ready for testing. General McRae made a trip to Coal Creek, accompanied by his granddaughter and Walter Seligman, an investor in the operation and McRae's son-in-law.

When the dredge finally started and the bucket line engaged for the first time, everything worked as planned. Sort of. Actually, several bugs were found almost immediately. First, the pumps were unable to move sufficient water from the dredge pond into the revolving screen to efficiently wash the gravel as it moved through the dredge's machinery. Eventually this was traced to some debris (apparently the remains of someone's lunch) that had made its way into the Atlas diesel pump engine. Second, the dredge construction pond was located approximately 200 yards off the main paystreak. As a result, the first 10 days of work were essentially lost as the crew worked the dredge over to where it should have been in the first place.

McRae and Seligman remained at the camp until after the first cleanup when they were assured that the dredge worked properly. According to the company accountant, Glen Franklin, following the initial cleanup McRae and Patty were so fearful that the gold, with a net value of $18,604.52, would be stolen that the two men slept in the manager's office. Since they were not entirely sure that the company safe was secure, Patty nailed the windows and door shut before retiring for the night. The next morning he was surprised to find that he had used a ball-peen hammer! Although the gold was safe, the pair made their escape from the office only after a claw hammer was dropped down the stove pipe so they could pull the nails from the door.

At the close of the 1936 season, the Coal Creek dredge recovered slightly over $122,000.00 in gold. This was nearly equal to the total purchase price of the dredge. The dredge operated continually, with only a few missed seasons due to World War II, until 1957 when it ran for the last time under Patty family management. At that time, the dredge had recovered $3,229,124.61. When inflation is taken into account, the total production for the Coal Creek dredge equates to $29,909,099.51.

As the dredge continued to work its way down the Coal Creek valley, in 1942 the buildings associated with Camp No. 1 were moved approximately one mile downstream to keep up with the dredge -- not to mention providing the crewmen a shorter "commute" to the workings. Camp No. 2 supported the operation from a location near the confluence of Boulder Creek and Coal Creek for the next 11 years. In 1952, the camp was again moved, this time to the confluence of Beaton Pup and Coal Creek. Camp No. 3 remains at this location today where it serves as a base camp for National Park Service operations and as a public use facility.

Subsequently the Coal Creek properties were sold to several different operators who attempted to work them at a profit. None of these worked out, however, because they lacked the managerial expertise of Ernest Patty and the economics of gold mining made it unprofitable to work the claims. They were finally sold to the National Parks Conservation Association in the early 1980s. NPCA then donated the claims to the National Park Service and they were incorporated into Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve.