Fannie Quigley

Fannie Quigley, known as the "little witch of Denali," became the subject of a Kantishna Valley tale in which, after shooting a moose from her back porch high on Friday Creek, she went down the hill to butcher it and made four trips carrying the meat back to her cabin. Each time she rested on a smooth round rock along the slope of Friday Creek, a place that had been mined four times. On the fourth trip, while panting on the hillside, she squatted on the rock, stooped casually, and picked up a gold nugget the size of a golf ball, marked only by a thin web of quartz in its yellow-rust hue. She put the nugget, valued at about $60, into her jacket pocket, shouldered the last quarter of moose, and continued up the hill, later saying she had seen it there all along but did not believe it because Friday Creek had already been worked four times.

Chena Ridge, Alaska · United States