Gold in the Tenderfoot

After the Klondike rush, prospectors searched many other places for gold, making rich discoveries near Fairbanks and many smaller discoveries in the upper Tanana Valley. Two miners from the Fortymile District found gold flakes on Tenderfoot Creek in 1888, but because the site was too far from a supply camp, they abandoned it. Seventeen years later, after gold was discovered near Fairbanks, prospector E.H. Luce found gold on Tenderfoot Creek, and news of his discovery attracted about a thousand people to the area in a small stampede. Between 1905 and 1995 the Tenderfoot Mining District produced 120,770 ounces, or 3.77 tons, of placer gold, with its most productive years from 1905 to 1916. The gold-bearing gravels lay 40 to 100 feet below the surface, so miners spent winters in drift pits bringing gravel up, while summer water shortages often limited sluicing and discouraged many miners, who left behind unworked gravel piles later used by the Alaska Road Commission to improve the Richardson Highway, giving rise to the story that the road was paved with gold. Riverboats brought supplies from Fairbanks to the Tenderfoot District, and a town at the mouth of Banner Creek, about a mile west, became the area's supply depot and was named Richardson for Wilds P. Richardson, head of the Alaska Road Commission. In 1907 the town had 500 people, four stores, four hotels, four saloons, a sawmill, a post office, and a telegraph station, but Tanana River bank erosion forced residents to move it twice, and after mining declined during the 1920s, the town slowly died as the Richardson Highway came to cut through the former town site.

Harding-Birch Lakes, Alaska · United States