Juneau Alaska History

The Gastineau Channel area was a fishing ground for native Tlingit and Haida people of Southeast Alaska for thousands of years; Tlingits are the most numerous in Juneau. In 1870, the largest permanent settlement in the Juneau area was Auk Village. What later became Douglas Island was Taku territory. Gold Creek was called Dzantik'i Heeni; Tlingits considered it the "biggest salmon creek of all." Their quiet days and cultural and subsistence lifestyle ended in the 1880s when a Tlingit named Kowee of the Auk tribe provided gold ore samples in response to a reward offered by George Pilz, a Sitka engineer. In August, 1880 Prospectors Richard Harris and Joseph Juneau found gold at the base of Gold Creek and staked a 160-acre site on the beach.. Within a month of US eastern newspaper announcements of the gold find, the first boatloads of prospectors came to mine gold on Gastineau Channel, along with loggers, commercial fishermen and homesteaders. When loose gold in the stream beds ran out, hard-rock mining began. Four Treadwell mines were in heavy production in 1917 when a broken water flume caused a mudslide, flooding three of them. In 1921 the Alaska-Gastineau Mill folded from high production costs, and WWII closed the Alaska-Juneau Mill. In 1906 Juneau became the capital of Alaska when the government moved from Sitka. Today, federal, state and local government employs half the city’s population. Tourism, commercial fishing and mining play major roles in Juneau 's economy.