In his classic 1969 book, Boyhood in the Nome Gold Camp (Mineral Industry Research Laboratory, University of Alaska), Irving McKenny Reed records the observations made by an enthusiastic young boy in one of Alaska’s great gold mining towns at the height of its glory: Nome between 1900 and 1903.
An article in the July-August, 2019 issue of Alaskan History Magazine highlights the young Reed’s adventures in Nome. He was only ten years old when he, his mother, and his six-year-old sister traveled by ship from Seattle to Dutch Harbor, where Irving’s father was developing a sulphur mine. It was a storm-tossed, 34-day voyage, but only the beginning of his life of Alaskan adventures. Irving Reed would grow up in the remote mining camps of Nome, Iditarod, Livengood, and Takotna, and he would go on to be a respected mining engineer, Alaska’s first fire warden, a State Game Commissioner for 12 years, and the Territorial Highway Engineer. His complete biography can be read at the Alaska Mining Hall of Fame, and a collection of Irving Reed’s photographs at the University of Fairbanks, including several photos from the Iditarod Trail in the 1920’s, can be found here.
Article in the July-August, 2019 issue of Alaskan History Magazine.
July-August, 2019 Issue, Vol. 1, No. 2, postpaid
Alaskan bush pilots and early aviators, Alaska’s first newspaper, The Esquimaux; the Alaska Steamship Company; a 1916 horseback trip across the Kenai Peninsula by Frank G. Carpenter; Alaska’s first commercially successful novelist, Barrett Willoughby; and an exciting childhood in the gold rush town of Nome
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