Thomas P. Aitken
(1872 - 1953)
Thomas P. Aitken was one of the most outstanding mine entrepreneurs that operated in the North Country. Aitken was responsible for one mine success story after another throughout the central Yukon River Region in both Canada and Alaska. He developed both placer and lode metal deposits.
Thomas P. Aitken was born on December 24, 1872 in the Chapel of Monance in Fife, Argyllshire County, Scotland and immigrated to the United States in 1894. His immigration papers listed his occupation as 'blacksmith,' and stated a willingness to do hard work. In 18955, T.P. Aitken joined his brother William H. Aitken at Cripple Creek, Colorado. There the two industrious brothers were to find a fortune in 'telluride' gold near Victor, Colorado. Tom Aitken would travel north with money in his pocket.
In the spring of 1897, Aitken heard the call of the Yukon and boarded the steamer Leah in Seattle and disembarked at Dyea. He placer mined in the Klondike district from 1897-1902. His success there is unknown, but he must have gained some good background in placer mining that served him well for future ventures. In 1903, Aitken traveled to the newly discovered Fairbanks district and staked and purchased rich ground on Cleary Creek. This relatively small stream basin would eventually account for more than two million ounces of placer gold, or about 30 percent of total Fairbanks placer output. At Cleary Creek, t.P. Aitken met Frank G. Manley, who owned some of the richest claims on Cleary Creek. T.P. Aitken leased ground from Manley on Cleary Creek during both 1905 and 1906. This arrangement began a long association between Manley and Tom Aitken. Brother William H. Aitken would also work with Tom under the Aitken & Aitken partnership intermittently for many years.
In 1907, with substantial profits accumulated from Cleary Creek, Aitken moved into the newly discovered Hot Springs District and formed another business partnership with Manley to mine ground on Glen Gulch. At that time, Manley had to return to Texas to face a spurious legal charge, which kept him out of Alaska for a critical time. At one time, Manley owed Tom Aitken more that $220,000. The debt was settled amicably.
In the summer 1910, Tom Aitken, Henry Riley, and Frank Manley traveled via the steamboat Edna to the new gold rush town of Iditarod. The Iditarod camp was discovered on Christmas Day, 1908 by prospectors John Beaton and William Dikeman, and both staked many claims in the spring of 1909. However, Flat Creek heads into Chicken Mountain, which is underlain by granite rocks. Because the major gold camps like Nome, Fairbanks, Wiseman, Juneau and the Klondike did not contain a known gold-granite association, many prospectors of the day did not believe that Upper Flat Creek contained placer gold. When Tom Aitken arrive into the Iditarod District, he found that placer gold deposits in the stream basins immediately flanking Chicken Mountain dad just been discovered. Aitken, Riley and perhaps with Manley acquired, through purchase and staking, a large group of claims known as the Marietta Association at the head of Flat Creek and assembled a large crew of about 100 men to mine the rich, shallow, placer gold deposits. By the 1911 season, the Marietta Association mine was the largest producer of gold in the Iditarod district, and Aitken and Fairbanks partner Henry Riley became two of Flat's most prominent citizens.
In July 1911, rumors that "outside" capital was coming to the Iditarod district materialized when representatives of the Guggenheim syndicate, headed by W. F. Copeland and A.E Austin, arrived in Flat. After discussions and meetings, Aitken sold his share of the Marietta Association to the Guggenheims for a reported $1.5 million, and agreed to be their agent. By the end of the summer, Aitken had acquired most of lower Flat Creek for the Guggenheims. In the spring of 1912, the Yukon Gold Company, operator of the Guggenheim gold mining operations in the Klondike district of Canada, brought inn a 6 cubic foot bucket line stacker dredge to mine the Flat Creek ground. The dredge was first positioned on the Marietta Association where it mined some of the richest ground ever mined by a gold dredge in Alaska.
In a well publicized event, Tom Aitken married artist Beryl Boughton in New York, April 3, 1912. Although the headlines of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer read "Tom aitken Will Take Bride to Alaska and Live in Seattle," it seems unlikely that Boughton ever traveled to Alaska that summer, and she disappeared from Aitken's life rather quickly. His wife of later years is identified in official records as Eliza Aitken, an emigrant from Austria.
During his years in Flat the Iditarod Pioneer seemed to follow Aitken's every move. Aitken and partner Sid Ensor left Flat by dog team on December 12, 1913, and traveled first to Innoko, Ruby ad Hot Springs camps en-route to his winter home in Fairbanks. It was on this overland trip that Aitken saw the need for a uniform transportation network in the area. His Ruby interview published in the Iditarod Pioneer on January 10, 1918 stated:
With an expenditure of, say, $1,000 on the trail it would be the best in Alaska. It is the logical mail route, covering as it does so many small camps between here and Iditarod.Aitken traveled to Juneau during 1914-15 and lobbied the Territorial Legislature to upgrade the Ruby-Ophir-Iditarod overland transportation route. as a result of the effort triggered by Aitken, the Territory committed funds to construct road networks in all three mining districts and improved winter dog team trail maintenance. Parts of this trail system continues to provide access for placer miners and is prat of the National Iditarod Historical Trail.
Commencing in 1915, Aitken returned to the lode mining that he learned at Victor, Colorado. The Silver King Mine silver-lead vein on Galena Hill in the Mayo District of Yukon, Canada was first found in 1911 by Harry McWhorter, and two partners. In 1914, McWhorter bought out his other partners and contacted Tom Aitken in Fairbanks, who agreed to finance the project at a larger scale. By the spring of 1915, McWhorter mined 1,180 tons of ore, and shipped the ore to the Selby smelter. In September 1916, Aitken exercised his option and bought the Silver King Mine for $75,000. With a large crew, Aitken mined 1,386 tons of high-grade silver ore during the winter of 1916-17, which yielded good profits. In 1917, Tom optioned the Silver King Mine to his Alaskan partners J.E. Ives, Frank Manley, and J.L. McGinn for $500,000. However, the Manley partnership failed and was abandoned in 1918. The Alaskan partnership gave up without knowing that just 500 feet further down the drift was one of the biggest and richest silver deposits ever found in the Keno Hill area. Aitken's activities in the May Mining District were brief, but his successful development of moderate tonnages of high-grade silver-lead ores at the Silver King mine helped catch the attention of larger mining firms. In 1919, Simon Guggenheim, President of American Smelting and Refining Company, sent engineer R.H. Humphrey North to examine the Keno Hill district. Eventually, United Keno Hill Mines Ltd., consolidated the district, and became Canada's largest primary silver producer for 60 years. Ore was mined there nearly continuously until 1989.
Tom Aitken's financial success in the Mayo District led him to invest in Alaskan lode precious metal properties. In 1918, Aitken agreed to lease a number of lode silver-gold claims in Kantishna district from Joe and Fanny Quigley. From 1919-1924, some 1,435 tons of high-grade silver ore were mined underground from six deposits on Quigley Ridge. However, high transportation costs, lower silver prices, and lease disagreements with the Quigleys forced Aitken to abandon the Kantishna silver project in 1924.
In 1919, Tom Aitken looked at the recently discovered (1918) high-grade Perseverance silver-lead vein deposit near the head of Bishop Creek, about 20 miles south of Galena. Aitken operated the Perseverance mine under lease during 1920-22 and produced a total of 225 tons of ore at an average grade of 75 percent lead and 104 ounces/ton silver. However, transportation costs forced the termination of the project.
In 1918, high-grade gold mineralization found in the Nixon Fork district northeast of McGrath also caught the eye of Tom Aitken, who leased claims from the discoverer, E.M. Whalen. Aitken would produce the first ore from the district. His mine crew extracted about 370 tons of high-grade ore that averaged 5 ounces/ton gold. In September of 1920, the Treadwell-Yukon Mining Company examined the new lode gold district developed by Aitken. Treadwell-Yukon offered a lucrative lease-option to Aitken, which he accepted. The Nixon Fork gold mine has intermittently produced high-grade gold ores since the 1920s, including a recent period that took place form 1996-2000.
In general Tom Aitken did better at placer mining then lode mining as illustrated at Candle Creek near McGrath. When Aitken first looked at the Candle Creek placer prospect in 1914, he recognized that the placer deposit was underlain by a manzonite body similar to that exposed at Chicken Mountain in the Iditarod district. He established a partnership with E. McKimon, and purchased the claims from the discoverer Louis Blackburn, and installed an open-cut scraper plant at the head of Candle Creek. The Aitken-McKimon partnership mined the upper claims from 1915-17 and produced more than $125,000 in gold from shallow, easy-to-mine ground. Aitken then decided to develop the property at a 0larger scale. In late 1917, he formed the Kuskokwim Dredging Company (KDC) and purchased a 3 cubic foot bucket lines tacker dredge that had formerly operated on the Seward Peninsula. The dredge was in production in 1918 and operated through 1926. In 1922, the KDC dredge produced nearly 24,000 ounces of placer gold worth $500,000 from about 335,5000 cubic yards of pay gravel, and became the largest gold producer in southwest Alaska.
As reported in a 1924 issue of the Farthest North Collegian, stripping activity conducted by KDC on Candle Creek discovered the complete skeleton of a Pleistocene mammoth. Aitken donated the important paleontological find to the Geology Department at the College in Fairbanks. Ernest Gatty stated at the time that the Candle Creek find was the most complete mammoth skeleton ever found in Alaska.
In May, 1924, Societus Metallicorum, the mining society just organized at the School of Mines in Fairbanks, invited Thomas Aitken to give a talk on gold dredging in Alaska. At the conclusion of Tom's presentation Charles Bunnell, President of the College and also president of the mining society, awarded Aitken the first honorary member of Societus Metallicorum, and gave him a membership pin.
Miners associated with Aitken noted that he worked hard and that he expected them to work hard; they also noticed, as might be expected from his Scottish origin, Aitken was tight with the dollar. But as the late Yukon historian, Aaro Aho wrote:
Aitken was never stingy with food. His miners always ate well.T. P. Aitken was a good money manager and with a combination of mining success and investments, built a multi-million dollar fortune by the late 1920's. However, much of his assets were lost in the Great Crash of 1929. Aitken managed to retain enough funds to retire comfortably in rural Washington during the mid 1930's. Anticipating irrigation water from the Grand Coulee Dam project, Aitken bought a farm and produced potatoes. In later life, Tom Aitken was perhaps not as tight as when he acquired his hard-earned assets. Charles F. Herbert, another important Alaskan mining man and former Commissioner of Natural Resources under Governor William Egan, remembers Tom Aitken during the 1930's as
a short but broad-shouldered man who was considered quite wealthy but not miserly. He grubstaked many prospectors during his time in Fairbanks and would not hesitate to tip a beer or two with miners, prospectors, and citizens in any one of the numerous pubs of the day.Herbert consulted with Aitken during his thesis research on gold dredging at the School of Mines in Fairbanks There is a persistent but unsubstantiated report that T. P. Aitken, a strong Anglophile, donated money to build fighter aircraft for the Royal Air Force during the early years of World War II. Tom Aitken's final resting place is Moses Lake, Washington, where he passed away on March 18, 1953, at the age of 81.
A combination of good business sense, mining ability, and willingness to take risks allowed Thomas P. Aitken - a man with a Midas Touch - to stand above many others in the Alaska-Yukon mining scene of the early 20th Century.
Sources
Bundtzen, T.K., 1978, A History of Mining in the Kantishna Hills: The Alaska Journal, vol. 8 no. 2p. 150-161.
Bundtzen, T.K., Miller, M.L., Laird, G.M., and Bull, K.F., 1992, Geology and Mineral Resources of the Iditarod Mining District, Southwest Alaska: Alaska Division of Geological and Geophysical Surveys Professional Report 92, 48 pages.
Editor, 1911, Future of Iditarod Menaced: The Iditarod Pioneer, July 8, 1911, p. 1
Editor, 1911, Suit for $48,000 Brought Against Manley and Aitken: Iditarod Pioneer, August 12, 1911, p. 1
Editor, 1912, Iditarod Miner Weds: Seattle-Post Intelligencer, April 4, 1912, p. 1
Editor, 1913, More Money is Needed for Roads: The Iditarod Pioneer, May 24, 1913, p. 4
MacDonald, L.E.T., and Bleiler, L.R., 1990, Gold and Galena, a History of the Mayo District: Mayo Historical Society, Feisen Printers, 502 pages
Mertie, J.X. Jr, 1937, The Kaiyuh Hills, Alaska: U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 868-D, p. 145-178
Morgan, I.A., 1924, Bones: Farthest North Collegian: June, 1924, p. 15-16
Shanley, J.S., 1924, Societus Metallicorum: Farthest North Collegian: June, 1924, p. 4-5
Sims, V.C., 1965, But His Name Wasn't Manley: Alaska Sportsman, May, 1965, p. 14-15
Yukon Archives, 1972, Aaro Aho Collection 82/161, Keno Hill: an Era of Individualism in Yukon's Great Silver District
Wells, F.G., 1933, Lode Deposits of Eureka Creek and Vicinity, Kantishna District: U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 849F, p. 335-379