Carl Heflinger

(May 17, 1912–December 14, 2014)

Iconic Alaska placer gold miner and industry leader Carl Heflinger spent 65 years mining placer gold throughout Interior Alaska. He was born May 17, 1912 in Washington State and passed away on December 14, 2014 at Fairbanks Memorial Hospital in Fairbanks, Alaska at the age of 102. Throughout his long life, Carl became known as a legendary gold miner and a civic leader known to everyone associated with Alaska placer mining.

Early Years

Carl was born in Taylor, Washington, about 25 miles east of Seattle, where coal was mined and bricks and tile were manufactured. Carl’s father, Charlie Heflinger, was a miner and worked in coal mines throughout Washington. In 1901, Charlie traveled to Dawson during the Klondike gold rush period. In January 1903, Charlie arrived in Fairbanks when there were just a few people in town—just a few months after Felix Pedro’s discovery. Charlie’s last mining job was working underground in the Treadwell mines near Juneau in 1915. Carl reminisced:

“While in my teens, we moved to a small stump town with a sawmill called Hobart, about 4 miles from Taylor where steamboats got a soft lignite coal and loaded it there.”

Carl would use a stump puller to remove the stumps from the logging activities in the area. It was hard work and paid little. Carl attended Hobart Grade School and Tacoma High School. At the age of 20, he decided to travel to Alaska. The Great Depression had left many without work and the logging industry of the Pacific Northwest was suffering and on the verge of collapse.

In 1932, Carl and partner Pike (Frank) Anderson boarded the vessel Admiral Evans of the Pacific Alaska Navigation Company in Seattle, with Carl’s sisters Grace and Mae and brother Harold waving them goodbye. He traveled steerage with $40 in pocket. At Ketchikan, Carl gave most of what he had to a stowaway passenger, leaving him with almost no funds. They stopped at numerous harbors in southeast Alaska, including the marble-producing quarries at Tokeen on Prince of Wales Island, and the soon-to-be-closed copper mining enterprise, Kennecott’s Beatson Mine, on Latouche Island, before arriving in Seward in February, 1932. They stayed in a flop-house without any money, often going hungry. They ate stale bread thrown out of a local bakery and begged for stew meat at the Waechter Brothers Meat Company. He remembered:

“I searched the railroad tracks for coal that dropped out of the rail cars to use in our coal cook stove.”

But later that summer, a Standard Oil Company cargo vessel arrived, and put every able-bodied citizen to work, including Carl and Frank. Later that year, Carl began to make his way north. He recalled:

“I hopped a freight train to Anchorage and first worked at 14th and C Streets at Bob Graham’s pig ranch. I worked for my food and did odd jobs like pitching hay and milking cows for Tom Peterking. Anchorage was a government town in those days and the Alaska Railroad, which was built by the Federal Government, employed a lot of people.”

Carl got $60/month working for Peterking and was able to acquire equipment. He bought an old pickup truck and a 30-inch circular saw, which he would use to cut cordwood with Bob Graham for Anchorage area wood consumers. One winter, they were one of the only wood cutting enterprises in Anchorage; they got $2/cord for his product, which was quite profitable for them.

The value of gold increased from $20.67/ounce to $35/ounce in 1934, which quickly caused a sharp increase in gold mining activity throughout the Alaska Territory. Carl traveled to Fairbanks that year via the Alaska Railroad in search of mining employment.

Carl’s first job was hand mining an open pit with wheelbarrow and shovel for Helmar Johnson on Cleary Creek north of Fairbanks. Subsequently, he worked with Ed Johnson in the Cripple Creek area near Ester in an underground drift placer mine on Alder Creek. The gold-bearing placer deposit was more than 110 feet deep and had ‘bad air’ along with other dangers typically encountered in drifts. The drift mine was not a paying proposition and Carl and Ed quit and both turned over their share of the dump to a Mr. Moody, the storekeeper at Ester. Carl completed much timbering at various mines and prospects with variable success. In 1935, Carl drove Thaw Points for the English Dredging Company on Fairbanks Creek.

Carl continued to conduct underground drifting at several locales throughout the Fairbanks District. As Carl became better established, his brothers Art and Harold arrived in the Fairbanks district and worked with him on several placer mining prospects. One memory Carl had was the extensive use of sled dogs, which were important during the drift mine activities in the Fairbanks area. Three of his dogs would frequently pull him around via dogsled or on skis to pick up mail, groceries or other items at Summit Roadhouse, which was on Cleary Summit. He described a life-threatening incident:

“Life in the drift mines was dangerous work and no man knew how long his luck would hold out….On January 29th, 1939, my luck nearly ran out on Last Chance Creek. At the 40-foot mark in the shaft, I stumbled on the ladder and tumbled backwards; I could hear the wind velocity in my ears increase as I gained momentum in the fall. I thought this was the end for me. I hit the bottom of the shaft and passed out for how long I don’t know…after regaining consciousness, I could feel my rib bones grinding against my backbone and my legs and hips seemed to be broken.”

Somehow, Carl managed to drag himself up the shaft ladder and onto the surface, where his brother Art would transport him via dog team to Summit Roadhouse, where a vehicle transported him to St. Josephs Hospital in Fairbanks. He spent 21 days in intensive care at the hospital. Twelve of his ribs had torn loose from his backbone, and a leg was broken but his hips were not broken. Incredibly, by February 17th, he was back at the mine (with a cast on his leg) and helped with others hoisting paydirt to the surface until April 27th.

Carl’s luck improved when later in 1939, the U.S. Smelting Mining and Refining Company (known locally as the F.E. Company) bought his claims on Fish and Last Chance Creeks. In an interview with author Margaret Reiss, he relates:

“I sold my half of the claims and then began surface operations with tractor and dragline. The FE Company paid me well—kind of getting me out of their hair as they prepared a dredge to mine Fish Creek. I mined Monte Cristo Creek—right where the Fort Knox mine is today. I sold FE Company one of the claims at the current edge of the Fort Knox pit, which was known as No. 2 above discovery on Fish Creek.”

WWII Years

On December 7th, 1941, Carl’s life changed with many others. The country was at war first with Japan and shortly after, Germany and the other AXIS nations. Carl remembered:

“All but two of the seventeen (17) men working for me were classified 1-A. In my case, as a mine owner/operator, I was $40,000 in debt to merchants around Fairbanks and the draft board took that into consideration. I needed another year to mine and pay off the debt so the draft board granted me a one-year deferment. The draft board wanted me to pay my bills prior to me joining the army.”

Carl was able to mine one more year (1942) and he indeed managed to pay off debt owed to local area businesses by continuing to mine on Monte Cristo Creek.

In November 1942, Carl enlisted into the U.S. Army Air Corps (USAAC) at Ladd Field, Alaska. Carl spent WWII servicing such notable aircraft as the P-39 Air Cobra and P-63 King Cobra pursuit aircraft and the Douglas A-20 and B-25 light bombers, all of which were integral parts of the USA/USSR Lend Lease Program. Carl also refueled hundreds of aircraft often in conditions exceeding -45° Fahrenheit temperatures. Of the 14,798 aircraft delivered to the eastern front during the war, 7,983 were flown along the ‘Alaska-Siberia’ (ALSIB) route through Ladd Field. Carl believed that those working on the aircraft, including himself, were not initially very well trained for the job of maintaining complicated flying machines. Carl remembered one incident that taught him a few humble lessons:

“One day while working on a P-39, I got up into the pilot seat to see how it worked and how it felt to be a pursuit aircraft pilot. I accidentally turned on the gunsight mechanism, which activated the gyroscope and red lights came on in the cockpit. I didn’t realize that the forward 37 mm cannon and wing-mounted machine guns were ready to shoot with the press of a button on the joystick…A captain came over to me and said ‘don’t move’. He jumped up on the wing and gingerly took my hand off the joystick. If I had pressed that button, all hell would have broken loose. I was asked to just leave the cockpit and nothing more was made of the incident.”

Before the end of WWII, Carl joined a group to clean up debris and repair buildings on a runway at Galena, which was then a Lend-Lease airfield west of Fairbanks. Then he was sent to ‘East Base’ in Great Falls, Montana, where the Lend-Lease route began. Carl was honorably discharged from the U.S. Army Air Corps in December 1945 at the rank of Staff Sergeant, serving 37 months.

Post War Years, Marriage and Mining

In 1944, Carl met and married Dorothy Joan Brady of San Francisco, and at the end of the war, built a house in Slaterville, a subdivision in Fairbanks. His cleanups on Monte Cristo Creek in 1946 were so poor that the Heflinger family could not make ends meet. During 1947–1948, Carl mined Olive Creek in the Livengood district northwest of Fairbanks with Carl Parker. In 1949, he mined on Portage Creek in the Circle district but returns from placer mining continued to be meager in the post WWII period. Dorothy persuaded Carl to seek other employment, at least temporarily.

From 1950–1952, he worked as a heavy equipment mechanic for Mitchell Trucking and Tractor. In 1952, he started a successful contracting business and was a founding partner of GHEMM Company (the ‘H’ in GHEMM Company is for Heflinger).

In 1953, he built a commercial building in Fairbanks that included a car repair shop, grocery store and apartments. From 1953–1959, he formed a partnership with Dodson and Norris, which specialized in ‘dirt work’ contracting around Fairbanks. This enterprise did quite well.

In 1954, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) sold all assets, including a gold dredge, to Chuck Herbert and Glen Franklin, who then mined the Livengood Bench system with dragline and tractor. The USSR&M Company purchased the dredge in 1955, had it rebuilt, and moved it to Hogatza in northwest Alaska where it mined pay intermittently from 1957–1996. In 1958, Carl Heflinger subleased and then purchased a part of the Livengood Bench system from Chuck Herbert and Glen Franklin and completed assessment work for the Callahan Mining Company, which controlled parts of the Livengood Bench.

From 1960 to 1969, Carl resumed placer mining with John Clark on some of the Callahan Mining Company ground at Livengood. After Clark left the partnership, Carl’s firm, Redstone Mining Company, mined on Livengood Creek until 1969, until the lease expired. In 1967, Carl staked claims on the Walker Fork of the 40 Mile River near Boundary after that area was dropped by Yukon Placer Mining Company. Carl then moved to the 40 Mile district, where he mined during 1972 to 1974. His son Fred was involved with the mine on Walker Fork.

Beginning in 1970, all of Carl’s mining activities in the Livengood and 40 Mile areas would be under the firm ‘Heflinger Mining Company’. In 1973, Carl leased his Livengood mining ground to Stanford Mines. From 1974 to 1976, Carl and his then partner Glen Franklin managed the Stanford Mines Livengood operations. From 1977 to 1979, Carl and sons resumed mining on the Walker Fork of the 40 Mile River and did some stripping at Livengood.

In the late 1970s through the late 1990s, Livengood Creek was again the focus area for Heflinger Mining Company. Heflinger also maintained an ownership position on the ‘Livengood Bench’, several miles from his mining operations on Livengood Creek and had a royalty share with lessors and would help with cleanups.

Civic Activities and His Family

Carl Heflinger ran for the State House in 1962, just three years after Statehood. The only precinct he won was Chatanika, where his old friends from mining resided. From 1970 to 1978, Carl was a member of the Alaska State Water Advisory Board. For a number of years, Carl served on the Building Board of the Fairbanks School district. He was appointed to a ‘Blue Ribbon’ advisory board for the Alaska Department of Natural Resources, which tackled many issues related to water quality and reclamation during placer mining activities.

Carl served as Treasurer/Secretary of the Fairbanks Branch of the Alaska Miners Association (AMA), which he took over from USSR&M Company General Manager Jim Crafford. Carl then served as the Branch Chief of the Fairbanks Branch of AMA and served on the Board of the AMA for years.

During the summer of 1984, Carl Heflinger made local news when Alaska Governor Bill Sheffield sent him with Ernest Wolff and Walter Roman to Washington D.C. to demonstrate gold mining techniques and to discuss the nature of small-scale mining as part of the 1984 Festival of American Folklife, which was sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution. The three men suffered from sweltering temperatures but managed to answer many questions about Alaska’s unique placer mining culture.

Carl and Dorothy began to travel, which included visits to Europe, Egypt, Fiji, New Zealand, and Australia; and in the 1980s, joined a group headed up by John Sims of the Alaska Office of Mineral Development (who was inducted into the AMHF along with Carl) to visit the metal mining and related industries of South Africa.

Carl and Dorothy strongly encouraged their four children to seek higher education. Bruce obtained a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). David obtained a B.S. Degree in Electrical Engineering, also from MIT. Fred obtained a B.S. Degree in Mining Engineering from the University of Alaska–Fairbanks. Their daughter, Marianne, obtained a B.S. Degree in Finance from San Jose State University in California. Their sons worked on the Trans Alaska Pipeline (TAPS) construction project during the 1970s.

Retirement, Passing and His Legacy

In 1999, at the age of 87, Carl Heflinger officially retired from mining. In 2004, Carl moved to the Fairbanks Pioneer Home, where he was able to spend quality time with his beloved wife Dorothy. He lost her in 2008 after 63 years of marriage.

Carl Heflinger died on December 14th, 2014 at Fairbanks Memorial Hospital at the age of 102. Nothing astonished Carl more than living into the new millennium, after several near-death experiences he had during his pre-WWII drift mining years and other medical issues experienced later in life.

At the time of his passing, Carl Heflinger had outlived his six siblings. He was survived by sons Fred, Bruce and Dave; by daughter Marianne Heflinger Mann; by grandchildren Paul and Maureen Heflinger; Chelsea, Skipper and Riley Mann; and many nieces and nephews. At the time of his passing, the extended family thanked staff for the outstanding care given to Carl and Dorothy at the Fairbanks Pioneer Home.

One of the writers of this biography (Bundtzen) benefited greatly from conversations he had with Carl while he was residing at the Fairbanks Pioneers Home during visits in 2006 and 2008 respectively. One of the reviewers, David Heflinger, provided a timeline checklist of Carl’s activities, which improved the manuscript. Beginning in 1965, Carl began to write his memoirs. Although never published, they share raw and humorous accounts of his life and dealings with many colorful characters in the Alaska Territory before Statehood. His World War II experience reminds us of the hazards that military aviation faced. Those interviews can be accessed at: www.nps.gov/aleu/photosmultimedia/interview-heflinger.htm.

There is an April 17, 2000 recording of one of Carl’s presentations at the ‘Pioneers of Alaska’ project, sponsored jointly by Igloo #4 and Auxiliary #8. The program features presentations by AMHF inductees Doug Colp, Glen Franklin, and Carl Heflinger, and is available at: www.jukebox.uaf.edu/Pioneers/htm/carlh.htm.

Written/Compiled by T.K. Bundtzen and Joan Skilbred; Reviewed by Charles B. Green, Denise Herzog, David Heflinger and Mitchell W. Henning

References Used in this Biography

Bundtzen, T.K., Swainbank, R.C., Deagen, J.R., and Moore, J.L., 1990, Alaska’s Mineral Industry—1989: Alaska Division of Geological and Geophysical Surveys Special Report 44, 100 pages.

Green, C.B., Bundtzen, T.K., Peterson, R.J., Seward, A.F., Deagen, J.R., and Burton, J.E., 1989, Alaska’s Mineral Industry—1988: Alaska Division of Geological and Geophysical Surveys Special Report 43, 79 pages.

Hayes, Otis Jr., 1996, The Alaska-Siberia Connection—The World War II Air Route: Texas A&M University Press, College Station, 184 pages.

Holdsworth, P. R., 1958, Report of the Commissioner of Mines for Biennium ended December 31, 1958: State of Alaska/Alaska Territory Department of Mines, 83 pages.

Long, Everett A., and Neganblya, I. Y., 1992, Cobras over the Tundra: Arktita Publishing, Fairbanks, Alaska, 115 pages.

Parker, Audrey E., 2003, Livengood The Last Stampede: Hats Off Books, Publisher TM, Tucson, Arizona, Library of Congress No. 2003095004, 158 pages.

Price, Kathy, 2004, The World War II Heritage of Ladd Field, Fairbanks, Alaska: Center for Environmental Management of Military Lands (CEMML), TPS 04-07, 120 pages.

Reiss, Marguerite, 1995a, Alaska Miners at War Part VIII Carl Heflinger—From Poverty to Paydirt: in, Rybachek, Rose, editor, The Alaska Miner—The Journal of the Alaska Miners Association, Vol. 23, No. 2, pages 10–13.

Reiss, Marguerrite, 1995b, Alaska Miners at War Part VIII Carl Heflinger—Working with the Russians: in, Rybachek, Rose, editor, The Alaska Miner—The Journal of the Alaska Miners Association, Vol. 23, No. 3, pages 10–12; 15.

Stratman, Joel, editor, 2014, In Memory: Carl Heflinger (1912–2014), in, The Alaska Miner, a Monthly Journal of the Alaska Miners Association: Vol. 42, No. 12, page 24.

Swainbank, R.C., Bundtzen, T.K., Clough, A.H., Hansen, E.W., and Nelson, M.G., 1993, Alaska’s Mineral Industry 1992: Alaska Division of Geological and Geophysical Surveys Special Report 47, 80 pages.

Williams, J.A., 1962, Alaska Division of Mines and Minerals, Report for the Year 1962, 119 pages.

Top of Page

 

 

Home | In Memory | About Us | Inductees | Paystreak | AMHFF News | Nominate | The '98ers | Recent Contributions | Contribute | Contact | Site Map
©2025 Alaska Mining Hall of Fame Foundation
Today is Sunday, 24 May 2026.