Joseph Juneau, born 28 May 1833 in Repentigny, Quebec, was the second and most adventurous son of Francois and Marguerite Juneau. From his boy hood on, he heard of his illustrious cousin, Laurent-Salomon Juneau who had followed the fur trade before settling down to found the city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. By the time Joe was sixteen he, also, was on the western path, traveling first to California in the rush of 1849. His trail is difficult to follow, but in the next twenty-five years, Juneau was in Oregon and the Fraser River, sometimes with his countryman "Buck" Choquette. In the mid-1870's, Juneau joined the rush to the Cassiar, near Deese Lake in British Columbia. The district was best reached up the Stikine River from Wrangell, Alaska.
An event in 1879 changed Juneau's life. A German immigrant mining engineer, George Pilz, needed experienced miners and prospectors to work at a mine in Silver Bay south of Sitka, and to follow up on rich specimens of gold-ore brought to Pilz by Indian prospectors and scouts.
Juneau and another experienced miner, Richard Harris, pursed Pilz's best prospects. In mid-summer in 1880, the two men followed Gold Creek as far as Snowslide Gulch where they obtained marginal but commercial pass (about 10 cents worth of gold per pan). Before tackling the rest of Gold Creek, the men returned to Sitka. Juneau was back in early October, and this time he and his partner proceeded up Snowslide Gulch and dropped into a basin cut by hundreds of gold-bearing quartz veins. They followed a creek that they named Quartz Creek into the basin. In thirty years of mining and prospecting, Joe Juneau had never seen its equal.
Juneau, more the easy-come easy-go prospector than Harris, sold his interest in the new district by about 1882. But his name remained. Miners decided to name the new city at the base of Gold Creek- formerly Harrisburgh or Rockwell- after Joe, who then bought drinks for any and all takers for severals weeks in celebration of the name-change.
Joe Juneau never had another comparable success, but he did make one more rich gold strike in the Circle district of Alaska in about 1895. Before he left his named townsite, Juneau and a young Tlingit girl called Susie by the miners, conceived a child. Susie was sent to Sitka where she married a man named Andrews, in order that the baby would have a name and would arrive in wedlock. The baby was Mary Andrews Marks, matriarch of many descendants in the Juneau area. Mary lived to the age of 102.
Joe made one last rush to the Klondike in 1897, but the rough years had taken a toll on a once rugged constitution. Juneau died in the Yukon in 1899. A few year later, miners and citizens of his city brought the body back for burial in Juneau, a belated honor, but well deserved.