Charles D. Lane
(1840-1911)
This Missouri native had a successful and glamorous career in the mines of Arizona and California before he sent Gabe Price north with a large party that unsuccessfully followed up rumors of gold in the Kotzebue Country in 1898. The Kotzebue venture for Lane. In 1894, Lane and Hayward, consolidated many of the key claims in Silver Bow Basin at Juneau, and went ahead to establish a mine and mill. In 1897, Lane and Hayward sold the claims to Mein and Beit, perhaps discouraged by the loss of the first mill to a massive snow slide. But Lane and Hayward affected a key consolidation of claims that later benefited the Alaska-Juneau Mine, the largest hard-rock gold mine in Alaska's history.
Lane was born at Palmyra, Marion County, Missouri on November 15, 1840. At the age of 12, Lane's family emigrated to California, settling near Stockton. Charles was mining by the winter of the same year. Over the next few decades, Lane farmed, mined, drove ox teams, and flirted with success. He thought that every job was a worthwhile learning experience: He tried in his own words,
"to draw a little bit of honey out of any kind of a flower."
Lane's first mining success was in the very fine placer gold on the bars of the Snake River Idaho. His first major success was at the hard rock Utica Mine, Angels Camp, California. It was also his first association with Hayward, a San Francisco financier. Hayward and Howard furnished the capital to buy out Lane's first partners and develop the mine, which to 1905, had produced some $17,000,000 in gold. He was also successful at the Fortuna min in Arizona, which paid out several millions of dollars.
In 1898, Lane financed and participated in the ill-fated Kotzebue gold play. Lane had returned to California, but his associate Gabe Price was at Golvin when the successful gold huntersÑLindeberg, Lindblom and BryntesonÑreturned in the fall of 1898. Price went back to Nome with the discoverers and was sufficiently impressed that he committed Lane to help develop the mines.
Lane was an ideal choice: Although nearly sixty years old, Lane was tough from years of hard physical labor. He was unafraid of a fight, physical or legal. The first battles were against men like Blake and Dexter who long has been in the Seward Peninsula, and had strings into Nome. The second and more difficult battles were against a corrupt Alexander McKenzie, who organized the claim jumpers, and his hand picked equally corrupt Judge of the Federal Court, Alfred Noyes.
Lane's wife Anna and son Tom T. backed the only successful hardrock mine on the Seward Peninsula, the Big Hurrah. Charles Lane's Wild Goose Company was only equaled by the Pioneer Company in the early days. Lane also organized the railroad from Nome through Anvil Gulch to Dexter. Lane did not confine his later activities to the Seward Peninsula. Shortly after its discovery, Lane optioned the Chichagof mine north of Sitka, Alaska. In 1907, he was preparing to develop Chichagof. A serious and long time illness, leading to death in 1911, led to the gradual demise of the Lane Alaska empire, but for his courage, foresight, and mining abilities, Lane deserves recognition as one of the true founders of Nome and important in the mining history of Southeast Alaska. An Alaskan toast could parallel one to Lane's home state, Missourri:
We've all abused Missourri,
And sung our songs of Pike;
And laughed to poke some wicked joke
At raw-boned hungry Ike.
But we've tot to pull our houses up,
And 'fess up flat and plain;
Can't find no mate to match the State
That gave us Charley Lane
SOURCES: THE NOME DISCOVERY
Ahwinona, Jacob, 1997, Reflections on my life, in Communities of Memory, Book of Nome, Alaska. Published at Nome, possibly available at Nome museum.
Brooks, A.H. 1908, The development of the mining industry, in The Gold Placers of Parts of the Seward Peninsula, Alaska: U.S. Geol. Survey Bull. 328, p. 10-39. Including a letter to F. L. Hess from Jafet Lindeberg, footnote p. 16-18: also a statement from Dr. A. N. Kittleson, 1905, footnote, p. 21.
Cole, Terence M., 1983, A history of the Nome gold rush: The poor mans paradise: Ph.D. thesis, Universityof Washington, 267 p.
"First grains of gold discovered at Nome now in San Francisco", American Mine Reporter, San Francisco, v.1, no. 6, p. 1-2. The newspaper article was partly based on an interview with Erik Lindblom, but it extensively quotes a letter in the Healy, Alaska "Aurora Borealis" published on 1 March 1899, and an address by Judge William W. Morrow, U.S. Court of Appeals at the University of California, 19 November 1915 on Rex Beach's "The Spoilers".
Harrison, E.S. 1905, Nome and Seward Peninsula: History, description, biographies, and stories: Metropolitan Press, Seattle, 392 p. Especially pages 197-227 in Biographies.
Lindblom, Robert G. to Cussie (Reardon) Kauer, City of Nome, letter, 2 pages, 3 June 1997.
(Robert Lindblom is Erik Lindblom's grandson by the marriage to Mary Ann Smith.)
Olsson, Siw, 1989, Torparsonen Som Slev Guldking: Omslagstockning: Lars Lindqvist, Dalslanningens, 144p.
Smith, Howard L., 1997, Nome River water Control Structures: BLM Open File Report 62.
Spence, Clark C., 1996, The Northern Gold Fleet: University of Illinois Press, 302p.
Vorren, O., 1994, Saami, Reindeer and Gold: Waveland Press, Prospect Heights, Ill.
Wickersham, James, 1938, Old Yukon. Tails ÐTrailsÑTrials: Washington Law Book Company, espec. P.327-378