Robert Fisk Lyman
1911 - 1974
Robert F. Lyman, circa 1932.
Photo from the Lyman family collection.
Robert (Bob) Fisk Lyman is in the tradition of the intelligent, entrepreneurial, hard working, independent Alaska miner, who established a mining family that is now in its third generation. Bob differed from the norm in that he was better prepared technically than were many miners of his time, and in that the precious metal he mined was, for many years, mercury rather than gold.
Background
Bob was born in Greenwood, South Dakota on August 7, 1911, to William Ernest (W.E. or Bill) and Laura Lucille (nee Williamson) Lyman, the third of six children: John, Richard, Robert, Eleanor, Margaret and Laura. W.E. and Laura met at Yankton College and were married in Greenwood in 1906 by her father. Both the Lyman and Williamson families were South Dakota pioneers, and an earlier generation of each had left the East for the state of Ohio, before the Civil War. Laura was the daughter of John Poage Williamson, a well known pioneer missionary to the Sioux Indians, the author of an English-Dakota language dictionary, and a legislator for a term in the South Dakota house. Bob's father, proud of the Lyman name, named his three sons Richard, John and Robert after the three sons of Richard Lyman of High Ongar, County of Essex, England, who, with his family, were the original Lymans to arrive in the New World, in 1630, and from whom all Lymans in America trace their descent.
Bob spoke little of his forebears. A few times he called himself the "black sheep" of the family because he did not choose the usual pursuits of ranching or the ministry. Looking in hindsight over 20 years after Bob's death, the historical record becomes highly relevant to explaining his personality and character. An address on "Characteristics of the Lymans," delivered by Lyman Coleman in 1872 at a Lyman reunion, enumerated traits of the Lymans generally, which eerily foretell the incredible work ethic, the high moral standards and the single-minded dedication that enabled Bob Lyman to succeed as a pioneering Alaska prospector and miner under the most rugged and adverse circumstances.
The adventurous, enterprising spirit of the Lymans, should be noted as a prominent characteristic. In every enterprise for the settlement of the country and development of its resources they have been pioneers. Age after age they have had a quick, attentive ear to the rallying cry, Westward, ho!
The hardships, self-denials and sufferings of their pioneer and frontier life is another characteristic of the family. [Their] temperament inspires great buoyancy of spirits, irrepressible elasticity under adversity, and dauntless energy and enterprise in the pursuits of life.
We may ascribe to them many useful inventions and labor saving machines. Many of these inventions are of curious workmanship, requiring the most skillful manipulation and combination of mechanical powers, evincing surprising ingenuity and skill. Next in the enumeration may be specified great fixedness of character and firmness of principles.
Early life in South Dakota
At the time Bob was born, the family lived in Lemmon, South Dakota, where his father was a star route mail carrier, one of the first to use an automobile. In 1915, the young family moved to Spearfish, South Dakota, partly to escape an infantile paralysis scare, partly so that W.E. could accept a County Agent position. He recounted:
"I did not continue long in this, and returned to my earlier love of carrying mail. This I did all through my life, intermittently interspersed with ventures in ranching, some good, some bad."
Laura was a gifted pianist. She graduated from the Conservatory of Music at Yankton College, near Greenwood, and studied piano in Chicago under Fannie Bloomfield Zeisler, then the outstanding piano teacher of the country. Laura took up a musical career soon after the move to Spearfish, joining the staff of Black Hills Teachers College and giving private piano lessons there almost continuously until her resignation due to illness in the spring of 1944.
Bob attended Black Hills Teacher's college for one year, where his mother taught, and then transferred to Yankton College, from which both his parents had graduated. Bob enrolled September 9, 1931. He graduated three years later on June 11, 1934, with a BA degree in Physical Science (Chemistry). Bob took education, chemistry, sociology, English and German classes among others. He played football and ran track during his college years. He was senior class president, Y Club president, and received the Dr. Frank Conger Smith Memorial Award. Bob's wife, Betty Lyman, said he was given the Yankton award as the leading scholar-athlete in his senior year. The focus and ambition were set in Bob's life at a young age, although the particular goal was not yet in view. Bob wrote his daughter Helen, when she sought direction as a college junior:
"I still didn't have the faintest idea what I was going to do when I was a junior in college. As a last resort, I spent half my credit hours during my senior year taking education so I could teach just in case I couldn't find something better. All this taught me was that I would rather dig ditches than teach high school kids."Following his graduation, Bob worked with his father on the rural mail route for a year and on a homestead.
First years in Alaska, and marriage
One of Bob's classmates at Yankton was Will Goding, from Skagway in the territory of Alaska. It was the height of the depression. Seeking new horizons and adventure, as well as a livelihood, Bob went home with Will in the spring of 1935. Bob had arrived in Alaska. He took a short term job on a Coast and Geodetic Survey boat (the C&GS, known since 1970 as NOAA, or National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) and another job unloading cargo from the Alaska Steamship boats at the Skagway docks. Will's father was an engineer with the White Pass and Yukon Railroad, and that fall, he secured for Bob free passage to the head of rail at Whitehorse and then down the Yukon River and into mainland Alaska and Fairbanks.
Once in Fairbanks, Bob's first job was digging ditches for a new town sewer system. Still living hand-to-mouth, he enrolled in the University of Alaska School of Mines. He lived in a yurt-like shelter near campus, made of upright poles layered over with thick moss - more like a cave than a house, but cheap and warm. Unless he was lucky enough to be invited out, his food was an unvarying daily ration costing 27 cents, consisting of hotcakes for breakfast, peanut butter on stale bread for lunch and cornmeal mush for dinner. Bob could hear the Alaska Railroad train go by the nearby tracks, heading into town. He would race to the station on his bike where he would get a job unloading, if he got there soon enough.
In his second summer in Alaska [1936], Bob worked the season driving thaw points for the FE Company (Fairbanks Exploration Company). It was hard work, but paid enough to lift him from the grinding poverty of the first winter. His sister Eleanor came to Fairbanks in the fall to teach school and they shared an apartment.
In his third summer in Alaska [1937], Bob obtained a summer assignment as field assistant to Alaska Mining Hall of Famer, John Beaver Mertie Jr. Bob worked for Mertie for two seasons, one in the Forty-Mile district and a second on the Seward Peninsula. In the winter time he continued at the School of Mines and graduated with a B.S. degree in Mining and Geology in 1938. At the college, Bob was one of Dean Ernest Patty's geological and mining students, who were known at least informally as Patty's boys.
Bob's experience and practical and academic background were good preparation for teaching a course in mining and geology for the Extension Service of the Alaska School of Mines. Bob was on the School of Mines extension faculty for three years: 1939-40, 1940-41 and 1941-42. In this capacity he traveled all through the Territory of Alaska, staying for six-week periods in each community. Because classes were always held in the evening, he had plenty of time to prospect, get out and talk to old timers, and learn the locations of possible placers from their stories of old gold strikes and prospects.
Bob went to the Kuskokwim River basin with Frank Rocheleau, who had been in his extension class. Bob blocked out pay on Donlin Creek, which joins with Flat Creek to form Crooked Creek, which flows into the Kuskokwim River at the village of Crooked Creek. In late summer 1941, Bob went into Fairbanks to order an HD-10 Allis Chalmers tractor and a Gould pump, with plans to begin operations during the summer of 1942. Bob's first choice was a Caterpillar D8, but the Army had commandeered most of the available Caterpillar tractors for the war effort. The heavy equipment cost about $10,000, and Bob signed away his entire salary for the next winter. He also took in another partner, Ken Johnston, who cosigned notes. Bob arranged credit with Harry Donnelley at the Miners and Merchants Bank in Flat, on no security beyond his good name and reputation. The machinery was to go to Bethel on the fall 1941 boat and up the Kuskokwim. Frank would freight it to the mine site during winter and also go to Flat to purchase a years supply of groceries. Meanwhile, Bob returned to his teaching job with mining extension and arrived in November in Juneau for his first assignment. He was living on his University of Alaska professor's per diem of $4 per day.
The assignment by chance led to marriage. A secretary, Elizabeth Freeman (Betty) Tuttle had arrived in Alaska on Columbus Day, 1941, and landed a job in Governor Gruening's office. She heard of the extension course from a fellow guest in the Baranof Hotel where she was staying, and decided to increase her own knowledge of rocks and minerals. Betty would say that almost immediately,
"I was far more interested in the teacher . . . than I was in the class. We became engaged the night before Pearl Harbor. The next day the world was turned upside down and we decided not to wait, but to get married as soon as possible."Bob left Juneau on December 17 for his next teaching assignment, in Petersburg, to be followed by Ketchikan. Bob and Betty were married in Ketchikan on February 13, 1942. Together they proceeded next to Wrangell. They were to finish the season in Haines, but Bob was reassigned to Seward to assist co-instructor John McAnerney with an unusually heavy enrollment. When the course in Seward was finished, Bob closed out his teaching career.
In Betty's words:
"It would take a volume to tell of all the events, the plans made and unmade in the next few months. The upshot of it all was Bob, being over 30, was not immediately drafted; gold mining was shut down for the duration; and in order to try and salvage his investment in machinery and pay off his debt, Bob decided to see if the long-idle cinnabar property on Return Creek, in the Yukon River drainage but only about ten miles from his Donlin claims, was a viable proposition. Cinnabar was a strategic metal for the war."
The DeCoursey Years
The abandoned mercury mine on Return Creek was at DeCoursey (a.k.a. DeCourcy) Mountain, ten miles from Donlin Creek and 30 miles from the gold mining town at Flat. Supplying at Flat, Bob and Betty backpacked from Flat to Decoursey, overnighting at two primitive rest cabins on the trail. They moved into an abandoned cabin at Decoursey. Bob began to mine and Betty learned to manage survival, living the first winter on canned and dried foods. Oddly the newlyweds enjoyed little privacy for the first two years. Personnel from the U.S. Geological Survey and the Bureau of Mines were active on site in geological field studies, stripping and trenching, in order to report on the scope and placement of the cinnabar ore bodies. In addition, there was more work than the partners could handle in getting the mine going, so they hired other men to assist with constructing the camp and other tasks. All personnel reached the mine by hiking in, or in the winter by dog team or tractor. There was no airfield and no radio communication. In 1943, a landing strip was completed, and that same year the Bureau of Mines established radio communications with Flat.
The DeCoursey Mountain mercury deposit had been discovered by Matt DeCourcy around 1911, and the property bore his name, although with a different spelling. In 1942, Bob Lyman acquired a four-year lease with option to purchase from Harry Brink, who, with his brother Jack, had staked the claims in 1927. At this time Bob was in partnership with the same men who had been with him in the now dormant Donlin Creek venture, Frank C. Rocheleau and Kenneth M. Johnston. In October 1942, Bob and Frank purchased Johnston's interest. Within months Frank's interest flagged and was soon spent. In July 1943, he left, and the partnership split. Frank kept the Donlin Creek claims, and Bob took the lease-purchase option. DeCoursey was burdened with Frank's unpaid share of back taxes. In late 1951, a welcome resolution arrived: Frank sold his Donlin Creek claims to Bob, paid his taxes from the proceeds, and left Bob the sole owner of the DeCoursey mercury mine and the Donlin Creek placer gold claims that he and Frank had originally intended to mine together. World War II redirected Bob's mining career from gold to mercury.
DeCoursey had only produced about 150 (76 pound units) flasks of mercury through 1932. In his years at DeCoursey (1942-1949) Bob produced 1,250 flasks, mining nearly solo, and recovering the mercury in a wood-burning, two-tube, Gould D retort (furnace). The 1942 operation was successful enough; when Bob's draft number came up, the draft board advised him, in Betty's words:
"...they needed the mercury more than they did him."It was also a job that needed exceptional ability to make do with whatever was at hand, even extending to dentistry. Betty lost a filling a few hundred miles from the nearest dentist. Bob filed down a silver dime, mixed it with a little mercury and refilled the cavity with a filling that lasted years.
After 1943, as solo operators of the business, Bob and Betty continued to hire a few men in the early years, but Bob took care of retorting and much of the other outdoor work. Betty took care of the cooking, laundry and all domestic duties as well as keeping up the books and the business end of the operation, which included compliance with many government regulations, even in the early years.
When retorting was in process, Bob got his sleep entirely in naps, having to rise and dress several times a night, walk to the retort in extreme subzero temperature, and stoke the furnace with wood to keep the temperature up. Processing the ore for a flask of mercury required five-eighths of a cord of wood. Though Bob hired part of the wood cutting job, he said that it seemed that all of his spare time was spent on the wood pile, for that was in the days before the invention of the chain saw.
To get the mercury to market, Bob freighted it by tractor in the early spring before break-up with three go-devils (heavy sleds) attached behind. Freight distance 25 miles to Crooked Creek if shipped by water; 50 miles to Flat if shipped by air. He would return with all the supplies for another year's operation. One spring, a final drive pinion gear on the HD10 tractor broke while crossing an ice bridge. Break-up was imminent; repair of the breakdown on the trail was out of the question. The future for a mine in the bush hung in the balance, depending on Bob's ability to move a 12-ton tractor plus 30 tons of freight 16 miles in a few days. The closest tractor capable of towing the outfit to camp was 50 miles away at a one-man placer gold camp. In his words:
Decisions are easy when there is only one solution. I hit that 50-mile trail on the run."The borrowed tractor was obtained with the promise to buy the whole mining outfit if it could not be returned before breakup. In this way, Bob acquired an HD14, which proved in the end to be useful for future mining operations.
Another time, a 4-inch pipe cross gave way on the retort. The order for a new one missed the deadline for delivery to the fall boat from Seattle to Bethel, a major port on the Kuskokwim River. The replacement pipe cross was shipped on the next boat, in June, and arrived at Crooked Creek Village nearly a year after the order, where it stayed until January of the new year. After freeze-up, the pipe cross was freighted by tractor to DeCoursey. Said Bob:
"The end result was a delay of two years on half the mercury production and three years on the other half. Due to a drop in the price of mercury during this time, our financial trials from the broken pipe crosses were greater than our tribulations from the tow tractor purchase."
Bob and Betty found happy family tranquility in the midst of punishing hard work and the high risk of failure inherent in the DeCoursey operation. They began their family during the DeCoursey years, and had three children, Helen Todd in 1944, William (Bill) Tuttle in 1945, and Spencer Williamson in 1949.
Betty traveled to Maine to be with her parents for the birth of their first child, Helen, who was born on August 16, 1944. Bob received the wire announcing her birth on August 17th, and he sat down to write a long letter to Betty, expressing his happiness and giving the news:
"About the only thing of interest in the mail was the settlement sheet for 138 flasks of mercury sent to Fairbanks. [Harry] Donnelly had opened the letter in Flat, and deposited the $25,944.00 to our account. It is still raining quite hard. I like the sound on the roof. I wish you were here to listen to it with me. The rain would not mean that the plane couldn't land or that the tractor would get stuck like it used to. It would not mean that every drop was retarding our work and making the men gloomy. It would be just a peaceful friendly rain that wasn't hurting us in any way and just by its sound alone was doing a lot of good. Perhaps in our jumbled life here at the mine we didn't ever ease up enough to see the beauty of our environment. At last with relative few worries on my mind I now am realizing the ease of mind I had so long wished for."
Mining Gold at Snow Gulch
DeCoursey played out in 1949 and Bob and family moved into Crooked Creek where Bob worked on the Kuskokwim riverboat Hazel B in 1950. The family also lived an interlude up river at the Red Devil mine. In spring 1951, they moved to their original 1942 destination, the gold placer at Snow Gulch, which ran into Donlin Creek. The operation was successful, and with the proceeds the Lymans bought a new Chevrolet and with a family now of four (Douglas Poage was born in 1951), they visited friends and family throughout the lower 48 states. The Lymans continued to mine at Snow Gulch through 1956 when the fixed-price of gold finally overcame any potential profit.
One of the successful side products of the Snow Gulch years was that Bob learned to fly in 1955 and subsequently acquired a Super Cub. Four years later, in 1959, Bob was to check out in the larger Piper Comanche, which he rented to fly the whole family on a vacation and visiting circuit around the southern forty-eight states.
In the summer of 1957, Bob contracted with a leading lower-48 mining firm, the Cordero Mining Company, to prospect the central Kuskokwim Region for mercury. In an efficient program, Bob landed prospectors and occasionally himself on the rolling barren ridge tops and then picked them up at the end of their traverses. Betty and family lived at the old mercury discovery, the Parks mine of the Willis family, a few miles downriver from Red Devil. One of Bob's prospectors, Jack Egnati, a Yupik Eskimo, discovered cinnabar at White Mountain, near the upper reaches of the Big River, a north-flowing branch of the upper Kuskokwim River.
The mine at Red Devil
During the successful years at Snow Gulch, Bob had put his profits into the rich mercury mine of Red Devil, and became a major stockholder and director. When the mine failed to make a profit due to poor management, Bob became increasingly alarmed. In the fall of 1957, Bob, Betty, and family moved across the river from Parks and began to build a house near the Red Devil airport. Betty became the postmaster of the new Red Devil post office. On November 9, 1957, Bob was asked to take over as general manager of the Red Devil mine. Betty continued to serve as the postmaster, and she also became the office manager for the mine, tending to the inventory and purchase orders and keeping up the payroll (up to 80 men) and other company records. The mine was much larger than any of Lyman's previous ventures. It took administrative skill as well technical ability to run. Red Devil was discovered by a young berry picker, staked in 1933 by Hans Halvorsen, and produced intermittently from 1939-1951. Most production was after 1952. The operation for Alaska Mines and Minerals, Inc., under Bob's leadership, was the most productive in the mine's history, with total recorded production of over 32,000 76 pound flasks of mercury through 1963, with an additional 4,000 flasks produced from 1969-71. Bob led the mine operation until 1963.
White Mountain
Managing the final days of the Red Devil Mine was a chore that Bob was willing to forego, and in the spring of 1964, after the mine closed, he and Betty took a long-deserved vacation on a cruise ship to the South Pacific Islands. In 1963, the Lymans, took up mining the White Mountain mercury discovery of Jack Egnati, with a totally Lyman crew, joined most summers by an interested prospector or one of the boy's friends. Bill and Doug were now married, and their wives joined the crew. The deposit lent itself to a family operation. Cinnabar was found in high grade masses in the faulted limestone hosts. Bob set up a jig plant to concentrate the dense cinnabar that also occurred in a workable placer below the lode. Most of the ore could be sold as concentrate, but Bob also set up a small retort in Corvallis, Oregon which, in the winter of 1964-65, the Lymans had adopted as their permanent winter home.
The Lymans had settled into a predictable cycle, based on mercury mining that benefited the entire family. It was ended by a tragedy. On September 13, 1974, Bob was killed in a tractor accident at the mine. His grave lies on the hilltop at White Mountain overlooking the Lyman Hills, which were named for him. The inscription engraved on the headstone reads:
Robert F. Lyman
1911-1974
Beloved Husband and Father
Pioneering Miner Metallurgist
He had the courage of his dreams.
Bob Lyman's Legacy
Bob Lyman left an Alaska legacy from young extension instructor before World War II to his tragic death as Alaska's top mercury miner in 1974. The scientists of the U.S. Geological Survey and his mining contemporaries recognized his great ability and talents. The Lyman Hills and the Lyman Fork of the Big River were named for him in honor of his contributions to Alaska's mining industry.
Bob Lyman also left a lasting mining legacy in his family. He had intended to go back to Snow Gulch, and had taken in some equipment. After he died, the rest of the Lymans went back to Snow Gulch in 1975 to carry on, but the results were discouraging. Bill and Spencer moved on, and went to work at the Schwartzwalder uranium mine near Golden, Colorado. Doug continued to return to Snow Gulch, still hoping. Spencer decided to rejoin Doug and Linda in 1980. At the tail end of the 1982 mining season, they found the Snow Gulch gold in large quantity.
Spencer met Carolyn in Anchorage and they were married in 1984 at Snow Gulch. They have lived there since, carrying on with the placer mining. Spencer's efficient washing plant and over 20 years of steady production on Donlin are a tribute to Bob's earlier work. A third generation of Lymans is showing the ability to carry on the legacy; teenager Aurora is proficient with the three-yard excavator at Snow Gulch. Bill, Spencer and Doug, like their father, possess an easy aptitude for designing, building, operating and repairing every kind of machinery and equipment, and all three learned to fly.
Doug went on from Snow Gulch to work for Westgold and Placer Dome, companies engaged in the major hard rock exploration of Donlin Creek downstream from Snow Gulch. Doug also worked in hard rock and placer gold at several Alaska sites: Nolan Creek, Stuyahok, Nixon Fork and Bear Creek. In 2001 Doug began working at the McGrath Airport and today is the Airport Manager at McGrath.
Bill Lyman's mining career took him from Alaska to the Schwartzwalder Mine (uranium) near Golden, Colorado, to the huge Ertsberg Mine (copper) owned by Freeport Indonesia in Irian Jaya, to the Haile Mine (gold) in Lancaster County, South Carolina. In 1991 he moved his family to Tucson, Arizona, where he is Engineering Manager for Vroom Engineering & Manufacturing.
Helen Lyman graduated valedictorian of the senior class of 1962 at East Anchorage High School, taught two years in the Peace Corps in Nigeria after college, lived in Virginia, Wyoming, and Georgia, and settled in Portland, Oregon in 1978. Inactive in the Oregon State Bar, she is employed at the northwest law firm of Lane Powell PC, and uses her vacation time to visit family in the Alaska bush or in Tucson, Arizona.
Betty, who will be 89 in December 2007, has returned to Alaska every summer since Bob passed on. She lives in Portland near Helen in the winter and with Spencer and Carolyn at Snow Gulch in the summer. Despite her privileged upbringing in Minnesota and Florida, Betty was always fascinated with the pioneer life and wanted to live it from the beginning. She became Bob's mining partner, companion and confidante. Composing the preface to an unfinished book of their life together, Betty wrote:
It was during a true Indian summer day in September that we laid him to rest in a grave atop a ridge overlooking the cinnabar mine and all the surrounding country he had made so much his own. I knew a unique life had ended and that to me, who had been fortunate to be a part of that life, it was an end to the way of life we had shared. What Bob accomplished and how he did it would be impossible today. I hope family and friends will be curious to know just how it was.
By Helen T. Lyman, 2007
SOURCES
Barton, Winifred W. and Williamson, John P. A Brother to the Sioux. Fleming H. Revell Company, 1919. Reprinted by Sunnycrest Publishing, Clements MN, 1980.
Bushell, Sharon. "Mining Adventure (Account of Betty Lyman)" Anchorage Daily News November 28, 2004.
Cady, Wallace, and others. The Central Kuskokwim Region, Alaska. 1955.
Coleman, Lyman D. D. Genealogy of the Lyman Family in Great Britain and America. Albany NY: J. Munsell, 1872. Reprinted by Higginson Book Company, Salem, MA: pages 472, 474.
"Last Rites Held at Bozeman for Mrs. W. E. Lyman." Bozeman Courier July 15
Lyman, Betty. Bob Lyman’s Story. unpublished manuscript. circa 2000.
Lyman, Betty. letter to George and Mabel Tuttle. July 2, 1943.
Lyman, Betty. letter to George and Mabel Tuttle. December 9, 1950.
Lyman, Betty. scrapbooks of family and personal memories: private letters, speeches and writings of Bob and Betty Lyman. 1941-1974.
Lyman, Betty. unpublished manuscripts: details of Bob Lyman’s early years.
Lyman, Bill. email communication to Helen Lyman. January 15, 2007.
Lyman, Elizabeth T. family history photo album. compiled 1978.
Lyman, Helen Todd. Brief biography of Bob Lyman manuscript. May 2007.
Lyman, Robert F. "28 Years in the Bush." speech written for a Knife and Fork Club presentation given in Corvallis, Oregon. November 29, 1970.
Lyman, Robert F. letter to Betty Lyman. August 17, 1944.
Lyman, Robert F. letter to Helen T. Lyman. February 12, 1965.
Lyman, Robert F. unpublished writing.
Lyman, Robert F. Yankton College transcript. e-mail communications from Judi Olson at yanktoncollege.org. Aug-Sept, 2007.
Lyman, W. E. "Every owner or driver of these pioneer auto-buggies was a voluntary guinea pig, doing free experimental work for the benefit of the manufacturers every time he cranked up. . . . There never was enough money to keep these pioneer vehicles in repair." The Rippling Water-Stone House Collection. published by the editor: Margaret Lyman Van Vactor. circa 1967.
Lyman, William Ernest. section of the Lyman family. recorded and compiled by Margaret Lyman Van Vactor. 1956.
Noyes, Leslie R. Rock Poker to Pay Dirt: The History of Alaska’s School of Mines and its Successors Fairbanks: University of Alaska Foundation, 2001. pages 174, 494, 573
Sainsbury, C. L., and MacKevett, E. M. Jr. Quicksilver Deposits of Southwestern Alaska. U.S. Geological Survey, Bulletin 1187, 1965. pages 5, 21, 44
U.S. Geological Survey, Professional Paper 268, pages 8, 111-113
Weber, Burr S., Bjorklund, Stuart C., Rutledge, Franklin A., Thomas, Bruce I., and Wright, Wilford S. Report of Investigations: Mercury Deposits in Southwestern Alaska. Bureau of Mines, Report of Investigations 4065, May 1947. page 30.