George Pilz
(1845 - 1926)
George Pilz, as the first professional mining engineer in the new territory of Alaska, became a leading figure among the miners who entered Alaska in the first decades after purchase. He was born in Saxony and educated at the famed mining academy at Freiberg. He left Germany in 1867 after exploring for coal, but possibly abruptly to avoid conscription for the Franco-PrussianWar. Initially Pilz looked at prospects in Canada and the United States for a German-owned company; he left that company to work for Calumet and Hecla at Hancock, in the Michigan copper ranges. In 1869, he left Michigan to erect a copper smelter in California. Over the next decade, in California, Arizona, and Nevada, Pilz established a reputation for cantankerous competence that assured him employment, but kept him moving for the rest of his life at prospecting, mining, and erecting mills and smelters.
In 1878, Pilz met Nicholas Haley in San Francisco; the men had previously met at a job in California. Haley, who had been stationed with the U.S. Army in Sitka, had rich gold-quartz specimens from the Stewart and other lodes near Silver Bay, south of Sitka. At first, Pilz thought the ore cam from the rich Grass Valley district in California, but Haley introduced George to army officers and soldiers in San Francisco who convinced Pilz the samples were from Alaska. Pilz found capital for the project and in February of 1879 moved to Alaska to start construction of a mine and mill at Silver Bay. Gold processed by Pilz's five-stamp mill was the first lode gold produced in Alaska. The mine shut down early in 1880 when it became evident that it was not rich enough to pay. Pilz was criticized at the time, but subsequent events have proved him right.
To extend his range of prospecting throughout southeast Alaska, Pilz enlisted the aid of several Tlingit tribes. He followed up on their samples with experienced prospectors, including Joe Juneau and Richard T. Harris.
One of his prospecting parties opened up Chilkoot Pass, later the gateway to the Klondike, after Navy Captain Beardslee convinced the local Chilkat tribe to open the pass on a profitable freighting basis.
Some of the best samples obtained by Pilz were brought by Kawa.Že, who probably then lived with the Auk people on Admiralty and near modern Juneau. The samples almost certainly were from the Gastineau Channel area. Harris and Juneau made their discovery in early October 1880, following an early trip that took the men to Gold Creek where they found the best placer showings and fragments of quartz with gold. On the first trip, Harris and Juneau went as far up Gold Creek as Snowslide Gulch, a left limit tributary, where they found marginally commercial indications of gold. (Snowslide tapped the quartz vein system that became the Ebner mine.) A grubstake agreement recorded by Pilz allowed Harris and Juneau to stake placer claims for themselves; also the right to stake lodes in the ratio of 3:1 favoring Pilz. N.A. Fuller, a storekeeper from Sitka, appears to have been associated with Pilz in some way. Later, Pilz maintained that Fuller was a subsidiary player, always acting on behalf of Pilz not on his own behalf. The confused matter caused trouble later on for both Pilz and for Richard T. Harris. A Sitka jury sided with Fuller and awarded a judgement against Harris in 1886. Pilz, who could have aided Harris, was in the San Francisco jail waiting for trial on a fraud charge, a charge that Pilz alwys denied. Many years later Pilz had few good words to say about Harris, but numerous letters from the period show that Pilz then regarded Harris as one of his few friends. Harris and the miners of Juneau sent gold dust to Pilz in San Francisco so that Pilz could make bail. The complex events suggest, again, that Pilz was his own worst enemy.
Following the discovery of the rich deposits in Silver Bow basin above modern Juneau, Harris and Juneau returned to Sitka. Pilz returned to the new town site with them. He approved of the work that the men had done and accepted the claims as fairly staked. There were enough miners in the territory to set off a rush to the new site in December 1880.
Pilz almost certainly erected the first prefabricated building in Alaska, when he erected a home pre-built in Sitka. On 7 February 1881 Pilz chaired the miner's meeting that adopted revised rules for the Harris district. He was also involved with the organization and platting of Juneau (then Rockwell or Harrisburgh).
Pilz's further career took him to Mexico, South America, and several other sites in Alaska. Pilz was in Dawson in 1906 and very probably in 1898; he was at Katalla in 1907, probably working on coal; he was in Chitina in 1911, then spent many years in the Forty-Mile region. He died in Eagle, Alaska 15 September, vociferous and cantankerous to the end.
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