Keldon ‘Kelly’ Gaylord Adams

(1912 - 2005)

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Kelly Adams was born in Hoquiam, Washington, on July 8, 1912 to Leal (Stevenson) and Arthur Gaylord Adams. (1, 2, 3). He graduated from Hoquiam High School in 1930. It was a trip to southeastern Alaska in the summer of 1932 to check out a gold deposit with his father Gaylord Adams that began his lifelong interest in gold and mineral prospecting and mining (4, 5).

In early 1933, he quit Oregon State College where he’d been studying aviation engineering, bought a small boat and motored north with Jim Locke, a young man he’d met at Lake Quinault in Washington who was enthusiastic to go to southeastern Alaska and do what all young, enthusiastic prospectors aim to do: strike it rich. New to the area, an acquaintance suggested he try prospecting around the old Puyallup mine at Hollis on the eastern side of Prince of Wales Island. He and Locke found gold, but not enough to live on. After struggling to mine enough gold to make ends meet, the two young men were hired by Wendell Dawson, owner of the nearby Harris River Gold Mine (now known as the Dawson Mine) who put them to work cleaning the tailings of the Old Kasaan gold mine. In ten days, he and Locke removed 1,100 wheelbarrows of sand and gravel from the stream and retrieved $1,100 in gold (at about $32/oz). (5, 15)

Adams and Locke wintered over at a nearby cabin on on Prince of Wales Island. While wintering over, Adams discovered a creek filled with quartz that had gold in it. He ordered a prospector’s mill, and averaged about $210 in gold a month from the area for five months, which was just breaking even. Then, they started clearing about $600 a month until it was time to pull out. (5, 15)

Adams continued to mine in Southeast Alaska, staking a gold mining claim at Kasaan in 1934 and prospecting around Juneau working through the summer of 1934 and into the winter. He and Locke got snowed in at a cabin near the old Crystal Mine and almost starved to death. He lost 40 pounds, from 174 down to 134 pounds by the time they were able to get out in March of 1935. In June 1935, he and Locke were offered a lease on a mining property in the Montana Basin north of Juneau. They decided to name their mining outfit, “The Big Hurrah Mining, Milling and Amusement Company.” They built a log cabin that 40 years later was still standing. The mill they’d taken from the Dawson Mine was flown in to this new venture. He returned home to Hoquiam later in the summer after being disappointed in not being able to mine a decent amount of gold. He left the mill to his mining partners and returned home to Washington. (5, 15)

In February 1938, after not being able to find enough work in Washington to get ahead, he partnered with a fellow Hoquiam resident Larry Erickson to mine near Hollis again. He got a lease and option on the old Puyallup Mine from Ben Leibrandt who’d set up the old 5-stamp mill and built a bunkhouse and a big woodshed. Jim Locke joined them at the mine. In one evening alone, Kelly found a rich vein of gold deep in one tunnel, breaking out enough of the gold-laden quartz to fill an old porcelain dish pan. After cleaning up that one dishpan of rich ore, the three men had made $1210. (15)

He returned to Washington state in the fall of 1938 and married Wendell Dawson’s oldest daughter, Dayle Dawson in December. He and Dayle settled in Yakima, WA, where their daughters, Sandra and Judith were born in 1940 and 1942. Throughout World War II, he was a bus driver for the workers at what is now called the Hanford Nuclear Plant. (6, 7)

He briefly returned to the Puyallup Mine in the fall of 1941, leasing it again from Ben Leibrandt, while his father-in-law Wendell Dawson returned to the Harris Creek Mine, now the Dawson Mine to try to earn some extra money before his second daughter was due in May 1942, taking out about $100 a day in 30 days. (15)

As soon as World War II ended in 1945, Adams returned to the Puyallup Mine on Prince of Wales Island, this time bringing his wife and two young daughters with him to mine gold. The family moved to Ketchikan when it was time for his oldest daughter to start school. In 1947, he began working for Ellis Airlines as a mechanic, and he became a licensed inspector for the Federal Aviation Administration with A&P and I.A. ratings. He also became an accomplished Alaskan bush pilot after earning his pilot’s license in 1949. (5, 6, 15)

Adams spent his free time prospecting in Alaska, British Columbia and several western states from 1945 until late 1956, including helping Wendell Dawson stake copper claims near the area that would become the Granduc Mine in northwestern British Columbia (B.C), Canada. near Hyder, Alaska, and Stewart, B.C. in 1954 (8).

After his first marriage ended in divorce, he met and married the love of his life, Ketchikan elementary school teacher Judith Chilton, a native of Minnesota, in 1951. They added two more daughters to the family, Martha “Tate” in 1953 and Grace in 1958. His wife Judy quickly became the biggest supporter and partner of Kelly’s prospecting and mining adventures throughout their almost 54 years of marriage (6).

In April 1955, Don Ross, Bill Easton and Kelly Adams formed the Uranium-55 Syndicate, dedicated to discovering uranium in southeastern Alaska. Ross and Adams were assigned to do the actual prospecting while Easton served as financial advisor and bookkeeper (9).

On May 18, 1955, Adams and Ross made the first significant discovery of uranium in Alaska. It was Adams who had first detected a large radioactive anomaly using a Geiger Counter the day before, while flying over Bokan Mountain on southern Prince of Wales Island. He didn’t have time to land the plane and stake a claim, so he drew a detailed map for his partner Don Ross and had him go out and stake the claim the next day. High-grade uranium mineralization was subsequently confirmed through ground prospecting by Adams. Their claim became the Ross-Adams Mine, and was honored as Mining World’s “United States Discovery of 1955”. Their discovery also caused an increase of interest in mining in Alaska. (9, 10)

U.S. Geological Survey geologist and AMHF Inductee Edward McKevett subsequently recognized Rare Earth Element concentrations in nearby veins as part of a study originally funded by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. It is the only commercial uranium deposit found in Alaska, with mining occurring from 1956-1971. Interest in REE endowment as critical to modern communications technologies caused new interest in the Ross Adams deposit, beginning in the Late 1980s and continuing to the present. Today, Bokan Mountain contains the best-documented rare-earth element deposit in Alaska (9, 10).

In the fall of 1956, Adams moved his family to southern Oregon where they lived until returning to Ketchikan in 1967 when Webber Air offered him a job he couldn’t refuse as a mechanic and FAA inspector in Ketchikan (6).

In 1973, Adams began taking summers off from his job as Chief Mechanic at Webber Air to focus on prospecting. He spent the summer of 1974 with his wife Judy and daughter Tate on Prince of Wales Island at the old Hope-Puyallup Mine, staking an extension, Puyallup Extension, tracking down two quartz veins that were predicted to intersect under a creek bed based on a geological survey Jack Rohm, with the Alaska Territorial Bureau of Mines, had done back in 1938. When he cleared the creek bed, he found there’d been a geological fault and they did not intersect. (6)

During that 1974 summer working at the Hope-Puyallup Mine, Kelly’s sister Annleal Smith flew up from Washington for a visit. Shortly after arriving at camp, his wife Judy and daughter Tate gave her a tour of the [Crackerjack] creek bed where he’d been spending most of the summer trying to find a rich vein. Annleal asked Judy: “What do you think are the chances of finding a fortune in gold here? I know Kelly’s convinced it’s a sure thing, but he always thinks he has a winner.” Judy responded, “If he weren’t an optimist, Annleal, he wouldn’t be a prospector. For every mine he has succeeded with, there must have been 100 – no, 500 – that didn’t pan out. I’ve seen him go around for two weeks convinced he’s going to receive fabulous assay reports on some ore samples he’s sent in to be analyzed. He’ll be talking about living somewhere sunny and warm in the winter and coming up here to prospect during the summer … already deciding how to spend the first million dollars. Then the assay report arrives and it shows the samples have a trace of this and a trace of that but nothing substantial enough to mine. “Without batting an eye, Kelly will say, ‘Don’t worry, Babe, that sample I found at Helm Bay last weekend was heavy as hell. I’ll bet it’s loaded with mineral. And it’s in a better location than this stuff, much closer to the beach, easier to mine. Wouldn’t it be nice to fix up that old cabin there and spend the summer beachcombing and fishing and digging out just enough ‘pay dirt’ to coast through the rest of the year on?’” Judy added, “I’ve been around him too long to believe in any bonanzas until I see them, but I think this place has a good chance of success, because of the geological survey evidence. However, I’m not counting any money until it’s actually in my hand.” (14)

In 1976, he re-staked the Dawson Mine, formerly owned by Wendell Dawson, near Hollis and began additional exploration and development. (6)

From 1976-1977, he served as president of the Ketchikan chapter of the Alaska Miners Association. (5)

Prospecting never left his blood after retirement, though. Kelly and Judith were among placer miners in 1978 who were rediscovering the gold of the historic Klondike District in Yukon, Canada using modern equipment. In 1978, they staked claims on Dominion Creek outside of Dawson City, Yukon Territory. He and Judy spent every summer in the Yukon through 1993, often with family members assisting in the mining, moving from claims on Dominion Creek to Independence Creek in 1988. His mining efforts earned him an induction into the Yukon Order of Pioneers (6, 10, 11).

In 1984, he retired from Webber Air after his wife also retired from teaching at White Cliff Elementary School in Ketchikan, and they moved to Gold Hill, Oregon, where they lived the rest of their lives. Fittingly, they lived up Sardine Creek Road on the Lucky Bart, an abandoned claim that produced several thousand dollars’ worth of gold from 1890 to 1914 (6).

By 1993, at age 81, he still was an active claim holder to the Dawson Mine on Prince of Wales Island with his partner Gene Romilly but was no longer actively prospecting or mining in Alaska due to the onset of dementia (12).

As mentioned in Chapter 4 of Ken Eichner’s 2002 book, Nine Lives of an Alaska Bush Pilot:

“Prospectors are dreamers. Kelly’s dream was to make enough money so he could drive a pink Caddie, smoke Cuban cigars, and fart through silk shorts. He spent a lot more time bent over banging on rocks than driving Caddies, but he did make a few profitable claims over the years.”

After his uranium discovery garnered a six-figure payout, he bought the silk shorts and a Cadillac, just like he promised (6, 8, 13). Kelly Adams passed away in Medford, Oregon, on March 28, 2005, at the age of 92. At the time of his passing, he survived by his beloved wife, four daughters, 10 grandchildren, and eight great-grandchildren (1, 6).

In a story his daughter Tate recorded, he left parting advice to all who seek gold: “To all you young fellows, beware of the gold fever. It’s a rough disease to overcome.” (15)

In 1997, prospecting and the thought of the next big find never left Adams, even when he was 85 and experiencing early mild dementia, he wrote to his daughter Sandy: “I have a damned good metal detector. I’d like to go over to Nevada or Arizona in some of the old mining ghost towns and check some of the house ruins and yards, as a lot of them didn’t have banks, so they hid the gold under the house or buried it in the back yard. Or possibly find another outcrop of a parallel vein that didn’t outcrop on the surface. How’s that for dreaming!” (16)

By Shannon Watts Michael, 2024; Reviewed by Tom Bundtzen

References Used in this Biography

1. State of Oregon, Certificate of Death, State File Number 05-007133; Date of Issue: March 30, 2005.

2. Memorial, FindaGrave: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/41194809/keldon-gaylord-adams.

3. World War II Draft Card, Keldon Gaylord Adams, 16 Oct 1940.

4. Hesperian, 1930, Hoquiam High School Yearbook, p. 12.

5. Southeastern Log, Volume 7, Number 11, by Bob Speed, “Adams among the lucky few,” November 1977, p. 14.

6. Information provided by daughters Sandra Adams Watts, Martha “Tate” Adams Cohn, and/or Grace Adams.

7. Washington Marriage Records, 1854-2013, Certificate of Marriage, Centralia, Lewis County, WA, License #12734, December 20, 1938.

8. Nine Lives of an Alaska Bush Pilot, by Ken Eichner, May 2002, Chapter 4.

9. The Alaska Sportsman, Vol. XXII, No. 4, April, 1956, p. 12-15, 32-33.

10. Obituary, Ketchikan Daily News, Ketchikan, AK, May 3, 2005, p. 2, col. 1-2.

11. 1988 Yukon Trip Journal, by Shannon Watts.

12. Mineral Investigations in the Ketchikan Mining District Southeastern Alaska, by Kenneth M. Maas, Peter E. Bittenbender, and Jan C. Still, U.S. Dept. of the Interior, Bureau of Mines, Open File Report 11-95, p. 70; https://dggs.alaska.gov/webpubs/usbm/ofr/text/ofr011_95.pdf

13. The Mail Tribune, Medford, OR, March 5, 1990, “Big find eludes miner,” page 1.

14. Chasing Rainbows, by Martha Adams, 1982, pg. 97.

15. The Big Hurrah – Stories Told by Kelly Adams, recorded and transcribed by Martha Adams Cohn, 1976.

16. Letter from Kelly Adams to Sandy Watts, 1997.

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