TREADWELL MINE
After their brief stop in seedy Wrangell, the Harriman Expedition happily departed for Juneau, two hundred miles to the north. John Burroughs observed how the scenery grew more extreme as they advanced up the coast. Devil’s Thumb, a dramatic spike of dark granite that rises like a mile-high smokestack, stood in the distance behind Patterson Glacier, the first serious ice seen from the Elder. Muir, eager as always to assert his knowledge of glaciology, shared the story of his twenty-mile hike to find its source. When Burroughs became overwhelmed by “the vast panorama of the encircling mountains,” he lowered his eyes to water level, where the views were more in tune with his pastoral sensibilities. A row of seven eagles, “like Indian chiefs,” regarded the Elder with indifference, he wrote. “Many whales are seen blowing, their glistening backs emerging from the water, turning slowly like the periphery of a huge wheel.”
Listed among the expedition’s experts in the natural sciences was one specialist with a decidedly commercial bent, the mining engineer Walter Devereux. He ran a consultancy in New York City but had made his fortune from silver and coal in Colorado. The expedition had arranged to tour Juneau’s massive Treadwell Mine complex, so, before arriving, Devereux gave a presentation on the Elder’s upper deck. Technological breakthroughs, he explained, were now allowing mining companies to extract tiny flecks of gold from quartz deposits. Though overshadowed by the Klondike Gold Rush, in the Canadian Yukon—the effects of which the expedition would shortly witness firsthand—Juneau’s advanced methods had made it possible to process thousands of tons of gold-bearing ore each day, making the Treadwell the world’s largest gold mine for a time. In less than twenty years, mining had transformed Juneau from a tiny Tlingit fishing village to a city of two thousand. In 1906 it would become Alaska’s new territorial capital.
In his diary, artist Frederick Dellenbaugh described stepping from his stateroom in the morning to soak in the future capital’s picturesque placement at the foot of Mount Juneau. Then, as now, Juneau from afar resembled an alpine hamlet in a model railroad set. His placid thoughts were shattered by a dynamite blast so loud that he assumed it had come from the Elder’s cannon.
The noise of detonations was nothing compared with the din of Juneau’s battery of ore stampers. Three hundred steel hammers, each weighing a thousand pounds, pulverized ton upon ton of hard quartz chunks ninety-eight times a minute, twenty-four hours a day. Burroughs wrote that, next to the stamping mill’s roar, Niagara Falls was but “a soft hum”; the very air was “torn to tatters” by the unnatural clamor.
From across the Gastineau Channel, the Treadwell Mine had been a loud curiosity. Up close, it was apocalyptic. A wide, deep hole a quarter of a mile long had been gouged out of the earth. The surrounding forests of Douglas Island had been reduced to stumps. As the deafening thrum of the stamping machines continued ceaselessly in the background, Dellenbaugh stood on the edge of the massive hole and watched the miners “looking like pygmies . . . working to get out more gold,” for two or three dollars a day. One mining company employee lamented to Dellenbaugh that the hills surrounding Juneau were likely rich in ore, “but the timber is so dense that prospecting is extremely difficult.”
The owners of the Treadwell Mine could proudly claim to have taken out gold with a greater value than the price paid for Alaska just thirty years earlier. Aside from wages, very little of that profit remained in the territory. The possibility that Alaska might also be absorbing nonfinancial costs had not yet occurred to anyone. Powdered ore was processed with mercury, cyanide, arsenic, and other chemicals, with the worthless leftover tailings dumped into Gastineau Channel. In the Juneau chapter of her Appletons’ Guide-Book to Alaska and the Northwest Coast, first published in 1893, travel author Eliza Scidmore mentions in passing that “the heavy plume of smoke from the Treadwell’s chlorination works has killed vegetation for a mile up and down the island’s edge.”