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Okay students! Pay attention now! Professor Balto's gonna get out his set of "Nome factoids", and edumacate you! (Heh heh...sorry for the little colloquial ditty...especially to those of you for whom English is not your native tongue...it was a pun...a play on words!)

This will span a few posts (and maybe a few days), because there's MUCH to tell about Nome and its history and so on! (Never thought so much history could arise from so small a place, huh? LOL - that's alright...neither did I!)

So Where IS Nome?
Nome sits on the southwestern edge of the large Seward Peninsula of Alaska (see the state map below...the red dot indicates the location of Nome). Nome fronts the Norton Sound, where it empties into the Bering Sea. It is only 190 miles from Russia (the peninsula was once part of the ancient Bering Land Bridge), and only 150 miles south of the Arctic Circle! (That's about a two-hour drive for most people...if you COULD drive to the Arctic Circle from Nome, that is!)

Take a look at the map here. However, please keep in mind that Alaska is HUGE...twice the size of the U.S. state of Texas. Everything in Alaska is pretty darned far from everything ELSE in Alaska (though the distances are very deceiving on a map of the state)! Heh heh. Nome sits nearly 600 miles northwest of Anchorage, and almost that same distance due west of Fairbanks (and Nenana, a suburb of Fairbanks, from which the serum run started).



The Naming of Nome - A 50 Year-Old Spelling Error
The most popular story, which has a lot of historic creedence, says that Nome got its name when, in the 1850s, a British cartographer (map maker) marked its unnamed location on a map as "? Name". Later, a second cartographer misread the question mark as a "C.", and the word "Name" as "Nome".

The town was known, locally, as "Anvil City" for a large part of 1899. This was due to the fact that the gold miners, who had staked property and mining claims on the Snake River, near Nome, wanted to avoid confusion with the nearby Nome River, and also with Cape Nome...a point of land twelve miles outside of the town. So they ditched the name "Nome", and decided on "Anvil City" (named for the more distant "Anvil Creek" and also "Anvil Mountain", the range which you see in the cartoons overlooking Nome. This range really exists, and sits about 4.5 miles north of Nome, and rises about 1,100 feet).

However, the U.S. Post Office insisted on calling the community "Nome" in keeping with the second cartographer's notes, especially because they felt that a town called "Anvil City" would be easily confused with the village of "Anvik" on the lower Yukon. At this time, a competing town site had been established at the mouth of the Nome River, called "Nome City". The Anvil City merchants, fearing that the U.S. Postal Service might decide to move its post office to the competing town, called a vote. It was reluctantly decided to change the name to "Nome".

Of course, to Nome locals, this theory was not well-known. They believed that the word Nome was derived from the Eskimo phrase "Kno-no-me", which means "I don't know" (probably a reply to questions regarding the name of the area).

(more to come on this topic! MUCH more!)

Beginnings and the gold rush fever
Nome exists because of the Alaskan gold rush of the 1890s. Word had spread fast that prospectors were discovering gold in the Alaskan frontier, and that (of course) set off a rush of hopefuls to this untamed wilderness seeking their fortunes.

The first to strike gold in the area of Nome were "The Three Lucky Swedes" (one of whom was actually Norwegian)...Jafet Lindberg, Erik Lindblom, and John Brynteson. In 1898, they were prospecting in a creek near the base of a mountain with a rock shaped like an Anvil. They named the creek "Anvil Creek", and the mountain (obviously) "Anvil Mountain". This was about 4.5 miles north of where Nome presently sits...and is the same mountain range you see in the cartoons, looming over the town of Nome.

Word spread, and a small prospectors camp started to form in the area around where Nome sits. At that time, it was only about 250 people strong. Then the news got out that a prospector from the U.S. state of Idaho (prospector John Hummel), who was too sick to travel to the (then) rich creek beds near the mountain, had tried his luck panning in the rich reddish sands on the beach of Norton Sound, near the prospectors' camp, and had hit paydirt...literally.

When the news reached the famous Klondike fields (which had been swamped in the initial gold rush of the late 1800s, and from the earlier gold rush in the western United States), a rush of miners and prospectors swarmed into the area. And, in no time, Norton Sound beach, and the fields of tundra around it, were swarming with around 20,000 gold-crazy miners, panners, and so on. There arose a great tent city, nearly 30 miles in diameter! The U.S. census in 1900 reported that one-third of all non-natives in Alaska (almost all of them whites) were encamped in Nome in 1900...making it the largest city in the entire territory!

Men stood (or knelt) almost shoulder-to-shoulder on the beach, and in the water, panning and digging for the gold (nearly $2,000,000.00 in gold was extracted from the beach the first year or so...an UNBELIEVABLE sum in those days!). Of course, claim-jumping was common, as were conflicts. A railroad had been built to Anvil Creek to meet the needs of the prospectors...and soon building supplies were being shipped up in order to construct necessary buildings to meet service and supply needs. Still, despite the promise of riches, most prospectors never found much, and ended up destitute. The U.S. army had to be called in to rescue and transport these people back south before the winter of 1901, which would strand them in the area for the winter. Most had previously bought one-way passage to the area, on the hopes that they would strike it rich.

A visit from Wyatt Earp
In 1899, the famed (and notorious) Arizona gunslinger and lawman, Wyatt Earp (made famous by the key part he played in the "gunfight at the O.K. Corral" in Tombstone, AZ) had come to the town of Nome looking to make money. He had, after his adventures in Tombstone, traveled around the west coast of the United States, opening drinking and gambling establishments, and making a great deal of money in the process.

Well, in 1899, he came to Nome with his third wife (Josie, whom he called "Sadie"...who was said to have quite a gambling problem). With business partner C.E. Hoxie, he opened the Dexter Saloon (which no longer stands; however, the "Dexter Roadhouse" sits on the site of that saloon, less than ten miles north of Nome on the Kougarok Road), from which he also operated Nome's Board of Trade...which supervised drinking and gambling for the town.

It's also said that Earp got himself into his share of trouble. He had several fist fights (some of which he lost), and was known not only as a heavy drinker himself, but also as a gambler and a womanizer. He was also arrested once on the charge of interfering with a lawman (he was later cleared of the charges...he claimed he was trying to help the lawman with another troublemaker).

By the time Earp decided to pack up and head out of Nome (in 1901), he had made a healthy sum of $80,000.00. This also, at the time, was an INCREDIBLE amount of money!

Below you can see Wyatt Earp (at center) standing with two associates in Nome in 1900.

Some pics of interest...


Nome as a "tent city" in 1899 (this is a view of Front Street, or what would become Front Street...which sits on the beach of Norton Sound)


A view of Front Street, in Nome, in 1908.


An aerial view of the town of Nome in 1925, the year of the Great Serum Run.


A view of modern-day Nome from the waters of Norton Sound...you can clearly see St. Joseph's church in the background...


A modern view of Nome from the air, looking southeast


The "Three Lucky Swedes"

(will post more tomorrow, Friday and through the weekend!)

wow! this is a lot of research and reading! it's too long to read right now, but i think i will print it out and read it tonight as late-night reading! great! i will make sure to tell you what i think after i have read all of this ^^

"The Last Train To Nowhere"
Whenever a visitor to Nome is encouraged to take one of the three scenic roads out of the town, which extend no more than 75 or so miles into the waiting tundra, one will eventually encounter some VERY interesting things! Not only will you see relics of the gold rush days (the Yukon/Nome Gold Rush of the 1890s)...old sluices, dredges, abandoned prospectors' homes, old mining ghost towns, etc., and some fascinating wildlife (musk oxen, brown bears, a variety of birds, possible walruses or seals, the occasional whale and caribou...though you're VERY unlikely to see wolves, polar bears, moose or wolverines; polar bears stay more on the permanent pack ice farther north; wolves and moose tend to keep to the Alaskan interior, and wolverines are a VERY rare sight in Alaska overall)...but you might find some other historical oddities as well. Such as the famous tourist photo spot, the Last Train To Nowhere.

Sitting at mile post 33 on the Council Road, which runs from Nome out along the coastline, and along the Solomon River in a northeasterly direction towards the very small town of Council, another remnant of the gold rush days (and one of the few western gold rush towns still inhabited...if only by a small amount of hardy citizens), is a rusting hulk of two train engines and the remains of some rail cars and track. This is all that remains of the Council City & Solomon River Railroad, begun in 1881 to service the gold rush, but never completed (due to failing funding).

In 1903, this train was brought here to service the railway, having been purchased from New York (where it serviced the New York Elevated Railroad Company). They did several runs, but the project of expanding the rail line was abandoned in 1913, when the bridge connecting the railroad to Solomon was washed away in one of the area's heavy storms. Without the funding needed to repair the bridge, the train was just abandoned...left sitting where it last stopped (possibly in response to the destruction of the bridge).

What's interesting is that these engines are the very last of their kind in existence. There are no others like them anywhere in the world, apparently, and the state has allowed them to simply remain on the open tundra, exposed to the elements. And they are slowly rusting away. It is a "frozen" moment in history...and someday, it will be gone. Here, from a website called "Tom Busch's Nome Alaska Links" (which I will add to my links thread), are some pictures of this now popular tourist stop:

Incidentally, here is another modern shot of Nome (from the air over Norton Sound, which is frozen over in this picture). You can see Anvil Mountain (which is much more a range or ridge, apparently, than just one stand-alone mountain) 4.5 miles in the distance. This is the same mountain ridge you see in the cartoons, looming over Nome. It sits north of the town.



(Also notice that Norton Sound freezes up enough, during the winter, to allow for foot, vehicle and sled traffic on the sound itself. It's at this time of year that the extremely-rare possibility of sighting a polar bear exists. Though it is EXTREMELY rare this far south of the arctic circle!)

(In that photo, above, the little dots collected on the ice are actually Christmas trees! Every year, around Christmas time, the "Nome National Forest" springs up when citizens take their Christmas trees from their homes and stand them up in the ice for display. There are no trees close to Nome, so citizens get together and truck out north to the Inuit village of Teller, or east near the old gold rush town of Council, to cut evergreen trees from the area, and bring them back to Nome for use as Christmas trees. And, after Christmas, they then plant them in the ice for as long as they will last. It's also possible some get planted out DURING Christmas too)

wow! awsume! I love christmas! It's the best!!! yay!!! hem hem, sorry about my outburst, you DO NOT want to see me at Christmas! Anyway, thats really cool. You have got so much info here! I haven't read it all yet, im gonna read it bit by bit, there is so much! Good job! How did you find out about the Christmas trees? Was it on some official Nome site or something?

In reality? Any good travel book about Alaska, which includes a chapter on Nome, will tell you about the Christmas tree thing. Heh heh.

cool, so do you do your research in books as well as the net?

Sure do

wow, cool! hey, i know its a bit off topic, but are you going to make another test thing like you did before? cause that was fun!

A new test? Oh, soon. I just have to get my "ducks in a row". LOL! And I don't want to expend my material too soon! =)