It was all about the Gold!
Coming Soon!
It was all about the gold! Alaska environmentalist and Master Guide, Michael McBride and fellow author and researcher, JoAnn Stewart, reveal this epic story of twelve gold seekers on a perilous journey into the Alaskan wilderness. The men undertake a dangerous raft expedition along the wildly inhospitable and little-known coastline of northern Cook Inlet, culminating for them in a fight for their lives. Only three survived; nine men were never found or heard from again. What happened to those lost seekers? How did Michael and JoAnn bring this story to life from the brink of being lost forever, and what can we learn about our own search for purpose in the story of men who risked it all in such a dangerous adventure? Join the authors in their quest for answers.
Alaska’s history dustbin is a virtual treasure trove of fascinating stories—some more fanciful than others. Perhaps few are as exciting, and little known as this one. The author is the only person alive who can recite this saga. With fresh paychecks from helping build the Alaska Railroad from Seward to Anchorage, twelve tough and adventurous men climb aboard two rafts in May of 1922 they had just built and constructed of surplus timbers from building the Railroad.
The twelve-man sweat-loaded and mosquito-swatted a season’s worth of supplies, ten horses and three wagons and tons of hay on the rafts! We estimate that the two rafts, about sixty by thirty feet, each carried about eight tons,16,000 pounds of gear. Without power these behemoths would be at the mercy of the wind and tide and could only be prevented from going to Yokohama by “miles of rope” to the shore where men and horses held on for dear life as the tides rose taking them back to from whence they had come or going to Japan with the tidal ebb. They eventually followed hundreds of miles of some of the toughest shorelines on earth to arrive one-hundred-plus miles at Chenik Lagoon in Kamishak Bay.
Getting to Chenik had required some sort of miracle, but they made the traverse against tremendous odds! Walking those hundreds of miles of shoreline, the anchor-men on the shore were swallowed by wilderness while those on the rafts were embraced completely by the tides, tethered to shore only by a bare spider thread of rope.
Theirs exploits were about to go down in the unwritten history book of unknown and reckless exploits ever undertaken by men on a raft. Tragically, apparently eight of the twelve died though the number remains a mystery. After years of research, we can only find traces of three survivors, not a single word about the other eight, one of whom was killed by a grizzly when they first arrived.
Theirs was a futile search for gold on the wild and rugged, and yes dangerous coast of Alaska. During these final days of the gold rush boom, a few risk -takers were richly rewarded beyond their dreams, for others like these fellows, it was a cold and miserable death. The halcyon days of gold nuggets flashing in shallow creeks and ready to be picked up were gone, the cream had been skimmed from the milk.
As one intimately familiar with their route and with the odds for success, I remain incredulous that any of the crew lived at all. Equally incredulous is the fact that they even got to Chenik. It was hundreds of miles of walking/floating/meandering down a wildly irregular coast punctuated with quicksand gulleys, submerged reefs by the mile and a myriad of deeply indented bays and coves, rocky points and towering cliffs that dropped straight into deep water. Their route was the stuff of sleepless nightmares.
They were constantly challenged with trying to keep the rafts from blowing away to Yokohama in offshore winds or trying to prevent them from being thrown on the rocks with an onshore wind. The sheer weight of those log monsters, their wind-resistance drag, the vicious push and pull of the giant tides twice per day on them surely makes it look impossible.
The original three of the boys on the raft, Uncle Harry Minzoff and nephews Alix Minzoff and Harry Agoff, came together in Wyoming well before they were joined by nine other applicants beside Ship Creek. The others were drawn and held together because “people naturally cooperate if even a small signal is given suggesting a shared purpose.” —Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari
That “shared purpose” was simple. Their lust for GOLD and what they imagined it might do for them
Ill-advised as this log raft misadventure might have been, it serendipitously comes across the years to us from the hundred year-old, barnacle-encrusted, derelict raft, the last bit of it now aground and rotting away in the intertidal at Chenik, some hundreds of shore walking miles south of Anchorage where the boys desperately beached it at last in a protected lagoon beside an ancient Native village site.
I am coughing a bit as this old story gets a needed dusting off. It gives us an unusual chance to reconsider the way any of us accepts new information when the opportunity presents itself. Though their actions might at first seem reckless and poorly planned, it is wise to remember that though perhaps not much like us, they were real people with real dreams, they shared hopes and dark fears with bright optimism.
Judging someone one hundred years in the past or your neighbor next door is rarely advantageous to the viewer, so put on your Carhartt’s and hip boots and wade into Ship Creek with me and let’s help the boys launch into some of the world’s largest, most powerful, and fastest rip tides. Bystanders couldn’t know as they waved farewell with their handkerchiefs on the banks of Ship Creek that they would never see nine of the twelve again. I invite the reader to posit their own answers to the questions we pose here. We believe that such participation could be instructive and useful as we move through life and study our own paths.
