Platinum Dreams; Platinum Original Reel 17

Oh, yeah, you were though, I was, yeah, I wasn't there, I was a punk, yeah, you go under the marketing and you shop rocks, up the river, yeah, yeah, yeah, and you go, shall we? We had last, what, why didn't you go ahead and tell us about this, you know, maybe, what, have a distraction? Have one? Oh, because we asked him. We were talking about hauling these pontoons up around the beach, round the mountain and up the river to the dredge site where it was built. And here's the site of the dredge being built, all the pontoons are here and here's the some of the superstructure going up for the dredge. And finally, here's the completed dredge.

The dredge is an eight cubic yard dredge. And this is the crew that was in the squirrel creek camp for the, uh, in the early, in the 30s, 36, 37, I think this was when, uh, the dredge was being built, they had a pretty good crew. Then this, although this could be earlier, this is, this truck came in with the first bunch of equipment in 1934, but, uh, that's one of the, only the aggressive, nice, a couple of people in there, uh, yes, here's Emma Shaw over here and, uh, yeah, I don't recognize too many of the other people, you know, you're okay. Oh, this was before me.

Okay, and there was just, just one more, we don't need to go through all these, I think just the one I was interested in was with your, okay, sibling and, uh, we should make sure we get, uh, uh, this is a shot of me in the camp, uh, I'm here and my sister's over here, my sister Karen, Ronnie Johnston, Amy Johnston, that was Charlie Johnston's girls, and butch, I don't remember her last name except that butch beat up on all of us. And this is the wash house, what we call the wash house back here in the, in the mining camp. This would have been 1946, 47, something like that, but an even earlier picture taken of the squirrel creek camp area was taken in 1932, uh, when they first came down here to look around, I wasn't there.

And these are reindeer in about the location just above where the camp now sits. These are, as a herd of reindeer here, and one of the early, early, early mining operations going on on squirrel creek and platinum creek coming down that way. I have a couple of pictures of well-known Eskimos from town. This is Shorty Killbook, and this is Old Man Small for who the Small's River is, is named for. And some of their grand children and their, even their kids are still here in, uh, in the platinum village, and these would have been, oh, maybe early 40s type pictures, something like that.

When you, when you were talking about one of these guys were both from being great walkers. Shorty Killbook was a wonderful, he just walked all over, he would think nothing of walking from platinum to togiac, and he had kind of halfway, huts along the way that he'd stay at, and he was just all over the whole country. Yeah, this looks like it's in front of my dad's house up at the camp, and I'm pretty sure it is, because we had planted some willow trees around there, and that's what it looks like. This one is down here in the goodness bay area back here, and this is in platinum. Okay. Okay. Now you, okay, we're rolling. Okay, that's me to describe a little bit about the area here. Platinum is on this south spit of the good news bay, and 10 miles from platinum is the

town of good news, which used to be called mum track, and we were talking about how the dredge was built, and so forth, the ship would come in, and we'd lighter the material off the ship to the shore, and then take it up along the beach, all the way past Red Mountain, and come right up the mouth of the salmon river up to the site, where the dredge was built, and they were cat caravans that came up through here, and sometimes the people would ride the caravan up, otherwise they'd stop at about here, and they'd come through the saddle area between Thorson Mountain and Red Mountain, and then walk to the squirrel creek camp over the tundra this way.

We'd also talk a little bit about how much the dredge only mined in the salmon river, and it mined from about Boulder Creek, the little below dowry creek, somewhere in here, and it mined all the way down eventually to Quartz Creek in the current river channel, and then there was another pastry found in an old river channel on the east bench of the salmon river, which ran from again about Medicine Creek, on down to almost to a little above this creek right in here, Quartz Creek, and that was mined with the dredge also, but after being pre-stripped with the large walking drag line that the Goodness Bay Mining Company had, so that at the lower end, they actually mined 125 feet below the surface area, 75 feet with the dredge, and a 50 feet of overburden had been stripped

off with the dig drag line in a year's prior to the actual mining. We took about almost 10 years of planning to do to mine this bench, counting the stripping operation that went on and then the actual mining with the dredge. This pastry actually curves and comes out, we drilled it all the way down to Shagbon Bay where it's about 200 feet deep here, and the salmon river pastry is also about 200 feet deep at the beach here. And the count for this geologist that we had several times come to the mine and did a lot of study with the geology in this area, Dr. Murti, J.B. Murti. His theory was that this whole area was glaciated during the last ice age, and that a finger or the glacier itself is what distributed the platinum from, we believe, red

mountain, perhaps some came from Susie Mountain also, but it was deposited into this river bed, the old channel at that time hand, apparently the new channel to both these rivers, this river may have been flowing both ways under the glacier and so forth. That with the water action to spread this material out, we believe the source was red mountain because we found the biggest nuggets in these creeks that were headed up into red mountain, squirrel creek and fox creek, and the cleric creek was the same thing that were big nuggets found in this particular creek, Darry Creek was the same way. So eventually the saluvial deposit from the glacier is what liberated the platinum in this area, and there's speculation that a lot of it may also have found its way out into

the Cuscoquim Bay bearing, seeing no doubt Shagmon Bay in this area here too. The road now shown on this map from the town of platinum to the mine originally came around this way to the mine, was built in 1941 with funds from the territory, and the Good News Bay mining company received funds every year to maintain this road and also to maintain the airstrip here at platinum. And the town of platinum is now receiving funds to maintain the airport, and I believe the parts of the road that they claimed in the city limits, the city limits come actually up to here somewhere. And then later on in the late 40s, maybe early 50s, we built another shorter route into the camp, which is the one we currently use now. This one has all been

dredged out or mined out. That's about it. Do you have any idea on where some of the names came from, like the Smalls River? We have small, small rivers from the Smalls family, old man small, and his family were early, very early settlers in this area, and consequently the river was named for him, the Smalls River goes way up into here. We had once thought, one time we thought of building a hydroelectric plant in this area because it's very narrow here, and there's two big gravel mountains that come here would have been very easy to build a dam, but we didn't do that. There's Thorson. Mountain was named, of course, after Charlie Thorson, one of the prospectors, brown prospectors in the area. Red Mountain got its name from its obvious

reddish color. I don't know how Susie Mountain got named. Shock Creek over here on the Kinney-Canog River was named for one of the men that worked for the Goodness Bay Mining Company, and it was a job because he did quite a bit of prospecting on this creek, didn't find anything, but it was named after him. Courts Creek, there's a lot of courts around here, and apparently there's a lot of courts in this creek. I don't know that any other names had any significance. Oh, Anita Creek was named after the sister of one of the partners, Charlie Johnston's sister is named Anita, and I believe that's where that came from. And we talked about this bench along here, this other pastry, that was called the Olson, Olson Bench, because it was my dad that thought originally that there might be another pastry, so they kind of named that

bench after the Olson, after my dad, Ed Olson. Seattle Creek, I guess someone was making a hole in there. And then there's some last chance creek, apparently there's a little bit of money there, and someone called it the last chance creek. Dry Gulch here off of the platinum creek is named, aptly because there was no platinum there, and of course platinum creek is named for its obvious content of platinum. The original discovery was on platinum creek by Walter Smith in 1926, and the discovery claim is actually almost where it runs into the Salmon River. Clara Creek Mining, I'm sure there must have been a Clara Strander, that name sounds familiar to me, so that's what I know.

Oh, that was built to the mine in 1940, 41, started from platinum, and went over the Tundra, and through here, and actually the original road ran around. This way and later we built this piece of road here, and the road was maintained by the company, but they received funding from first to territory, and then the state of Alaska, along with the airport that the company built here also. We talked about how the equipment got from the spit to the site here by the mining camp, where it was built, and it came in by boat to shore, and then it was brought by Cat train, all along the coast past Red Mountain, up the whole mouth of the Salmon River to where it was built right about in here, and the dredge

only operated in the Salmon River, the present current valley of the Salmon River, up to about this point here, down the river all the way the quartz creek, and then in the other bench pastry, which was an old river channel of the Salmon River, it operated from about here on down to again about the quartz creek, and then it came over and made another pass up the Salmon River, and ended up where it presently is today parked right about there. Okay, we're going to do it.

Thank you. There and then if I need to slow anything.

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