Juneau Articles

The city's own overview runs from Tlingit fishing camps on Gastineau Channel to Chief Kowee's ore samples and the 1880 strike by Joe Juneau and Richard Harris. It also covers the town's string of names (Harrisburgh, Rockwell, Juneau City), the Treadwell and A-J mines, and the 1906 capital move.

A short history of the gold find, explaining how Auk Tlingit leader Kowee pushed Sitka engineer George Pilz to send two discouraged prospectors back to Gastineau Channel. It follows Juneau and Harris to Silver Bow Basin and the 160-acre townsite they marked out in October 1880.

Written for the centennial, this piece explains how seawater found a fault and weakened rock pillars under Douglas Island until an extreme tide on April 21, 1917 brought the workings down. About 350 men got out in time, but the collapse ended work for nearly a thousand miners.

The chair of the Treadwell preservation society describes the four Treadwell mines, once the biggest gold operation in the world, and the night in 1917 when Gastineau Channel poured into three of them. A new concrete bulkhead saved the Ready Bullion mine and about 150 jobs.

This Curious Juneau episode traces the capital from Sitka to booming gold-town Juneau, ordered in 1900 and carried out in 1906. It also covers the long run of failed votes and bills to move it closer to Anchorage.

A State Library researcher challenges the past-tense way local signs describe the Tlingit peoples of the Juneau area, as if they had simply left. The piece argues that the Áak'w and T'aaku people are still here, and it recalls the 1962 burning of the Douglas Indian Village.

In October 2024 the city formally apologized to the Douglas Indian Association for burning the village that stood where Savikko Park and Douglas Harbor are now. Tribal leaders welcomed the apology but called it a first step toward fuller recognition.

The tribe's own page lists the ancestral village sites around Juneau and Douglas, including the downtown Juneau Indian Village, the Douglas village at today's Sandy Beach, and Auke Village. Read it alongside the downtown totem trail to see whose land the port sits on.

After days of heavy rain, part of Mount Roberts slid onto South Franklin Street on November 22, 1936. It buried boarding houses and killed 15 people. The story revisits Juneau's worst natural disaster, steps from where cruise passengers now walk.

A reporter checks the Red Dog Saloon's famous claim that marshals took Wyatt Earp's revolver as he passed through Juneau in 1900. Archives, museum records and newspaper dates don't support it, though the owner happily keeps the legend.