The 30-ouncer was more than four inches long and one inch wide.įranklin did not keep his discovery a secret. In 1898, geologist/explorer Josiah Spurr described the gold found in Franklin Creek as “nuggety.” He wrote of seeing both 30-ounce and 14-ounce chunks recovered there. He found gold on the Fortymile and a little later on the ankle-deep creek others named for him. The town’s namesake was one of two prospectors who in 1886 journeyed up the Fortymile River (then known by Natives as the “Creek of Leaves”). Howard Franklin was long gone by the time Prindle passed through. “The gold was easy to mine and more easily spent on the little flat at the mouth of the creek, which was then crowded with miners.” “A small collection of cabins, picturesquely located on the small flat at the mouth, is known as Franklin and includes a post office and roadhouse. Prindle, who visited Franklin in the early 1900s, saw this: Meals at that roadhouse cost $1, paid in gold dust, reported geologist and government explorer Louis Prindle, who left his name on a lonely volcano in the boreal forest not far away. It now has no roof and the log floor joists are exposed, but the structure was once a lively place built into a south-facing cliffside of sedge and shale, Franklin was home to 200 people in the late 1800s. The Franklin roadhouse is still identifiable by its 39-foot by 29-foot log outline. Those dogs were ready to pull sleds over the trail that followed the river and ridges to both Chicken and Eagle. In the early 1900s, gold miners and other river travellers called Franklin “Dogtown” because so many were staked at the mouth of Franklin Creek. We noticed stone steps fitted into the hillside with care, a shed with an intact roof, and a dozen spruce-log buildings on their way to becoming soil. No one was there to meet us at Franklin, population zero, the site of the first major gold strike in Interior Alaska. The four kids and two dogs in our party were all over it. Like many Alaska ghost towns, it was a less-than-ideal place for kids and dogs: rusted nails, jagged edges and punky wood floors that can no longer bear weight. There, up a path of floury soil, was Franklin, Alaska. The map told us one should be dead ahead.
My canoeing partner and neighbor, Ian Carlson, 13, wanted to see a ghost town. Floating down the Fortymile River, we saw a cut in the green hills that hinted of a creek.