What it brought was gold. On July 22, 1902, an Italian prospector named Felix Pedro — born Felice Pedroni — struck pay dirt in the creeks north of Barnette's post, and word raced through the North. Barnette sent his employee Jujiro Wada to carry the news to the miners of Dawson, and the stampede was on; by 1903 hundreds of prospectors had poured into the Tanana Valley and a town was rising on the Chena. Barnette had already chosen the name: at the urging of Judge James Wickersham, he called the place Fairbanks, after Charles W. Fairbanks, a powerful Indiana senator who would soon become vice president under Theodore Roosevelt. The senator never visited, but his name stuck to the gold camp for good.
For a few years Fairbanks was one of the richest gold camps in the North. The easy creek gold gave way to deep, industrial mining — giant gold dredges that chewed through the frozen ground and left long gravel tailings still visible today, with Gold Dredge 8 preserved as a landmark of the era. The boom faded as the best ground was worked out, and the population rose and fell with the price of gold, but mining never entirely left: the Interior is still Alaska's gold country. The dredges that sit quiet in the hills are the town's wooly mammoths — perfectly preserved in the dry, cold air, monuments to the rush that made the place.
Why People Visit Fairbanks
Visitors come to Fairbanks for the aurora — the city's spot under the auroral oval is hard to beat — and stay for the layered Interior story: gold dredges and frontier cabins, a northern university and big-sky wilderness in every direction. It is the gateway to Denali and the Arctic, with hot springs and ice art for the winter and the Midnight Sun for the summer. Equal parts gold-rush heritage and far-north spectacle, Fairbanks rewards anyone drawn to the heart of Alaska.
