Front Street collected characters. Wyatt Earp — the Tombstone lawman — arrived in 1899 and ran the Dexter Saloon for two years as a businessman rather than a marshal; biographers estimate he left Nome with about $80,000, more than his lawman years ever paid him. The rush also drew a subtler kind of prospector: in 1900, political boss Alexander McKenzie and federal judge Arthur H. Noyes worked a scheme to seize the richest claims — including the Swedes’ — through the court itself, until a federal appeals panel shut it down and jailed McKenzie. Rex Beach turned the affair into his 1906 novel The Spoilers. Nome incorporated as a city on April 9, 1901; storms and fires — the worst in 1913 and 1934 — later took most of the original gold-rush buildings, though St. Joseph’s Church of 1901 still stands.
What’s with the Three Lucky Swedes? The Three Lucky Swedes struck gold on Anvil Creek on September 22, 1898 — the strike that set off the last great American gold rush. The prospectors — Jafet Lindeberg, Erik Lindblom, and John Brynteson — were working a few miles above the Bering Sea beach on the Seward Peninsula. Two were Swedish; Lindeberg was Norwegian; the nickname stuck anyway, and the “Three Lucky Swedes” entered Alaska legend. The tent city that sprang up on the shore below — briefly called Anvil City — became Nome. Within two years the luckiest beach in the north held one of the largest cities on the Pacific coast above Seattle, out at the edge of the continent, facing Siberia.
Why People Visit Nome Alaska
Nome combines gold-rush history, sled-dog tradition, Bering Strait geography, and open tundra in a way no other town can. Visitors come for race week in March, for the beach where the last great American gold rush ended, for muskox and wildflowers in the long summer light, for the aurora, and for the plain fact that the road runs out here. Remote, resilient, unforgettable.
