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.
The rush itself broke every rule of gold country. In the summer of 1899, gold turned up in the black sand of Nome’s own beach — and a beach below the tide line could not be staked as a claim. The ground was free to anyone with a shovel, a pan, and a strong back. Word reached Seattle, and steamers unloaded tens of thousands of stampeders onto the sand. The 1900 census counted 12,488 people, with summer estimates running far higher — for a moment, Nome was the largest city in Alaska. Tents, saloons, and false-front stores ran for miles along the shore.
Why People Visit Nome Alaska
- Walk Front Street, where the annual thousand-mile sled dog race from Anchorage has finished under a burled wooden arch since 1973 — a brand-new arch went up for 2025, and race week in March is the town’s biggest event of the year.
- Visit the Carrie M. McLain Memorial Museum for collections from the 1898 Anvil Creek gold rush, the 1925 Serum Run, and the Iñupiat communities of the Seward Peninsula.
- Drive the three gravel highways — Nome-Council, Kougarok, and Nome-Teller — for wide tundra views, seabirds, summer wildflowers, and muskox sightings before the roads simply end.
- See the abandoned gold dredges standing on the tundra outside town, massive relics of the 1920s–30s deep-dredging era.
- Visit Anvil Creek, the September 1898 discovery site a few miles north of town.
- Look up at the four White Alice antennas on Anvil Mountain, the Cold War communications site in service until 1979, accidentally photogenic against the Arctic sky.
- Stop at St. Joseph’s Church, completed in 1901 — one of the few structures to survive the town’s early disasters.
- Try recreational beach gold panning in summer — the same sands that started it all still give up color, and visitor panning is permitted on the public beach.
- Watch for the aurora borealis on clear nights from September through March — Nome’s long winter darkness makes it one of Alaska’s best northern-lights towns.
