The Iñupiat were here first, and they are here still. The coast around Sitŋasuaq — the Iñupiaq name for the Nome area — had been fished and hunted for centuries before any prospector arrived, part of a network of Seward Peninsula communities living by salmon, seal, walrus, and caribou. Roughly half of Nome’s people today are Alaska Native, and the town remains a hub for the surrounding Iñupiat villages of the region. Whatever gold built here, the deeper story of this coast is continuity — a homeland that long predates the stampede and outlasts it.
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.
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.
