Bart Thane was born in 1879. One of a new breed of college trained engineers, he graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1898. He was the star quarterback on Berkeley's football team. Many of his teammates were majoring in mining engineering and would play key supporting roles in Thane's most ambitious endeavor.

At just shy of 20 years of age, the young Thane came to Juneau to begin his mining career. Long time mining man Herman Tripp hired Thane in his first job running and maintaining the shaft pumps in the Sumdum Chief mine 60 miles south of Juneau. Tripp, who had reservations about college boys, quickly became a fan of the young Californian, resulting in a lifelong friendship. In three years, Thane gained controlling interest in the Sumdum Chief mine.

By successfully raising money from state sources Thane had, by 1911, obtained operational control of six gold mines in the Juneau Gold Belt and had a mountain name after him.

Through a rather bazaar course of events, Thane would gain control of the Perseverance mine near Juneau. The President of the company, Colonel William Sutherland had been accused by stock and bondholders of mismanagement of the company and was sued. Sutherland dropped dead of a heart attack; two wives claimed his estate, neither of which knew about the other.

The company seemed to be hopelessly caught up in litigation when with the backing of D.C. Jackling and W.P. Hammon, Thane raised $8 million in 1912 to take over and develop the Perseverance mine into the world's largest gold mine at the time. This complex would later be known as the Alaska Gastineau.

Thane had a three part plan for the Perseverance mine: provide for tide water access via a two mile tunnel, develop a year round hydroelectric power plant, and construct a revolutionary new mill that would handle up to 6,000 tons per day of ore.

The Sheep Creek Adit, as the tunnel was known, was started in November 1912 and completed in February 1914. It is 10,497 feet long and was driven at the fastest rate any tunnel had been excavated in the world. This tunnel gave Thane tide water access via Sheep Creek valley.

With the assistance of some of his former football teammates, Thane constructed the Salmon Creek Dam, which is the first thin arch concrete dam ever constructed. The dam is 172 feet high, 648 feet across at the crest, 47.5 feet thick at the base tapering to 6.5 feet at the top. Today there are more than one hundred of these dams throughout the world designed after the one at Sheep Creek near Juneau, Alaska.

The new mill designed to crush, grind, and recover gold from 6,000 tons per day relied on a new rotating mill that was being used in the large copper mines of Nevada and Arizona. Completed in 1915, and the mill, which many in the mining industry were skeptical as to its success, did not handle 6,000 tons per day, but rather handled 10,000 tons per day at less than the cost projected.

With the success of the new mill, it became clear that more electrical power would be needed. Annex Creek on Taku Inlet was optioned from Herman Tripp in April 1915, the power project was producing power by December of that year. It is the first time a lake had been tapped via tunneling under and punching a hole through the bottom of the lake.

Amazingly, water was turning the water wheels 2 miles away within 42 minutes after blasting the hole through the lake. Annex Creek and Salmon Creek still produce 20 percent of Juneau's power today, and are the lowest cost power producers in the State of Alaska.

The Alaska Gastineau Perserverence, for a short period prior to World War I, was the largest gold mining complex in the world. It produced more than 500,000 ounces of gold.

The loss of labor during the war and post war inflation made the mine unprofitable. On June 3, 1921, the mine shut down.

Thane promoted the hydroelectric plants, mill town, and support facilities for a new pulp mill site. In 1923, an apparent deal was made with Japanese investors. However, the Yokohama, Japan earthquake of the same year killed the investors and the proposed pulp mill died with them.

Even though he had positively changed the course of the mining industry, Thane died in New York City in 1927, a broken and embittered man.

Fred Bradley, the genius behind the Treadwell and AJ Mines, said of Thane upon hearing of his death, "He built great monuments to man, but forgot what he was here for."

https://poajuneau.nationbuilder.com/garside_charleshttps://poajuneau.nationbuilder.com/degroff_edEuro-American presence in southeast Alaska began in·the latter part of the 18th century when explorers visited the area in search of highly prized furs, particularly the sea otter, for trade purposes. The survey for Alaskan resources included the search for precious minerals and the hope of discovering the famed Northwest Passage (State of Alaska 1982).

Countries involved in exploring the northwest coast of North America included Spain, England, Russia, France and Japan. Russian explorers are recorded as the first to encounter Native groups in southeastern Alaska. The first published account of exploration in Gastineau Channel was written by Captain George Vancouver, describing his journeys in 1793 and 1794. Seventy years later, the name Gastineau Channel was included on the 1867 Humphrey manuscript furnished to Western Telegraph Company (Werner 1925).

John Muir, a well-known naturalist, visited Lynn Canal in 1879. Upon his return to Sitka after interacting with Chilkat Tlingits, Muir noted that gold might be found in the area lying between Windham Bay and Sullivan Island in northern Lynn Canal.

Chief Kowee of the Auk Tlingit brought ore samples to George Pilz, a mining engineer residing in Sitka in 1880. These samples confirmed Muir's statements of potential gold reserves in southeast Alaska ( DeArmond 1967).

The Governor's Mansion was designed by James Knox Taylor. He was a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects, then serving as the first Supervisory Architect for the U.S. Treasury Department.

Taylor utilized design premises which had succeeded in Eighteenth Century English and American Colonial country houses.

These houses were designed to produce the most usable space for the cost, with facilities to perform the formal institutional functions required, and spaces amenable to formal and informal living under the same roof.

The examples he appeared to have followed had succeeded in performing these functions. The modifications he designed into this building succeeded admirably. An additional virtue of his design is that it permitted the basic building to be constructed and pressed into full service, with additional finishing construction, furnishing and decorating accomplished over a long period of time, as funds and authorization were provided.

An Act of June 6, 1900, provided that the temporary seat of government for the District of Alaska would be established in Juneau "when suitable grounds and buildings are available." From the passing of this 1900 Act by Congress until the Mansion was completed and occupied in 1913, a series of events—dramatic when considered as a totality moved forward the concept of more self-government for the Territory.

Continued Congressional attention to Alaska resulted in an Act for the Protection of Game, June 7, 1902; an Act Creating Road Districts and Providing for Road Overseers, April 27, 1904; the long-sought Delegate in Congress Act, May 8, 1906. The site of the building had been reserved in 1911 by Executive Order of the President, Number 1331. The Second Organic Act, August 24, 1912 provided that the capital of the Territory ". . .shall be at Juneau."

The Governor's Mansion, already under construction when the Act became law, thus became the first public building constructed for the new permanent capital of the Territory. The Alaska Governor's Mansion was first occupied by the Territorial Governor, Walter E. Clark, and his family, on January 1, 1913.

The Act also created a legislature of twenty-four members—two Senators and four Representatives from each of the four judicial division—to convene "at the capitol at the city of Juneau, Alaska on the first Monday in March in the year nineteen hundred thirteen, and on the first Monday in March every two years there after." The first legislature convened in space rented in the local Elks Club hall.

Juneau was a busy community. It had been founded as a mining camp, and had flourished as a result of the mines on both sides of Gastineau Channel and the marine commerce spawned by traffic between the lower states and the greater Alaska to the north and west.

A. H. Humpheries, an official of one of the mines recalls what Juneau was like in the era when the Governor's Mansion was under construction and the Territorial Government was about to begin full operation in the town, "Juneau in 1912 was alive and booming.

I had gone there from "The Westward" as we called it, out around Cordova and Valdez, after two memorable years in the Kennecott copper and Valdez trail country. ...men were shaved and groomed. Businessmen were in city clothes. A great treat to us was to see women and children on the streets and in the stores. ...the streets were thronged with pedestrians on the sidewalks. Horsedrawn vehicles threaded the centers.

I had spent five years in New York City. It never appeared to me so civilized as Juneau did that first day in 1910. The stores were busy, and displayed good merchandise.

Both the raised sidewalks and the streets in the main part of the city were of planking. They were very clean with streams from fire-hose nozzles. There was an efficient sewer system, ample electricity, and a telephone exchange with "hello girls" who would trace a party for you anywhere they could be reached. ...

The morning following our arrival, after breakfasting..., we sought out the source of the town's activity—the office of the Alaska Gastineau Mining Co., in the Valentine Building . . . and walked out with jobs. My friend was to work with Herman Tripp at Sum Dum Mine. ...Ed Russell published the "Dispatch." . . . "The Juneau Empire"... later, founded by John F. Strong and John W. Troy, . . .They had been associated in Nome with the "Nugget," and much later became governors of the Territory. ...

There was a staff-house with "private mess" down by Gold Creek at the foot of the tram and a big bunkhouse and a mess hall up the hill near the mine.... The mine was in the development and construction stages. Everybody in the organization was new and came from some other place.... ...the Alaska Gastineau mine was being developed for 6.000 tons of ore daily output.

The Alaska Juneau Mine, with an even more modern reduction plant, was planned for 10,000 tons a day, while across the channel the thirty-year-old Treadwell Mine properties were producing enough ore to keep some 2.000 stamps continuously pounding it to pulp 363 days a year. All this activity made the Juneau-Douglas operations for a short time at least, rank as the hard-rock miners' capital of the world....

I was thirty in 1913.... The very recollection of . . . that period fills me with pleasure. We can never recover the feeling we had toward each other in that distant simple age. The nearest I can think of to parallel it, would be a cruise ship that had been long enough at sea for everybody to get acquainted. We had a feeling of being of the world, but separated by time and distance. We were constantly refreshed by the arrival of new people from "below." ... at that period I had never met an adult Caucasian born in Alaska....

In 1912, the only automobile in town was Bart Thane's official Model T. It was chauffeur operated. The streets seemed full of horse-drawn vehicles, buggies, delivery wagons, big Studebaker ranch wagons, a lot of them designed so runners could be substituted for wheels when snow descended on the town. The freighters used "common sense" bob sleds in winter. There was no snow removal at that time. We just tromped it down and wore it out.

There was no radio, and no television in that distant age. But there was plenty of diversion in the big social hall for those off shift. We formed the Ptarmigan Club, and invited the whole town to a house warming dance when the place was opened for business....

It was almost the last stand in Alaska and in the West of the now forgotten art of driving workhorses. . . a string of five or six four-horse or six-horse teams, hitched to heavy Studebaker wagons, loaded high and safety-lashed, teamsters sitting on top or even standing precariously for a better view fore and aft with a handful of lines, would pull out of Willoughby Avenue at a fast walk along Front Street and then, with infinite care make the sharp turn up Seward—hoofs pounding, chains rattling, harness creaking, wheels rumbling, every axle speaking its piece—the leaders prancing proudly with necks arched under their reached manes. One team after another, that was the scene twice a day for several years. . . .

Jay Hayes, Alaska Road Commission superintendent . . . had to keep roads up without money.... By 1915 a few more autos appeared on the streets, plus a few delivery trucks. . . . Cash Cole bought a little red Model T.  Doc Loussac, the druggist, had a black one shipped up....

Juneau was a busy seaport with big cargo and passenger ships docking nearly everyday and sometime three or four...."

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