Copper dominates the early history of the Chitina Basin. Copper can be found lying on the ground throughout much of the Chitina Basin but particularly rich deposits are located within a 120 km arch stretching between the Kotsina and Chitistone rivers (Mendenhall and Schrader 1903:16; Moffit and Maddern 1909:47). Archaeologists think that the Ahtna began using copper between 1,000 and 500 years ago producing arrowheads, awls, beads, personal adornment, knife blades, and copper wire probably through a process of heating and pounding or cold hammering (Workman 1977; Pratt 1998). Copper was also widely traded throughout eastern Alaska so it is not surprising that Europeans learned of the region’s copper deposits early on in their contact with Alaska Natives.
The first written reference to the Ahtna and to copper comes from a report describing a Russian expedition to the mouth of the Copper River in 1783. On that expedition the Russians encountered a group of Alutiiq (Native people who inhabit Prince William Sound, the lower Kenai Peninsula, Kodiak Island and portions of the Alaska Peninsula) who told them of traveling up the Copper River to trade for furs and copper (de Laguna 1972). In 1797 A. A. Baranov, director of the Russian America Company, sent Dimitri Tarkhanov to explore the Copper River and look for the source of copper (Grinev 1993). Tarkhanov reached the Lower Ahtna village of Takekat, or Hwt'aa Cae'e (Fox Creek village), located across from the mouth of the Chitina River, and was therefore probably the first European to see the Chitina River (Grinev 1997; Kari 2005). But he never learned the source of the copper. According to Tarkhanov (Grinev 1997), the chief of Takekat, who was named Kaltysh, and his family went in the fall to mouth the Copper River to prepare yukola, or split dried fish and while there Takekat probably “conducted a profitable trade in copper which his fellow tribesmen procured on the upper reaches of the river.”
In the intervening years between Tarkhanov’s visit and the sale of Alaska to the United States in 1867, the Russians explored much of the Copper Basin and succeeded in establishing a small trading post in the vicinity of Taral (Ketz 1983, Pratt 1998, VanStone 1955), but they apparently never explored the Chitina River or located the source of copper.
Allen (1900) may have been the first non-Native to be shown a source of copper. Whether the prospector John Bremner actually explored the Chitina River is uncertain (Pratt 1998). Bremener spent the winter of 1883/84 at Taral and was said to have explored the Chitina River sometime between February and April 1885 (see VanStone 1955).
There is some question as to why Nicolai would reveal the source of copper to Allen when according to most Russian sources the Ahtna violently resisted showing them (Grinev 1993, 1997). One reason Nicolai may have been disposed toward Allen, according to some Ahtna elders, was because he was a “nice guy” who wanted to know what Indians knew and wanted their help, in contrast to the Russians who were “pretty bad guys.” In any event, while Allen learned the general location of the copper the exact location of the vein was not revealed until 1899 when a group of prospectors succeeded in obtaining a map and guide from Nicolai (Pratt 1998).
The novelist/historian Ronald Simpson provides one interpretation of the situation in his novel Legacy of the Chief. As Simpson imagines it, Nikolai shows Allen the source of the copper, pointing across the Chittystone River and as he points the white men turn silent…“ [i]t was as if they had found something holy.” When Allen asks Nicolai to describe the place, Nicolai waves him off sensing that “he had just done something he might later regret.” Nicolai reasons that Allen is only the leader of a small expedition, not a prospector, and he only wants to know that the source of the copper exists, or so Nicolai hoped. Of course that was not the end of it. More expeditions follow, and then in 1898/99 a flood of prospectors poured into the Copper Basin. Most were headed for the Klondike, but some stayed to prospect. In the meantime the legend of the rich copper vein grew.
In fact Nicolai and his people were facing hard times in the fall of 1899. Simpson imagines this was because earlier in the season many of Nicolai’s young people had taken up with the prospectors, drinking and carrying on, instead of preparing for winter. By the fall of 1899 they had returned to Taral but the situation is exacerbated by the presence of a commercial fishery at the mouth of the river (begun in 1889), and hundreds of prospectors who were hunting for game and setting fire to the country.
Lone Janson in her book The Copper Spike writes that Nikolai and his people were facing starvation at the onset of winter in 1899. Janson does not write about the extenuating circumstances: the commercial fishery and the presence of prospectors, but USGS geologist Fred Moffit (1915; 1930), who visited the Chitina Basin soon after, writes that forest fires were a problem as prospectors burned “many square miles” of timber, in part to get rid of mosquitoes and to provide forage for stock. The geologist Oscar Rohn (1900) who traveled up the Chitina River during the summer of 1899 wrote that animal populations had either declined or the animals had migrated out of the valley because he had found large numbers of animal skulls and bones but saw few animals.
For these reasons it could not have been a better time to approach Nicolai with a proposition for learning the location of the copper.
The facts of the situation are that Nicolai did reveal a source of copper for a cache of supplies and for this he has been demeaned by some as the savage innocent who “traded a multimillion-dollar copper mine for a cache of food” (Janson 1975; Mendenhall and Schrader 1903). From this perspective the Ahtna are considered passive participants who made little contribution to the history of the region except to reveal the source of the copper that gave the industry its start (Pratt 1998).
In Simpson’s view Nicolai is smarter and more calculating. He cannot know the value of the copper to the outside world, but realizes it must be worth something and therefore has to wring some meaningful concessions from the white men. The prospectors suggest that they split their cache of food with the Ahtna, but Nikolai bargains, asking for all of the food and the prospectors’ word that they will build a clinic for the Indians. In the end Nicolai reveals the source of the copper, gets the food, staving off starvation, and eventually a clinic, though it is built long after Nicolai dies. This fictional account leaves out the fact that what Nicolai revealed to the prospectors was essentially worthless to the Ahtna, who had no need to mine copper since they could easily pick it up off of the ground. It was also worthless to the mining industry. As National Park Historian Geoff Bleakley points out, richer copper deposits were found further west in the Kennicott valley and the Nicolai prospect never produced any copper.
But overriding the argument of whether Nicolai was duped or not is the fact that the Ahtna were never compensated by the mining industry for the use of Ahtna lands or the minerals extracted from those lands.
As Simpson’s Nicolai knows, the world is changing, but little is written about how those changes affected the Ahtna. Instead historians have focused on the heroic efforts to build the Copper River Northwestern railroad and the Kennicott mine. Simpson’s Nicolai sees a different story. The whites have introduced disease and whisky, “which is like a disease.” As a result traditional society begins to fall apart as young people stop listening to their leaders and go off to live the easy life and work for wages. Men become drunk and useless and it falls to the women to take up the slack. In interviews with Ahtna elders it appears that outlying villages and camps on the Chitina River were abandoned by the 1920s. Certainly the more remote areas further up the Chitina River were abandoned early on. No elder interviewed in the last 20 or 30 years lived at Tebay Lakes or Nicolai’s camps on the Kiagna River or at Dan Creek. Pratt (1998) notes that the Ahtna may have, for religious reasons, avoided the Nizina River following Nicolai’s death around 1899 or 1900. According to VanStone Taral was occupied until the construction of the Copper River Northwestern Railroad in 1911 when everyone moved to Chitina, though Constance West thinks people lived there for sometime after that.
Eventually a syndicate of eastern financiers, that included the Guggenheim brothers and the House of Morgan, developed the Kennicott valley prospects and built the Copper River Northwestern Railroad to transport the ore to tidewater. The town of Chitina was established first as a construction camp for the railroad and later became a stop on the railroad and commercial center for the region. In 1920 a school was built for the local Native population, prompting the final abandonment of villages such as Taral and Tonsina because Ahtna children were supposed to attend school during the winter months (Buzell and McMahan 1995). The school operated sporadically until 1927 when it became permanent. Both the Native and non-Native population of Chitina increased until 1939 when Kennicott closed the mine and the railroad was shut down. The Alaska Road Commission closed its offices in Chitina in 1942, adding to the decline in population and in 1956 both the infirmary and the school closed and the remaining population dispersed to other places where jobs and health care were available. However many people who had been raised in Chitina or still had relatives there returned in the summer.
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