The Alaska Gold Story

1965

A True Story I Hope

This story was told to me by friends that are presently living in Alaska

Written 2017* 512 Words *

By Howard Yasgar

In the year 2000, my wife and I took a cruise to Alaska.

While we were there, we went on a salmon fishing trip, and we met some interesting people.

One of the people we met was a fellow named Blackie, he was the captain of a charter salmon fishing boat.

Blackie was a super nice fellow; he did everything in his power to ensure that we caught some fish.

When our fishing trip was over, we told Blackie that we were from the Florida Keys, and he and his wife should come to visit us.

We kept in touch, and the following year Blackie and his wife came to visit us in Miami.

When they arrived, we couldn’t help but notice that they were wearing gold necklaces and pendants.

Blackie was also wearing a hand-crafted gold wristwatch, and his wife, had a heavy gold ring on as well.

I just had to ask them how come they had so much gold jewelry, and that’s when they told me the following story.

Several years before Blackie became a charter boat Captain, he was working as a heavy diesel truck mechanic on the ice road in Alaska.

Blackie said, that was where he met his wife, she was working in a restaurant there.

It was love at first sight, and once they got married, finding a suitable place to live economically in Alaska became a problem.

However, they eventually were offered an older log cabin that was available, but it was far out of town.

They went to look at it, and Blackie said it was an older style log cabin, which was very unusual even for Alaska, but it was nice, and it was nicely furnished, so they decided to rent it.

One day, they started having problems with the toilet, and, at the same time, their freshwater pump didn’t seem to be working properly.

Blackie started looking into repairing it by first lifting off the top of the toilet tank.

He said the entire bottom of the toilet tank was filled with brownish yellow mud.

Then he looked at the long PVC Pipe running from the freshwater pump, it was also clogged with the same mud.

When he started scooping it out of the toilet tank, he realized it was very heavy, and he recognized that it was not only mud, but it was finely powdered gold.

It took him a few weeks to dig up and remove all the gold behind the cabin.

Blackie had to do all the digging kind of secretly as he didn’t own the property.

They took all the gold to the local assayer in town, and he melted it down.

Blackie traded it for the gold wristwatch that he was wearing, as well as all the necklaces they had and the pendant and gold ring his wife wore.

Now that’s an Alaska gold story.