Nome: City of the Golden Beaches (Alaska Geographic, Vol. 11, No. 1)

Nome: City of the Golden Beaches (Alaska Geographic, Vol. 11, No. 1) by Terrence Cole. paperback edition. ISBN: 9780882402017.

The story of Nome, like that of so many other Alaskan owns, is closely intertwined with the history of the Klondike. Yet the Klondike River and the gold district named for it are not in Alaska as is commonly believed, but in Yukon Territory, Canada. The real Alaska gold rush was not in the Klondike in 1898, but ti the sandy beaches at Nome a thousand miles to the west in the summer of 1900. Few historians have delved deeply into the wild story of the Nome stampede and one of the most unusual gold strikes in history. When miners found gold in the sand on the Nome beach, many presumed that the gold had been washed ashore by the waves and had come in with the tide like driftwood. Across the United States fortune hunters envisioned the Bering Sea as a golden lake, from which an inexhaustible supply of treasure could be dredged. No less improbable was the strange town that grew up on the shores of the golden sea, and is still there today.