Category: Family history

The Adventuresome Life of Henry Durand by John Durand © 2014

Probably few readers of the Durand Heritage Foundation Newsletter know of the adventuresome life of Henry Durand, who in the 1940 U.S. Census gave his occupation as “mining owner” of “gold mines.” His story is worth telling.

Born September 12, 1882 in Faribault, Minnesota, Henry was one of the younger sons of Felix and Leocadie Durand. His oldest sister Louise would marry first cousin Pierre Durand and beget the large family that today comprises most of the so-called Wisconsin Durands.

Henry’s nephew Elzear of the Wisconsin Durands left a brief sketch of Henry in his “Life History and Memories.” Elzear wrote: “He was quiet, and went to night school in Faribault in the winter months and worked out some.”2 Elzear’s information is an interesting addition to what we learn from the 1900 U.S. census. There, 17-year-old Henry is shown as still living on his parents’ farm, having had completed just two years of schooling. But he could read, write, and speak English.

Elzear also wrote that Henry worked winters in the logging camps, “always leaving his sweetheart behind.” We do not know who his sweetheart was, or how many winters he left her behind, but the next official record we have is Henry’s enlistment in the Army four years later, on May 20, 1904, in Duluth, Minnesota. Perhaps in the intervening years Henry had worked as a cook in the logging camps, because he gave his occupation as “cook.” From his enlistment record, we learn that he was 21 years and 8 months old, 5 feet 51⁄4 inches tall, had blue eyes, dark brown hair, and a “ruddy” complexion.

Assigned to the 28th Company of Coastal Artillery, Henry was sent to the Philippine Islands, if as the company cook we know not. In the Philippines, the U.S. was still establishing its presence throughout the islands following the Spanish-American War, and the Army was still fighting pitched battles in the southern regions against Filipinos resisting American governance. However, Henry’s service probably never took him much beyond the environs of Manila, because that was where most of the Coastal Artillery was stationed. Henry was thus on the other side of the world and weeks of travel distant when his mother died in July 1905.

Henry’s unit returned to the U.S. just after the famous San Francisco earthquake destroyed a large part of the downtown in April 1906. Henry and other soldiers policed the devastated city during the early stages of recovery and rebuilding. A year later, he was discharged at Fort Rosecrans, a Coastal Artillery installation near San Diego.

Elzear said that Henry never returned to the Midwest after his discharge, but wrote home to say: “I am headed for Alaska. Don’t write until you hear from me.” The next news his family heard was, “I am okay. I hired out for five summer months at $7.00 a day and seven winter months at $5.00 a day. I am a cook.”

That was big money. The pay of an Army private at the time was a little over 50 cents a day, so Henry would be making more than ten times as much. But Alaska was also a land of high prices. A hundred pounds of flour that sold for about $4.50 in Seattle cost at least $10 in the gold fields, about $240 in today’s dollars.

From Nome, Henry would have gone to the small port at the mouth of the Yukon Rivier, and then traveled by riverboat up the Yukon River. At the mouth of the Innoko River, he would have transferred to a smaller craft to ascend the Innoko to the mouth of the Iditarod River, and thence gone up the Iditarad to a loop in the river that enabled off-loading on a river bank a few miles from the gold fields of Flat. His river trip was about 350 miles, and the off-loading place would become Iditarod. Henry probably “hired out” as a cook in Nome that summer of 1907. When gold was discovered in the beach sands there in 1899, miners had swarmed in to take gold by panning and rocker boxes. Several thousand people then came to populate Nome, a new town that grew up amidst the miles of gold-seeker tents along the beaches. Now, almost ten years later, the easy gold was gone, and most mining was done by huge dredging machines. Dredging companies hired crews, housed them in bunkhouses, and fed them in mess halls.

Henry did not stay long in Nome. In the 1910 U.S. Census, taken in January of that year, 27-year-old Henry is shown to be the owner of a restaurant in Flat, a half dozen miles southwest of Iditarod (yes, the place the now-famous dog sled race is named for). Wikipedia provides a succinct history of how Flat came to be.

An article in The Pacific Miner for the city of Seattle describes the excitement caused by the newest gold find, which would be the Alaska Territory’s last, big strike for many years:

‘Nearly 35 miles of pay dirt on the five creeks has been discovered averaging 500 feet in width and so rich it was not unusual to secure anywhere from $5 to $50 per ton… The steamship Victoria, the first large boat [of the season to leave Seattle] for Nome and the mouth of the Yukon, sailed with 550 passengers and a freight cargo that sunk her low in the water. Most of the passengers and freight are for the new Iditarod gold fields, and the passengers come from all parts of the world, lured by the stories of gold to be had for the digging. The stampede to the north has almost reached the proportions of the Klondike rush. The men who sailed will take Yukon steamers at St Michael [at the mouth of the Yukon River] and at the mouth of the Innoko will transfer to smaller steamers to ascend the Innoko and Iditarod.’

At a loop on the Iditarod River where river craft could tie up, some 6-7 miles from the gold fields of Flat, the boom town of Iditarod sprang up. Although the gold fields were but a few miles from Iditarod, a contemporary writer described the ground between as “a miasmatic tundra bog in which horses sink to their bellies and which is almost impassable for the man traveling afoot.”6 Nonetheless, a picture taken of Flat in the fall of 1910, when Henry already had his restaurant going, shows a few permanent structures and dozens of tents scattered hither and yon.

It is unlikely that Henry occupied one of those permanent structures. At the time of the census, he was sharing rented quarters with a “pardner,” a miner. Their quarters may have been nothing more than a tent on a wood platform. Such may also have been the case with Henry’s restaurant.

The rapid transformation of Iditarod and Flat from wilderness to settlements was remarkable. A picture taken of people awaiting the arrival of the first riverboat to reach Iditarod in 1911 shows the importance of the event.

What enabled the building out of Flat was the completion of a “railroad” between Iditarod and Flat (soon to be called Flat City) in early summer of 1911. The “railroad” was a makeshift affair. One writer said:

‘The rails are composed of wooden stringers spiked to a corduroy log road and sheathed with hoop iron. The motive power is seventeen mules operated by an engineer who finds a long whip and sulphurous language more efficacious than a throttle valve. The train covers the distance from terminal to terminal in two hours on an average trip, although on one occasion it made the journey in one hour and forty-two minutes.’

The new “railroad” enabled bulk freight to be moved across the “miasmic tundra” between Iditarod to Flat City, which in turned enabled the transportation of machinery that changed the type of mining done, from miners using pans and sluice boxes to large operations using draglines and dredging machines.

As often the case with boomtowns, Iditarod and Flat City today are ghost towns. However, in 1993 a historian with the State of Alaska interviewed several people who had firsthand knowledge of what Iditarod and Flat City were like in the “olden days.” The purpose of the interviews was identify the few buildings still standing that might prove to be of historical interest. One of those interviewed was Henry Durand’s stepson. Then 73 years old, Henry’s stepson was still coming up from Seattle during the warm season to mine gold on a tributary of Otter Creek. The following narrative is reconstructed from his and the other oral histories and online documents.8

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The first year the “railroad” operated, it hauled some 4,000 tons of freight from Iditarod to Flat City, including building material that enabled people like Henry to construct permanent business establishments along a wagon path next to Otter Creek. That wagon path became Flat City’s “Main Street.” Little planning went into the way the settlement developed. There was no town charter or mayor or city council or even law enforcement. Flat City governed itself by custom, common interest, and “by your leave.” There were a few married couples among the population of hundreds of miners, but from earliest days, perhaps not surprisingly, prostitutes situated themselves on the other side of Otter Creek. By unspoken agreement, they did not mix socially with Flat City society, and if they married (which several did) they always left for a new life elsewhere.

Circumstances over the years caused Henry to run his eating establishment at different locations in Flat City. One instance was probably when a dredging company moved every building worth salvaging from the verges of Otter Creek so it could get the gold beneath them. Most accounts refer to Henry’s place as “Henry’s café” or “Henry’s restaurant,” as if an official name did not matter. An account of Flat City in the late 1920s also describes the “Durand Café and Hotel” as “a big two story building.” For my part, I want to say that, in a picture taken in 1912, the stocky, dark- haired fellow standing in front of the Flat City Restaurant with two huge dogs is Henry Durand. A young man who came up from the States to work with a dredging operation in 1929 wrote: “I did not need any groceries because I began eating three meals a day at Henry Durand’s restaurant. He charged a dollar a meal.”9 Could it be that Henry was still charging the same $1.00 a meal advertised on the sign for the Flat City Restaurant?

The 35 miles and more of pay dirt on Otter Creek and its tributary streams provided plenty of opportunity for gold seekers. It was all placer mining (rhymes with “passer”), which involved washing gold out of alluvial sand and gravel. A registered placer claim in Alaska at the time was a rectangle measuring 660 by 1,320 feet, or 20 acres. Unfortunately, the entire area was permafrost. In summer, the miners could get gold by washing the thawed ground, but those first winters, when the land froze and became snow-covered, most of the miners hunkered down and tried to keep warm, or headed out before the rivers froze to enjoy less primitive living elsewhere. A few operations sank shafts below the permafrost so they could accumulate pay dirt to process when the streams flowed again, but not many lived year-round in Flat City. Henry was among those who did. After all, the miners had to eat.

In wintertime, Flat City was a small, isolated community. Wireless service by the U.S. Signal Corps kept Iditarod and Flat City in touch with the outside world, but the U.S. Mail was a weekly delivery by dogsled from Fairbanks. Someone becoming seriously ill or injured in the winter had to wait for the first boat that left Iditarod for Nome in late spring, or endure a weeklong dog sled journey to Fairbanks. Otherwise, local women did much of the healthcare.

At this writing, I have been unable to find Henry Durand’s whereabouts at the time of the 1920 census. He was not Flat City when the census was taken in November that year. Perhaps like many he had headed down to Seattle to spend the winter months, and arrived there after the 1920 Seattle census was completed that summer. For some time, Henry had been employing others to cook, so perhaps he left his restaurant in the care of his cook.

In 1925, Henry’s restaurant caught fire and burned completely down, along with several adjacent buildings on Main Street, including “Fullerton’s General Merchandise Store.” It was a tough year for the Fullertons. The following winter, James Fullerton, pudgy owner of the store, died of complications from a burst appendix while being transported by dog sled to Fairbanks. It was probably after that fire that Henry Durand decided to build and operate the Durand Café and Hotel.

A letter from 1926 indicates that Henry was at the center of Flat City’s development. Addressed to the “restauranter Henry DuRand” by the Alaska Territorial Highway Engineer, it gave specifications for the Flat City airstrip that would be built that year, with the Territorial government picking up two-thirds of the cost. The runway was to be 400 feet wide and 1,400 feet long, and “must be perfectly smooth and free from bumps.”11 The completed airstrip would fundamentally change both life and mining in Flat City. Rather than depending on riverboats and dog sleds, Flat City could now fly passengers and freight in and out during much of the year.

In his “Life History and Memories,” Elzear said that when Henry went to Alaska after the Army, he did not return to the Midwest for twenty years. Assuming that Elzear was being literal, that would have been about 1927. Perhaps he flew out from Flat City’s new airstrip. When he was back in Faribault, Elzear says, Henry’s sister Anne (Mrs. Leon Blais) asked him “if he would care to go and call on his poor sweetheart, still single. Both of them were in their 40’s. But love had faded away.” Perhaps Henry already had his eye on Anna Fullerton, widow of the fellow who died while being transported by dog sled for medical treatment for a burst appendix. In the 1930 U.S. Census, Anna is listed as the Flat City postmistress and the head of a household with two boys, John and Richard Fullerton, ages 10 and 8, both of them attending the short-lived Flat City elementary school. It was young John Fullerton who was interviewed for the oral history of Flat City 63 years later. That same 1930 census shows Henry residing as a “lodger” in his Durand Café and Hotel, along with seventeen other men, nearly all of them miners.

Most of the mining was now done by dredging. The capital and management needed to run a dredging operation changed the way mining was done around Flat City. Depending on its size, a dredge required anywhere from a half dozen to twenty or more men to keep it going 24-hours a day with shifts of 10-12 hours and occasional time off for maintenance. Most of the crew earned a dollar an hour, and if the operator did not provide their room and board directly, they received another thirty cents an hour to cover that expense. At the end of the mining season, all but a few of a dredge crew headed south. The more skilled workers were kept around to maintain, repair, and improve machinery. A few miners went into the hills for the winter to cut firewood or trap. Flat City consumed enormous quantities of firewood, both to heat buildings and to fuel steam boilers used to power mining machinery and thaw the permafrost.

By then, Henry had gotten into business other than providing food and lodging. Perhaps he had to. From a 1914 peak population of about 6,000 in Flat City and the proximate gold fields, there were now just 124 people living in Flat City when the 1930 census was taken mid-winter, and about 100 more in nearby enumeration areas called Willow Creek, Chicken Creek, Flat Creek, Crooked Creek, and Discovery.

Apparently having enough capital to begin a new venture, Henry began by taking on a partner, Fritz Awe. According to John Fullerton’s oral history, Henry decided that Fritz would be a good person to get hooked up with “because he understood equipment.” They formed Awe and Company, bought several trucks and an old caterpillar tractor and some sleds, and began hauling fuel and freight and supplies from Iditarod for the mines and businesses that operated in the Flat City area. (The old “railroad” had ceased operating between Iditarod and Flat City by then, and was being torn up for firewood.) In winter, Durand and Awe bought wood from the woodcutters, hauled it into town on tractor- pulled sleds, custom cut it to length, and sold it.

Perhaps it was love, perhaps familiarity, perhaps convenience, or most likely some of each. Whatever the case, we know that Henry and Anna Fullerton had lived and worked in close proximity in Flat City for many years, and when the Anna decided to leave Flat City so her oldest son John could attend high school, she resigned her position as postmistress in 1933, and moved to Seattle. And Henry went with her. They were married on Christmas Day that year. Henry was 51 years old, and Anna was 47. One of their witnesses was Gus Uotila, a Flat City resident who apparently headed south for warmer weather in winter.

Elzear wrote that in late 1935, “about two months before my father died, [Henry] came to Spooner. I hadn’t seen him for about 33 years. By this time he was not well.” We do not know what Henry’s health problems were.

One account says that Henry Durand had come by some mining claims from miners who had run up tabs at his restaurant and could not pay up, and so they turned over their claims to settle their bills. Perhaps that is so. However, every claim had to be worked every year and an annual fee paid, and those in the know kept a sharp eye out for claims that were at risk of default by miners going broke or just giving up because of ill health, discouragement, or fatigue. Whatever the case, Henry Durand had some claims, and John Fullerton said that Henry and Fritz Awe decided to go “into the mining business to make more money.” By this time, the new official price of gold had been fixed at $35 an ounce, more than double of just a few years earlier.

Henry sold his restaurant business in Flat City, and with his cash and borrowing ability, he and Fritz Awe bought a dragline, tractor, washing plant, pipeline, pump and other equipment they needed (probably in Seattle), and in early 1937 they began mining “along the virgin limit of Flat Creek.” The “virgin limit” is the edge of pay dirt along a stream. After that, John Fullerton says, “they acquired ground on Chicken Creek and moved over there. Lower Chicken Creek had never been mined, so they built a camp there and mined big time on Chicken Creek.” At some point, Fritz Awe’s brother Claude joined them. After a couple years of high school in Seattle, John Fullerton began coming back to Flat City to work summers with the mining operation. When his younger brother Richard began college, he also joined the mining crew during summer breaks. Presumably, their mother returned to Flat City with the boys.

The last information we have about Henry’s personal involvement in gold mining is from 1940. John Fullerton makes no mention of this operation, which is described in a Department of the Interior report:

A number of the streams that flow outward from Marvel Dome have placer deposits in their valleys, and several small mining camps are busy on them each year. In 1940, the largest of these, in point of placer-gold production, was the Marvel Creek Mining Co., which consists of Henry DuRand, Fritz Awe, and Luther Hess. This company mined with a dragline, tractors, and bulldozers. Practically all of the placer gravel on Marvel Creek is naturally thawed, so that it can be readily dug.

What we know of Luther Hess is that he was 73 years old in 1940, lived in Fairbanks, and was probably an investor, because he described himself as proprietor of a gold mine. It might have been his claim the operation was mining on Marvel Creek, for which he received a percentage of the gold, a common arrangement.

America’s entry into World War II brought still more changes to Flat City. Unless a gold mining operation was virtually self-sufficient (i.e. was small and did not require many resources), mining for gold was deemed a non-essential industry. Big operations were shut down. According to John Fullerton, Fritz Awe sold his interest in their operation to Henry Durand, went off to build Alaska airfields for the military, and never returned. Both Fullerton boys also went to the war and did not return to Flat City until a couple years after it was over in 1945. I speculate that with the onset of the war, the Marvel Creek Mining Co. shut down, and that Henry and Fritz moved their equipment back to Flat City “for the duration” (as they said at the time).

John Fullerton says that he and his brother Richard both came to be one-third partners in Henry’s operation, with Henry having the other third. Whether Henry gifted his stepsons their one-third interests we know not. Left fatherless by their merchant dad, the two little boys were the closest thing to offspring that Henry enjoyed in Flat City. He had watched them grow as neighbor boys from earliest ages to young manhood, and may have developed fond feelings for them, as well as for their mother. In any event, when Henry died May 21, 1945 at age 62, his remaining mining interests went to the Fullerton boys.

With Henry’s gold mine shut down during the war, he appears to have lived out his life in Seattle. Elzear says that Henry “was a deep thinker, and no one knew much of his business,” and that Henry’s sister Rose (Mrs. Fred Trombley) “was with him when he died.”

We cannot trust much of what Elzear has to say of Henry’s life. He got a lot of it wrong, but we can probably be sure of the truth of his last anecdote. In 1952, Henry’s wife Anna died, and Henry’s sister Anne (Mrs. Leon Blais), “a widow for a long time, went to the funeral from where she lived in Portland, Oregon. The two boys didn’t even offer to pay her fare back. I don’t know how much wealth there was left behind, but I don’t think there was so very much. If there was, it’s under the name of his wife’s boys…Poor, rich uncle.”

Henry’s younger stepson, Richard S. Fullerton (born May 16, 1921), had completed three years of college when he entered the armed forces. I would assume that he finished earning his college degree after the war. However, I have been unable to discover anything more of his life, except his death, which appears to have occurred in August 1990. John Fullerton, Henry’s older stepson who provided the oral history, continued to mine gold in the Flat City area into the 1990s. He died in 1999 at age 80. His son Tad still lives in Anchorage, Alaska, and his descendants still have connections to the ghost town of Flat City, but only for family get-togethers and recreation.

*Prepared by John Durand for publication in the Durand Heritage Foundation Newsletter.