Wrangell-St. Elias National Park And Preserve: The Journey Of George Flowers
By Barbara 'Bo' Jensen
Driving along the McCarthy Road into Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve, I slow down to gaze at Long Lake. Three miles in length, the private lake within the preserve feels like a peaceful summer camp pond, ringed with snug cottages, leafy trees, and sunny wildflowers. Nothing about the idyllic scene reveals the perilous hardships of one man’s odyssey to reach gold-rush Alaska.
According to the 1940 U.S. Census, an unassuming man named George Flowers lived here. He was listed as 67 years old at that time, a Black man born about 1873 in Mississippi; even he was unsure of his exact birth year. Never married, he lived alone in a one-room cabin he built by hand near Long Lake, 15-20 miles from the remote mining towns of McCarthy and Kennecott, Alaska. Flowers told the census taker that he had never been to school, and according to the section “Employment Status of Persons 10 Years Old or Over,” he made part of his income as a trapper. Other common Alaska work options on the census form that year included fur farmer, driller, or reindeer herder. He received at least $50 income from another unspecified type of employment, most likely as a track walker for the railroad. The form does not say.
George Flowers is a hard man to find. His astounding story must be pieced together from archives, newspaper stories, and books like Cold Mountain Path by Tom Kizzia (Porphyrus Press, 2021). But it is the unwritten portions of his story that impress me most.
In his book, Kizzia notes that Flowers grew up in a sharecropper family in Mississippi. He would have been born only eight years after Emancipation reached the state in 1865 and freed some 435,000 Black people enslaved there. We do not know the status of his parents, but sharecroppers often included people newly freed from slavery who, with few other options, agreed to work for shares of crops grown in White landowners’ fields. This system was rife with fraud and exploitation, and sharecroppers often ended the harvest season deep in debt to the landowner. Even though he was born free, Flowers’ formative years would have begun in the tumultuous era of post-Civil War Reconstruction; he would have come of age as White Mississippi lawmakers drafted a new state constitution enshrining the restrictive Jim Crow laws that smothered the Deep South. His rights and his safety would have been constantly under threat.
George Flowers and Kennecott kids/ Geoffrey Bleakley Collection, Makawao, HI.
The Depression of the 1890s would have added additional economic pressures. No wonder, then, that this young man set off on a desperate and dangerous journey to seek his fortune far from home.
In 1898, word finally reached Seattle and San Francisco that gold had been discovered in the Klondike on the Yukon River – nearly two years earlier. As the news spread across the country, “He left the South on a freight train during the Klondike gold rush,” according to Kizzia. Hopping a freight train was arguably an even more dangerous option than riding in the tense, racially-segregated passenger trains of the time. Illegally “riding the rails” risked violent encounters with tough railroad security “bulls.” Boxcars could be sweltering hot during summer days and freezing cold at night. Riders often went days without food. And people lost limbs or were crushed under the wheels while hopping on or off the moving trains.
But the freight train was free, for a young man from abject poverty. After traveling more than 2,500 miles across the country, Flowers arrived in Seattle – only to find that he was not welcome on any steamship to Alaska, even if he could pay. Racism and segregation were well-established in the Pacific Northwest and across the country. His plans ruined, he could have chosen to turn around and go back home. But Flowers decided to continue. If he wanted to get to the gold fields of Alaska and the Klondike, he would have to walk.
And so, he did.
Over 2,200 miles of absolutely punishing terrain.
In fact, tens of thousands of stampeders could not afford passage on a steamer and traveled overland. Many met the Canadian requirement to bring a year’s supplies, carrying their huge kits on horses or mules when possible, through mud, deep snow, and up unnervingly steep, rocky trails over high mountain passes. According to a 2012 Anchorage Press article, it may have taken Flowers four years to get to Alaska on foot, “most likely follow[ing] the Telegraph Trail through British Columbia,” also known as the Ashcroft Route to Dawson City in the Yukon Territory. Eventually, he reportedly wandered into Mentasta, an Ahtna Indian village at the headwaters of the Copper River in Alaska, emaciated and exhausted. The Ahtna people took him to a mining camp on the Chisana River, where the camp supervisor, John Hazelet, provided him with food and clothing.
He had made it to gold rush country – but several years after the gold rush had ended. Hazelet’s Kennecott outfit was mining copper instead. However, Flowers could not get a job there. Kennecott Mines would not hire a Black man. In the mining town’s community hall, mine managers allowed the Ku Klux Klan to hold black-face minstrel shows and other events. Flowers had left Mississippi almost 5,000 miles behind him, only to find the Klan alive and well in remote Alaska.
And yet, by all accounts, Flowers was friendly and kind to everyone he met, likeable and interesting to talk to, with a talent for music. According to Kizzia, “George found work at the small placer gold mines in the creeks, gathering a grubstake to settle alone on the Lakina River near Long Lake around 1920.” He survived by trapping, hunting, fishing, and gardening. Eventually, he was hired as an occasional track walker for the CRNW railroad to make sure the line was safe. After his dangerous rail journey to Seattle and his multi-year trek to Kennecott, Flowers must have felt more than qualified for the job.
Long Lake seems like a summer camp, and when Flowers lived there, in some ways it was. The families of those same Kennecott Mines managers used it as a summer getaway from the noise and dust of the copper mill in town. These “Kennecott Kids” enjoyed walking down to Flowers’ cabin to visit him, where he would pull out his guitar and sing for them, or cook up some fried fish. Flowers often played his guitar at dances and community celebrations and became a fixture in McCarthy and Kennecott.
After the mines closed in 1938, Flowers told a friend that he was healthy and doing fine and liked having fewer people in the valley. But this was 1940, and he expressed concern about the “great I wont say wor I will say conflick or murder I thank it is wrong it looks like there is no safe place to live on earth.” Despite his many hardships and with no formal education, over the years, George Flowers had learned to read and write. He is said to have kept a Sears catalog nearby to help him find words and spell out his thoughts as he wrote simple letters to friends who moved away.
In the winter of 1948, Flowers was walking the railroad track and got his feet wet. They froze. Gangrene set in; friends flew him to a doctor in Valdez, but it was too late. He died, far from his home at Long Lake, about 75 years old. According to that Anchorage Press article, he was buried in Valdez, not in the White cemetery, instead “given a pauper’s burial in the semi-abandoned Native graveyard on the outskirts of town.”
But you won’t find George Flowers there. In 1964, a tsunami from the Good Friday Earthquake in Alaska destroyed Valdez, washing away the Native cemetery and taking Flowers’ remains out to sea. He was free at last, less than a year after Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech and only a few months before passage of the Civil Rights Act – legislation outlawing the racist discrimination he had endured, and overcome, his entire life.
Bo Jensen is a writer and artist who likes to go off-grid, whether it's backpacking through national parks, trekking up the Continental Divide Trail, or following the Camino Norte across Spain. For over 20 years, social work has paid the bills, allowing her to meet and talk with people living homeless in the streets of America. You can find more of Bo's work on Out There podcast, Wanderlust, Journey, Deep Wild, and www.wanderinglightning.com
Read More:
Blacks in Alaska History Project: https://archives.consortiumlibrary.org/collections/specialcollections/hmc-0681/
Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park: https://www.nps.gov/klgo/learn/goldrush.htm
For the Love of Freedom: Miners, Trappers, Hunting Guides, and Homesteaders: For the Love oF Freedom Miners, Trappers, Hunting guides, and HoMesTeaders An Ethnographic Overview and Assessment Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve (nps.gov)
Kennecott Mines National Historic Landmark: Kennecott Site Bulletin Web Version.pmd (nps.gov)
Kennecott Kids: https://www.nps.gov/wrst/learn/historyculture/kennecott-kids.htm
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