January-February 2020
The Davidson Ditch The Davidson Ditch is a 90-mile pipeline built in the 1920s to supply water to gold mining dredges north of Fairbanks. Abandoned in the 1960’s, it was the first large-scale pipeline project in Alaska, and lessons learned in its construction were applied to building the 800mile Trans-Alaska Pipeline System from Valdez to Prudhoe Bay half a century later.
By 1910, most of the placer claims around Fairbanks had been well-worked. From a peak of 9.5 million in 1909, gold production began declining, and by 1920 less than one million dollars in gold was being produced annually.
Mining engineer Norman C. Stines, an unusual man with an equally unusual history, had worked abroad with some of the preeminent mining engineers in the world. He had observed the success of the huge gold mining dredges near Nome, and he believed the same technique would prove profitable in the Fairbanks area, but the lack of available water presented a problem.
Dredges, which work from barges, require tremendous amounts of water to float the barges, thaw the permafrost, and remove the overburden, exposing the gold-bearing ground. In their research document The Davidson Ditch, produced for the cultural resource consulting firm Northern Land Use Research, Inc. in 2005, Catherine Williams and Sarah McGowan wrote, “Only by moving millions of cubic yards of the muck overlying goldbearing gravels …. could the low-grade placer gold deposits be mined profitably.”
Nome surveyor and civil engineer James M. Davidson had overseen the construction of the 50-mile Miocene Ditch, which channeled water from the Nome River to early mining operations in that area. Born on December 3, 1853 at Ft. Jones in northernmost California, Davidson had attended the University of California, took courses in civil engineering, and had mined on the Klamath River before turning to farming. Almost wiped out in the financial panics of the 1890’s, he’d been among the thousands of hopefuls crossing the Chilkoot Pass in 1898, but as a trained engineer with a background in mining, the then-45-year-old Davidson was better prepared than most of the stampeders on the trail to the Klondike.
alaskan-history.com
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