Alaskan History
John E. Ballaine and The Alaska Central Railway “Ballaine’s decision was a compound of necessity, careful decision, intuition, and hope.” William H. Wilson, Railroad in the Clouds (Pruett Publishing, 1977) Gold, coal, timber and other natural resources were the motivating factors in the construction of early railroads in the territory of Alaska, and there were many of them, by one count over thirty. In 1900 John E. Ballaine, a young real estate and newspaper businessman in Seattle, foresaw the value of an "all-American" route to the rich Klondike gold fields in Canada, while also noting the potential wealth of resources which opening such a route would make available in Alaska. He began investigating the options for a rail line from Alaskan tidewater, where a port could be established, to the large interior rivers such as the Tanana and the Yukon, which were already well-traveled by freight barges and big steam-driven sternwheelers. Dismissing the sites of Cordova and Valdez due to their formidable construction problems and already being claimed by the Morgan-Guggenheim Alaska Syndicate, and bypassing what would later be the ports of Whittier and Anchorage because of tricky access problems, Ballaine settled on a site at the head of Resurrection Bay which remained ice-free even in winter. A longabandoned Native village site was located near the head of Resurrection Bay; Frank Lowell and his family settled there in 1884. In 1895, when gold was discovered in the Sunrise-Hope area, the old Native trails provided a popular access route for mail and supplies from the head of the Bay to the new goldfields on Turnagain Arm. On May 30, 1898, a small party of the United States Geological Society (USGS), lead by Lt. H.G. Learnard, landed at Resurrection Bay with the purpose of exploring the territory for a route from tidewater to the Tanana River. Learnard’s party mapped the trails from Resurrection Bay to Turnagain Arm and from Crow Creek across the Chugach Mountains to Eagle River, a route which would come to be known as the Iditarod Trail. The official reports included references to extensive coal fields along the Matanuska River, and the agricultural possibilities of the Matanuska Valley, and they influenced the decision of John Ballaine to pursue a route from the head of Resurrection Bay to the head of Turnagain Arm and thence along the north side of the Arm before curving around the bulk of the Chugach Mountains to Knik Arm and beyond. With the help of his brother Frank and a large group of Seattle businessmen who liked his northern venture, Ballaine raised over $30 million dollars in capital and organized the Alaska Central Railroad Company in March, 1902. He acquired the Lowell family homestead, situated on land which would one day become the town of Seward, and formed the Tanana Construction Company to build the new railway.
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