Alaskan History
The Episcopal Church in Iditarod & Flat City 1909 ~ 1911
~ Hudson Stuck D.D. F.R.G.S.~
Left: First Avenue in Iditarod, circa 1911. Right: Author Hudson Stuck, from his book.
Hudson Stuck, born in England in 1863, came to the United States at the age of 22. In 1889 he began formal theological studies in Texas and was ordained deacon on Aug. 7, 1892, and an Espicopal priest on Nov. 30, 1892. He served the church in Texas until 1904, when he moved to Alaska to become Archdeacon of the Yukon in the Missionary District of Alaska. He explored the territory extensively and published many articles and several books describing his journeys, including The Alaskan Missions of the Episcopal Church in 1920. This article is an excerpt from Chapter IV: By Dog Sled or Launch. The Iditarod was the last major gold rush in Alaska, covering a vast area spreading from Ruby on the Yukon River, south along the Kuskokwim Mountain into the drainages of the Innoko and Upper Kuskokwim Rivers, centering in the towns of Flat and Iditarod. Prospectors had visited the area since the 1880’s, and minor stampedes had kept interest in the area alive. And then on Christmas Day, 1908, three miners found what they’d been searching for on a tributary of the Innoko River and over the next decade $30 million worth of gold was dug from the ground. From The Alaskan Missions of the Episcopal Church (1920), by Hudson Stuck: In the roughly chronological order which has been observed in this narrative, this is the place to speak of the Iditarod, and since the history of the Church in that camp is in all probability a closed chapter, the complete incident may illustrate the difficulties in the way of undertaking religious work in a placer mining camp.
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