Nellie Frost watching her husband and a crew of miners shoveling-in on the Frost claim near the mouth of Mills, Creek, 1897. Frost 16, Frost Collection. Courtesy of Rolfe Buzzell.
Join us online for a virtual Cook Inlet Historical Society lecture.
Free.
Advance registration is required to receive the link. Please register directly on the Anchorage Museum website by following this link: Register Here
Speaker: Rolfe G. Buzzell, Ph.D.
March 2021 marks the second printing of Gold Rush Wife: The Adventures of Nellie Frost on Turnagain Arm, 1895-1901. The book was written by Nellie’s daughter, based on stories and documents provided by her mother, and edited for publication by Anchorage historian Rolfe Buzzell.
Nellie Frost followed her husband from San Jose, California, to Sunrise City in 1897, the second year of the gold rush that brought an estimated 10,000 people to Turnagain Arm 20 years before Anchorage began. Gold Rush Wife is the story about the hardships and joys of Nellie Frost’s years on the mining frontier during the stampede to Turnagain Arm that began in 1896. Written and edited from one hundred-year-old historic documents and through narratives told to her daughter Dorothy Frost, Gold Rush Wife chronicles Nellie’s experiences in a northern gold rush that predated the more famous stampede to the Klondike. Nellie’s story provides insight into the rich social life of an isolated, predominately male mining camp. It is that rare narrative of a woman’s experiences, in her own words, of life in a remote mining camp in the late 1890s.
Rolfe Buzzell earned his Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and has been a resident of Alaska since 1977. He is the editor of two books by participants of the Turnagain Arm Gold Rush: Memories of Old Sunrise: Gold Mining on Alaska’s Turnagain Arm, The Autobiography of Albert Weldon Morgan (published by Cook Inlet Historical Society in 1994; 2nd edition published by Ember Press in 2015); and Gold Rush Wife (published in 2016 by Ember Press, and 2nd printing in 2021). Dr. Buzzell worked as a historian in Alaska for the National Park Service for two years and as a historian for the Alaska State Office of History and Archaeology for 30 years. He began researching the history of Sunrise City in the 1980s. He has since mapped the archaeological ruins of Sunrise, successfully nominated the site to the National Register of Historic Places as a historic archaeological district, supervised the restoration of Point Comfort (the town’s cemetery), and has written extensively about the history of Sunrise. His forthcoming article about Women of the Sunrise Mining District was recently been accepted for publication in Alaska History journal. Dr. Buzzell is currently working on a history of the town of Chitina, Alaska, which was once a major station on the Copper River and Northwestern Railway midway between Cordova and Kennecott Mine.