George Max Esterly Alaska gold rush papers

Photograph album documenting George Esterly's Alaska gold rush experience, accompanied by related correspondence, writings, and clippings, and typescript biographies of his father and grandfather. The album contains 185 photographs taken on the way to Alaska, on the trail, and in Wrangell, Skagway and Dawson. The photographs are accompanied by typescript descriptions taken apparently from letters written home to his family, and one newspaper clipping of a printed letter by Esterly describing Alaska. There are snapshots of gold miners on ships, in camps, playing shell games, wandering the streets of Skagway and Dawson, and on the trail. Also depicted are Esterly's Dawson City Electric Light and Water Power Company, women in the towns, "Indian murderers," the "Newman Opera Co.," snowstorms, and the interior of Esterly's cabin. One photograph is by photographer E. A. Hegg.

Previously, some photographs from this scrapbook on pgs. 7, 13, 16, 18, 19, 21, 23, 28, 29, 33, 41, 48, and 50 were digitized individually. The scrapbook was digitized in its entirety in 2021 to provide greater context for the individual images and the captions supplied by the creator.

The album is accompanied by a typescript "Narrative of the Expedition, 1904," written by an unidentified person who refers to Esterly as an entrepreneur; a letter written by Fenton Blakemore Whiting, reminiscing about the gold rush and con man Jefferson R. (Soapy) Smith; a letter written by Esterly to Whiting; three clippings; typescript poems about the gold rush; an advertising silk for an entertainment at Dawson; and two sets of typescript autobiographies by Esterly's father and grandfather, describing early days in Wisconsin, and his grandfather's farm machinery inventions.