Field Trip!

It was a wonderful day for Northwest History today, as I got to do a field trip with some of my public history students. This quarter we are creating a smartphone driving tour of Idaho's Silver Valley, an area with a rich history. So today we piled into a couple of cars and took a road trip.

We visited the Wallace District Mining Museum, the Northern Pacific Depot Museum, Cataldo Mission (and the adjacent museum), and the ghost town of Burke. The highlight was the Mining Museum, where director Jim McReynolds rolled out the red carpet and gave us an inside view of running a small museum. Shauna Hillman opened the Depot Museum specially for us and gave us a wonderful tour. Some of the interesting features of Burke were hidden under the snow but we still enjoyed gawking at the mining ruins and comparing historic photographs to what remained. On the way back to Spokane we did a quick visit to Cataldo Mission, including a lightning visit to the Sacred Encounters exhibit. A few photos:

Silver Valley Field Trip

I really should do this sort of thing more often. Not because it is a great educational experience for my students (though it is!) but because I enjoy it so. In what other profession do you get to spend your days with bright, enthusiastic young people, discussing your favorite topic? I do love this job.

Presentation this Wednesday: Alaska's Gold Rush Maritime Landscape

This sounds fascinating!

Remains of the SS Islander, which sank in 1901
with a reported ton of gold bullion

On July 17, 1897, the steamship Portland pulled into Seattle carrying $700,000 in gold from Alaska. The event sparked the first in a series Gold Rushes that brought tens of thousands of people to Alaska. The Gold Rush era left many lasting legacies, among them a complex marine archaeological landscape that extends thousands of miles from British Columbia to the Arctic. This lecture builds on four field projects and the speaker’s experiences as commercial fisherman in Alaska to discuss the dynamics that created a vast “shipwreck landscape” and describes selected shipwreck sites investigated by teams from the Alaska Office of History and Archaeology, the Sea Education Association, and the NOAA National Marine Sanctuary Program. The lecture touches on Alaska history, the history of history technology, and addresses contested issues of community memory and its relationship to the archaeological landscape.

The Spokane Society of the Archaeological Institute of America
invites you to a lecture by John Odin Jensen. Jensen will speak on the Gold
Rush in Alaska, which left many lasting legacies, among them a complex marine
archaeological landscape that extends from British Columbia to the Arctic. This
lecture builds on four projects to discuss the dynamics that created a vast
"shipwreck landscape" and describes shipwreck sites investigated by
teams from the Alaska Office of History and Archaeology, the Sea Education
Association, and the NOAA National Marine Sanctuary Program.

This lecture will be held: Gonzaga
University's Wolff Auditorium in Jepson Center 6:30 PM, lecture
ends at 8:30 PM

Lecture is FREE:

AIA Event Listings - Alaska's Gold Rush Maritime Landscape - Archaeological Institute of America:



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