The Gold Rush That Wasn't: Copper River’s Scurvy Epidemic and the Ghosts of the Valdez Glacier
As Seattleites debated housing and labor, a grim report arrived from the interior: men dying of scurvy in the Copper River country, and the recovered bodies of seven explorers who froze to death on the Valdez glacier.
Victims of the Scurvy Brought Down From Copper River.
Reports of Gold Discoveries in the Upper Copper Specimen-Af-the-Grand.
Chances to Learn It from the Steamship Excelsior. The epidemic of scurvy in the Copper River country is disappearing, and a few bad cases now exist in the Interior. The Excelsior took on at Valdez fifteen men afflicted with scurvy, five of whom she landed at Juneau, and brought the remaining ten to Seattle. The flesh of these men had turned almost black, and their legs were so devoid of strength that they could hardly walk.
At Copper Center twenty-five scurvy patients were in the hospital.
The bodies of six of the seven men who froze to death on the Valdez glacier on February 16 have been recovered, and are now at Valdez, from which place they will be shipped to Seattle. The body of the seventh member of the party, Dr. [Name Illegible], has not been found.
Purser Christian states that there are from 100 to 400 people at Valdez, and about 700 men in the Interior. He says that favorable reports are brought in respecting the condition of the country, and that the opinion is strong that gold exists at Quartz Creek, twenty miles south of Copper Center. Good strikes are reported. Several of the passengers who returned from this district on the Excelsior had specimens of ore and small quantities of gold dust in bottles taken from diggings on this stream.
While modern Seattle grapples with housing affordability and tech-boom wealth, this 1903 report highlights the brutal reality of the state's resource extraction history. The 'gold rush' narrative often obscures the human cost—here, men dying of malnutrition (scurvy) and exposure in the wilderness, their bodies becoming commodities to be shipped back to the city for burial.
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