Ephemera

Back when I was in college, I got a small grant to do pretty much whatever I pleased for a summer, which is how I came to spend six weeks in the Alaskan taiga, swatting terrier-sized mosquitos and learning the basics of field archaeology among the mortal remains of Dishkakat (or, variously, Dishkaket), a small Gold Rush town. Rule one of rural Alaskan field school: Put mosquito netting up around the latrine before you do anything else, because skeeters on the nethers sounds funny until it's happening to you. No, wait, that's rule two—rule one is to be all kinds of Emily Post to your campmates, because many of them are carrying rifles, and six weeks is a lot of time for resentments to build up.

Anyroo, that was many moons ago, but I'm pretty sure that these are photos of the building in whose ruins I spent many hours, troweling away the years in my one-meter square. Our crew of twelve found a silver coin (probably a Liberty dollar, but worn almost smooth), a clock's hour hand, decorative metalwork from a rifle stock, part of a compass, half a bottle of some sort of hooch, and a pair of black stockings jammed into the space between two of the logs remaining in the wall. Mostly we found dirt.

The town, which was built on the site of a Native seasonal fishing camp, wasn't a great success in the Gold Rush, and it was abandoned by the end of World War I. By the time our class arrived, most of the buildings were just lumps among the trees; this one was a slightly bigger set of lumps, since the bottom two or three logs were left in place. Rule three: When in doubt, assume that the town's biggest building is the bar.