The Iditarod National Historic Trail: Historic Overview & New
Insights for its Centennial Year updated by Robert E. King1
Today’s Iditarod Trail, a symbol of frontier travel and once an
important artery of Alaska’s winter commerce, served a string of
mining camps, trading posts, and other settlements founded
between 1880 and 1920, during Alaska’s Gold Rush Era. Alaska’s
gold rushes were an extension of the American mining frontier
that dates from colonial America and moved west to California
with the gold discovery there in 1848. In each new territory,
gold strikes had caused a surge in population, the establishment
of a territorial government, and the development of a
transportation system linking the goldfields with the rest of
the nation. Alaska, too, followed through these same general
stages. With the increase in gold production particularly in the
later 1890s and early 1900s, the non-Native population boomed
from 430 people in 1880 to some 36,400 in 1910. In 1912,
President Taft signed the act creating