Barnette abandoned his plan to continue to Tanana Crossing. On September 27, 1902 he was elected recorder for the newly formed Fairbanks Mining District. At the end of December, with the most immediately profitable claims recorded, Barnette dispatched an employee, a Japanese adventurer named Jujiro Wada, to Dawson to spread the news of Pedro's strike in order to drum up business. January 17, 1903, Dawson's "Yukon Sun" newspaper published a story entitled "Rich Strike Made in the Tanana." Within two days, the story made the front page of "The New York Times". The Fairbanks Gold Rush was on. Abe Spring, a resident of the Tanana Valley since 1900, and an eventual mayor of Fairbanks, counted "seven or eight hundred people" who braved deadly cold to arrive in the Fairbanks Mining District during the winter of 1902–1903. But the first prospectors to reach Fairbanks were frustrated by creeks that could not be mined in winter and squeezed by price gouging at Barnette's Trading Post. Barnette's monopoly allowed him to set his own prices and bundle products together in whatever fashion yielded the most profit. Prospectors who wanted to buy a bag of flour were also required to buy three cases of canned goods. Hungry and destitute, an angry mob of stampeders threatened to lynch Wada, whose story had lured them from Dawson and Circle. Then they marched on Barnette's store. Barnette, expecting trouble, met the mob with a dozen riflemen at his side. Barnette eventually agreed to cut the price of flour by half and dropped the requirement to buy canned goods. James Wickersham, traveling from Dawson to Fairbanks in March, noted crowds of "stampeders" on the road. Wickersham arrived on April 9 to swear in J. Tod Cowles as the Justice of the Peace. He described the town as "just now in its formation period," with a tent city of 500 people. "Miners, sourdoughs, cheechacos, gamblers, Indians, Negroes, Japanese, dogs, prostitutes, music, drinking! It is rough but healthy & the beginning, I hope, of an American Dawson." On May 4, 1903, Barnette made a trip to Seattle, where he was commissioned as postmaster of Fairbanks. In San Francisco, he sold a two-thirds interest in Barnette's Cache to the Northern Commercial Company (NCC). Some years later, NCC would purchase the store entirely.