The Great Quake: How the Biggest Earthquake in North America Changed Our Understanding of the Planet

by Henry Fountain

  Kompkoff, thirty-seven, lived in a house along the bulkhead with his young wife, Avis. She was not Alutiiq but Eyak, a group whose home territory was in and around Cordova, to the east. Avis had been born in Anchorage to a mother who was an alcoholic—she couldn’t handle much of anything, least of all a baby—and had been adopted within a few days of her birth by a Chenega couple, Sally and William Evanoff. Now, not yet twenty, Avis already had two children of her own—Jo Ann, the oldest, was nearly three, Joey was not quite two—and was pregnant with a third, a boy they named Lloyd when he was born in the fall of 1963. She and Joe and the kids lived in a two-room house that her adoptive parents had once lived in. It had a living room–kitchen and a bedroom, with an old wood stove made from an oil drum.

  Avis had loved growing up in Chenega—hunting with her father, gathering berries that her mother made into jam and pies and playing underneath the dock when the tide was out. As she grew older, she began to appreciate Chenega’s beauty, and now, as an adult, from time to time she would stop what she was doing and gaze out past the cove to the lands beyond, including the peaks of the Chugach. What a lovely world God has created, she would find herself thinking. And we get to enjoy it in this beautiful place.

  The scene that greeted William R. Abercrombie upon his arrival at Valdez, Alaska, on the evening of April 21, 1899, was, as he later put it in his journal, one that he would not soon forget.

  Abercrombie, a forty-two-year-old captain in the US Army, had visited the settlement the year before, as part of his explorations on behalf of the War Department, and at the time had encountered many would-be gold prospectors, fortune seekers who had been lured north by the promise of riches to be found in Alaska and the Canadian Yukon. The gold rush was in full swing, and these men had been lured to Valdez, specifically, by another promise, made by unscrupulous steamship operators on the West Coast. The little outpost at the head of a long fjord on Prince William Sound, the operators said, was the surest gateway to the gold.

  The first of these adventurers had shown up late in 1897, and when Abercrombie had arrived that first time, early the following spring, most of them had already headed north. Others arrived while Abercrombie was there and left as soon as possible, hoping to travel while the ground was still frozen, which would make the going easier. Still others left in the fall. All of these adventurers pinned their hopes on successfully traversing the Valdez Glacier, twenty miles of ice that began four miles from where they had disembarked from their steamships and that rose to an elevation of about 4,500 feet. A second glacier, the Klutina, would have to be crossed as well, and then the would-be miners would have to build boats—having lugged saws and other tools with them for the task—for the trip down the rough rapids of the Klutina River to the Copper River valley. Some would stop and hunt for gold there, but others would keep going to the Tanana River and, eventually, to the Klondike.

  That was the plan, anyway. Most of the men (they were almost all men) were novices, lawyers and teachers and accountants and businessmen with some money but not a lot of sense, it having been consumed by that most pernicious of maladies, gold fever. They had little idea what they were getting into.

  Abercrombie himself was partly responsible for the popularity of this route. He had first come to the Alaska Territory in 1884, as a lieutenant heading up a small party to explore the Copper River. He had not gotten very far before quitting in disgust. The rapids proved to be too much, and the water was so cold his men could pull upstream for only fifteen to twenty minutes at a time. But on his return he reported that the Valdez Glacier might be a good alternative to reach the interior. It isn’t clear that he actually saw the glacier, since the one he described ran east–west, whereas the Valdez Glacier ran north–south. Perhaps he saw no glacier at all. But the idea of using a thick ribbon of ice as a highway to the gold eventually caught on.

  In 1898, with the War Department worried about the large numbers of hapless Americans heading north, Abercrombie came to Valdez under orders to seek an alternative to the glacier route. Before heading back to Seattle, he had found the remnants of a trail that skirted the glacier far to the southeast, and in the spring of ’99 he returned aboard the steamship Excelsior to begin the work of building a road. Barely had the ship reached Valdez when scores of those once-proud adventurers he had seen the year before began clambering aboard. They had had enough of Alaska and were desperate to get home.

  The men were demoralized and despondent, and by their looks had been through a difficult time. Their woolen Mackinaw suits were worn out and faded from overexposure to the elements. They were unwashed, their hair and beards long and unkempt. Many of them had the atrociously bad breath that is a sign of scurvy, and frostbitten toes and fingers were common. “A more motley-looking crowd it would be hard to imagine,” Abercrombie wrote.

  The arrival of the steamship with a military contingent had given the men a new sense of hope—of getting home, preferably at the government’s expense, since most were now almost penniless. Once away from the squalor of Valdez and on board the relative splendor of the Excelsior they couldn’t contain themselves. “A wholesale orgy was inaugurated that lasted until midnight,” Abercrombie wrote, “the cabin and decks of the steamer giving unmistakable evidence of the potent influence of the liquor on those who had indulged so freely.”

  Abercrombie soon learned what had happened, from speaking with a quartermaster’s agent who had stayed behind the previous year. “My God, Captain, it has been clear Hell,” the agent told him. The short story was that the men’s dreams of gold had been dashed: of an estimated four thousand adventurers who landed in Valdez in 1897–98, fewer than one in ten had gotten anywhere near the Yukon or the Klondike. The longer, sadder story was that the route to the interior had proved deadly. Some men had died on the twenty-mile trek across the Valdez Glacier, lost forever in crevasses or frozen to death after being stalled by howling winds and storms. Others had made it over the glacier but found the going almost as bad on the other side, with many eventually dying of exposure or scurvy or drowning in the Klutina or the Tanana. The men now in Valdez—about six hundred all told—were the lucky ones. They had managed to straggle back.

  Perhaps they weren’t so lucky. Throughout the long and exceptionally hard winter of ’98–’99 they had lived like rotting sardines, crammed fifteen or twenty into cabins so small there was barely room to move. At least 70 percent of the survivors, Abercrombie estimated, were “more or less mentally deranged.” Many of them talked of a “glacial demon,” a sort of Abominable Snowman who whisked lives away.

  Abercrombie knew something of the horrors up on the ice. He had crossed the Valdez Glacier the summer before as part of his reconnoitering of the region, and though the conditions had not been as harsh as in other seasons, the trek had been nightmarish. With the help of some wild ponies, he and a small party of soldiers and civilians had made it across in twenty-nine hours. The physical dangers were great—at one point they found themselves in an ice field so littered with crevasses that it seemed equally dangerous to go forward or back. But the threats to the mind were great as well; during the night, no one slept a wink as they heard the constant cracking and booming of the ice and expected at any moment to be entombed by blocks falling from above them. “During my 22 years of service on the frontier,” he wrote later, “I never experienced a more desolate and miserable night.”

  It was difficulties and dangers like this that led the War Department to send Abercrombie back in 1899 to begin building the road to the north. This route avoided the glacier by following the old trail through Keystone Canyon, a narrow defile a dozen miles east of Valdez, and then north across a low point in the Chugach Mountains, later to be named Thompson Pass. Abercrombie needed men to help, so without much pause he arranged passage back to Seattle for some of the worst-off of the survivors, started building a hospital to help others recover, and offered work to those who were healthy. It was the beginning of better times for the little settlement at
the water’s edge.

  —

  As in other parts of Prince William Sound, natives had frequented the Valdez area for untold centuries. The canyon trail that Abercrombie found, in fact, was a native one, used for trading and raiding. This was Alutiiq country, frequented by the same natives who inhabited Chenega and elsewhere in this part of the sound. But little is known about what, if any, settlements were established by the natives. So the first permanent inhabitants may have been those would-be miners of the gold rush.

  Europeans had discovered the area more than a century earlier, although Captain Cook had missed it when he entered the sound in 1778. It was left to Salvador Fidalgo, a Spanish navigator, to first sail into the fjord that is now called Valdez Arm, in 1790. Like Cook, Fidalgo had been looking for the Northwest Passage, and like Cook he never found it. But sailing eastward, about a dozen miles into the arm he passed through a narrows and found another long deep bay, which he named Port Valdés, after a Spanish admiral. The setting was spectacular, with nearly mile-high peaks on both sides and with glaciers seemingly poking out of every low point in the mountains. The bay itself was twelve miles long, three miles wide at its widest point and up to nine hundred feet deep. (In the twentieth century, the region’s boosters pointed out that the bay was so big and so protected that it could easily provide mooring space for all the world’s ships.) Best of all, at its eastern end was a wide alluvial plain, a delta made of sediments washed down from some of the glaciers. In a place where most of the coastline was inhospitable because the mountains plunged right to the water, this was flat and friendly terrain.

  For more than a century after Fidalgo’s visit, little of note happened in Port Valdés, although Russian traders no doubt circulated there to do business with natives. But in the mid-1880s gold was discovered in northern British Columbia and in southeastern Alaska. Word began to spread to Seattle and beyond, and when other discoveries were made farther north—especially a huge strike in 1896 on a tributary of the Klondike River in the Yukon—the gold rush was on.

  The Klondike, however, was in Canada, and most of the major routes to it were largely in Canadian territory as well. Alarmed by the influx of novice miners who might strain the region’s meager infrastructure and resources, the Canadian government imposed rules and customs duties for those who would enter from the United States. Among other things, adventurers were required to pack in a year’s supply of food. That added to the cost and also made the trip more difficult, as that much food could easily weigh half a ton or more.

  The steamship companies of the Pacific Northwest began advertising the route over the glacier from Port Valdés as an “all-American” one that would allow miners to avoid the onerous Canadian rules and duties. What’s more, if they so desired, prospectors could forget about going to the Klondike—where all the good claims were rumored to have been taken anyway—and could instead explore the valley of the Copper River, which was much closer and said to be rich in gold.

  When the first ships arrived at Port Valdés during that fall of 1897, they discharged passengers and their supplies as close as possible to the foot of the glacier—a spot on the shore about four miles away. At least the start of the adventurers’ journey would be a little less onerous. Thanks to the bay’s high tides, there were large tidal flats there. Ships could beach themselves when the tide was going out, unload directly onto the land (or, in the winter, ice) and leave with the rising tide.

  The would-be prospectors would still have to ferry their supplies, bit by bit, across the gently rising plain to the foot of the glacier. Tents and then ramshackle buildings sprouted near the shore, as staging all the equipment and supplies and getting them to the glacier could take days. Some people never even made it to the glacier but instead chose to stay behind, figuring they could make more money catering to the miners’ needs than they ever could by heading north to the Klondike.

  Thus the settlement of Valdés—soon changed to Valdez, amid anti-Spanish sentiments during the Spanish-American War—came into existence, the result of an accident of geography. It was the shortest distance to the glacier and, hopefully, the gold.

  Later, though, it was geology, not geography, that was to play a crucial role in the town’s fate.

  —

  A glacier such as the one above Valdez is like a giant milling machine moving across the landscape. The weight of the ice causes the glacier to move, very slowly, downhill with gravity, and as it does it scours the rock below and to the sides, grinding it up into smaller pieces of all sizes—boulders, gravels, sand and fine silt. Some of the boulders and finer material are carried along by the glacier and eventually deposited in a heap, called a moraine. But as the glacier creeps and grinds along, friction causes the underside of the glacier to melt too. Much gravel and sand, especially, is washed out by this meltwater and carried by gravity to the lands below.

  In colder times, when the glaciers extended farther south—when much of Alaska was covered in ice—this scouring action had carved the deep narrow basin that became the Valdez Arm and Port Valdez, as well as the other fjords in Prince William Sound. Now, in warmer times, the glaciers had retreated, but they were still slowly scraping the Chugach Mountains. Some of the resulting silt, sand and gravel was brought down from the Valdez Glacier and others nearby by meltwater that formed three rivers—the Robe and Lowe to the east, and an unnamed meandering stream that came down from the north.

  Over thousands of years, all that sediment had filled in part of the deep basin and formed the broad plain, which was roughly triangular in shape. One point of the triangle was at the foot of the Valdez Glacier; two long sides, defined by the steep slopes to the east and west, widened out from there. The third side of the triangle was at the water’s edge, and it was about three miles long. The settlement of Valdez sat about midway along this side.

  This triangular delta was deep, as well: in some places there were up to six hundred feet of gravel, silt and sand. Below that was bedrock. The sediments were loose, or what geologists call unconsolidated, meaning they hadn’t been subjected to the pressure and heat that over eons would turn them into solid blocks of rock.

  Unconsolidated sediments can support weight because the individual grains of sand or pieces of gravel are in contact with one another, forming an unbroken, weight-bearing chain from the surface all the way to bedrock. So in that respect, the plain was a fine place to start a town—it was easily solid enough to support the buildings and whatever else was constructed on it. But the individual grains in unconsolidated sediments also have plenty of space around them, and these pore spaces can become filled with water. That can spell trouble under certain conditions. If the sediments are shaken, the grains become compacted and the pressure of the water increases. The sediments slump—which can cause anything built on them to become unsteady—and water is forced out in any direction in which the sediments are not confined. Usually this is upward, but if there is an open face—a riverbank, say, or along the water’s edge at Valdez—the water can move outward, taking sediment with it. What had seemed like perfectly solid ground can turn, in an instant, into quivering jelly and give way. The process is called liquefaction.

  The Valdez plain had plenty of water. For one thing, the unnamed glacial stream meandered across it, changing course and splitting into smaller braid-like streams depending on the seasonal flow. This was recognized as a problem by an engineer in Abercrombie’s party, who wrote of the hastily built structures at Valdez: “There is danger at any time of having the buildings swept into the Bay by the swift and quickly changing channels formed by the numerous streams.” And it was a problem when Valdez grew—there was so much flooding, the location of which was unpredictable year to year, that during the Depression Civilian Conservation Corps crews had built dikes to protect the town.

  But that was only one problem; belowground another danger lurked. The water table in most parts of the plain sat just a few feet below the surface. That meant that the sediments were not only l
oose but constantly saturated as well. The plain was ripe to liquefy if shaken. And because it was bound on two sides by the solid rocky slopes of the Chugach, if it were to liquefy, the water and sediments had only one way to move: toward the bay.

  Although no one knew it, Valdez had been founded on land that was inherently unsafe. All it would take to trigger a catastrophe would be some rigorous ground shaking—something that nature would eventually provide.

  —

  The debacle of the winter of 1898–99 might have spelled the end of the tiny settlement, but the road that Abercrombie was building proved to be a lifesaver. In 1899 he completed some ninety-three miles of a rough-hewn trail, wide enough for packhorses, to the Tonsina River. In a few years there was a link all the way to Eagle City on the Yukon in the gold country. When the gold rush there ended, construction crews from the Alaska Road Commission (which had taken over the work from the army) extended the road to the growing town of Fairbanks, in north-central Alaska. By 1907 the road was finished, and Valdez had become the main port for goods destined for the interior. A steady stream of horse-drawn wagons headed out of Valdez through Keystone Canyon from late spring to early fall, and some horse-drawn sleds even made the trip when snows came.

  The little town that had sprung up by accident on the alluvial plain grew fast; by 1905 the population exceeded five thousand. Although by then the Klondike gold rush was long since over—many of the original prospectors had given up or decamped to Nome, far to the north and west, when gold was found there in 1899—some gold discoveries in the Copper River valley and near Valdez itself kept the town a base for miners. Copper was being mined as well, and reports of a huge lode of rich copper ore in the Wrangell Mountains to the northeast suggested that Valdez might remain a mining hub for a long time.