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Three Friends Mining Company
Gold Dredge No. 1, Nome, Alaska
Click on the postcard to enlarge itThree Friends Mining Company was the first successful dredging operation Alaska's Seward Peninsula. Under the direction of W. L. Leland, they installed the dredge above on the Solomon River in 1905. The machinery was from Bucyrus, and the wooden hull was built by the Western Engineering and Construction Company in San Francisco. It only took the crew 57 days to gather up the pieces from the beach where they were unloaded and put it all together.
The "three friends", W. L. Leland, Frederick H. Rindge and Charles A. Griffin, had studied dredging in California, and their well-managed operation was a model for other Alaska companies for many years.
The postcard, published about 1906 by B.B. Dobbs Photographic Supply Stores in Nome, is an original in the collection of Murray Lundberg
The information on the dredge was extracted from Clark C. Spence's excellent The Northen Gold Fleet: Twentieth-Century Gold Dredging in Alaska (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1996)
