Juneau gold belt earliest gold prospectors in the belt area. In 1880, he revealed to prospectors Joe Juneau and Richard Harris the presence of gold in Silver Bow Basin's Gold Creek, after which Juneau was founded in the same year. The Juneau gold rush of 1880 resulted in some of the largest gold mines in the world, including the Treadwell complex of lode mines on Douglas Island and the Alaska-Juneau lode mine, in Juneau itself. The steep, wet, timber-covered, seaside mountain setting provided water power, transportation, and lumber such that, "extraordinarily low costs of operation make available low grade ore that under conditions
Juneau, Alaska ships between the months of May and September. The city is named after a gold prospector from Quebec, Joe Juneau, though the place was for a time called "Rockwell" and then "Harrisburg" (after Juneau's co-prospector, Richard Harris). The Tlingit name of the town is ("Base of the Flounder’s River," ‘flounder,’ ‘base,’ ‘river’), and Auke Bay just north of Juneau proper is called ("Little lake," ‘lake,’ ‘diminutive’) in Tlingit. The Taku River, just south of Juneau, was named after the cold wind, which occasionally blows down from the mountains. Juneau is unusual among U.S. capitals (except Honolulu, Hawaii) in that there