District of Alaska Skagway at the Shootout on Juneau Wharf. Alaska still had plenty of gold of its own, and many who had failed to make their fortunes in the Klondike strike came back to look for it. An earlier strike had established Juneau in Southeast Alaska, and gold was found in Nome in 1899. For several years a prospector named Felix Pedro had been searching in the Tanana Hills of the Interior for a gold-rich creek he had stumbled upon years earlier but had been forced to abandon. As the summer of 1901 drew to a close, Pedro was about to embark
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