Pioneer's diary recalls Valley's past

WASILLA -- The huge words "HERNING: EVERYTHING FOR EVERYBODY" can be found emblazoned on the side of an old wooden building in downtown Wasilla. Today, this building houses a modern bistro and coffeehouse as well as several other small organizations. One would hardly suspect, when walking into the sleepy ambiance of the Valley Bistro that occupies the building's upper level, that this very structure was once the heart of Wasilla's commercial life, providing everything necessary for everybody in the vicinity.

The building is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and sits, appropriately enough, on Herning Street in Wasilla, the same street as Wasilla City Hall.

The mastermind behind this retail center was O.G. Herning, miner, businessman, photographer, cartographer, and general jack-of-all-trades in the Knik-Wasilla area.

"He did everything," said Benoni Nelson, curator of the Knik Museum.

Herning was also manager of the Klondike and Boston Gold Mining Company, Expedition No. 4, and owner-manager of the Knik Trading Company of Knik and Wasilla.

Herning was a representative of the Klondike and Boston Development Company, part of a group who landed near the village of Tyonek in 1898, and quickly developed an interest in the Knik area.

During Herning's early days, neither Palmer nor Wasilla existed as such, and Knik was nothing more than a small trading post managed by George Palmer, who would go on to play a pivotal role in the foundation of the town that now bears his name. Herning settled here, operating the Knik Trading company that catered both to residents in the area and dogsled teams bringing gold and other valuables in from mining settlements in the Interior. The vast resources streaming from these towns made the difficulty of their extraction worthwhile. Herning commented frankly in his journals on the amount of gold being moved through Knik in 1912, as well as the arduousness of its transport: "Four dog teams arrived in Knik after 33 days on the trail from Iditarod, with 2,600 pounds of gold."

Alaska gold mining represented unusual challenges to the early prospectors in the Valley area, owing to the high cost of retrieving the precious metal from the northern wilderness. The difficulty of getting supplies and manpower to the Alaska mines drove up the operation costs of those mines. Herning, however, earned his success as a prospector by using new hydraulic mining technology to extract gold from soil and mud.

When Congress appropriated money to build the Alaska Railroad, however, and dictated that the railroad's southern terminus must be an ice-free port in 1914, the boom town of Knik began to shrink. Residents moved to Wasilla, which enjoyed a spot alongside the new railroad, among them Herning in 1915. It was here that he established his new store, along what is now the Parks Highway near Main Street. Here also he lived out the last 30 years of his life, peddling goods of all sorts to Wasilla residents until his death in 1947.

O.G. and his wife Martha managed the store and lived in the rear room without running water or an indoor toilet. Their children and children's children managed the grounds and helped with anything that needed doing. Memories of these times are still sharp in the minds of those who lived them. Even dozens of years later, when Bud Herning, O.G.'s grandson, revisited town in 1999, he could recall, "My memories of Wasilla are probably 90 percent of this store … Since I've been back, it's kind of like I never left."

The vision of Wasilla and Knik's golden past remains a romantic memory for those who can recall it even today -- a time when the woods were wilder, the people tougher, the winters colder. Bud Herning, in his 1999 meeting with members of his near and distant family at the old Herning store, recalled these memories.

"My children don't believe all the stories I tell them -- the fish stories, the bear stories, the big vegetable stories," Bud said of his earliest days in Wasilla. During this gathering, Bud told the history of his involvement with the Herning store and recounted some stories of the city's older days.

The oldest history of all, however, is still provided by O.G. himself. One of the reasons that he remains such a rich source of information on the Valley's past is his tendency to photograph everything, traveling over the countryside by boat, horse, dogsled and foot with camera in hand. Today, many of his black-and-white photographs grace the walls of the Dorothy Page Museum in Wasilla and the Knik Museum on Knik-Goose Bay Road.

Herning's most famous legacy, however, is his inimitable journal, filled with the minutiae of life in the unsettled north. In it can be found a rough record of the colonization of the area, as well as a terse account of the emotional currents eddying about the feet of the early miners, trappers, and their families. Started in 1898, the journal chronicles Herning's early adventures in the Valley as well as his move to Wasilla and the establishment of his second store.

Herning's writing values economy over elaboration, with most dates comprising only a few clipped sentences. Neither was Herning extremely fastidious in his deployment of punctuation.

"It's interesting to read the diaries," said Leroi Heaven, president of the Wasilla-Knik Historical Society. "He never bothered with commas or periods or anything -- he just kept on going."

Still, the Herning journals are not wholly artless. In them can be found such gems as, "January 11, 1920: First big wind of the winter, making everybody's eyeballs jingle," as well as characters that seem lifted from Robert Service poems, "Cyanide Charlie," "Blowhard Foster," and "Sweet Marie."

"We're preserving all of this for history's sake," said Nelson, who compiles information on Herning and other city founders at the Knik Museum. "Our mission is to preserve history."

Today, the museum contains information on Knik history, the Gold Rush, and a Musher's Hall of Fame that displays the history of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race since its incipience in 1973. The museum also features a Canine Hall of Fame and operates a Canine Cachet fund to help raise money for the enterprise.

Be it contained in museums, journals, or the brains of interested individuals, however, these records of the Valley's past never fail to conjure up gilded visions of what the area must once have resembled.

Contact Daniel Spoth at daniel.spoth@frontiersman.com

Knik's history

In the late 19th century, Russian trading posts sprung up along the banks of the Susitna River, dealing both in gold and in the very lucrative fur business. However, the United States government's presence in the area began to be felt in the years following 1898, when an Army group landed at Knik with the intention of finding a land route to the Yukon River. This development provided the roots for independent American prospectors and frontiersmen to try their luck in the then-unsettled Alaska wilderness. Unlike the Russian explorers, who were interested mostly in trade, the first U.S. colonists were concerned with the dual purposes of searching for profit and finding a home.

Once called "Sunny Knik," and "the California of Alaska," by those who lived there, the town quickly became a hub for not only boats sailing the inlet, but also mining teams traveling to and from the Hatcher Pass mines and those in the Interior.

Knik was around long before Anchorage, and is sometimes called "the town that created Anchorage." However, with the advent of the Alaska Railroad in 1914, which never ran out to Knik, most residents moved out to Wasilla or Ship Creek, near Arctic Valley, both sites on the new railway. Though the migration of these residents from Knik to Wasilla and many of the other towns on the fledgling Rail Belt certainly hurt Knik, some residents lingered for years afterward.

"It wasn't like everyone just left in 1917 and it became a ghost town," Nelson said.

Ship Creek, which was deep enough for the boats and barges that traveled across Cook Inlet dock for long periods of time, came to be such a popular point of anchor that the nearby settlement was named Anchorage. Its placement at the terminus of the railroad contributed to a long period of growth, eventually crowning the city as Alaska's largest.

"Knik" is an aboriginal name meaning, roughly, "fire." Nelson speculates that this name was drawn from the amount of bearberries growing in the area. The bearberry, sometimes called "kinnikinnick" is one of the first plants to sprout following a forest fire or burn.