E. T. Barnette
American mayor
Elbridge Truman Barnette (1863 – May 22, 1933) was a Yukon riverboat captain, banker, postmaster and swindler, who founded the city of Fairbanks, Alaska, and later served as its first mayor.
Biography
He was born in 1863 in Akron, Ohio to Truman C. Barnett (1832-1872) and Amanda Averill (1835-1913). In 1886, he was sentenced to four years in prison in Oregon state for stealing from a partner in a horse-trading venture in Canada. Political connections of the Barnette family saw the sentence commuted after one year, on the condition that Barnette never return to Oregon.
Stampede to Dawson
Barnette was in Helena, Montana, in the summer of 1897 when he received the news of gold strikes in the Klondike. On August 2, 1897, he arrived in Seattle, Washington, where with 160 other passengers, he boarded the steamer Cleveland, bound for St. Michael, Alaska, on the Bering Sea. At St. Michael, Barnette partnered with other stampeders to purchase another steamer, the St. Michael, with the intention of steaming up the Yukon River to Dawson.
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This entry incorporates text from “E. T. Barnette” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.