‘Wise’ Mike Stepovich

(1874-1944)

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Self-educated ‘Wise’ Mike Stepovich entered the Fairbanks mining district during the Alaska-Yukon gold rush, far from his homeland in Eastern Europe. Through 40 years of hard work in the Fish Creek-Fairbanks Creek area, he mined gold and tungsten and participated in many other activities—a true north country pioneer. His son, Mike Stepovich II, championed the cause for Alaska's Statehood and would be Alaska's last Territorial Governor. Few Alaskans can ignore the influence that Governor Mike Stepovich and his large family have had in Alaska's politics, the business community, the legal profession, Monroe Catholic High School, and competitive sports in Interior Alaska. Governor Mike attending Catholic MassStepovich II died on February 14th, 2014, in San Diego, California while preparing to attend Catholic Mass with his son. This narrative concerns the Governor's father—'Wise Mike' Stepovich.

AMHF Inductee Felix Pedro, an Italian immigrant prospector, is credited with the initial Fairbanks gold discovery on July 2nd, 1902. But there were others not far behind him who rushed into the newly discovered placer gold district during the fall of, 1902, including Tom Gilmore, Frank Costa, Al Hilty, John Arnell, Ed Quinn, William Smallwood, Frank Cleary, and ‘Wise Mike’ Stepovich.

Marko Stijepovic, the third son of Mijo Stijepovic, was born in 1874 on a small hillside farm near Risan, in Montenengro. Marko’s home was in a Balkan province that was declared autonomous from the Ottoman Empire in the early 19th Century and later liberated from the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1878. After WWI, it became part of greater Yugoslavia. The hillsides where Marko grew up in were known for the growing of medicinal herbs and for meat smoking; both of these enterprises were the main vocations of the Stijepovic family. The local economy was poor, and like many young men, Marko wanted to find opportunity elsewhere.

The Bay of Kotor, a winding bay of the Adriatic Sea and often called Europe’s southern-most fiord, offered to many a springboard to the world. Overseas freighters would take on water and goods there along with passengers bound for North America, including stowaways. Some of those stowaways were young Balkan men wanting to avoid conscription into the Austrian Army. Others just wanted to start a new life in the New World. In 1892, Marko Stijepovic, at the age of 18, became a stowaway on a ship bound for the United States.

Shortly after he arrived in Baltimore, Maryland, Marko traveled by train to Fresno, California, the center of a Balkan agricultural community. Somewhere along the way, his surname was changed to Stepovich, a practice common to many immigrants from eastern Europe. Building on his experiences growing up in Montenegro, Marko, still just a young man, worked in California agriculture for nearly five years, selling calves to ranchers and harvesting figs. He found Serbian woman to dry the figs and then sold the figs to customers in Colorado.

When news of the Great Klondike gold rush in Yukon, Canada reached the United States in the spring of 1897, Stepovich quit his agriculture business and purchased all-weather clothing, picks, shovels, gold pans, and other working gear in Seattle and boarded a steamer bound for the great north-country Gold Rush. His business plan was to sell gear to the thousands of prospectors traveling to the Klondike Rush. In the fall of 1897, Marko arrived in Dyea at the head of Chatham Straits by boat from Seattle and hired Tlingit packers to haul his considerable freight over Chilkoot Pass. The notorious outlaw Soapy Smith and his gang were patrolling the Chilkoot Trail and demanding toll money for rights to use the trail. Not to be coerced by the bandits, the 23-year old Marko and his hired men broke trail around Soapy Smith’s camp, thus avoiding the outlaws and their toll demands and then continued over Chilkoot Pass. Thereafter, Marko became known as ‘Wise Mike’ Stepovich, which stuck for the rest of his life. A Fairbanks eating establishment, Soapy Smith’s Restaurant, which is owned and operated by Nick Stepovich, one of Wise Mike’s grandsons, commemorates this event.

At Bennett Lake, Wise Mike built a cabin and wintered over. The next spring Stepovich loaded his outfit onto a raft and drifted down the Yukon River to Dawson, the gold rush town built to service the miners in the Klondike. Somewhere along the way, Wise Mike lost his outfit of prospecting gear after it was loaded onto a steam boat and swept into the Yukon River. Thus, he was denied his plan to outfit the Klondike prospectors. Taking advantage of his past experience working farm animals, Stepovich picked up three draft horses and freighted for the Klondike miners during the winter of 1898-1899. After building up profits, he rented a warehouse from the Canadian government and initiated a salmon packing business. The salmon spoiled due to lack of preservation and the business failed. In 1900, Wise Mike traveled to the Stewart River strike south of Dawson and continued to freight for mining companies with his horses. Unfortunately, by early 1902, all but one of his horses developed Hobb’s disease and died.

When news of a gold strike on the Tanana River began circulating in Dawson during July, 1902, Stepovich packed up his gear on his one remaining horse and transported them down to Circle via river steamer. From there he traveled cross country, reaching the new gold camp during the fall of 1902. Camps constructed to service miners were being built in the hills and stream basins where gold was being discovered. Barnette’s Cache, named after proprietor E.T. Barnette, was a trading post situated on the Chena River about 15 miles due south of Pedro Creek, the first mineralized area discovered. The trading post was accessible by steamboat from the Yukon River, including Eagle and Dawson upstream and St. Michaels downstream, and all points in between. Barnette’s Cache became the supply center for the newly emerging camp although for a time, it was to receive serious competition for business from the community of Chena at the mouth of the Chena River. About the time that Wise Mike arrived, the area around Barnette’s Cache was renamed Fairbanks, after Charles W. Fairbanks, a U.S. Senator from Indiana. The rapidly expanding region where gold was being mined and developed became the Fairbanks Mining district.

Mike Stepovich became interested in acquiring property near Barnette’s Cache, with the idea of engaging in commercial activities to service the mining industry. With a Canadian partner, Mike first staked a property now known as the Fairbanks suburb of Graehl, but lost it due to complications related to the lack of U.S. Citizenship within the partnership. He later acquired property on Garden Island, where produce, grass and grains were grown for people, milk cows and beasts of burden needed for the gold mining camps. When the nuns of the newly built St. Joseph’s Hospital needed land for their milk cows, Wise Mike sold about 2 acres to the Catholic Church for pasture land.

A year after his arrival, Mike Stepovich began to prospect and stake mineral claims in the newly recognized Fairbanks district. The mineralized region which contains the gold and other mineral deposits is more-or-less subdivided into three geographic areas. Gold placer and lodes in the northeastern part of the district are drained by the Chatanika River on the north, upper Goldstream Creek on the southwest. The southeastern part of the district includes Fish Creek-and Fairbanks Creek, which drain into the Little Chena River. The western part of the district includes the Ester Dome area, which is drained by Lower Goldstream Creek and the Chena River below Fairbanks. The Ester Dome area is spatially separated from the northeastern and southeastern parts of the district by nearly 20 miles. The Fish Creek-Fairbanks Creek area is where Mike Stepovich spent nearly all of his prospecting and mining career.

Stepovich filed his first mining claim on July 30th, 1903 near the mouth of Fairbanks Creek, at its confluence with Fish Creek. During the early years, he prospected for both lode and placer gold. For example, on August 10th, 1910, he sold 2.5 tons of high grade gold-quartz ore to a local custom mill for $700. In 1905, the esteemed U.S. Geological Survey geologist Chester Wells Purington visited a placer gold mine on Fairbanks Creek operated by Stepovich, which featured an elevated sluice box.

Through time, Mike Stepovich acquired more mining ground in the Fairbanks and Fish Creek basins. When gold was discovered on Ester Creek in late 1905, many miners left their claims on Fish Creek to find wealth in the last placer gold strike to be discovered in the Fairbanks district. When claim assessment requirements were not recorded by those that left for the new fields, they were considered abandoned claims under federal mining law and Mike re-staked some of them in his name--a common practice even today. In early 1909, an argument ensued between Stepovich and others over an abandoned lode gold claim on Fish Creek and other abandoned placer claims on Fairbanks Creek. Stepovich was confronted by three disgruntled miners, AMHF Inductee Merton Marston, William James, and ‘Poppa’ John Butrovich at Wise Mike’s cabin on Fairbanks Creek. One of the miners opened up with a rifle and Stepovich answered with his six-shooter. No one was hit. The encounter was brief and the three intruders quickly disappeared.

They were later taken into custody. After a jury trial in November, 1909, two of the three were found guilty, but given surprisingly light sentences. Marston became an Iditarod millionaire and left Alaska eight years later for the Pacific Northwest to start a chicken ranch and later manage and remodel Seattle’s Sorrento Hotel, today the oldest operating hotel in Washington State.

During the height of the drift mine activities in the Fairbanks district, Mike’s brother, Dan, arrived in 1905 or 1906 to be a miner in one of the Ester placer drift mines. In 1913, Dan was killed in an underground cave-in. He is buried in Clay Street Cemetery.

Wise Mike Stepovich was among a small group of Fairbanks miners that was not just interested in gold, but also in strategic metals like tungsten, a metal used to strengthen steel. Tungsten has the highest melting point of any metal (6,192o F), and also the highest tensile strength of any metal. It is also the heaviest of the industrial metals with a specific gravity of 19.3, similar to platinum and gold. World War I had begun in Europe and there was demand for tungsten’s use in the manufacture of artillery gun barrels, artillery projectiles, and in steel alloys.

In 1915, Stepovich discovered tungsten mineralization in replacement zones in marble near a granite contact on the eastern flank of Gilmore Dome. His prospecting friend, Fred Johnson, had told him that scheelite, the principle ore mineral of tungsten, had been identified in abundance in placers from that area. From 1915-to-1918, 2 inclined shafts, about 325 feet apart, were driven northward down the dip of the mineralized zone at an angle of 30o. More than 2,000 feet of underground workings were driven by Mike and his mining crew to develop the zone. During 1915-1918, Stepovich managed to produce about 300 tons of hand-sorted, high grade tungsten ores that averaged about 8% tungsten (with a gold credit) and 10 tons of scheelite concentrates that averaged about 65% WO3.

Transport of ores and concentrates to market was a challenge due to lack of transportation in the remote Interior mining camp. Stepovich hauled ore in mule-driven carts from his tungsten mine on Gilmore Dome to a small gravity mill on Fairbanks Creek. After selected milling, boats hauled the scheelite (CaWO4) concentrates and high grade ore down the Little Chena and Chena Rivers to the Northern Commercial Company docks in downtown Fairbanks—near the current Alaska Mining Hall of Fame Museum site. The tungsten concentrates would then be loaded on river boats that went down the Tanana and Yukon Rivers to St. Michael. The final leg was ocean-going ships to a Tacoma buyer.

In 1917, Stepovich purchased a second hand crushing mill from Willow, Colorado, and had it shipped to Fairbanks. As noted by authors Higgs and Sattler, stenciled lettering on the equipment “via Chitina” confirms that the mill was shipped via the Copper River and Northwestern Railroad from Cordova to Chitina. Stepovich transported the mill equipment along the Valdez-Fairbanks trail to Yellow Pup Creek with a sleigh pulled by 12 mules. Later in 1917, Wise Mike built a new camp halfway between the mine and the mill. The camp featured a cabin, tent sites, and a vegetable garden.

But just as Stepovich was expanding his operation, circumstances changed. As WWI was coming to an end, the tungsten price crashed in 1918, and Mike was forced to close his hard rock tungsten operation and resumed placer gold mining on Fairbanks Creek. In 1931, Mike would again open up the Stepovich Lode and produce about ten tons of tungsten concentrates before prices fell again in 1932.

The combination of hard rock tungsten, placer and lode gold mining, and real estate investments in Fairbanks had given the self-educated and hard-working Balkan immigrant well-deserved financial success. Wise Mike asked an attractive Croatian woman from Portland Oregon’s Balkan community, Olga Barta, to marry him in 1918 and she accepted. Shortly after she moved into Wise Mike’s cabin on Fairbanks Creek, Olga decided that wilderness living in Interior Alaska was not for her. After their son, Mike II, was born in St. Joseph’s Hospital in 1919, she took her baby boy back to Oregon and never returned. Olga divorced Wise Mike and eventually remarried.

Over the years since immigrating to America, Wise Mike kept in touch with his family in Montenegro by writing letters to his mother, who could not read or write. Vuka Radovic, whose older sister had married Mike’s older brother Gojko, often visited Wise Mike’s mother and would read the letters written in the Yugoslav language by Wise Mike. Through reading these letters, Vuka became interested in Alaska. In 1928, Wise Mike returned to Montenegro for a visit and met Vuka. It didn’t take Vuka long to be attracted to Wise Mike, whom she regarded as smart and interesting. After a short courtship, Wise Mike asked Vuka to come back to Alaska with him and she agreed. Wise Mike and Vuka were married in Montenegro in 1928. After a journey by ship through the Panama Canal to a west coast port, they took a train to Seattle and then boarded an Alaska Steamship Company vessel to Seward. From there the Alaska Railroad transported the couple to Fairbanks.

Many friends met Wise Mike and Vuka at the train station in Fairbanks, and after a short stay in town, the couple decided to travel out to the Stepovich cabin on Fairbanks Creek. Vuka couldn’t speak English and she thought that getting out to the cabin would take away the stress of communicating in English, until she could spend the time necessary for learning new language skills. People lived along various locales on Fairbanks Creek and near the old gold rush camp of Meehan. Vuka quickly became close to Wise Mike’s neighbors and friends, including Jack and Martin Sather and their families, Dan and Isabelle Egan and their family, Pete Bojanvich, and Mike Yankovich. By that time, the Fairbanks Creek community was a close knit, tight group of perhaps 30-35 men and a few woman and children, which included prospectors, blacksmiths, mechanics, and miners. Virtually every family had a substantial garden. Mike Yankovich would bring Vuka milk from his cows so that she could make kajmac cream to top off moose meat soups. Vuka would attend the small elementary school on Fairbanks Creek and learn English with the small children attending classes. Vuka became interwoven into the community and learned how to drive sled dogs, take on responsibilities related to Wise Mike’s mining activities as well as raise a family. Fairbanks Creek remains today as one of the most interesting locales in the historic Fairbanks mining district.

Wise Mike and Vuka quickly built a family. Miso was born in 1929, followed by Alex, Nada and Ellen. Wise Mike's son with Olga Barta, Mike II, began writing letters to his dad. In 1936, Mike II, by then 17 years old, about the same age that Wise Mike was when he left Montenegro for the new world, traveled to Alaska for a visit. Fairbanks certainly was not like Portland, Oregon where he grew up. Mike II became instantly attached to his step mother. As quoted in Judy Ferguson’s book Bridges to Statehood—The Alaska Yugoslav Connection, Mike Stepovich II stated:

“Vuka became the cement for both sides of my father’s Stepovich family.”

In 1937, Mike Stepovich II began to work for his father during the summers and attended the University of Notre Dame in the winter. Wise Mike had eleven (11) employees, including seven Italians, two Slavs, and two Norwegians. Mike II drove truck into town each week to pick up supplies for the Fairbanks Creek mining camp and to play baseball, his passion. There he met many people, some of whom would become his mentors—like lawyer Julian Hurley. Mike Stepovich II would obtain a law degree at Notre Dame, and practice law in Fairbanks. He observed that Vuka treated him better than her own children. Mike II decided to eventually make Alaska his home.

When the Stepovich children were of school age, Vuka and Wise Mike decided to reside in Fairbanks during the winter, where the children could obtain better schooling. Wise Mike and Vuka bought a house on the corner of Cushman and 8th Avenue. For years, Wise Mike owned and built other property in downtown Fairbanks, including Shields Restaurant and a building at 2nd Avenue and Lacy, across from the current establishment known as Big Ray’s. The Stepovich building on 2nd Avenue was constructed in 1939 from some of the first lumber to be milled by Fairbanks Lumber Company. Years later, the Stepovich Fairbanks residence on 8th Avenue burned down. Fortunately no one was killed or injured although the loss made things difficult the following winter.

From 1938 -1940, Wise Mike operated a large bulldozer-dragline surface operation on Fish Creek employing 15 for the effort. He also continued to drift mine on deeper ground that surface equipment couldn’t excavate. Mike’s portrait photo shows a pan full of gold won in 1939 from a drift mine on Slippery Creek, tributary of Fish Creek. In 1941, Stepovich sold his Fairbanks Creek-Fish Creek mining ground to the Fairbanks Exploration Company, which was preparing ground for a large bucketline dredge (Dredge #2)—which would eventually mine in Fairbanks Creek basin beginning in 1949. The Stepovich mining camp house was moved from Fairbanks Creek to Fish Creek, where it still resides. In 1942, Wise Mike was prevented from mining. His equipment was confiscated by the War Department for government use in constructing military airfields and other infrastructure, a controversial unilateral action taken throughout Alaska that affected hundreds of small scale gold mining enterprises. Wise Mike decided that he would rebuild his way back in California, where he had arrived in the United States more than 45 years previously. The family moved to Los Gatos.

During WWII, Stepovich, leased his tungsten lode claims on Gilmore Dome to Cleary Hill Mines Company. From the summer of 1942 to May, 1944, Cleary Hill Mines produced a total of 2,196 units of WO3, nearly all from inclined shafts driven by Stepovich years earlier. The entire production of the strategic metal was sold to the Metals Reserve Company, Reconstruction Finance Corporation, Washington D.C..

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In 1944, Wise Mike Stepovich died unexpectedly of a stroke in California at the age of 65. Thus ended the life of one of the more interesting personalities to be inducted into the Alaska Mining Hall of Fame.

Mike Stepovich II, Wise Mike’s first son, described his father in a June 9th, 1958 issue of Time Magazine, where he offered a frank, tough-love appraisal of his father:

“Wise Mike was rugged and sometimes mean-tempered, and there were those who say he won his nick name with wise-guy answers to everything. His breakfast appetizer was four or five coffee royals—a couple slugs of bourbon sweetened with a dash of coffee. His hobby was seven deck ‘pan ginney’ dealt out at the Pastime Cafe.”

After finishing law school and completing a stint in the U.S. Navy during WWII, Mike Stepovich II would marry another descendant of a Balkan immigrant from Portland, Oregon, Matilda Baricevic, in 1948. Matilda and Mike would move into his father‘s apartment building at the corner of 2nd Avenue and Lacy in Fairbanks, where Mike II would begin a law practice with AMHF Inductee E.B. Collins and Charles Clasby. By the time that President Dwight Eisenhower appointed Mike the Territorial Governor of Alaska in 1957, Matilda and Mike had seven children, adding six more before they were finished making their family. Mike Stepovich II became a very influential Alaskan leader in the drive for Alaska Statehood. He helped persuade a skeptical President Eisenhower about the positive merits of Statehood when the President was being pressured by the Pentagon to include more than half of Alaska into several huge military reserves. Governor Stepovich would later continue his career as an outstanding trial lawyer in Fairbanks before retiring in the early 1980s. Certainly this biography is about his father—not him—but few Alaskans can ignore the influence that Governor Mike Stepovich and his large family has had in Alaska politics, the Alaska business community, the legal profession, Monroe Catholic High School, and competitive sports. Many members of the athletic Stepovich family have engaged in Alaskan sporting activities. Governor Mike Stepovich died on February 14th, 2014, in San Diego, California, due to a head injury sustained while attending Catholic Mass with one of his sons. He was 94 years old.

Wise Mike Stepovich was a self-educated individual that, as a teenager, entered into the competitive environment of gold mining strikes in North America, far from his homeland in Eastern Europe. Through more than 40 years of hard work in the Fairbanks mining district, Wise Mike battled his way through adversity and engaged in the mining of both gold and tungsten. Most economic geologists and many University of Alaska geology students that have worked in the Fairbanks area have likely visited the Stepovich Lode at least once, since it is a type locality for that type of tungsten-gold mineralization in Interior Alaska.

The mineralized area where Wise Mike Stepovich would spend his mining career, the Fish Creek basin, has become important to the community of Fairbanks. Recognition of gold, tungsten and bismuth in association with granite was late in the exploration cycle of the district. Just north of the Stepovich lode, the giant Fort Knox deposit was discovered in 1984 and placed into production in 1996. In 2013, the Fort Knox gold-tungsten-bismuth deposit yielded its 6th million ounce of gold to Kinross Gold Corporation. Fort Knox is by far the largest hard rock gold deposit to be mined in Alaska. Closer to the original Stepovich claim holdings, the Gil mineralized area, which was prospected and drift mined by Wise Mike before WWI, has been found by Kinross to contain a promising deposit of hard rock gold. At the time of this writing, significant quantities of placer gold are being recovered by an Airport Equipment Rental (AER) operation adjacent to the original Stepovich home on Fish Creek below the mouth of Fairbanks Creek. Chris Stepovich, a grandson of Wise Mike, is general manager of the large placer gold mining operation. Thus the gold mining activity pioneered by Wise Mike Stepovich in this area continues to this day.

Compiled by Thomas K. Bundtzen March 9, 2014

SOURCES

Notes
This biography benefited from a variety of sources including books, newspaper articles, U.S. Geological Survey publications, Territorial Department of Mines records, Fairbanks Gold Mining Company documents and discussions with Stepovich family members, including Nick and Pete Stepovich and Mike Stepovich III. . Important background information from Wise Mike’s early years in Montenegro and later years on Fairbanks Creek were derived from the excellent work of Judy Ferguson entitled Bridges to Statehood—the Alaska Yugoslav Connection. Specific sources are listed below. Because there are several in the family named Mike Stepovich, the writer chose to retain the usage Wise Mike to describe Mike Stepovich I throughout the text.

Bibliography

Byers, F.M., 1957, Tungsten deposits in the Fairbanks district, Alaska: U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 1024; pages 179-212.

Ferguson Judy, 2009, Bridges to Statehood: Vuka and Governor Mike Stepovich, in, Bridges to Statehood—The Alaska-Yugoslav Connection: Voice of Alaska Press, Big Delta, Alaska, pages Pages 63-77.

“Filled Cabin with Smoke,” Fairbanks Daily News Miner, April 19th, 1909, page 6.

Higgs, A.S., and Sattler, R.A., 1994, History of Mining in Upper Fish Creek, Fairbanks, Alaska: Northern Land Use Research, Inc., for Fairbanks Gold Mining, Inc., 23 pages.

Hill, J.M., 1933, Lode deposits of the Fairbanks District, Alaska: U. S. Geological Survey Bulletin 849-B, pages 29-162.

Maloy, Gayle, 1992, Hard Life in Interior Alaska: Alaska Living Magazine, Volume 3, No. 5, pages 22-24.

“Marston and James Sentenced to Jail”, Fairbanks Daily News Miner, November 20th, 1909, Page 4

Mertie, J. B. Jr., 1918, Lode mining in the Fairbanks district, Alaska in 1916: U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 662, pages 418-423.

Prindle, L.M., 1908, The Fairbanks and Rampart quadrangles: U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 337.

Prindle, L.M., 1913, A geological reconnaissance of the Fairbanks quadrangle, Alaska: U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 525, 216 pages.

Prindle, L.M., and Katz, F.J., 1909, The Fairbanks gold placer region: U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 379-E, pages 181-200.

Purington, C.W., 1905, Methods and costs of gravel and placer mining in Alaska: U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 263, 272 pages.

Stewart, B.D., 1940, Report of the Commissioner of Mines to the Governor for the Biennium ending 1940: Territorial Department of Mines Biennial Report, 92 pages.

Stewart, B.D., 1944, Report of the Commissioner of Mines to the Governor for the Biennium ending 1944: Territorial Department of Mines Biennial Report, 48 pages.

“Wise Mike Tells of Raid on Cabin,” Fairbanks Daily News Miner, November 8th, 1909, page 1.

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