History
Prince of Wales Island is the homeland of the Kaigani Haida people. Kaigani is a mispronunciation of the Tlingit word x'aax' aani which translates to "crabapple country". The Tlingit name for the island is Taan, meaning "sea lion". The island is traditional Tlingit territory with the Haida moving into the area in the late 18th century and the abandoned Haida villages actually being Tlingit in name.
In 1741, Aleksei Chirikov, commanding a ship on Vitus Bering's second voyage of exploration out of Kamchatka, made the first European landfall on the northwest coast of North America at Baker Island on the west coast of Prince of Wales Island while out to sea without stopping. . It was not until 1774 that a Spanish expedition sailing in a 39 foot boat from La Paz, Mexico reached Sumez Island off of Prince of Wales' west coast. A British expedition in 1779, under Captain James Cook, passed Prince of Wales Island. Comte de La Perouse led a French expedition to the area in 1786.
Mining of gold, copper, and other metals on the island began in the late 19th century. Gold production came from underground lode mines exploiting: gold-bearing quartz veins in metamorphic rocks (such as the Gold Standard, Sea Level, Dawson, Golden Fleece and Goldstream mines); skarns (at the Jumbo and Kassan Peninsula copper-gold mines); zoned mafic-ultramafic plutons, as at the Salt Chuck silver-gold-copper-PGE mine; and VMS deposits such as Niblack. Uranium was mined at Bokan Mountain in the 1950s and 1970s.
Read more about this topic: Prince Of Wales Island (Alaska)
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