A cabin and deck houses were added, the vessel was painted, and from that time until her loss in the Alaskan Gulf, the Phœnix regularly plied the waters of Behring Sea and the North Pacific Ocean between Okhotsk and the Russian colonies in America.
CHAPTER XXII
Ellamar is a small town on Virgin Bay, Prince William Sound, at the entrance to Puerto de Valdes, or Valdez Narrows. It is very prettily situated on a gently rising hill.
It has a population of five or six hundred, and is the home of the Ellamar Mining Company. Here are the headquarters of a group of copper properties known as the Gladdaugh mines.
One of the mines extends under the sea, whose waves wash the buildings. It has been a large and regular shipper for several years. In 1903 forty thousand tons of ore were shipped to the Tacoma smelter, and shipments have steadily increased with every year since.
The mine is practically a solid mass of iron and copper pyrites. It has a width of more than one hundred and twenty-five feet where exposed, and extends along the strike for a known distance of more than three hundred feet.
The vast quantities of gold found in Alaska have, up to the present time, kept the other rich mineral products of the country in the background. Copper is, at last, coming into her own. The year of 1907 brought forth tremendous developments in copper properties. The Guggenheim-Morgan-Rockefeller syndicate has kept experts in every known, or suspected, copper district of the North during the last two years. Cordova, the sea terminus of the new railroad, is in the very heart of one of the richest copper districts. The holdings of this syndicate are already immense and cover every district. The railroad will run to the Yukon, with branches extending into every rich region.
Other heavily financed companies are preparing to rival the Guggenheims, and individual miners will work their claims this year. Experts predict that within a decade Alaska will become one of the greatest copper-producing countries of the world. In the Copper River country alone, north of Valdez, there is more copper, according to expert reports, than Montana or Michigan ever has produced, or ever will produce.