George Cheek

Epitaph for Ophir - a Novel About an Alaskan Mining Town George Cheek

Gold drew stampeders to Alaska's Innoko river region in 1906, when the town of Ophir was founded. More than 40 years later, the unchanging, government-mandated price for gold was strangling the town and its mining operations. Two young men, trying to recapture a dying way of life, spend a cold but entertaining winter in a remote cabin with an old timer while, in the town, a boatload of liquor contributes to odd goings-on. A gunfight with no shots fired, a wrestling match where a woman defeats a man and the initiation of a 16-year-old boy into the brotherhood of the north help break the monotony. Community events take place in a roadhouse and two bars, where domestic disputes become public and where, on one night, a woman, squatting over a spittoon to avoid a 60-below outhouse, demanded to know if goggle-eyed spectators "never saw a lady pee before?" A Christmas party for the town's eight children is disrupted by a bungled knifing and, later, three of the children die in a fire when they are locked in while their parents visit a bar. The story is fiction, but Ophir and its troubles both were real. Ophir is gone, wiped out in a fire, but still appears on most maps. A few mines still operate.