Pioneer Museum
& The Big Stampede
The Pioneer Museum will give you a glimpse of Frontier Alaska, where Sourdoughs carved a livelihood from the wild, beautiful, and sometimes harsh land.
Their daily lives, work and recreation are preserved here in artifact and photo displays.
The museum is supported by donations, and located in Alaskaland Pioneer Hall in the Gold Rush Town.
Among the items you will find here are:
- Prospecting and mining tools and equipment
- Early day telegraphic items
- Primitive printing relics that supported communications.
- Frontier transportation
- dog sleds
- snowshoes
- horse-drawn sleds
- horse-drawn stages
- sternwheeler mementos
- early aviation relics from the Interior, where Alaska's air transportation got its start.
- Household goods
- Business materials
- medical
- engineering
- legal
- other professional materials
- Handmade tools
- Handmade appliances
Complementing the Pioneer Museum is "The Big Stampede Show"
In the same building, this show dramatically brings home the rigors of the Gold Rush trails.
It is a lighted 45 minute presentation, illustrated by fifteen enormous oil
paintings by famous Alaskan artist C. R. "Rusty" Heurlin and narrated (on tape)
by the late well-known and loved Poet Laureate Ruben Gaines. This mural presentation in a
circular room actually moves the guests around to see the murals, while the murals remain
in place.
The presentation illustrates the hardships of the "men who moil for gold" (Robert Service) and the subsequent settlement of Alaska. This was originally designed for the Alaska '67 Centennial Exposition in Fairbanks, which celebrated the purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1867.
There is a small charge for the Big Stampede Show.
The Pioneer Museum and Big Stampede Show are presented by Pioneer Memorial Park, Inc., a 501(c)3 charitable/educational group initiated by the Pioneers of Alaska. The link above will take you to their web site.