Clyde F. Baldwin, a Whittier resident, traveled with twenty-one other men in north-western Alaska on a gold hunting expedition from 1898 to 1899. Anna Hunnicutt lived in the Alaska territory as a missionary of the Whittier Friends Church for much of her young adulthood. Additionally, Anna’s mother encountered the crew of the Penelope in 1898. The Baldwin-Hunnicutt Collection is composed of two hundred 4”x5” gelatin dry-plate glass negatives made by Clyde F. Baldwin during the prospecting tour, a set of papers listing the captions of the photos, and a set of scanned letters from Quaker missionaries in Alaska.

Clyde F. Baldwin, a Whittier resident, traveled to and lived with twenty-one other men in north-western Alaska from 1898 to 1899. The trip to the Kuuvak (or Kobuk) River Basin (then known as the Valley of the Kowak) was intended to be a gold hunting expedition, and was sponsored by the Long Beach and Alaska Mining and Trading Company as a part of a historical gold rush later dubbed the “Kobuk River Stampede”. During this brief rush, roughly two thousand miners came from Southern and Bay Area California in search of wealth, but little to no gold was ever found-- an outcome which the native Inupiat people anticipated and warned of from the beginning. The Long Beach and Alaska Mining and Trading Company expedition began on a small yacht, the Penelope, and the men eventually made camp and spent fifteen months at ten degrees above the Arctic Circle. Anna Hunnicutt lived in the Alaska territory, primarily Kotzebue Sound Mission, as a missionary of the Whittier Friends Church for much of her young adulthood. She married twice, first to Z. Edward E. Foster in 1899, with whom she had two children, Vivian and Gladys, and later to a Mr. Marshall. She took on a quasi-maternal role for an indigenous Alaskan woman named Ashugak, who adopted the English name Iva Kenworthy and later married an indigenous man and took the last name Augrook. Additionally, Anna’s mother encountered the crew of the Penelope in 1898. Please be aware that this collection contains discriminatory language referring to, and ideas about, indigenous Alaskan people. These words and concepts are a historical reality and can inform the modern scholar about the interactions between White American missionaries and the people they intended to minister to. This collection was processed by Paige Harris, and digitized with the help of John McDonald, in 2023.

7 boxes (7 linear feet)

The collection is open for research use.