AUTHOR’S NOTE: After deciding, in the summer of 1899, to truncate her participation in the gold-seeking expedition of the Kings County Mining Company and return home, Brooklynite Mary L. Penney seemed to know that, despite her nursing career, her husband and her five children, she was not ready to settle into middle age and sedately grow old.

When 67-year-old Brooklyn resident William Franklin Penney was an enumerator for the 1900 U.S. Census in his neighborhood, he noted that his wife, Mary Lovett Penney, was 41 and that, in December, he would be 68. Four of their five children were still living at home; only 22-year-old Harold had moved on. The other children — sons Ronald and Ely and daughters Geraldine and Florence — ranged in age from 13 to 19.

In the “occupation” column of the census, William wrote “retired” for himself. He left the space blank for his wife.

But Mary had a career. She had been a nurse, specializing in obstetrics, for more than 20 years, and she had no immediate plans to join William in retirement. In fact, her participation in the 1898-99 Kings County Mining Company expedition to Alaska had emphasized for her that life was short and too full of opportunities to stop having adventures, whether William joined her or not.

Years later, two of her granddaughters would write about their energetic grandmother and decide that by 1900 Mary and William had grown apart. “I expect that … she and Grandpa had found they neither needed nor wanted much of the other,” wrote one granddaughter, “and the gap in the generations showed up even more clearly as he slid into his seventies.”

After coming home from Alaska, Mary returned to nursing, but within a few years her life and nursing in Brooklyn were no longer satisfying. When the state census for Iowa was conducted in 1905, Mary appeared as a resident of Linn County, which contains Cedar Rapids.

A city directory for Cedar Rapids the following year showed her living there — a nurse with a residence on 17th Street with her three youngest children: Ely, Florence and Geraldine. William remained in New York.

According to one the granddaughters’ narratives, Mary may have traveled initially to Iowa to nurse a patient, perhaps someone connected to a friend back home. In Iowa, however, she found that she preferred Cedar Rapids over Brooklyn and had several favorable nursing positions available. She saw little need to return to living in New York. Instead, she enticed her children to the Midwest.

In 1910, Mary moved even farther west — to Montana. She convinced Geraldine to join her so they could become homesteaders. “Here you are, 28 years old and not married yet,” Mary told her daughter, “and the men are all in the West!”

Homesteading opportunities were expanding — more land was available, and homesteaders could file on double the usual 160 acres — and, particularly for women, Montana offered some of the greatest chances to grab some land. By some estimates, nearly one in every five persons who homesteaded in Montana during this time period was a woman.

On April 12, 1910, Mary and Geraldine filed on two abutting parcels forming roughly an entire section of Montana ground — just over 640 total acres — near Ekalaka, Montana, in the southeast corner of the state. They staked their own property, built or helped to build small, side-by-side cabins, planted buckwheat, and managed to meet all proving-up requirements on time to earn their patents. They also did this while remaining gainfully employed and riding to and from their homesteads on horseback.

Within a few years, Geraldine (who worked in a bank) was married to a Montana man, and both mother and daughter were land owners. Geraldine remained in Montana for years before coaxing her family to Brooklyn, while Mary returned to Iowa. The Montana homesteads had, after all, been a money-making venture, and both women had proven themselves capable of financial success.

After William Penney died in 1913, Mary probably felt more than just financial freedom. In Tipton, Iowa, on May 12, 1924, nearing her mid-60s, she remarried. Her new husband was a widower named Silas Wright Munn, a 76-year-old Pennsylvania-born, retired farmer and house painter.

Meanwhile, back in Alaska….

Eight men from the Kings County Mining Company — all of whom had traveled by train cross-country to San Francisco to join the passengers who had sailed there on the bark Agate — are known to have either returned briefly to the States and then come back to Alaska or else to have never left at all. Besides Dr. Frederick Schneider, the physician and government assayer who was discussed at some length in Part Eight of this series, here are brief synopses of their paths:

NATHAN A. TURNER: Elected as company secretary at Kachemak Bay on Nov. 11, 1898, Turner had a tenure in the Cook Inlet region of about five years, according to his 1935 obituary, and his colorful tales of his adventures in Alaska have proven thus far to simultaneously contain enough truth and exaggeration to make them entertaining but tough to swallow.

Thirty years after the expedition launched from Brooklyn, Turner strolled into the office of the Brooklyn Eagle newspaper and proceeded to unleash a volley of stories about his experiences, with titles for each one — just in case he became motivated enough someday to write a book about it all.

His yarns included “The Tragic Fate of Billy Hurd,” the mostly verifiable story of William Hurd’s death in Kenai in 1899 and the not-so-verifiable tale of how he and other men from the mining company (10 of them, he said) traveled through great stretches of wilderness to rescue the “White Marooned Shanghaied Slave Girl” from the notorious “Dr. G.”

It appears that Turner never wrote the book containing the stories he had so vigorously promoted.

EMILE ABOUT: Born in France in 1852, About was elected as a company trustee in Alaska. In 1898, he either returned briefly to the States and then came back to Alaska or never left at all. Soon, however, he made his way to the gold rush in Nome, where, according to the Nome Nugget, he had been “since the earliest days of the camp.”

About owned several placer-mining claims on Anvil Creek, the stream on which the first gold strike had occurred. Later, he married a woman named Emily Girardez and operated a French laundry in town. He died of either a heart attack or a stroke in Nome on Aug. 6, 1916. Emily remained in Nome until 1931.

THOMAS PARKS WEATHERELL: Weatherell was elected as the new company vice president in Alaska. According to his 1939 obituary, he left Alaska initially along with most of the other miners in 1899 but returned after only two years. He then made his way to Nome and spent a number of years prospecting.

Weatherell later mined in Fairbanks and at various camps along the Yukon River. Eventually, he settled in Talkeetna, where he managed a store and, in 1918, became postmaster. He served in that capacity until 1927, when he resumed mining and, in the late 1930s, returned to his home state of New York. He died in his own home only about four months later at about age 65.

PER ERIC HELLMAN: The Swedish-born Hellman was living in the village of Kenai with two other Swedish-born mining company members in 1900. Sometime between 1900 and 1909, he moved to Seattle and got married. He and his wife emigrated to British Columbia a few years later, and he lived out his life there, working as a sailmaker for commercial fishermen until his death in 1953. Hellman’s younger brother, Oskar (who changed his name to Oscar Emil Hillman), also spent some time mining in Alaska.

ALFRED JOHNSON: Another of the Swedish-born miners to remain in Alaska and be living in Kenai in 1900, Alfred Johnson (listed sometimes as Antone Johnson) has proven to have a difficult path to follow. So far, nothing is known about the rest of his time in the Last Frontier.

HERMAN STELTER: Jumping right into active mining on the Kenai Peninsula, Herman Stelter, who was born in Germany in about 1860, spent nearly two full decades living just below the mouth of Surprise Creek in the lower part of the Kenai River canyon. Numerous government officials, law-enforcement officers and outdoorsman stopped by his home over the years and then wrote about Stelter’s industriousness, hospitality and staying power. As a consequence, we have numerous second-hand accounts of his connection to the Kings County group and his character.

One can only speculate how long he might have continued to live along the river had he not developed a heart condition and found it necessary in 1917 to sail to California for medical attention. He died there the following year at nearly the age of 60.

CARL AUGUST PETTERSON: It appears almost certain that no one from the mining company stayed longer on the Kenai Peninsula than did Carl Petterson, who never left. Little is known of the Swedish-born Petterson’s early life, but much more is known about his time in Alaska. He gave up mining after a few years and turned to commercial salmon fishing, then fox farming. In the 1920s, he began operating a store in Kenai and did so until his death in 1937.

Probably his most fondly remembered connection to the Kenai was his 1903 marriage to a Kenai-born woman named Matrona Demidoff and the large family they raised together. Members of the extended Petterson clan still live on the peninsula.

TO BE CONTINUED….

Photo from “Once Upon the Kenai: Stories from the People” Carl August Petterson and his bride, Matrona Demidoff, pose for a wedding portrait in 1903 in Kenai. Demidoff has been born in Kenai; Petterson was one of the members of the Kings County Mining Company who remained in Alaska after most of the company returned to the East Coast.

U.S. Forest Service photo, circa 1910s Herman Stelter, seen here in front of his home in the Kenai River canyon, was another of the Kings County Mining Company members to stay in Alaska.