Jafet Lindeberg
Norwegian-American
1874 – 1962
Jafet Lindeberg was a Norwegian prospector, one of the 'Three Lucky Swedes' whose 1898 gold strike on Anvil Creek founded Nome, Alaska. He led the Pioneer Mining Company and defended the claims against one of the era's most notorious frauds.
Biography
Jafet Lindeberg was born on September 12, 1874, in Kvænangen in northern Norway. He came to Alaska in 1898, recruited for a U.S. government project importing reindeer, but soon left it to prospect on the Seward Peninsula. In September 1898, with Swedish immigrants Erik Lindblom and John Brynteson, he found gold on Anvil Creek near the future site of Nome. The trio, forever after known as the 'Three Lucky Swedes' despite Lindeberg being Norwegian, staked the Discovery Claim and organized the Cape Nome mining district.
The strike, and the discovery the next summer that the very beach sands of Nome carried gold, set off one of the great Alaskan stampedes. Lindeberg co-founded the Pioneer Mining Company, which worked the partners' claims and made them millionaires, and he is counted among the founders of the city of Nome.
The wealth drew predators. In 1900 politically connected claim-jumpers led by Alexander McKenzie, abetted by corrupt federal judge Arthur Noyes, seized the Swedes' mines through a court receivership. Lindeberg and his partners fought the scheme to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and won; McKenzie was jailed and Noyes removed, and the affair inspired Rex Beach's novel The Spoilers. Lindeberg remained a prominent mining man and businessman, later living in San Francisco, where he died on November 5, 1962, the last of the three discoverers.