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Go to the website Copper Rail Depot to visit Alaska's premier outdoor large-scale railroad.


The CRNW Railway --"Can't Run and Never Will" --Cordova to Kennecott, Alaska, 196 miles, standard gauge common carrier--1911-1938.
The Bonanza copper Lode--to this day the richest of its kind--discovered one year after Nicolai revealed the source of copper to exist in the southern slopes of the Wrangells at the Nicolai Lode in 1899. The great Bonanza mine--soon to become a part of Kennecott Copper Company--would change forever the lives of the people of the Ahtna 'tuu Ts 'itu who were at Tsedi-na to witness the coming of the ket-chee ten-eh thloo-da-kee --the white man's iron machines --the great locomotives of the Copper River & Northwestern Railway.
"Even as the railroad remnants, from the very small to the gigantic, gradually vanished, the echoes remained. All those people engaged in so much intense activity in those four decades had left their indelible imprint upon the land. All those frustrations, triumphs, failures, the outright catastrophes, the deaths, the births, the newfound friendships and the marriages--all those things which are common in any human community--were somehow concentrated and magnified along the CRNW Railway line.
"It is still possible to follow along the old railroad track bed in the places carrying the old names such as Uranatina, or Chitina, Strelna or McCarthy, but especially at Kennecott, and pick up the faint sounds of laughter crying or shouting or some other echo of people long gone. Sometimes it is the sound of the clanging of heavy metal tools. Occasionally the reverberations of the train working its way up the tracks, along with the hollow sound of a steam whistle echoing its way up the valley, can still be heard. That can only be the legendary ghost train, Chitina Local No. 71, maintaining its unearthly schedule along the uninhabited valley. From time to time a complete passenger train is rumored to have been spotted from the air, but none has ever been found on the ground.
"From the most distant mine sites--the lofty encampments of Erie, Jumbo, Glacier, Bonanza, and Mother Lode, high along the Bonanza Ridge, on down the line through Kennecott and beyond to Blackburn, Shushanna Junction, McCarthy, Chokosna, Strelna, Chitina, Uranatina, Tiekel, Bremner Station, Abercrombie Rapids Landing, and the Million Dollar Bridge--the wind whistles through them all. It carries a multitude of echoes through all these isolated places. Sometimes they are louder and more intense than at other times. But the echoes are always there.
"At some spiritual or other-dimensional level, the train still runs, the mines still operate, and the people never left. This is a very special, highly energized place. Over time, as the players from those old days are forgotten, the echoes will begin to fade, but not all of them.
"Even as the other echoes gradually wane, those of the Ahtnas of the Raven Clan will not. They cannot. Here they must remain. For this is the land of Nicolai--the last great chief of a humble but proud and unconquered people who were placed on this land of the 'Atna'tuuTs'itu' to be its guardians. These are the Ahtna Indians, who were here from the beginning and who will be here until the very end of humankind--Saghani Utsuuy--the people of the Raven Clan--the Children of the Earth."
from the chapter Echoes, from Legacy of the Chief


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