Courthouse News Service began in-person coverage in the state of Alaska in October 2015. This includes daily trips to the Anchorage Trial Courts and the Anchorage division of the federal court for the District of Alaska, as well as regular live coverage of the majority of other state courts including the trial courts in Fairbanks, Palmer and Juneau.
Fairbanks Facts
Fairbanks is Alaska's second largest city, with a population of just over 100,000.
It's known as the Golden Heart City — a nod to its central location in the heart or interior of Alaska and its beginnings rooted in gold mining.
But it's also known as Hub of the Interior and Gateway to the Bush — the launching spot for people heading to the wilderness, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, gates of the Arctic National Park or up the Haul Road toward Prudhoe Bay and Arctic Circle.
Fairbanks has been a boom town of one sort or another since its beginning in 1901, when E.T. Barnette cruised up the Tanana River on the SS Lavalle Young with 130 tons of supplies bound for the Tanacross gold fields. He had intended to continue upriver until the captain refused to go any farther for fear of running the sternwheeler aground. Capt. Charles Adams dropped Barnette and his wife, a business partner, three other men and $20,000 in provisions on the south shore of the Chena River at what is now downtown Fairbanks.
One year later, Felix Pedro discovered gold in a creek 12 miles north of Barnette's trading post and the stampede of miners began.
Barnette named his settlement Fairbanks in honor of then-Indiana Republican Sen. Charles Fairbanks — later Theodore Roosevelt's vice president — as a favor to Fairbanks' admirer Federal Circuit Judge James Wickersham, who was said to be the most powerful government official in 300,000 square miles. Wickersham promised to help Barnette's trading post succeed, and he did that in 1903 by setting up government offices in Fairbanks and later the first courthouse downtown.
By 1905, gold production reached $6 million per year. But by 1920 the gold boom was bust until World War II brought military construction — building of the Alaska Canada Highway, cold-weather testing station, air fields and what is now Fort Wainwright due to Alaska's proximity to Russia and Japan.
The Cold War helped solidify the need for a continued military presence after World War II. By 1950, two-thirds of Alaska's interior working population was employed by a government entity.
The next boom came in the late 1960s in the form of liquid gold — oil at Prudhoe Bay. For a decade, pipeline construction and oil-related jobs brought another stampede of people to the interior.
Most of the booms have since gone bust or leveled off. The area still provides jobs connected to gold mining, oil production, the military, the University of Alaska at Fairbanks and tourism.
Locals refer to the region around Fairbanks as Interior Alaska. It's known for its extremes in temperature: 62 below zero on the cold end and 80s on the high end. Solstices bring extremes of 22 hours of darkness in winter and daylight in summer.