While young compared to most of the Lower 48 (we didn't get started as a town until 1880), Juneau has an exciting, colorful past. Our history comes alive at the Juneau-Douglas City Museum, where visitors can enjoy artifacts from early Tlingit culture to mining to statehood.

The following articles shed light on various interesting aspects of Juneau history. Enjoy...

A Century of Cruising

Most Alaskans think cruise tourism to the state is something relatively new. Indeed, the big and shiny ships bringing thousands of visitors to Alaska each summer are a relatively new sight in Alaska's coastal waters, but tourists have actually been coming north on ships to sightsee for more than a century...

Juneau's Museums are a Record of the Past

Indoor and outdoor venues are interesting and informative...

Doing the Iceworm Wiggle

With music played to a slow fox trot rhythm, partners circle counter clockwise, arms joined, with the ladies on the outside. Inspired by Native dance and created by Marie Lysing Johnson, the 5-step Ice Worm Wiggle Dance consists of running steps, swinging arms, quick hopping, foot shuffling, hand joining, and "Yippee" shouting...

Fish Wheels Spin Through Time

Rhythmically turned by the water's current as baskets splash in and scoop migrating salmon out, the fish wheel drives throughout the day and into the night. Integrating Native basket weaving techniques for the webbing and knowledge of where to dip net for salmon, fish wheels popped up in Alaskan waters in the late 1890s with the spur of the Gold Rush...

July 4, 1898 -- Early Juneau Celebrates

Following the discovery of gold by Joe Juneau and Richard Harris in 1880, the Juneau area was flooded with hard-working prospectors and miners. Working in Juneau's mining camps was strenuous. There was little relief from the noise of the mines, except for two days a year...the 4th of July and Christmas...

Juneau's Frontier Dairies

Your typical vision of milk deliveries rarely includes loading milk containers into a boat to ferry down a glacial river and then through a saltwater channel before reaching the customers of a wilderness community. But in frontier Juneau, nothing was typical...

Famous Jailbird Gets Start in Juneau

When Robert Stroud murdered local bartender F.K. "Charlie" Von Dahmer in Juneau in 1909 over the love of a local prostitute, not even he could foresee a future that would make him prison history's most famous "birdman"...