Elbridge Truman Barnette (1863 – May 22, 1933) was a Yukon riverboat captain, banker, postmaster and swindler, who founded the city of Fairbanks, Alaska, and later served as its first mayor.

On August 2, 1897, he arrived in Seattle, Washington, where with 160 other passengers, he boarded the steamer Cleveland, bound for St. Michael, Alaska, on the Bering Sea.

[1] The St. Michael only made it as far as Circle, Alaska, before a series of misfortunes including a breakdown, a fire, an outbreak of disease among the crew, and the freezing over of the Yukon halted any further progress.

Barnette took a job in Dawson managing mines for the North American Trading and Transportation Company (NT&T).

Barnette came away with the idea of establishing a trading post at the halfway point, where the railroad would cross the Tanana River (near modern-day Tanacross, Alaska).

[3] In 1901, Barnette partnered with Charles Smith, an acquaintance from Circle, arranging for $20,000 in supplies to be shipped from San Francisco, California, to St. Michael.

At St. Michael, the Arctic Boy was loaded with 130 tons of merchandise, but the steamer ran aground before reaching the mouth of the Yukon and had to be beached in order to save the cargo.

Having no other means to transport the merchandise further, Barnette and Smith sold it to local entrepreneurs, only to repurchase it when customs officer James H. Causten invested $6,000 in the enterprise in return for a third share of profits.

and Isabelle Barnette, Charles Smith, their employees and their cargo to the head of navigation of the Tanana River, at least as far as the Chena Slough.

[5] This was 200 miles short of Tanana Crossing, where Captain William R. Abercrombie had just completed the U.S. Army's trail between Valdez and Eagle.

But it was late in the year, when Alaska's glacier-fed rivers run shallow, and Adams doubted that the heavily laden steamer could make it that far.

Late in the month, it reached the shallow Bates Rapids (near Big Delta, Alaska) of the Tanana River and could proceed no further.

During the winter, Barnette sent Dan McCarty, one of his hired hands, to Valdez in order to escort Isabelle's brother, Frank J. Cleary, back to the post.

Cleary was charged with taking care of the post while the Barnettes made a trip to Seattle to purchase additional supplies as well as a flat-bottomed boat capable of proceeding further up the Tanana.

When Barnette reached the post, using small boats to ferry supplies from the Isabelle, he was informed that Pedroni had finally located the rich vein that he had been looking for.

[9] At the end of December, with the most immediately profitable claims recorded, Barnette dispatched an employee, a Japanese adventurer named Jujiro Wada, to Dawson to spread the news of Pedro's strike in order to drum up business.

January 17, 1903, Dawson's Yukon Sun newspaper published a story entitled Rich Strike Made in the Tanana.

[11] But the first prospectors to reach Fairbanks were frustrated by creeks that could not be mined in winter and squeezed by price gouging at Barnette's Trading Post.

Hungry and destitute, an angry mob of stampeders threatened to lynch Wada, whose story had lured them from Dawson and Circle.

Barnette eventually agreed to cut the price of flour by half and dropped the requirement to buy canned goods.

[14] In San Francisco, he sold a two-thirds interest in Barnette's Cache to the Northern Commercial Company (NCC).

[3] Barnette's Trading Post, only three years old, was demolished to make way for the Northern Commercial Company's expanded store.

Judge Wickersham, confirmed in his earlier assessment of the settlement, moved the seat of the Third Judicial District from Eagle to Fairbanks.

[18] By 1906, gold production had risen to $6,000,000 a year, and with a population which had surpassed 5,000, Fairbanks rivaled Nome as Alaska's largest city.

[21] In the dark of March 27, 1911, Barnette fled Fairbanks, taking with him an estimated $500,000 ($10.5 million in 1990 dollars) of dubious provenance.

Fairbanks Daily News-Miner editor W. F. Thompson called the trial "the rottenest judicial farce the North has ever witnessed."

[25] Isabelle Cleary Barnette died in September 1942 at Agnews State Hospital in San Jose, California.