The dredge began operation in 1936, and the following year McRae purchased a second nearly identical dredge for nearby Woodchopper Creek.
At a cost of $156,000, McRae purchased a dredge from what was by that time called the Walter W. In 1935 the wealthy Canadian investor Alexander McRae was scouting locations for mining Alaskan gold on an industrial scale and after crisscrossing the territory, he selected a Yukon River tributary called Coal Creek where small-scale placer miners had been active for decades. Spence explains, even early dredges were considered a safe investment: Nevertheless, the Union Construction Company and other dredge-makers had discovered a winning strategy. Unlike the dredges Johnson designed for the tropics, the Alaskan machines faced cold and ice that curtailed the months they could operate and demanded that permanently frozen ground be thawed before it could be worked. The parts were then transported to a specific gold claim and reassembled. The dredges the Union Construction Company produced were built in San Francisco and then dismantled and shipped in pieces to Alaska. And in the early years he brought his family-his wife Pearl and sons Keith and Paul-on these work trips that took them on lengthy Yukon River steamboat journeys and to some of Alaska's most remote mining districts. Starting in 1909, Johnson began traveling to Alaska to direct the construction of dredges near Nome and throughout the Seward Peninsula as well as in the Alaskan interior at Ruby, McGrath, Iditarod, Circle, and Fairbanks.
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