Once the gold claims petered out or were snared by the Alaska Syndicate in 1900-1905, the wild adventurers left the Alaska boom towns, abandoning a few communities like Dyea to memory. The towns that survived the boom-and-bust cycle had to tough it out, expanding to meet a mix of markets that included timber, mixed-metals extraction, fishing and canning, and adventure tourism.

In addition to the realization that single-market economies were hazardous in the north country, the political and business founders of the survivor towns had to face the fact that no one would make much money for several years after the gold fever had subsided.

The number of Internet cafes that are making a reasonable go of it in Alaska's modern coastal towns prove that the telecom collapse of 2001-02 does not imply that consumers are disinterested in maintaining connectivity. In fact, the services in towns like Skagway survive in part because of the number of tourists who consider access an indispensable part of life, recession or no-and because of local miners and cannery workers who consider the Internet to be as necessary as satellite TV.

The important point is that retention of infrastructure often has to depend on local heroes who keep broadband promises alive as a labor of love. The ethereal service providers, as well as the investment bankers and venture capitalists who sustained them, have departed from the broadband landscape in 2002 as completely as the stampeders left Skagway by 1902. Broadband access to the Internet lives on through hard work and ingenuity.

The final analogy must be remembered in the aftermath of the ugly WorldCom collapse at the end of June: The names that remain from the Alaska Gold Rush are those of the crooks and con artists like Soapy Smith, who took advantage of the community builders. No one remembers those in the early 20th century who kept the coastal towns of Alaska alive.

In the decades to come, if we remember only the jocks and jerks and downright crooks who caused the collapse of the telecom rush, we will have shown that as a society, we learned nothing over the last century. That means more boom-and-crash behavior to come.