Felix Pedro(ni), from the Apennines to the Gold Country of Alaska

The moose was dying in the icy water amongst the pebbles of the creek, as they called the streams up there. Leaning over the beast in an attempt to drag it to the bank, the man spotted a golden speck lodged in the hoof of its left front leg. He looked more closely: it was not one of those deceptive glimmers that the sun so often makes flash amongst the inhospitable snows of the Far North to confuse human predators hunting for the longed-for wealth, the most elusive of all prey. In a flash, he realised he had finally rediscovered Lost Creek, which so often featured in his dreams. He had scoured it four years earlier, finding it so full of gold that he suspected the existence of a rich vein, but hunger had forced him to head for the Chena River to seek provisions at Captain Barnette’s store. Since then, he had never stopped searching for that inexhaustible bonanza, lost amongst the woods and mountain gorges around the vast Tanana river basin, but without success. And now, a poor, dying moose – a shot fired in a fit of hunger – had led him back to his lost fortune.

The faintest hint of a smile flashed for a moment across his gaunt face, with its features carved as if by an axe. Back in the village, they would have welcomed the man who had discovered gold in Alaska as a hero: Felice Pedroni from Trignano, known throughout the Wilderness as Felix Pedro.

But yes: fictional imagination can add very little to the adventurous story of this mountain man, born and raised in a small hamlet in the municipality of Fanano, in the Modena Apennines, who, following a village row, decided to emigrate to the fabled ‘Merica’ in search of his fortune – and ended up finding it, discovering a rich gold vein that is still being mined today. His story seems straight out of a Jack London novel: the epic tale of the indomitable gold prospector who, in the lands of the Far North, braves the perils of ice and wolves until he finds the blessed vein, securing the wealth he so longed for. In Alaska, his figure still carries the aura of a legend and is periodically celebrated during the Golden Days, held annually in Fairbanks – the state’s second-largest city, founded by Pedroni together with boat captain Elbridge T. Barnette – in memory of the gold rush. Every 22 July, a horseman gallops down the town’s main street with a bag of gold hanging from his saddle and deposits it at the bank. It is Felix Pedro reborn, re-enacting what he did on 22 July 1902 with the first gold nuggets found in Lost Creek, later renamed Pedro Creek in his honour. For four years he had combed the vast area around the Chena River to the point of obsession, but the stream seemed to have vanished. The gold rush, which Chaplin would parody 25 years later, was consuming him. He carried on out of sheer inertia, hunting elk to sustain himself: a poor dago, as the Italian emigrants contemptuously called him, lost in the frozen vastness of the Wilderness. He saved the life of an Indian chief’s son, and that was his stroke of luck. The natives trusted him and guided him towards territories unknown to white men. Until he came across the moose, killed it and fulfilled his dream. ‘Perhaps their medicine man sent it to me,’ he couldn’t help thinking, with his superstitious mountain man’s mind. In those parts, he felt a bit like an Indian himself.

The fact is that, at the age of 44, Felix Pedro became a rich man. Filthy rich. But he couldn’t forget his Double: Felice Pedroni. The villagers would have been left speechless, seeing him strolling down the high street in a wide-brimmed hat, a pistol in its holster and a garland of gold nuggets in his belt instead of bullets. Instead of enjoying his wealth, he dreamt of returning home. He wanted to marry one of his alter egos. On his return to Trignano, he began courting a schoolmistress from nearby Lizzano, Egle Zanetti, determined to take her to Alaska. But partly because of the age difference, and partly because of the envy and suspicion aroused by his display of wealth, her family strongly opposed the match, even going so far as to intercept the letter in which Egle gave her consent to the marriage. Bitterly disappointed, Felice Pedroni returned to Alaska alone and became Felix Pedro once more. Having lost his love, all that remained were the dollars. But on 22 July 1906, exactly four years after the discovery of gold at Lost Creek, he took the fateful misstep of marrying the Irishwoman Mary Ellen Doran, a former saloon dancer who ran a roadhouse in Dawson City. The marriage soon began to crumble, whilst Felix Pedro’s fortune dwindled. In January 1908, Mary Ellen sought a separation, but the 1910 federal census still listed the couple as living together. Just over a month later, their life together came to an abrupt end with the death of the gold prospector, once again on that recurring date of 22 July, which seems to punctuate his epic life like a fatal riff. The official report cited a heart attack, but the beautiful Irishwoman was not above suspicion; rumours spread of poisoning and even of a pin driven between his vertebrae. Buried in San Francisco, it was not until 1972 that Felice Pedroni was reinterred in the cemetery at Fanano – which, in his honour, has been twinned with Fairbanks since 2002 – before finally resting in Trignano, where, on 13 August, I shall speak of him in front of his family home: from the Apennines to Alaska and back (albeit in a hearse), Felix Pedro gave us a ‘daring life’ more beautiful than any novel.