Moses Point is a fish camp situated at the mouth of the Kwiniuk River on the northern shore of Norton Bay, about 100 miles (160 km) east of Nome and 31 miles (50 km) southwest of Koyuk, Alaska. Residents of Elim use it mainly for subsistence fishing. The name also applies to a sand spit about nine miles east, which forms the southern shore of Kwiniuk Inlet. The Kwiniuk rises at 1,370 feet (418 m) in the Kwiktalik Mountains and flows northeast for 30 miles (48 km) through a watershed of roughly 86,488 acres (35,000 ha). It then turns southeast for another 10 miles (16 km) to Devils Slough, an abandoned meander channel that now connects the river to the sea. The active channel and floodplains hold sorted gravel, sand and silt. Lowlands east, west and north of the camp are thick with silt and peat, and permafrost and ice wedges concentrate in marshy depressions. Coastal beaches, spits and bars are unconsolidated Quaternary sand and gravel. The camp sits on the Iditarod Trail, which carried thousands north after gold was discovered near Nome in 1898. Gold seekers gave a Unalit Yup’ik man the name Moses, and the camp was named for him.

The eastern Norton Sound region has long been a meeting point of Iñupiat, Yup’ik and Athabaskan peoples. Archaeological sites at Cape Denbigh and Shaktoolik suggest that the Nukleet people lived there between 1100 and 1400, and Yupiit occupied the area from about 1400 to 1800. Captain James Cook sailed through Norton Sound in 1778. The Russian-American Company founded Redoubt St. Michael in 1833, and commercial whaling in the Bering Strait from 1848 turned the sound into a trading hub. A smallpox epidemic between 1838 and 1844 devastated the local Yup’ik population. The survivors moved south, and Malemiut Inupiat migrants arrived from the north, drawn by new hunting and trading opportunities. Their descendants live in the Shaktoolik region today. Johan A. Jacobsen, a Norwegian ethnographer who traveled the region from 1881 to 1883, recorded a village at the mouth of the Kwiniuk, which he transcribed as “Kjuwagonak.” Elim grew up around a reindeer reserve established in 1911 and a Covenant mission founded in 1914. Since then, Moses Point has been a traditional subsistence fish camp, chiefly for five species of Pacific salmon and Pacific herring.

Early in the Second World War, the Civil Aeronautics Administration was authorized to build an airfield and radio station at Moses Point, one of several emergency strips supporting lend-lease flights to the Soviet Union. The Army took over in 1942, built a garrison on more than 1500 acres (607 ha) that included Quonset huts, frame buildings, a small hospital, and an access road, After the war the airfield was returned to civilian control. The Federal Aviation Administration, which succeeded the CAA in 1958, operated the site until the mid-1980s, when the land passed to Elim Native Corporation. A new airport opened at Elim in 1999, leaving a radio station on the barrier beach at Moses Point. Hazardous waste was found along the access road, in garrison buildings and in the Kwiniuk, including six sites where drums were buried. The Defense Department’s Formerly Used Defense Sites program has overseen remediation since 2006, but state contaminated-sites records still list several Moses Point entries. Read more here and here. Explore more of Moses Point and Kwiniuk River here: