LEONHARD SEPPALA WAS BORN in Skibotn, Lygenfjørd, Norway -- 600 miles north of the Arctic Circle -- the 14th September in the year 1877. His family moved to the village of Skjervøy two years after his birth. His father was both a blacksmith and a fisherman. As a child Leonhard did farm work, keeping the family homestead going while his father was away on the fishing grounds. He began to go in his father's fishing boat the "Leviathan" at the age of twelve, and also apprenticed in his father's smithy. It was a demanding and rugged life for a child; "Sepp" (as many later called him) grew up tough and self-reliant. Each year until 1897 he went to the Finnmark fishing grounds. At the age of twenty he went to the city of Kristiana (now called Oslo), where he worked at the smithies there until he completed his "masterpiece" in December 1898, the project (a hand-forged vise) that would demonstrate his competence at the trade and allow him to work as a Master blacksmith. After the death of his childhood sweetheart Margit, whom he had planned to marry, Sepp returned to Skjervøy to work in his father's smithy.
THE GOLD STRIKES IN ALASKA and the Yukon were the talk of Norway around 1899. Seppala's friend Jafet Lindeberg returned home from Alaska flush with gold dollars and encouraged Sepp to take ship for the gold fields, even offering to lend him money for his passage. In 1900 Sepp succumbed to the lure of gold; on the 14th June he arrived on the S.S. Ohio in the city of Nome, where Lindeberg had his Pioneer Mining Company. He then had to learn mining from the ground up, starting out driving horses and a wagon (which he had never done), filling a slip scraper to clear the sluice boxes, and shoveling gravel on Discovery Claim at Anvil Creek. The Scandinavian miners, including Sepp's employer, had constant problems with claim-jumpers and shyster lawyers, all of whom were determined to do the foreigners out of their claims and take them over. Lindeberg was a leading figure in the immigrant miners' fight for their rights, and Sepp, as a Pioneer employee, was involved in a number of hair-raising adventures in defense of Pioneer claims against claim-jumpers.