| THE WORLD'S
LAST GREAT GOLD RUSH
Before 1896, only First Nations peoples and the hardiest of fur
traders, prospectors, missionaries and North West Mounted Police
officers ventured into the Yukon Territory. But in two short
years, the people, the history and even the landforms of Yukon
would be profoundly altered. From a pre-gold rush figure of fewer
than 5,000 people, the population of Yukon would soar to over
30,000 in 1898. And a land, which had not even been drawn on maps
one century before, would become the place to be in North America,
and arguably the world.
The Klondike Gold Rush was the most publicized gold rush in
history. Newspapers and magazines were filled with the tales of
Yukon adventurers, miners and Mounties, and the hardships and
windfalls of the gold rush stampeders. The Klondike attracted, and
was immortalized, by m any of the best writers of the era
including Jack London, Robert Service and Tappan Adney. The
characters surrounding the Klondike Gold Rush are still the stuff
of legends and dreams. The discovery and discoverers of gold in
the Klondike continue to be surrounded by controversial and
sometimes conflicting stories.
According to the oral traditions of the Tagish First Nations
people, the gold rush story begins when Skookum Jim, Dawson
Charlie and Patsy Henderson travelled down the Yukon River from
Tagish, in the southern Yukon. They were looking for Jim's sisters
Shaaw Thia, also known as Kate, was George Carmack's wife. Well
before his trip to the Klondike, Skookum Jim had a dream in which
his spirit helper, frog, appeared in the form of Wealth Woman. She
gave him a golden walking stick and told him he would discover his
fortune in the north.
After finding Kate and George Carmack, Skookum Jim and the others
were fishing in the Klondike River. It was July when veteran
fold-seeker Robert Henderson approached the group and told Carmack
about some good prospects he had found on Gold Bottom Creek in the
Klondike River Valley. According to the unwritten code of the
miner, Henderson had to share his knowledge of potential finds
with whomever he met. Carmack asked whether there was a chance
that he could stake a claim. In a voice that was overheard by
Skookum Jim and Dawson Charlie, Henderson replied that Carmack was
welcome, but not his First nations brothers-in-law.
In early August, the group poled their boat up Rabbit Creek, a
tributary of the Klondike. They went over the dome that separated
the creeks and visited Robert Henderson's camp at Gold Bottom.
Henderson once again insulted the First Nations men by refusing to
sell them tobacco. "His obstinacy", Carmack later
recalled, "cost him a fortune."
The group headed back to Rabbit Creek and panned out a few
encouraging traces of gold. Then, in place where the bedrock was
exposed, someone found a nugget the size of a dime. Energized by
the find, they turned over loose pieces of rock and found gold
that, according to Carmack, lay thick between the flaky slabs like
cheese sandwiches. The date was August 16, 1896.
George Carmack, Skookum Jim and Dawson Charlie staked their claims
the next day and renamed the creek "Bonanza". The men
headed downstream to the community of Fortymile to register their
claims, but they never travelled over the dome to tell Henderson
of their find. Henderson stayed on Gold Bottom Creek for another
three weeks. By the time he caught wind of the great discovery,
the best locations on Bonanza Creek had been staked.
A staking rush began that brought prospectors from all over Yukon
and Alaska. On August 31, 1896 gold was discovered on Eldorado
Creek, a tributary of Bonanza. Eldorado was no more than five
miles long and produced over 30 million dollars worth of gold (an
amount estimated at 3675 million U.S. in 1988 dollars).
But the world didn't know what was happening in Yukon until July
14, 1897 when the steamship Excelsior landed in San Francisco. On
board was over a half a million dollars worth of Klondike gold.
News of the great discovery travelled over the wires like
wildfire. When the steamer Portland landed in Seattle three days
later a crowd of 5,000 greeted the 68 miners on board. Over a
million dollars worth of gold was carried down the gangplank in a
battered assortment of suitcases and rope-tied bags.
The Klondike Gold Rush was on.
It's a matter of ongoing speculation why the Klondike Gold Rush
captured the imagination of so many people. The world was under
the influence of severe recession at the time. The idea of the
North American frontier, which had brought so many people from the
Old World to the New, was still a fresh concept in the minds of
the American populace. This was the land of the entrepreneur, the
adventurer, the innovator and the fortune hunter.
In a time where there was little food news, the press played on
the sensational wealth of the Klondike prospectors and created the
idea of a land where riches just lay in the ground for anyone to
dig up and carry away. Tens of thousands of people took the bait,
and they packed their bags for Dawson City.
Steamship companies were swamped with enquiries, suppliers
couldn't keep up with the demand for Klondike outfits and
newspapers debated the relative merits of the different routes to
the Klondike.
Although steamers could travel along the Inside Passage, around
the cost of Alaska and then up the Yukon River all the way to
Dawson City, this route was very expensive and it was nearly
impossible to book a ticket on the Yukon River boats. Among the
other exhausting and often life-threatening routes to the
Klondike, it was the Chilkoot and the White Pass trails that
became the most popular paths to Dawson City.
From the start of the Chilkoot Trail, at Dyea, to the end, at Lake
Lindemann, was only a distance of 32 kilometers (2Omi) - but it
was a climb of 1,067 meters (3,500 ft), some of it at a nearly 40
degree angle. The White Pass was not as steep, and it was lower
than the Chilkoot, but it stretched over 72 kilometers (45 mi).
At the top of the Chilkoot trail, on the summit of the pass, was a
wind blasted NWNP post that enforced the policy that each
stampeder had to carry one year's supply of food and living
materials into Canada. This amounted to close to one tone of live
saving supplies. Thus the treacherous trail was made even more
arduous (and tedious) by the fact that the average stampeder
needed to make this trip 20 times in order to ferry all of his of
her goods to Lindemann.
The stampeders who made it over the Chilkoot and White Pass
gathered at Lake Lindemann and Bennett Lake in the winter of
1897/8. They still needed to travel over 800 kilometers (500 mi)
to Dawson City, but the rest of their journey would be by water. A
flurry of boat building denuded the surrounding hillside of trees.
When the ice went out on the lakes on May 29 of that year, a
rag-tag flotilla of 7,000 barges, rafts and homemade plank ships
began their journey to Dawson.
When this armada reached Dawson they discovered that all the
claims had been staked two years before. Many of the stampeders
headed back as soon as they arrived. Others stayed and found
wealth in different enterprises.
Fortunes were made in Dawson, but many were also lost. Some of the
richest Yukon citizens were the business people who sold the
stampeders goods and services. There was no shortage of
moneymaking schemes and the desperation that fuelled them - a
couple of entrepreneurs even hit on the idea of sifting gold dust
from the dirt beneath the floors and foundations of the saloons.
In 1898, the confluence of the Yukon and Klondike Rivers had been
transformed from a small fishing camp used by the Han First
Nations people, into Dawson City, the largest and most
cosmopolitan Canadian city west of Winnipeg. On sale in the
streets of Dawson were French champagnes, oysters, the finest
Paris fashions, porcelain, parasols, lacquer work and imported
delicacies.
But the Klondike Gold Rush ended as quickly as it began. In the
summer of 1899, gold was discovered in the sandy beaches of Nome,
Alaska. Many of the people who had arrived too late to stake
claims in the Klondike left immediately for the "new Eldorado".
Ironically, the greatest year for gold production in Yukon was
1900. Over 22 million dollars worth of gold was extracted, in
contrast to the $2.5 million of 1897 and the $10 million of 1898.
The Klondike Gold Rush marked the end of a decade and the end of
an era. Soon after, gold mining was taken over by corporations and
government who could make the investment in complex machinery.
The Klondike Gold Rush brought out the best and the worst in the
people that followed its call -it remains a fascinating enigma to
this day. One of the last manifestations of the dream of the North
American frontier, the Klondike was seen as a place where any
person could make his or her fortune by exploring unopened
territory. The concept of frontier has become a myth or an
idealized notion. But the vestiges of the Klondike quest are still
to be seen and sensed in the landmarks of Yukon - from the summit
of the Chilkoot Trail to the boardwalks of Dawson City.
For More Information Contact:
Tourism Yukon
Box 2704
Whitehorse, Yukon
Canada YlA2C6
Tel: (867) 667-5388
Fax: (867) 667-3546
http://www.touryukon.com/
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