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Greed and Glory in the Klondike

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 the Yukon would be profoundly altered. From a pre-gold rush figure of under 5,000 people, the population of Yukon would soar to over 30,000 in 1898.

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 sister Shaaw Tla, also known as Kate, and her husband George Carmack. 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.

The first strike

After locating Kate and George Carmack, Skookum Jim and the others were fishing in the Klondike River. It was July when veteran gold-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 Hendersons 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 a 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.

The stampede to the Klondike begins

A staking rush began which 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 worth of gold (an amount estimated at $675 million U.S. in 1988 dollars).

But the world didnt know what was happening in the Yukon until July 14, 1897 when the steamship Excelsior landed in San Francisco. On board was more than 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.

The call of the frontier

Its a matter of some speculation why the Klondike Gold Rush captured the imagination of so many people. But the world was under the grip of a severe recession at the time and the press played on the sensational wealth of the Klondike prospectors. The media helped create 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. Although steamers could travel along the Inside Passage, around the coast of Alaska and then up the Yukon River to Dawson City, this route was very expensive and it was nearly impossible to book a ticket on the Yukon River boats.

Most stampeders ended up booking passage to Skagway, where they were faced with two equally daunting overland routes to the Klondike: the Chilkoot or White Pass trails. Those who survived this first challenge gathered at Lake Lindemann and Bennett Lake in the winter of 1897/8. They still had to travel over 800 kilometres (500 mi.) to Dawson City, but the rest of their journey would be by water.

In the long dark winter months 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 boats began their journey up the treacherous Yukon River to Dawson.

Hard times and heartache

When the motley armada finally reached Dawson, the stampeders learned that all the claims had been staked two years before. Many of the would-be prospectors turned around and headed home but others stayed and found wealth in different enterprises. In fact, its said that more fortunes were made in Dawson by entrepreneurs selling goods and services to the miners, than in the goldfields.

Theres no question that finding gold in town was considerably less arduous than extracting it from the banks of the Klondikes rivers and creeks. It was backbreaking work, but many of the gold mining techniques employed by miners 100 years ago are still being used.

By 1898, the small Han First Nations fishing camp at the confluence of the Yukon and Klondike Rivers had been transformed into the largest and most cosmopolitan Canadian city west of Winnipeg. On sale in Dawsons streets were French champagnes, oysters, the latest Paris fashions, porcelain, parasols, lacquer work and imported delicacies.

It all ended as quickly as it began. In the summer of 1899, gold was discovered on the sandy beaches of Nome, Alaska. Many of the stampeders who had arrived too late to stake claims in the Klondike left immediately for the new Eldorado. Somewhat ironically, the greatest year for gold production in the Yukon was 1900. That year, more than $22 million in gold was extracted, in contrast to the $2.5 million of 1897 and the $10 million of 1898.