Gold rushes in North America during the nineteenth century were
nothing new, but none generated quite the delirium of the
Klondike gold rush in 1898. Over a million people are
estimated to have left home for the Yukon gold fields, the largest
single one-year mass movement of people in the century. Of these,
about 100,000 made it to the Yukon, about 20,000 panned the creeks,
4000 found something and a couple of dozen made - and invariably
lost - huge fortunes.
The discovery of gold in 1896 on the Klondike, a tributary of
the Yukon River, was the culmination of twenty years of prospecting
in the Yukon and Alaska. A Hudson's Bay fur trader first noticed
gold in 1842, and the first substantial report was made by an
English missionary in 1863, but as the exploitation of gold was
deemed bad for trade in both furs and religion neither report was
followed up. The first mining on any scale took place in 1883 and
gradually small camps sprang up along almost 3200km of river at
places like Forty Mile, Sixty Mile and Circle City. All were
established before the Klondike strike, but were home to only a few
hundred men, hardened types reared on the earlier Californian and
British Columbian gold rushes.
The discovery of the gold that started the stampede is
inevitably shrouded in myth and countermyth. The first man to
prospect near the Klondike River was Robert Henderson, a dour Nova
Scotian and the very embodiment of the lone pioneer. In early 1896
he found 8¢ worth of gold in a pan scooped from a creek in the
hills above present-day Dawson City. This was considered an
excellent return at the time, and a sign to Henderson that the
creek would make worthwhile yields. He panned out about $750 with
four companions and then returned downriver to pick up
supplies.
Henderson then set about finding a route up the Klondike to meet
the creek he'd prospected, and at the mouth of the Klondike met
George Washington Carmack and a couple of his aboriginal friends,
known as Skookum Jim and Tagish Charley. Henderson told Carmack of
his hopes for the area, and then - with a glance at the aboriginal
pair - uttered the phrase that probably cost him a fortune,
"There's a chance for you George, but I don't want any damn
Siwashes [aboriginal people] staking on that creek." Henderson
wandered off into the hills, leaving Carmack, rankled by the
remark, to prospect a different set of creeks - the right ones, as
it turned out. On the eve of August 16, Skookum Jim found $4 of
gold in a pan on Bonanza Creek, a virtually unprecedented amount at
the time. Next day Carmack staked the first claim, and rushed off
to register the find leaving Henderson prospecting almost barren
ground on the other side of the hills.
By the end of August all of Bonanza had been staked by a hundred
or so old-timers from camps up and down the Yukon. Almost all the
real fortunes had been secured by the winter of 1896, when the
snows and frozen river effectively sealed the region from the
outside world. The second phase occurred after the thaw when a
thousand or so miners from the West Coast arrived drawn by vague
rumours of a big find, emanating from the north. The headlong rush
that was to make the Klondike unique, however, followed the docking
in July 1897 of the Excelsior in San Francisco and the
Portland in Seattle. Few sights could have been so stirring
a proof of the riches up for grabs as the battered Yukon miners who
came down the gangplanks dragging bags, boxes and sacks literally
bursting with gold. The press were waiting for the Portland
, which docked with two tons of gold on board, all taken by hand
from the Klondike creeks by just a few miners. The rush was now on
in earnest.
Whipped up by the media and the outfitters of Seattle and San
Francisco, thousands embarked on trips that were to claim hundreds
of lives. The most common route - the "poor man's route" - was to
take a boat from a West Coast port to Skagway, climb the dreaded
Chilkoot Pass to pick up the Yukon River at Whitehorse and
then boat the last 500 miles to Dawson City. The easiest and most
expensive route lay by boat upstream from the mouth of the Yukon in
western Alaska. The most dangerous and most bogus were the "All
Canadian Route" from Edmonton and the overland trails through the
northern wilderness.
The largest single influx came with the melting of the ice on
the Yukon in May 1898 - 21 months after the first claim - when a
vast makeshift armada drifted down the river. When they docked at
Dawson City, the boats nestled six deep along a two-mile stretch of
the waterfront. For most it was to have been a fruitless journey -
every inch of the creeks having long been staked - yet in most
accounts of the stampede it is clear that this was a rite of
passage as much as a quest for wealth. Pierre Berton observed that
"there were large numbers who spent only a few days in Dawson and
did not even bother to visit the hypnotic creeks that had tugged at
them all winter long. They turned their faces home again, their
adventure over … It was as if they had, without quite knowing it,
completed the job they had set out to do and had come to understand
that it was not the gold they were seeking after all."
As for the gold, it's the smaller details that hint at the scale
of the Klondike gold rush: the miner's wife, for example, who could
wander the creek by her cabin picking nuggets from the stream bed
as she waited for her husband to come home; or the destitutes
during the Great Depression who could pan $40 a day from the dirt
under Dawson's boardwalks; or the $1000 panned during rebuilding of
the Orpheum Theatre in the 1940s, all taken in a morning from under
the floorboards where it had drifted from miners' pockets half a
century before; or the $200 worth of dust panned nightly from the
beer mats of a Dawson saloon during 1897.
By about 1899 the rush was over, not because the gold had run
out, but because the most easily accessible gold had been taken
from the creeks. It had been the making of Alaska; Tacoma,
Portland, Victoria and San Francisco all felt its impact; Edmonton
sprang from almost nothing; and Vancouver's population doubled in a
year. It was also the first of a string of mineral discoveries in
the Yukon and the far north, a region whose vast and untapped
natural resources are increasingly the subject of attention from
multi-nationals as rapacious and determined as their grizzled
predecessors