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Table of contents

Along the Klondike river, boom towns formed that were supported by the miners.

Alaska Gold

Those that found gold spent their time and money in saloons, while those that found nothing continued to labor. In , miners received news that gold had been discovered in Nome and that it was much easier to get, causing the departure of the majority of the miners and the decline of the boom towns. Over the next two years, at least , eager would-be prospectors from all over the world set out for the new gold fields with dreams of a quick fortune dancing in their heads.

Only about 40, actually made it to the Klondike, and precious few of them ever found their fortune. Swept along on this tide of gold seekers was a smaller and cannier contingent, also seeking their fortunes but in a far more practical fashion. They were the entrepreneurs, the men and women who catered to the Klondike fever. George Carmack, the man who began it all, was neither a die-hard prospector nor a keen businessman. The California native was simply in the right place at the right time. Not that this son of a Forty-Niner had anything against being rich.

There had been rumors of gold in the Yukon as far back as the s, but little was done about it. By , there were perhaps miners panning fine placer gold from the sandbars along the Yukon River. In , gold was found in paying quantities on the bars of the Stewart River, south of the Klondike River.

The next year, coarse gold was found on the Forty Mile River, and a trading post, called Fortymile, then sprang up where the river joins the Yukon River.

Klondike Gold Rush

But when news of the strike on Rabbit Creek soon to be renamed Bonanza Creek reached the citizens of Circle City, they decamped in droves. So law enforcement was in place just in time to greet the droves of prospectors who would soon be stampeding to the Klondike region of the Yukon District, which would become a separate territory on June 13, Like his Indian friends, George Carmack believed in visions.

Shortly before his dramatic discovery, he had a vision in which two salmon with golden scales and gold nuggets for eyes appeared before him. So lacking in mercenary impulses was he that he interpreted this as a sign that he should take up salmon fishing. Henderson insulted the Indians again by refusing to sell them tobacco. While cleaning a dishpan, one of the three unearthed the thumb-sized chunk of gold that set the great rush in motion. On the way, he bragged to everyone he saw of his good luck.

Most of the old-timers just scoffed. But a few cheechakos newcomers went to investigate, and the word spread.

Within five days, the valley was swarming with prospectors. By the end of August, the whole length of Bonanza Creek was staked out in claims; then an even richer vein was found on a tributary that became known as Eldorado Creek. If all this had come about early in the year, the news would have reached civilization within a few weeks. But winter was already closing in.

Once the rivers froze and the heavy snows fell, communication with the outside was nearly impossible. William Ogilvie, a Canadian government surveyor, sent off two separate messages to Ottawa, telling of the magnitude of the strike, but both were lost in the bureaucratic shuffle. The fever quickly reached epidemic proportions. The amount of gold in circulation had dropped, helping to cause the deep economic depression that had been eating at the United States for 30 years. The Pacific Northwest had been hit especially hard.

People were tired of being poor; many who had jobs quit them for the promise of greater rewards. Streetcar drivers abandoned their trolleys; a quarter of the Seattle police force walked out; even the mayor resigned and bought a steamboat to carry passengers to the Klondike. He was just one of a growing number of enterprising citizens who realized there was a fortune to be made right here at home, simply by selling a product, however dubious in value, with the name Klondike attached.

Inventors dreamed up devices that promised to make the task of digging gold positively pleasant. Nikola Tesla, one of the pioneers of electricity, promoted an X-ray machine that would supposedly detect precious metals beneath the ground without all the trouble of digging.

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A Trans-Alaskan Gopher Company proposed to train gophers to claw through frozen gravel and uncover nuggets. Clairvoyants touted their abilities to pinpoint rich lodes of gold. Several ventures were underway to invade the Klondike by balloon. Even as all these cockeyed schemes and services were being offered, there was one crucial commodity that was in desperately short supply—transportation. Everything that floated was pressed into service—ancient paddlewheelers and fishing boats, barges, coal ships still full of coal dust.


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A few ships sailed around the Aleutians and through the Bering Sea to St. Michael, Alaska, on Norton Sound. The passengers could then take riverboats upstream from the Yukon River delta to the gold fields, a 1,mile trip on the winding Yukon.


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Most boats went only as far as Skagway in the Alaska Panhandle, where the passengers and their outfits were unceremoniously dumped on the mile-wide tidal flats. Skagway itself was no beach resort. But even in this chaotic setting, legitimate businesses flourished.

Golden Alaska A Complete Account to Date of the Yukon Valley by Ingersoll & Ernest | Fruugo

What the would-be miner needed by now was some way of getting his outfit to the gold fields, so anyone with a wagon and a team or a few mules could do well for himself—or herself. In addition to the boat passage up the Yukon, there were at least five trails being touted as the best route to the gold fields. But three of those were so long and hazardous that only a few men ever succeeded in reaching the Klondike alive on them. The two most heavily traveled routes began in Skagway and the neighboring town of Dyea. In the fall of , the more popular was the mile Skagway Trail over White Pass.

At first glance, it seemed the less demanding of the two; it climbed more gradually, which meant that—in theory at least—pack animals could negotiate it. Once on the trail, miners found it nowhere near as easy as it looked. Most of the pack animals were broken-down horses that would have been lucky to survive the trek under the best of conditions. Faced with this nightmare of mud and mayhem, thousands of miners turned back, sold their outfits, and retreated to civilization with spirits broken and pockets empty. But thousands more slogged on and reached Lake Bennett, the headwaters of the Yukon River.

Only a very few made it before cold weather choked the lake and the river with ice. The rest were marooned on the shores of the lake until spring. But even there, the Klondikers were forced to hire Indian packers, at as much as 50 cents a pound, or else lug their outfits themselves, pounds at a time, leaving each load alongside the trail somewhere, then going back for the next load and so on, over and over; by the time a miner transferred his whole outfit to the far side of the pass, he might have walked the mile trail 30 or 40 times, and spent three months doing it.

The most daunting part was Chilkoot Pass, which lay at the top of a nearly vertical slope, four miles long. An unbroken stream of Klondikers toiled up it day and night—a total of 22, in the winter of It was an agonizing climb, and the worst of it was that each man had to repeat it again and again until his entire outfit was carried over the pass. The only consolation was that, between loads, he got a free ride down the snowy slope on the seat of his pants. Then, with admirable generosity, he went back and helped a young couple run their skiff through the same rapids. Thompson wrote in his diary that they rested easy that night.

Sixtymile River flowed into mile Lake Laberge. It took a week to battle across it in howling north winds and snowstorms. The going was easier below Laberge, although the weather was bitterly cold with dense fogs. The big worry was the ice accumulating in the river. The Yukon—the third-biggest river in North America, after the Mississippi and the Mackenzie—usually froze solid by mid-October. On October 9, about 80 miles from Dawson City, they decided to stop and winter at the mouth of the Stewart River, where they found some old serviceable cabins and Big Jim saw promising color in his gold pan.

Jack staked out feet on the left fork of Henderson Creek and boated downriver to file his mining claim in Dawson City. Founded the previous year, Dawson now had more than a dozen saloons with dance halls and gambling, a street of prostitutes called Paradise Alley and some 5, inhabitants living in cabins, tents and shanties. There was a food shortage, no sanitation, and the filthy streets were full of unemployed men and sled dogs. Jack befriended two brothers, Louis and Marshall Bond, who let him camp next to their cabin in Dawson.

Their father was a wealthy judge with a ranch in Santa Clara, California; he would later appear, lightly fictionalized, as Judge Miller in The Call of the Wild.

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Jack stayed in Dawson for more than six weeks. Dawson City today is a hardy, free-spirited, extremely remote community of 1, people, still trading on its history as the capital of the Klondike gold rush. Even in an era when industrial-scale mining has been introduced in the region, independent gold miners are still digging and sluicing in the nearby Klondike Valley, using excavators and diesel pumps, as well as shovels and gold pans.

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Some of them are finding significant amounts of gold, and spending their money on whiskey, poker, blackjack and can-can shows at Diamond Tooth Gerties gambling hall. The downtown streets are unpaved. You walk on raised wooden sidewalks past frontier-style buildings, some dating back to the gold rush era. At the Downtown Hotel is the Jack London Grill and a saloon that serves a highly unusual cocktail, the Sourtoe—a severed, mummified human toe dropped into the liquor of your choice.

The legend is that the drink dates back to the s, and originally involved an amputated frostbitten toe. These days, according to the bartender, the saloon accepts toes lost to other misfortunes, including lawnmower accidents. She took me to an ancient dive bar called the Pit with dramatically sloping floors and a raunchy oil painting on the wall. The customers included gold miners, a professor, a dancer and a musician.