The gold rush in the Klondike, not in California, is the focus of this week’s look at the past.
August 16, 1896
Gold! Gold! Gold in the Klondike!
All gold rushes start with that first, serendipitous discovery – the glitter of metal under the water, the tentative, outstretched hand against the cold nugget and the rise of excitement as the reality of the discovery takes hold.
In 1849, it was James Marshall along the American River. On this day in 1896, it was four would-be miners on the small tributary of the Yukon River called Rabbit Creek.
From the very beginning, the Klondike Gold Rush proved a different beast entirely from its California predecessor.
For starters, James Marshall hadn’t even been looking for gold on that cold winter morning in 1848 – he was building a sawmill. The same couldn’t be said for the northwest region of Canada, along the disputed border of Alaska, where gold was known to exist.
By 1896 an estimated 1,000 prospectors eagerly dug along the banks of the Yukon and its tributaries. Those who staked claims in the area during the 1870s and 1880s had little to show for their efforts. The gold they did uncover barely paid for the supplies needed to survive in the harsh climate.
That all changed when an American prospector named George Carmack, his wife Kate Carmack (whose native name was Shaaw Tláa), her brother Skookum Jim (Keish) and their nephew Dawson Charlie (Káa Goox) came across the sluggish waters of Rabbit Creek.
Posterity doesn’t recall which one of them made the discovery, but that first flash of gold in the river soon turned into a stream as the miners began digging and sluicing away. Nearby miners in the area who heard about the discovery made a beeline to the area began staking their own claims.
The region’s isolation, and the amount of snowfall during the winter of 1896, conspired to keep word of the discovery firmly within the confines of Yukon River basin—to the benefit of the few dozen prospectors who had already been working in the area.
The first shipments of gold entered the ports of Seattle and San Francisco in the Summer of 1897. They also brought with them the newly-minted millionaires who had made the discovery. The cat was out of the bag and the rush was on.
Stampeders
In 1849, they were called Argonauts, a romantic allusion to the classical Greek myth of Jason and his team of adventurers who set out in search of the Golden Fleece.
But in 1896, they were called stampeders.
A half-century of civil war, economic depressions, two presidential assassinations and increased industrialization had stripped the veneer off the whole affair. By the time the Carmacks discovered the precious metal in Canada, North Americans had grown used to the boom and bust reality of gold rushes. Classical allusions were too pat, too inherently optimistic to describe the horde of people sweeping towards the northwest wilderness. A stampede indeed.
The siren call of wealth beyond imagining attracted a different class of people in 1896 than it had done in 1849.
The stampeders were largely single men, untethered to any one place – in this way at least, similar to those who went in search of California gold back in ‘49. The similarities end there, however.
By the end of the 19th century, the bulging urban centers of America had begun to birth a new class of men: factory workers. These perpetually underpaid men and women saw the news of gold to the north as nothing short of a godsend.
Those with little hope cleave that much more stubbornly to the faintest of hopes. The drive to strike it rich in the Klondike was appropriately likened to catching a disease. The name for this virulent strain? Klondicitis.
All that glitters
Within no time at all some 80,000 to 100,000 people infected with the fever set out for the Klondike. But where on earth was the Klondike?
In 1897 when the hordes of gold-seekers set out to the region, the Klondike wasn’t even yet a territory of Canada.
The primary towns of the region – if you could even call them by such a lofty name – were along the Yukon River and before the big discovery housed no more than a few thousand miners and natives.
For the stampeders eager for wealth, the path to the Klondike was along the Pacific coast by boat to one of the few coastal towns of Alaska.
From there, a tortuous hike over mountain passes brought them to Canada and the Yukon River. After a white-knuckled ride down the ice-choked river, the stampeders finally entered Dawson City, the new hub of the rush.
The most famous of the mountain passes that gold-seekers had to traverse was known as the Chilkoot Pass.
“Pass” is a bit too grandiose of a term for what essentially amounted to a small icy cleft in the coastal ranges that separated Alaska from Canada.
The first stampeders, led by native guides, cut steps into the ice-covered slopes leading up to the pass.
Eventually the installation of a length of rope for hauling oneself up each step made the climb marginally less deadly. At the top of the pass stood the Canadian Northwest Mounted Police, or NWMP, who acted as border patrol agents.
Canadians are nothing if not eminently practical and within a few days of the arrival of the first stampeders, the NWMP knew that these crazy Americans would get themselves killed in the Canadian wilderness of someone didn’t impose some order.
Therefore, NWMP ordered that entry into Canada would only be allowed to those stampeders who carried with them at least one-year’s supply of food and shelter.
So, in addition to pickaxes, gold pans, sluice boxes, hammers, nails, clothes and other knick-knacks for mining gold, the stampeders now had to carry what amounted to 1,000 pounds of provisions.
From the coastal Alaskan town of Dyea over Chilkoot Pass to the headwaters of the Yukon at Lake Bennett stretched a 33-mile long trail of overburdened, exhausted would-be gold miners. Each person’s nearly 2,000 pounds of supplies had to be hauled piecemeal, since the steep slopes leading to the pass made use of horses and mules nearly impossible. That didn’t stop some people from trying and today, Dead Horse Gulch stands as testament to their folly.
By the time the stampeders made it to the summit of the pass, the NWMP waited to charge an import fee for the very supplies they themselves had required each person entering Canada bring. Between just February and June of 1898, the Mounties collected $174,000 in duties, a sum that would today amount to about $4.9 million.
Between the cost of the required provisions, the duties charged by the Mounties, and the cost of a ticket aboard a steamship from Lake Bennett to Dawson City, most stampeders found themselves destitute at journey’s end. In fact, upwards of one-third of those who started out towards the Klondike turned back before arriving.
For those who stuck it out, their reward was sour. You see, by the time word had reached them in the summer of 1897, it was already too late, although it would take them the entire journey to figure it out.
By the time they arrived at the Klondike, those men and women who had risked life and limb at a chance to strike it rich found that most of the claims along the lode had been staked. Those that remained produced nothing. By the end of 1898 the rush was over.
Antone Pierucci is a Sacramento-based public historian and a freelance writer whose work has been featured in such magazines as Archaeology and Wild West as well as regional California newspapers.
This Week in History: The gold rush in the Klondike
- Antone Pierucci
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