A flood of prospectors (largely US) when gold was discovered in Canada's Yukon Territory in 1896. The rush lasted for five years, generated an estimated $50 million in gold, established the town of Dawson, and invigorated the economies of British Columbia, Alberta, Alaska, and Washington State.
The Klondike Gold Rush was a frenzy of gold rush immigration to and gold prospecting along the Klondike River near Dawson City in the Yukon Territory, Canada, after gold was discovered in the late 19th century.
Discovery
In August 1896, three people led by Skookum Jim Mason (a member of the Tagish nation whose birth name was Keish) headed north, down the Yukon River from the Carcross area, looking for his sister Kate and her husband George Carmack. After meeting up with George and Kate, who were fishing for salmon at the mouth of the Klondike River, they ran into Nova Scotian Robert Henderson who had been mining gold on the Indian River, just south of the Klondike.
On August 16, 1896, the party discovered rich placer gold deposits in Bonanza (Rabbit) Creek.
Stampede begins
The news spread to other mining camps in the Yukon River valley, and the Bonanza, Eldorado and Hunker Creeks were rapidly staked by miners who had been previously working creeks and sandbars on the Fortymile and Stewart Rivers.
News reached the United States in July 1897, when the first successful prospectors arrived in San Francisco on July 15 and in Seattle on July 17, setting off the Klondike stampede.
Most prospectors landed at Skagway, Alaska, or the adjacent town of Dyea, Alaska, both located at the head of the Lynn Canal. Here, some 25 to 35 grueling miles (40 - 56 km) from where they landed, prospectors built rafts and boats that would take them the final 500-plus miles (800-plus km) down the Yukon to Dawson City, near the gold fields.
A hard life
The climb to the Chilkoot Pass was steep and hazardous, rising a thousand feet in the last half mile (300 m in 800 m).
Others took the Copper River Trail or the Teslin Trail by Stikine River and Teslin Lake, and some used the all-Canadian Ashcroft (the Cariboo Wagon Road) and Edmonton trails. In 1897, many using this route late were caught by winter ice below Fort Yukon, Alaska, and had to be rescued, but use of this route was implicit in the discovery of gold finds at Nome and St. Michael near the Yukon estuary, and at Fairbanks, Alaska.
An estimated 100,000 people participated in the gold rush and about 30,000 made it to Dawson City in 1898.
Throughout this period, the North West Mounted Police, under the command of Charles Constantine and his more famous successor, Sam Steele, maintained a firm grip on the activities of the prospectors to ensure the safety of the population as well as enforcing the laws and sovereignty of Canada, strictly policing the entry of weapons into the territory and requiring all those transiting White Pass or Chilkoot Pass to be carrying sufficient goods to survive.
The first female member of the North West Mounted Police was Katherine Ryan, widely known as Klondike Kate. In addition to staking three claims in the Klondike area, she was also a gold inspector, entrepreneur and political activist — all very unusual activities for a woman to be involved in at the time. Another Yukon legend to claim the title of Klondike Kate was Kathleen Eloise Rockwell, a dancer-turned-gold rush entertainer in Dawson City.
In 1898, there was a call to women to join the Victorian Order of Nurses' Klondike contingent.
For a few short years, Skagway, Alaska (the main "Yukon Port") and Dawson City were on the world's "Grand Tour", an around-the-world circuit of the wealthy and those who entertained them; musicians and other artists of the stature of Anna Pavlova made the long journey to visit the city where the streets were virtually paved with gold (claims staked on the gravel pits used to pave downtown Dawson have been found to have a higher percentage of gold in them than operating claims).
The Klondike field continues to be worked today, although most of the original deposits were removed in the early 1900s when small claim holdings were consolidated and were worked by large-scale industrial extraction methods, notably steam dredges.
Cultural legacy
Among the many to take part in the gold rush was writer Jack London, whose books White Fang, The Call of the Wild, and "To Build A Fire", a collection of short stories, were influenced by his northern experiences, and adventurer "Swiftwater" Bill Gates. Part I of Jack London's 1910 novel Burning Daylight is centered around the Klondike Gold Rush. Service, whose short epics "The Shooting of Dan McGrew" and other works describe the fierce grandeur of the north and the survival ethic and gold fever of men and women in the frozen, gold-strewn north.
One of the most thorough popular histories of the Klondike Gold Rush, titled simply Klondike, was written by Canada's Pierre Berton, who was raised in the Yukon Territory. (In the United States, Berton's book is entitled The Klondike Fever.) Berton covers nearly every misadventure of the nightmarish and harrowing journeys taken by the many parties on different routes bound for Dawson City, and also covers in fair detail the goings-on in that town up until about 1904.
Charlie Chaplin's silent movie The Gold Rush (1925), one of the highest grossing movies ever, was set in the Klondike, as was the silent epic The Trail of '98 (1928) and Mae West's Klondike Annie (1936).
The gold rush is an important event in the history of the city of Edmonton, which, until 2005, celebrated Klondike Days, an annual summer fair with a Klondike gold rush theme. The tenuous, and arguably fraudulent, connection of Edmonton with the Klondike Gold Rush was a source of much ridicule for years;
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