On 17 July 1897, the steamer Portland tied up in Seattle carrying sixty-eight miners and, as the Seattle Post-Intelligencer trumpeted, "a ton of gold" — an undersell, since the cargo was closer to two tons. The gold had been dug the previous summer, in August 1896, when George Carmack, his Tagish brother-in-law Skookum Jim and their companion Tagish Charlie found thick seams of gold in Rabbit Creek, a tributary of the Klondike River in Canada's remote Yukon. They renamed it Bonanza Creek, and miners already in the region quietly staked everything worth staking that winter. The outside world knew nothing until the first boats came out the following summer — and then it lost its mind. America was mired in economic depression, and here was gold you could apparently shovel. Clerks quit, tram drivers abandoned their trams mid-route, and Seattle's own mayor resigned to head north. Perhaps 100,000 people set out for the Klondike.
Most had no idea what they had signed up for. The cheap route ran by ship to the Alaskan ports of Skagway and Dyea, then over the coastal mountains and 500 miles down the Yukon River by home-made boat. Skagway itself was a lawless racket run by the con-man Jefferson "Soapy" Smith, whose crooked telegraph office charged five dollars to send messages along wires that connected to nothing; he died in a shoot-out on the town wharf in 1898. From Skagway ran the White Pass trail, deceptively gentle-looking and soon nicknamed the Dead Horse Trail after some 3,000 overloaded pack animals perished on it. From Dyea ran the Chilkoot Pass — too steep for animals at its summit, where stampeders climbed 1,500 steps cut into the ice, the "Golden Stairs", in an endless human chain.
A ton of goods
At the summit waited the North-West Mounted Police, who enforced the rush's most famous rule: no one entered Canada without roughly a year's supplies — about a ton of goods, close to half of it food. The rule, imposed after near-famine in Dawson City in the winter of 1897–98, meant each stampeder had to relay their outfit up the pass load by load, thirty or forty climbs for those who could not afford packers, taking as long as three months. Then came winter boat-building at Lakes Bennett and Lindeman: when the ice broke in May 1898, a fleet of more than 7,000 improvised craft set off down the Yukon, running rapids like Miles Canyon that claimed boats by the score until the Mounties imposed pilots and rules there too.
Of the 100,000 or so who set out, only around 30,000 to 40,000 reached Dawson City — and most found that every foot of Bonanza and its fabulous tributary Eldorado had been staked nearly two years earlier. Many never even looked for gold; they took one dazed walk around town and booked passage home, or found wages digging other men's claims. Dawson itself was the spectacle: a swampy boomtown swollen to some 30,000 people, briefly one of the largest settlements north of San Francisco, where gold dust bought champagne, eggs sold for a small fortune, and dance-hall queens like Diamond Tooth Gertie became legends. Only a few hundred people ever became genuinely rich from Klondike gold, and a good number of those — like "Big Alex" McDonald, the "King of the Klondike" — died broke anyway.
The rush moves on
The end came as abruptly as the beginning. In the summer of 1899, news arrived that gold had been found in the beach sands of Nome, on Alaska's Bering coast, and Dawson emptied within weeks — thousands of the same restless men chasing the next sure thing. The whole stampede had lasted barely two years. Its most durable output was not bullion but stories: a young Californian named Jack London spent the winter of 1897–98 in the Klondike, came home broke and scurvy-ridden, and mined the experience for The Call of the Wild, White Fang and "To Build a Fire". Robert Service, a bank clerk who arrived after the rush, versified it in "The Shooting of Dan McGrew". The Klondike's ledger is easily totted up: fortunes for a few hundred, wages for some, and for the rest the hardest journey of their lives in exchange for a tale — which, human nature being what it is, most of them reckoned a fair trade.
Quiz nuggets
- Gold was struck in August 1896 on Rabbit Creek — renamed Bonanza Creek — by George Carmack, Skookum Jim and Tagish Charlie.
- The rush began when the steamer Portland reached Seattle in July 1897 with "a ton of gold" aboard.
- Canada's North-West Mounted Police required each stampeder to bring about a ton of supplies — roughly a year's worth.
- The White Pass route was nicknamed the Dead Horse Trail after some 3,000 pack animals died on it.
- The stampede ended in 1899 when gold was found at Nome, Alaska; Jack London turned his Klondike winter into The Call of the Wild.