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The Klondike Gold Rush of 1898
Some 100,000 gold seekers headed for Dawson City, Yukon, about 40,000 made it, but only a handful made fortunes
by Rick Crosby When, I stepped off the bus in Dawson City, Yukon, one December, the temperature was minus 47° Fahrenheit. After getting settled in my hotel, I went downstairs to the lobby and told the receptionist, I was going for a walk. "Be careful,? she warned, "at these temperatures you can burn your lungs out.? After half a block, I sensed what she was talking about. The air was so cold, I had to cover my face with my ski jacket to take a breath. As I turned back to the hotel, I met a sled being pulled by a wolf dog with a big toothy grin on its face. Unlike me, that wolf dog was in its element. As I stepped up on the wooden porch of the hotel, a mound of snow in a corner moved. A husky dog looked out at me for waking it up. This taste of hardship and meeting the husky felt like something out of a Robert Service poem. The lure of the North had taken hold of me. Maybe it was that same lure on a July morning in 1897 that people on a San Francisco wharf felt when the steamship Excelsior pulled up to the dock. As disheveled men, dirty and tired, disembarked down the gang plank carrying luggage heavy with gold nuggets, the lure of the Klondike Gold Rush turned to fever. On Cordova Street in Vancouver, traders sold everything from fur coats to mechanized gold pans to would-be prospectors massing for the trip to the Yukon. In Victoria, the docks were clogged with men and women desperate for passage on any kind of vessel. The Bristol left with 600 horses jammed into stalls. If passengers weren't squeezed into rough bunks, they slept on deck, in their clothes, in driving rain. The trip north on board those vessels was only the beginning of the trials the stampeders would face to make it to the gold fields. The Klondike stampeders weren't the first gold seekers in the Yukon. In the 1870s and 80s prospectors who had looked for gold in Idaho and discovered silver in Apache country in Arizona were already there. They were restless seasoned men who carried only their tools and could live off next to nothing. It is a curious irony that unlike the men and women on boats like the Bristol whose dreams were destroyed by the depression of the 1890s, the prospectors who first struck it rich were often running from the advent of civilization. The Chilkoot Pass was the route of choice to the gold fields. From Sheep Camp, a cluster of common hovels and tents where a meal cost two days wages, the stampeders gazed up at a frail ribbon of climbers. Dressed in heavy damp clothing one stampeder carried what looked like a coffin on his back. Others, bent double, carried round duffel bags or crude wooden back Six miners looking at a pan containing $45 in gold. For thousands of stampeders the adventure was in getting to the Klondike. Those who endured scurvy and starvation often worked for others who'd struck it rich. Photo courtesy Vancouver Public Library, Special Collections. packs roped over their shoulders. The summit of the Golden Stairs may have been exhilarating but as each man lifted his load of supplies the reality would have been daunting. He would have to make this trip again and again to check his one ton of supplies through the Mounted Police Post. For the average man getting his ton of supplies up the 1,500 Golden Stairs took three months. One look at photographs of stampeders, taken during the stampede, tells the story. There's weariness on the face of a man sprawled at the entrance to his tent holding a tin cup of coffee. Quiet determination shadows another man resting comfortably by his lean-to while a man gaunt faced with uncertainty looks on as his supplies are weighed by a professional packer. But by summer, 1897, boats were arriving in Dawson in droves. On a June night when Harry Ash opened his saloon, he took in $30,000. He had the only piano in Dawson, lugged piece by piece over the Chilkoot trail. When Ash left three months 56 www.resourceworld.com August 2008natural fancy coloured diamonds www.torchriver.ca3bolero resources featuresmining newsbuying opportunities in junior mining stocks the world needs it we've got it910111213diamond exploration & mining15161 888 242 3234 1819- a field visit yukon mining exploration is booming, much more than in the rest of canada. it has increased from $22 million in 2004 to an estimated $132 million for 2008 - a 600% increase. while for this same period mining exploration in canada increased from $1.17 billion to $2.76 billion, a 235 % jump.2223ad design by25big nic, hope bcartha resources exploring wyoming uranium prospectsgive me a stage where this bull can ragesouth africa and precious metalsmolybdenum, uranium & goldmarc natural fancy coloured diamondsin 2005, only 616 carats of investment-grade natural fancy diamonds were recovered, compared with 123.29 million carats of colourless diamonds.leadership development goes deeper at goldcorp35endeavour silver intersects mexican high-grade silvercrescent gold spins off uranium assets to focus on goldmininghard creek nickel increases turnagain resourcesapollo gold plans black fox gold production41riverstone drills karma project, burkina faso, west africaglass earth gold ltd. exploring new zealandpremier gold active on several frontsride the ups & downs encana using co oiloilwww.cambridgehouse.combc's horn river gas playwhen where who how developments in alternative energyalternative energyin the newsnaikun wind energy advancing bc offshore wind project facts and newsfacts and newscoming events59directoryprofessional directorysummer doldrums for many junior miners6364