When was the klondike yukon gold rush

Many people died during the river trip. Only about 30, weary stampeders finally arrived in Dawson City. Most were gravely disappointed to learn reports of available Klondike gold were greatly exaggerated. For many, thoughts of gold and wealth had sustained them during their grueling journey. Miners who came to the Yukon in the winter had to wait months for the ground to thaw. They set up makeshift camps in Dawson and endured the harsh winter as best they could. With so many bodies crammed into a small area and sanitary facilities lacking, sickness, disease and death from infectious illness were commonplace.

Other people stayed in Dawson and attempted to mine gold—they usually came up empty-handed. Although the discovery of Yukon gold made a few lucky miners rich beyond their wildest dreams, many people made their fortunes off the backs of the miners chasing those dreams.

Even so, the adventurous stampede for gold united people of all walks of life in a common goal. The influx of people to Dawson turned it into a legitimate city. Still, it had a horrific impact on the local environment, causing massive soil erosion, water contamination, deforestation and loss of native wildlife, among other things.

The gold rush also severely impacted the Native people. While some made money off miners by working as guides and helping haul supplies, they also fell victim to new diseases such as smallpox and the introduction of casual drinking and drunkenness. The population of some Natives such as the Han declined rapidly as their hunting and fishing grounds were ruined.

The Klondike Gold Rush slowed by the end of as word got out there was little gold left to be had. Countless miners had already left Yukon Territory penniless, leaving gold-mining cities such as Dawson and Skagway in rapid decline. Impact of the Klondike Gold Rush. In Dawson quickly grew as thirty thousand some say fifty pick-and-shovel miners, prospectors, storekeepers, saloon keepers, bankers, gamblers, prostitutes and adventure seekers took over the town site.

Most arrived to discover the good ground had been staked in the previous two years. Many simply booked passage home but others stayed and made fortunes through other endeavors. Money was not an issue in Dawson, as gold was in abundance, and businesses that catered to the gold-strapped miners thrived. Overnight millionaires roamed the streets seeking ways to spend their riches. The best food, drink and clothing were all available for purchase, at a high cost.

As Dawson grew, so did the fortunes of those who made the right business decisions. While most men devoted their energies to working a single claim, Alex McDonald, a Nova Scotian whose shy, awkward manner belied a canny business sense, bought up the claims of discouraged miners and hired others to work them for him. Next, she opened a lunch counter and, with the profits, hired men to build cabins that sold before the roofs were on.

A successful roadhouse near the gold fields followed. But that was not ambitious enough for Mulroney. She went on to build the grandest hotel in the Klondike—the Fairview, which boasted brass beds, fine china, cut-glass chandeliers and chamber music in the lobby, even electricity generated by the engine of a yacht anchored in the harbor. For a brief time, Belinda and Big Alex became partners in a scheme to salvage the cargo of a wrecked steamboat.

Crafty Alex got to the wreck first and made off with the most valuable supplies, leaving Belinda only some cases of whiskey and a large inventory of rubber boots. Mulroney went on to become the only women manager of a mining company, the largest in Yukon Territory. But life in Dawson had become too tame for the Queen of the Klondike. When news came of a bigger gold strike in Nome, Alaska, she headed down the Yukon to conquer this new region. So did most of the population of Dawson.

During one week in August , 8, people deserted Dawson for the beaches of Nome. Just three years after the discovery of gold on Bonanza Creek, the great gold rush was over. Of the 40, people who reached Dawson, only about 15, actually had the grit to work the gold fields; of those, about a quarter actually unearthed any gold, and only a handful of them became wealthy.

Of that handful, a very few managed to hang onto their wealth. Most gambled or drank it away. Big Alex McDonald became obsessed with buying up unwanted claims and eventually found himself stuck with a lot of worthless real estate. He died broke and alone. Belinda Mulroney married a fake French count and lived in style for several years, until her husband invested her money in a European steamship company—on the eve of World War I, which put an end to merchant shipping. She, too, died nearly penniless.

Tagish Charley sold his claim, spent the proceeds lavishly, and died an alcoholic. Ironically, George Carmack, who had never had much use for money, was one of the few miners who managed to keep and even increase his fortune by investing in businesses and real estate. He was still a wealthy man when he died in Vancouver, British Columbia, in Although the heyday of the individual prospector ended with the rush to Alaska in , a more subtle and more profitable exploitation of the Klondike began.

The new railroad line from Skagway was completed that summer, opening up the area to the big mining companies with their mechanical dredges, which did the work of hundreds of miners. They continued to mine the land the gold seekers had abandoned for another 50 years, and unearthed millions more in gold. Once again, the men of business had triumphed. This article was written by Gary L. Blackwood and originally appeared in the August issue of Wild West.

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Such is the enduring power of the story—a dog named Buck is kidnapped from California and thrust into the frozen wilds of the Far North—that this is the ninth time that the novel has been adapted for film or television. In summertime, the advantages of hour daylight are offset by horrendous swarms of mosquitoes, among other challenges. The best story that Jack London never wrote, at least not in full, was a factual account of his time in the Far North.

But it can be pieced together from letters and diary entries, a handful of nonfiction articles that he sold to magazines, the remembrances of other people, and guesswork from his fiction. And you can still see his cabin and his old stomping grounds in Dawson City, the former capital of the Klondike gold rush, where my plane lands with a crunch on an unpaved runway. He grew up poor in a broken home, and at age 15, he joined a gang of prison-hardened oyster pirates who risked their lives in small boats at night, trying to outwit the armed guards who watched over the oyster beds in San Francisco Bay.

Jack soon became an expert sailor, and an accomplished drinker and brawler in the waterfront saloons. At 17, he sailed across the Pacific and up to the Bering Sea on a seal-hunting ship. He also worked hour days in a Dickensian canning factory in Oakland, hoboed from coast to coast on freight trains, learned to beg and steal, spent 30 days for vagrancy in a vicious New York jail, and became a confirmed socialist—all by the age of In July , he had just quit a job in a laundry when the steamship Portland docked in Seattle and the Excelsior in San Francisco.

Miners came down the gangplanks hefting three tons of gold from far northwest Canada. Newspapers and telephones spread the word almost instantly, and sparked one of the biggest, wildest, most delusional gold rushes in history.

Experienced miners and prospectors were joined by great hordes of factory workers, store clerks, salesmen, bureaucrats, police officers and other city dwellers, most of them completely inexperienced in the wilderness and clueless about the Far North.

Jack, a voracious reader with little schooling and vague ambitions to become a writer, threw in volumes of Milton and Darwin and a few other books. Thompson, who kept a terse, deadpan diary of the trip. Disembarking at Juneau, they hired Tlingit canoes and paddled up a mile fjord to Dyea, where the infamous Chilkoot Trail began. To reach the Klondike, they first needed to get themselves and all their supplies over the Alaskan coastal range, on a trail too steep for horses or pack mules.

They sent 3, pounds of supplies to the summit with Tlingit packers, at 22 cents per pound, and carried the rest on their backs. Several sources state that Jack hauled about a ton, which was average. A strong man who could backpack pounds had to make 20 round trips, walking a total of 40 miles, in order to move that burden one mile.

The going was rough and muddy, with patches of quagmire. They had to cross and recross a raging river on felled trees. Men who fell were usually drowned by the weight of their packs; they were buried in shallow graves beside the trail.

Nine miles out from Dyea, Cap Shepard was in so much pain from his rheumatism that he said goodbye to the other men and turned back down the trail. The others pressed on through heavy rain and deepening mud. They picked up an elderly gold-seeker named Martin Tarwater, who offered to cook for them. It was the last piece of level ground before the dreaded ascent to Chilkoot Pass. A photographer, Frank LaRoche, was there documenting the gold rush for the U. Geological Survey. He gathered up 24 men and photographed them standing in the mud with a glacier in the background.

They all look stern and solemn, including young Jack London with a tousled forelock protruding from his cap and a hand shoved into his pocket. Yet it fails to convey a key fact: Most of the men had to climb that terrible slope 20 or 30 times. The pass marked the boundary between Alaska, an American possession, and the Yukon Territory. Canadian authorities required each individual to bring enough food to last a year, or about 1, pounds.

And that load doubled with mining and camping gear. Many men looked up at the steepness of the trail, calculated how many trips it would take and turned back toward Dyea, dumping the detestable burden of their supplies.