Contact Home Links Research Center Stories Expeditions Placer Locations Safety Online Forum Gold Gallery Video_Archive Gold and Pyrites Rocks-Minerals-Gold Precious Metals Prices Getting Started Legal Issues - Mining Law GPS Units Gold_Rush! Extractive Metallurgy Arizona Ghost Towns Search Engine Cool Tools Hard Rock/Open Pit Mines De Re Metallica ATVs From the Past Recent Finds News Forex and Gold Extras Equipment Dealer Review! Old Books from the 1800's Online 1872 Mining Law Privacy Policy Gold Miner Game Guide to Buying a Claim Equipment for the Desert Most Popular Gold Detectors Ebay Auctions! USGS Data Arizona Mine and Mineral Museum GIS Topo Maps Ore Google Maps/Google Earth NASA World Wind Gold Macros Aqua Regina Newsletter Buy me a Cold One Custom Research Equipment for Sale Metal Detector Manuals My Books Straight Talk News Minerals List Type Database Tucson Gem and Mineral Show Place Names Database Gems and Minerals Gold Price
The Chilkoot Pass
A little over one hundred years ago, a grim procession of tired and dirty men (and a few courageous women) lined up in the northern frontier to climb treacherous stairs carved in ice. The steps led up the steep mountains of Alaska's Coast range, amidst glacier clad peaks, to the crest of Chilkoot pass. Each person, carrying a heavy fifty-pound pack, would repeat the climb at least forty more times. The numerous trips were required because at the top of the pass is the Canadian border, and there the Royal Canadian Mounted Police required each person entering the Yukon to posses at least one year's worth of food and other goods before they could pass into the interior. Only one thing could have convinced one hundred thousand men and women to leave the comfort and security of civilization and venture across the globe to a land hardly explored, a land as wild and forbidding as any on earth. That one thing, of course, was gold!
The miners' story actually starts a few years earlier, on the Seventeenth of August, 1896. That's when George Carmacks and his Native American brothers-in-law, Skookum Jim and Tagish Charlie, discovered a thumb sized nugget of gold while resting at Rabbit Creek, a minor tributary of the Klondike River, itself a tributary to the mighty Yukon. Claims were staked, and the news soon spread among the hundred or so prospectors scattered up and down the Yukon. Meanwhile, the United States and much of the rest of the world was locked in a deep depression. This was before the establishment of the Federal Reserve, and paper money as we know it did not exist. The currency was gold; but the supply of gold had hardly increased in the previous fifty years, while the population had quadrupled. Prices and wages had fallen, in many cases simply because there wasn't enough money available to exchange goods.
Those who had money often didn't spend it, because in those desperate times gold became more valuable every day. No word of the strike left the Yukon in 1896. It would take some time to realize how substantial the strike was, and in any case no serious mining could begin until the ground froze. Only then would it be possible to dig a dry hole in the swampy creek bottom. All through the dark, sub-arctic winter, in temperatures as low as -60 degrees, the miners dug on, suspecting to hit pay dirt from bedrock along the creek. It was a brutal time, and those miners suffered serious deprivations. It's ironic, because they were finding more gold then they could ever imagine, yet there was a tremendous shortage of food and other necessities. Men sat hungry, pockets full of gold, dreaming of the lavish dinners they would buy back home! By the spring of 1897, long rows of pay dirt filled the valley of Rabbit Creek (newly renamed 'Bonanza Creek'). When the spring thaw came, the miners dammed the creek and used the water to sluice gold from the dirt. What they found exceed their wildest expectations — when the first steamships made it up river, sixty eight miners left for civilization carrying with them over three tons of solid gold! On July 17, 1897 the prospectors and their staggering wealth reached Seattle.
Almost immediately the rush was on. Newspapers were a relatively new form of mass media out West, and they fanned the flames of hysteria, exaggerating the huge strike into mythical proportions. At the same time the new trans-continental railroads allowed an unprecedented number of people to pursue the wealth. The papers in Seattle and San Francisco, sensing the fortunes to be made, promoted themselves shamelessly as the most desirable ports of departure. Soon, hundreds of ships and boats of every description were making their way north to Skagway and the Klondike Trail. What the would-be miners didn't know would soon stun them. After all their efforts — crossing the continent by every imaginable means and enduring unbelievable hardships — they arrived in Dawson City to find all the creeks had been claimed. Some stayed to eke out a living, others left to chase other Gold Rushes in Nome and Fairbanks, but most drifted home, changed forever by their experiences.
Contributed by Mike Champion