Other Rushes · 1896–1899
The Klondike Gold Rush
August 1896: gold is found on Bonanza Creek in the Yukon
One hundred thousand people set out for the frozen Yukon; barely a third made it. The Klondike was the last great romantic gold rush.
Half a century after California, gold fever struck one last time on a grand, romantic scale, in one of the coldest and most remote corners of North America. The Klondike Gold Rush drew a stampede of would-be miners into Canada's Yukon, and most of them never even reached the gold.
The discovery on Bonanza Creek
On August 16, 1896, a party led by George Carmack and two Tagish First Nations men, Skookum Jim (Keish) and Dawson Charlie, found rich gold on a Klondike tributary then called Rabbit Creek, soon renamed Bonanza Creek. It is unclear who spotted it first; the group agreed to record Carmack as the discoverer, fearing officials would not honor a claim credited to an Indigenous man.
The stampede
News took almost a year to reach the outside world. When steamships carrying Klondike gold docked in Seattle and San Francisco in July 1897, they set off a frenzy. An estimated 100,000 people set out for the Yukon. Only about 30,000 to 40,000 actually made it, and far fewer ever mined.
The Chilkoot Pass and the "ton of goods"
The journey was the real story. Most stampeders sailed to Skagway, Alaska, then climbed the brutal Chilkoot Pass into Canada, a staircase of ice so steep that photographs of the endless human chain became the defining image of the rush.
To prevent mass starvation in the remote interior, Canada's North-West Mounted Police required every person to bring roughly a ton of supplies, a year's food and equipment, before crossing the border. Since no one could carry that at once, prospectors relayed their goods up the pass in dozens of exhausting trips.
The peculiar characteristic of the Klondike stampede was that the journey to the goldfields was harder than the mining that awaited.
Dawson City
At the confluence of the Klondike and Yukon rivers, Dawson City exploded into a boomtown of perhaps 40,000 people at its 1898 peak, briefly one of the largest cities in western Canada, complete with saloons, dance halls and wild inflation. Like every rush town, it emptied almost as fast as it filled once the accessible gold was claimed and news of a strike in Nome, Alaska, pulled the crowd away in 1899.
Most Klondikers went home with nothing but a story. But the rush opened the Yukon, and its images, the ships, the passes, the endless line of climbers, remain the popular picture of what a gold rush looked like.
