The Klondike(by Denis)

Probably the most famous gold rush ever. Not in the quantity of gold discovered, but in the number of Stampeders that went and the interest it raised around the world. There's even a former major of Hamilton, ON who died in the Yukon as a gold rusher.
The Klondike, as it became known, was so named for the river connecting to the Yukon river at Dawson City and having as one of its tributaries, Rabbit creek, the discovery creek, later changed to Bonanza creek; all a few miles south of town. George Carmack, is co-credited with the discovery, along with Henderson who also struck gold on the neighbouring "Gold Bottom" creek. and that's another story... read Pierre Burton's "Klondike"... and Pierre also originates from Dawson City who's father was a Klondiker. Gold found in 1896 arrived in San Francisco and Seattle in the Spring of 1997 "by the ton" and this started a gold rush the likes never since seen.

 

Gold seekers came by different ways... The interior of BC or Alberta and places all along the Pacific coast. None of the entry points were to dramatize this gold rush as did the famous picture taken on the Chilkoot Pass in the winter of 1897-98. A small town next to Skagway called Dyea led the way up this famous trail. Skagway had it's own trail, called the White Pass, which was replaced two years later by a narrow gauge railroad. This railroad killed the Chilkoot Pass and the town of Dyea that same year. Skagway survived and this very same railway still runs today for tourists, and is known as the White Pass Railroad which links Skagway to Whitehorse.
Each Stampeder was required, by the Northwest Mounted police (now RCMP), to haul in ONE TON of goods, so as to assure he could survive on his own for a year. A man hauled an average 50 lbs up the Chilkoot pass, which meant an average 40 trips to haul his TON, which took from 45 to 90 days for many simply to climb the Chilkoot pass. This he hauled to lake Bennett (near Whitehorse) where he built a boat, scow or raft to navigate the Yukon into Dawson and the Klondike. A few years later, the large sternwheelers from Whitehorse along with the White Pass Railroad, made the trip a 6 day journey, instead of a 90 day trek, if things went well!

Skagway was a lawless town controlled by a scoundrel named "Soapy Smith". He mined the pockets of the Klondikers . His "parlour" is still downtown and, it appears, in the same condition it was the day he was shot. It's fenced off and in the process of finally being sold, to be included as a historical point of interest. Skagway is being kept to look period as you can see from the following photographs. Today, large cruise ships land thousand of eager passengers daily in Skagway, making it a very "tourist" oriented town.

 


Skagway Spring 1897. A few months old!

Skagway 1899.

Skagway today.

 


The famous Chilkoot Pass picture, Winter of 1897-98. Men lined up the pass, slid down (on right) and started over the next day.

This is what a ton of supplies looks like. It not just grub, but includes stove, axe, picks, clothing, nails, tent...etc.

"Soapy Smith's Parlor", located just off the main street in Skagway is fenced and reported to not have changed much since the day he was shot.
 

From Whitehorse, the Klondikers had to navigate the waterways of the Yukon river. Near Whitehorse was the mile canyon, a fast water / rapid channel and further on the fingers rapids. Many lost their lives and many more lost their outfits ( the one ton of food and gear was called an outfit) especially loaded onto a crude boat or raft built over the Winter of 1896-97 at lake Labarge.
 


This was the first hurdle... Mile canyon. Today it's calmer as the City of Whitehorse has dammed up the river just east of Town for a hydro electric power generating station.
 


 

 

 

 


This is a picture of one of the fingers rapids. Here you see a stern paddle wheeler navigating upstream one of the rapids. What they did was tie a steel cable at both extremes of the rapids and winched the boat through the rapids slowly with a steam deck winch.


The next picture is of a fully restored paddle wheeler, the "Klondike" which is a National Park museum at Whitehorse. This vessel would only draw 4-1/2 feet of water! ---->

 



 

 

 

Dawson City

The discovery of gold by Carmacks et.al. was found on gravel bars and gravel shoals in the Bonanza creek, Gold Bottom Creek and the Eldorado Creek. This gold was panned and it was so rich that by the Winter of 1996 quite a few miners were rich beyond their dreams. They sailed the Spring of 1997 out to Seattle and San Francisco with their "tons" of gold and this is what started the gold rush.

Gold Placer mining started with panning gold from the creeks by local miners from the Forty Mile region, Eagle and Circle downstream from Dawson. Dawson started as a town early in 1996. These local miners soon had all the good ground "claimed" and by Winter of 1996 most easily panned golds were depleted from the creek beds. By the time the Klondikers arrived, all the good claims were gone and all that was left was working for the claim owners.
Dawson City was flooded with over 30,000 Klondikers by 1997-98. It is said 100,000 Klondikers left home for the Klondike. The first to arrive were those who climbed the Chilkoot Pass and built boats to float down Yukon to Dawson at Spring break-up. The Yukon river headwaters are actually only about 40 miles from Skagway... over a mountain though! Those that followed were then brought in by paddle wheelers from their ships at the mouth of the Yukon at the Arctic ocean.

Gold being depleted from the sand bars forced the miners to go underground where they found the ancient riverbeds of the Bonanza, Eldorado, Gold Bottom and Hunker creeks as well as the Klondike river itself. Here through millions of years of erosion, the gold was settled on the creek/river beds, but, it was locked in the permafrost and that's where the work started. Through innovative methods of building small fires, these miners melted the permafrost to the old creek beds and bedrock, them following the small incline along the streambed headed towards the deepest part of these to extract the alluvial gold which had concentrated there... and all done by back breaking hand. They would pile this muck up above and in the Spring, they would sluice they muck to separate it from the gold. This method of mining lasted for a few years and after depleting the recovery of the "concentrated" gold from river / creek beds, it was no longer economical nor feasible to continue extraction of the less concentrated areas.

This necessitate a new mining method called "dredging". Individual mining claims were consolidated into huge tracks of land. A few large well funded companies were created and dredges were built to mine the remaining gold. It was mass production at its best. Dredges would extract all the soil from one side of the river bank to the other, all the way down to and include a foot or two of bedrock (which is fragmented and soft around here) and sluice the whole works so as to separate the gold from the ore and leave behind a legacy of miles and miles of these telltale tailings... piles of gravel which look like bulbous worms all over the landscape. This method of mining lasted well into the 1950's.

Today, mining is done by mostly family operations called Placer miners. Placer from the word "placed gold from somewhere else". There are between 90 and 110 placer operations at any one time along the same rivers as was being mined 100 years ago. The Bonanza (our trailer park is located at the mouth of the Bonanza creek and the Klondike rivers, 1 mile east of the Yukon and Klondike rivers' confluence at Dawson), the Hunker, the Eldorado and the dozens of tributaries to these rivers/creeks plus a few more in the area. But most of the gold from the Klondike is in the Gold belt surrounded by the Bonanza and Hunker creek regions... all about 15 kms apart.
Placer operations range from the "one man show", many of these we saw along the Bonanza creek, to small 2-5 man operations using some heavy equipment and hydraulics (fire type water hoses) to fairly large operations similar to the one we were fortunate enough to visit, involving earth moved by D9 Cats, articulating trucks, all processed by huge sluicing machines... literally millions of dollars of equipment. And still these only run during the six months of non-winter season as it really does get to 50-60 below on a steady basis around here in the Winter time.


View of Bonanza creek and the mining operations from the "dome" above Dawson City. At bottom of the page is the Klondike river and our campground right at the confluence of Klondike and Bonanza. You can literally see for miles up this creek at the mine tailings.

View of Dawson City and the Yukon river looking south - upstream. The Klondike river is just past the city in the bend going left and the picture to the left is very close to being a match.

 


Ah... The joys of panning. Here I am panning the Bonanza creek at claim 6 above Carmacks discovery claim. Claims were 500 feet long along the stream, went bank to bank, and were then numbered from the discovery claim as claim #2 below or above (meaning below or above stream). This is a back-braking job.

Mining soon moved to shaft and tunnel. This is a diorama of what shaft mining was like as they built small fires to melt a half foot of permafrost at a time, so they could reach pay dirt and bedrock. The gold was found, concentrated along the bottom of ancient river beds, of which the Bonanza was one. Small fires were built to melt off more permafrost so as to move forward along the creek bed to your claim boundary line.

As the muck was being removed from the shaft and the drifts, it was piled up above so that in the Spring, it would thaw and could be sluiced so as to separate gold from muck. This operation was called the "cleanup". This diorama displays an example of such an operation. The self unloading bucket shown above was a later invention which greatly eased this operation. By the way, these great dioramas were taken at the Fairbanks Heritage Village museum and were done there by an artist whose name was not credited... but they were the best I had ever seen.
 

The next evolutionary step in mining the Klondike was by the use of dredges. This is dredge #4 of the Canadian Klondyke Mining Co. Ltd. A corporation started by a man named Joe Boyle of
Toronto. This 200 ton behemoth, has of wooden hull type and operated till the mid 1950's. It paid itself off in the first few months of operation!

Basically, these machine had a bucket chain at the front which scooped all the gravel including 2 feet of bedrock and passed the whole works through screens. Anything 1.5 inches or less was sluiced to separate the gold.


Today's' Placer miners' operations range from small single man operations like the one above which uses a small shaker / sluice combination to huge shaker/drum screen sluicing machines like the one to the right, which require huge equipment to move the thousands of yards of gravel needed to keep such machines operating at capacity.

Fact is, all of today's operations still basically run on the same principle of that of the old prospector's gold pan.... they move gravel with the use of water, and because gold weighs 19 times more than water and 4 times that of gravel, it will remain behind when agitated over such things as riffles, bedrock, angle iron, or just the circular swishing of water in a gold pan...



 


Modern machines such as this use shaker screens or screen drums to separate the gravel from the rocks. Water usage is in the thousands of gallons per minute! The thought here is... the more gravel you process, the more money you make and we hope Paul is doing good.

The bottom line is GOLD!...This is what it's all about.
 And this is Guy, the owner's son, and you can see why he's smiling, right! As a matter of fact, Guy is always smiling and I think it's because he's got the greatest job in the world!

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