The Klondike(by Denis)

Denis was so impressed about the history of the Klondike, especially after reading the book on it by Pierre Berton.  Klondike panning real gold and of course a touch of gold fever, he had to write on it... so here goes... 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. Pierre Bertonwrote the book  "Klondike"... and Pierre originates from Dawson City, and his 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 (south of 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 still mining "Klondikers!".

Skagway Spring 1897. A few months old!	Skagway 1899, 2 years old!.	Skagway today, 110 years old!.
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's 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.

The side 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 1896 quite a few miners were rich beyond their dreams. They sailed the Spring of 1897 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 of the Forty Mile region, near Eagle, AK (see Alaska web page) and the town of Circle downstream from Dawson. Dawson only started as a town early in 1896. The local miners soon had all the good ground "claimed" and by Winter of 1896 most miners panned and depleted the gold from the easily accessible creeks. 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 1897-98. 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 the 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 easily accessible 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 bottom of the Klondike river itself. Here, through millions of years of erosion, the gold was settled on the creek/river bed rock, 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, inches at a time. They then followed the incline of the ancient streambed and headed towards the deepest part to extract the alluvial gold which had concentrated there... and all done by back breaking hand. They would haul to surface this muck and pile it for Spring, when they would sluice the muck to separate it from the gold. This method of mining lasted for a few years and after depleting the "concentrated" gold from the ancient river/creek beds, it was no longer economical nor feasible to continue extraction of the less concentrated areas. But, many times, it was reported that the gold was so concentrated when mining the bottom of the creek beds, that a pan of gold would fill a bag!

Depletion, necessitated 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 and include a foot or two of bedrock (which is fragmented and soft around here), then sluice the whole works on board, 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 and one-two man operations called Placer miners. Placer word derived from "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. There's the Bonanza creek (our trailer park is located at the mouth of the Bonanza creek and the Klondike rivers, 1 mile east of the Yukon river at Dawson), the Hunker, the Eldorado and the dozens of tributaries (called pups) 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", to small operations using heavy equipment and hydraulics (fire type water hoses) on up to fairly large operations involving earth moved by D9 Cats, articulating trucks, and all processed by simple to huge sluicing machines... literally millions of dollars of equipment. And still these only run during the 5-6 months of non-winter season as it really does get to 50-60 below on a steady basis around here in the Winter time.

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.

Fact is, all of today's operations still basically run on the same principle of that 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...



 

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