GOLD in the Yukon!

Click on the highlighted words below to see images of the Klondike Gold Rush. Many of these pictures come from the fabulousdigital collections at the University of Washington.

In July of 1897, the SS City of Portland steamed into the Seattle Harbor, carrying 68 ordinary people who had just made it rich in the Yukon. Gold had been discovered there they year before by Lyin' George Carmack in the Klondike River. After that, it was only a matter of time (and a lot of hard work by reporters and advertisers) until Gold Miners were stampeding to The Klondike, in the Canadian Province of Yukon Territories, to find gold.

At first, people got to the Klondike River in the Yukon by a variety of ways, starting from all sorts of West Coast American and Canadian cities. But, Seattle's Chamber of Commerce wanted to make it so that everyone who went to the Klondike came through Seattle. They hired Erastus Brainerd, He sent letters to leaders in all the major cities in the U.S. and even to some foreign countries, suggesting that Seattle was the only departure point worth taking to get to the Klondike. He placed thinly veiled ads in newspapers all over the globe. We had all the supplies you needed, he insisted, and we were the closest reliable city to the gold.

As a result, people came to Seattle from all over the globe. They shopped in our stores. They stayed in our hotels (and our spare rooms and garages and closets!). When the season was right, they jammed themselves into ships to get up to the Klondike and make themselves rich.

Getting to the Klondike was not easy, though. If you survived the boat ride through Alaska's Inner Passage, you arrived in Skagway and from there had to cross the mountains. There were two routes through the mountains. The first was White Pass, where so many horses were killed on the dangerous roads that they called it "Dead Horse Pass." The other choice was Chilkoot Pass, with a staircase carved into the snow that went straight up the equivalent of twelve stories. At either pass, you were required to pass the Canadian Mounties' scales, proving you were carrying enough equipment and food (a ton was what they required) to survive a harsh Yukon Territories winter. After you had cleared one of those passes, you still had to travel up 500 miles of river to get to Dawson City, where the first gold had been discovered. Only about a quarter of those who left for The Klondike ever made it to Dawson City.

Once you had arrived in Dawson City and found a piece of land to stake a claim on, you proceeded to begin to mine. There were several obstacles to finding gold, however. First, the ground was frozen. Before you could dig in the ground, you had to thaw it. Most of the mines dug into the ground at the Klondike yielded little. But they were dangerous and difficult to work.

Most started by going through the dirt lying on the ground or under the streams running of the mountains. You sifted through the dirt, looking for gold, by using a pan filled with the dirt and water. Gravity helped you by sifting the heaviest bits (the gold) to the bottom of the pan. More elaborate sifting operations used sluices, which carried lots of dirt and lots of water. Often, there were tiny bits of gold mixed in with the dirt. That meant tedious hours spent searching piles of dirt in your cabin with a magnet to attract out iron or mercury to bond with the gold.

Life in the Klondike was no picnic. Men, women and children worked the mines, the streams and the dirt piles, hoping to get rich. Most of them did not get rich. The majority of gold found in the Klondike came out with those first prospectors on the SS Portland. But, the people of Seattle, who had mined the miners, found themselves rich with money earned from the Gold Rush in the Yukon Territories.