Photo above: Miners climbing the Chilkoot Trail. Photo Courtesy Library University Washington; first published in 1900, "The Klondike, a souvenir", Rufus Bucks Publisher, Seattle, 1900 Cantwell, George G. Right: Poster from the play, Heart of the Klondike. Courtesy Library of Congress.

Klondike Gold Rush

It all started on Bonanza Creek on August 16, 1896 when gold was found by George Carmack, Dawson Charlie, and a man named Skookum Jim, and when the news would reach Seattle and San Francisco one year later, the rush was on. One hundred thousand miners would flood the Canadian and American soil from Skagway and Dyea, Alaska to the Yukon River. The first arrived in Skagway on July 29, 1897; within one year that town would be Alaska's largest. They would make boom towns such as Dawson Creek in the Yukon swell from five hundred residents to forty thousand, create towns like Dyea from small trading post to boom then back to bust so fast, your head would swim from the same vertigo many miners felt when climbing the Chilkoot Trail toward the gold fields, and make fortunes of few and disappointment to many. The trip was arduous, a 33 mile walk through steep permafrost terrain from Dyea to Bennett Lake, then a boat trip of five hundred miles. There would be snowslides and less gold than most thought. A railroad was constructed from Skagway to Whitehorse, making the trail itself obsolete. By the time it was completed in 1900, much of the rush would be over. Of the thirty thousand miners who actually made it to the Klondike fields, it's said only four thousand found gold. The fields would be abandoned by 1903, and many had left even before then, back in 1899, when gold was found in Nome. Some who remained would turn to farming land around the boom towns, such as E.A. Klatt, but there was nary a fortune to be found in that.

Just how did they get there once the fever started. There were a variety of passageways from the United States and Canada. Most, however, came to Skagway and onto the Chilkoot Trail or White Pass route. Others came from Edmonton through the Edmonton Backdoor route, from Ashcroft through the Ashcroft Route, the All-American Glacier Route, or a long all-water route that took passengers all the way toward Nome, Alaska, then south down to Dawson City.

Today, most of the history, at least on the American side, focuses on the routes from Skagway or Dyea, and on the history of the towns that boomed, then busted.

Photo above: Mining camp at Bennet Lake, May 1898. Photo courtesy Woodside, H.J., 1858-1929. Library and Archives Canada. Below: Scene of the mountains surrounding Klondike Gold Rush National Historic Site. Courtesy National Park Service.

Klondike Gold Rush Now

There are three park units that focus on the Gold Rush. A small single building Visitor Center in Seattle, which includes the story of how the men began their journey north, prompted by the Gold! Gold! Gold! headline in the newspaper of July 17, 1897. One of the unique features of this small park is a partnership with the Living Voices theatre company, who puts on summer performances of the Klondike, the Last Adventure, a play in the park theatre at 2 p.m. There's limited seating and it's unkown whether this program will be offered other years.

At Skagway, the Visitor Center and over a dozen other restored buildings in the town give a wonderful vision of what life was like in this Klondike Gold Rush decade. There's even the sense of capacity with more than one million visitors coming per year to a town that dips to under one thousand in the winter. If you venture ten miles north to Dyea, you get the real sense of what bust is ... there's almost nothing there to remind you that a gateway to mining city once existed at this trailhead to Chilkoot.

Dyea, Alaska today is an abandoned oasis of forest with few remnants of a vibrant community, now part of a ranger tour from Klondike Gold Rush National Historic Site. Dawson City is more vibrant than that, but certainly not boom, containing just over a thousand citizens today.