Introduction

William R. Morrison, University of Northern British Columbia, 2003

The Klondike (Yukon) gold rush of 1897-1899 was one of the most colourful and dramatic episodes in Canadian history and the last and greatest in a series of massive North American gold rushes that began in California in 1849.

The Klondike gold rush occurred in what is now the Yukon Territory, where miners had been looking for gold since the early 1870s. On August 16, 1896, three men - Skookum Jim and Dawson Charlie, brothers and members of the Tagish First Nation, and George Washington Carmack, an American married to their sister - found gold in Rabbit Creek, a small stream flowing into the Klondike River. They found it, they said, under rocks in the stream, "thick between the flaky slabs, like cheese sandwiches."

The deposits were incredibly rich. On Eldorado Creek, a small tributary of Rabbit Creek (subsequently renamed Bonanza Creek), gold worth more than $30 million (Can) was eventually found. Today, the same amount of gold would be worth $440 million (US), or $660 million (Can). And this was just from one of many gold-bearing creeks in the Klondike. By 1911, $140 million worth of gold (nearly $3 billion today) had been taken out of the ground.Because communications were so slow between the Klondike and what residents called "the outside," it was not until the spring of 1897 that the world learned of the discovery. Tens of thousands of people headed for the Klondike in that year, with about 40 000 of them making it north. Dawson City, founded about 20 km from the goldfields at a point where the Klondike flowed into the Yukon River, was for a time the largest city in Canada west of Winnipeg. For two wild years the Yukon was consumed with gold fever, and people from all over the world climbed the Chilkoot Pass, and sailed or floated down the Yukon river in search of wealth - which most failed to find. Meanwhile, the Northwest Mounted Police kept a watchful eye on the Territory.

Many of the photographs in this tour were taken by Tappan Adney (1868-1950), an ethnographer, artist and journalist who covered the gold rush for Harper's Weekly and wrote a book about it, The Klondike Stampede, which is still in print.