I supposed it bears some explaining that the photo of the people lined up ascending the snow field are not in fact waiting to get the last popsicle at the 7-11. Nor is it a run on the Bank of Snowdrift, Alaska. The famous picture is of the miners ascending the Chilkoot pass on the trail into the Klondike in 1896. They carried 70 pounds or more up the pass on their backs, about 30 trips in all, as they were required by the RCMP to have at least a ton of supplies to enter the Klondike. The line moved at one step a minute, and many dropped out, having to go all the way back down to the bottom to start over, if they could not make the next step. It is far steeper than it looks in the photo. If you fell, you slid quite a ways. Later a railroad was built, the White Pass and Yukon, in order to access the gold fields. The Klondike rush was instrumental in establishing the Yukon-Alaska border, which was arbitrarily drawn by the RCMP when they mounted a machine gun at a pass where they could handle immigrants into the fields. (The easiest way to get to Dawson City was by boat up the Yukon River from Alaska some 1800 miles, but it took a while.) Most of the miners who accessed the fields where Americans fresh from a depression in the Pacific Northwest, and they had established their own government and claim system long before Ottawa got involved.
They had to make their own boats to get down Lake Bennet and the Yukon River, and there on the shore they whipsawed timber or rip sawed the logs by hand with vertical reciprocating saws to make planks.
The gold rush was not the first finding of gold in Alaska or the Yukon. Mining of placer ground had been going on in BC nearby and in the Yukon to the south since 1870. It was simply a better find. The discovery at Dawson was initially known to be very rich by the pan. That fact quickly became important to the placer miner who was knowledgeable of the importance of even a single discovery of coarse gold. The cockroach theory hit home fast. Gold is like cockroaches. You find one biggie gold thing, and sure as shootin' there are more around. This fact about the spread of the discovery is overlooked by many historians, as it is hard to see that it would not appear to be a fallacy to rush into an area where only one rich discovery had been made. How again did everyone hear so fast how rich it was so soon? The gold mining grapevine was operating fairly efficiently. It is also instructive to realize that only a short distance away from where Skookum Jim and his partner made their strike there was an experience placer miner prospecting and he did not find a thing! There is a lot more skill and luck to figuring the stuff out than at first it may seem.
Gold miners have become blase of late. The find in Alaska of the Pogo deposit, by Teck corporation has not stirred much excitement. The Pogo is in the Tintina Trench, which runs right into the Yukon, and is known to host about 70 gold deposits or various types and sizes. The Pogo itself is the richest large deposit found in North America in the last 20 or so years since the Hemlo discovery in Ontario. It is 20 feet wide and runs a continuous half ounce per ton. That is rich and wide. Yet the resulting Alaska "rush" was a yawner, coming as it has on the heels of the great gold price and mining meltdown in Canada, which many mining people say is the worst contraction of the industry in living memory.
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