Gold on the Klondike 9. Crazy gold rush. Hundreds of miles to the dream

Original taken from amarok_man in Klondike Gold Miners. Photo

In September 1896, the most famous California Gold Rush in history began. She proved that to make money from gold, you don’t have to mine it—it’s enough to know how to lure nuggets out of miners’ pockets.

On September 5, 1896, the Alaska Commercial Company's steamship Alice sailed to the mouth of the Klondike River. On board were hundreds of miners from nearby villages. They were following in the footsteps of George Carmack. Three weeks earlier, he had brought from these places a hard drive case completely filled with gold sand. Thus began the most famous and large-scale gold rush in history.

The “discovery” of the Klondike was not accidental. The prospectors approached him slowly but surely. Gold had been found on the Pacific coast of Canada before 1896. Missionaries and fur traders were the first to notice the precious metal in local rivers back in the 40s of the 19th century, but remained silent. The first - out of fear that the influx of prospectors would shake the moral foundations of the Indians who had just converted to the new faith. The second - because they considered the fur trade a more profitable business than gold mining.

But still, in the early 50s, the first prospectors appeared on the Fraser River in British Columbia. There were few of them: the mines here were not very rich, and besides, the gold rush in California was in full swing. But as California's reserves dwindled, the migration of miners intensified. With varying success, they explored the beds of Canadian rivers, gradually moving north to the border with Alaska.

Even the first cities of prospectors appeared. First, Forty Mile is a settlement on the bend of the river of the same name and the Yukon. When gold was found just to the north, many miners moved to the new community of Circle City. They mined little gold here, but still managed to organize their life. For just over a thousand residents, two theaters, a music salon and 28 saloons were opened here - that is, a saloon for about every 40 people (!).

Wave of prospectors .

George Carmack disrupted the quiet life of British Columbia miners. He found such placers of gold that the residents of Circle City had never dreamed of. When news of new deposits reached this city in November 1896, it was empty within just a few days. Everyone went to the future capital of the gold rush - Dawson.

I must admit, they were lucky. Winter was beginning, there was no connection with the “mainland”, no one could come to the Yukon or leave here, and wide circles of the American public learned about new gold deposits only in the summer of next year. A thousand miners were given the opportunity to pan for gold in the most fertile areas for six months, without worrying about competitors.

The real gold rush began only after, at the beginning of summer, these prospectors brought their gold to " mainland" On July 14, 1897, the steamship Excelsior entered the port of San Francisco. He was on a flight from Alaska. Each passenger had gold dust worth from $5 thousand to $130 thousand in his hands. To understand what this means in modern prices, feel free to multiply by 20. It turns out that the poorest passenger on the flight had $100 thousand in his pocket.

And three days later, on July 17, another ship, the Portland, entered the port of Seattle. On board there were 68 passengers and a ton of gold belonging to them. “The time has come to go to the Klondike country, where gold is as abundant as sawdust,” the city newspaper, The Seattle Daily Times, wrote the next day.

And it came chain reaction. Dozens of ships headed north. By September, 10 thousand people left Seattle for Alaska. Winter put a pause on the fever, but the following spring more than 100 thousand fortune hunters took the same route.

Hundreds of miles to the dream

Next is a crossing across Lake Lindeman and 800 km of rafting along the Yukon River strewn with rapids to the Klondike. Of the more than one hundred thousand who sailed to Alaska, no more than 30 thousand reached the gold mines. At best, a few hundred of them made a fortune from the mined gold.

But there were almost more people who actually made money from the miners. They didn't pan for gold. They understood earlier than others that they could make money not by digging into the permafrost in search of nuggets, but by luring these nuggets out of the pockets of miners for scarce services.

The power of premonition .

A native of New York, John Ladue, due to his inexperience, also tried the profession of a prospector. Tried panning for gold in North Dakota. When the idea turned out to be a failure, he became a sales agent. In 1890 he came to British Columbia as an employee of the Alaska Commercial Company. To avoid competition, he opened a trading post (in other words, a small store with a warehouse) in the middle of nowhere - at the mouth of the Sixty Mile River. The nearest prospectors worked 25 miles from his store - on the Forty Mile River. But Ladue lured the miners by not selling, but by distributing equipment for free in exchange for a promise to pay for it as soon as the client found gold.

When the first news came from the Klondike, John was one of those who was closest to the mines found by Carmack. He arrived there with the first prospectors. But unlike them, he staked out not gold-bearing areas, but 70 hectares that no one needed at the mouth of the Klondike River. He brought food supplies there, built a house, warehouses and a sawmill. This is how he became the founder of the village of Dawson. When the gold rush hit the area, everything that was built in Dawson was built on Ladue land. A few years later he returned to New York a millionaire

In terms of prudence, only one other person can compare with John LaDue. Retired captain William Moore bought land in Skagway Bay ten years before the start of the gold rush. A former sailor, he noticed that this is the only place for a hundred miles where the fairway allows large ships to approach the shore. For ten years, he and his son slowly built a pier, warehouses and a sawmill in Skagway. Moore's calculation was simple: prospectors would explore all the rivers to the south, which means that someday they would reach these places.

The forecast was fully justified: during the two years of the Klondike fever, more than 100 thousand people passed through Skagway, and the farm of William Moore turned into a large city for those times.

2000 rubles for scrambled eggs.

But still, the biggest fortunes from the Klondike fever were made by those who understood the mechanisms of trade. At the height of the gold boom, commodity prices in Dawson and other mining towns were not just high, they were outrageously high.

Let's start with what it took to get to Dawson. At the height of the fever, Indian porters charged $15,000 at current prices to carry a ton of cargo across the Chinkuk Pass.

For clarity, we will continue to operate with today's prices. A boat that would allow you to raft 800 miles across the Yukon could not be bought for less than $10,000. The future writer Jack London, who found himself in the Yukon in the summer of 1897, made money by helping to guide the boats of inexperienced prospectors through the river hummocks. He charged a lot for the boat - about $600. And over the summer he earned $75 thousand. For comparison: before leaving for the Klondike, London worked at a jute factory and received $2.5 per hour of work. That's $170 a week and 2300 for three months. That is, thirty times less than on the hummocks of the Yukon.

Economics of Jack London.

In general, from the stories of Jack London you can easily study the economy of the Klondike. The heroes of his autobiographical stories sell elk meat for $140 per 1 kg, buy beans for $80. When the Kid - the hero of the book "Smoke and the Kid" - manages to get cheap sugar, he is surprised at the seller's pliability: "The weirdo asked for only $3 a pound." And this is no less than $150 per 1 kg. $83 per kg Smoke and Baby pay for spoiled brisket to feed their dogs. Eggs cost from $20 to $65 each in Dawson and other mining towns. The price of a kilogram of flour in the most remote villages reaches $450! In the story “Race,” the Kid buys a second-hand suit for almost $4,000, which doesn’t even fit him in size, and justifies himself to Smoke: “It seemed to me that it was remarkably cheap.”

Dawson also had its own “queen” - Belinda Mulroney. She started out speculating in clothing and then moved into whiskey and shoes, selling rubber boots for $2,500 a pair. And she also became a millionaire.

Moreover, these people were not pioneers. Enterprising people have known for a long time how to make money on the gold rush. A few decades earlier, when the fever swept through California, the first millionaire was not some guy with a pick and shovel, but the one who sold shovels to guys. His name was Samuel Brennan, and he found himself in right time in the right place.

Mormon Alcoholic .

Bigamist, adventurer, alcoholic and head of the San Francisco Mormon community, Samuel Brennan, among other things, “famous” for the phrase: “I will give you the Lord’s money when you send me a receipt signed by him.”

And it was like this. During the height of the California Gold Rush, many Mormons came there. Religion obliged them to give God a tenth of what they earned. Mormon miners brought tithes of the gold they mined to Samuel. And he was obliged to transport him to Utah, to the headquarters of the church. But no parcels of gold sand arrived from California. When it was hinted to Brennan from Utah that it was wrong to embezzle God’s money, he responded with that very phrase about the receipt.

Drunk in literally With the wealth scattered under their feet, the prospectors went on a wild rampage, trying to outdo each other with their unbridledness

By then, Brennan could afford such impudence. He no longer depended on anyone. And all because one day the discoverer of California gold, James Marshall, came to him - then still a modest shepherd and owner of a small store. He had found gold a couple of months earlier, but kept his secret. However, left without money, he somehow paid in Brennan’s store with gold dust. And to prove that the gold was real, he admitted where he found it.

The pastor used the situation to his advantage. Over the next few days, he bought all the shovels and other household utensils around the area. And then he published a note in his newspaper that gold had been found on the American River. With this note, the California gold rush began. Brennan's calculation was simple: his store is the only one on the road from San Francisco to the mines, which means that the miners will pay as much as he asks. And the calculation worked: very soon he was selling for $500 the shovels he had bought for $10. For a sieve that cost him $4, he asked $200. In three months, Samuel earned his first million. A few more years passed, and he was no longer just the richest man in California, but also one of the “pillars of society,” the owner of newspapers, banks and steamships, and a California state senator.

However, Samuel's end was sad. Apparently, the Lord, embarrassed to send him a tithe receipt, found another way to remind him of justice. Several risky financial transactions and a scandalous divorce bankrupted California's first millionaire. He met his old age by sleeping in the back rooms of local saloons.

Prospectors-spenders

The writer Bret Harte, who became famous for describing the life of prospectors, talks about a man who, having sold his land at a profit, loses half a million dollars in a San Francisco casino in one day. Witnesses of the gold rush in Australia in their memoirs shared memories of characters who lit cigarettes in local pubs tubes of five-pound notes (that’s like a five-thousandth in our reality) and paid the cab drivers with handfuls of gold dust.

This scourge did not spare Russia either. The gold rush was not as spontaneous as in America, production was controlled by the state, but still the income of even hired workers in the gold mines of the Urals and Amur was tens of times more than that of an ordinary peasant. “Literally intoxicated by the wealth scattered under their feet, the prospectors embarked on a wild revelry, trying to outdo each other with their unbridledness,” we read from Mamin-Sibiryak in “ Siberian stories from the life of the mine people." “During the usual half-hour afternoon tea, pounds of very expensive tea and huge loaves of sugar were thrown into a cauldron of boiling water. Expensive imported clothes and shoes were worn for one day, after which everything was thrown away and replaced with new ones. A simple peasant bid 4 thousand rubles. at stake and, without any embarrassment, lost this amount, which in reality represented for him a whole wealth, with which he could perfectly furnish his Agriculture and live comfortably all your life.”

Feverish economy

In his essay “The Economy of the Klondike,” Jack London sums up the gold rush. In two years, 125 thousand people came to the Klondike. Each one carried at least $600. This is $75 million. Jack London also estimates the work of the miners. He sets the "fair price" of a day's work at $4 per day. The result is this: to earn $22 million (and this is the entire price of gold mined in the Klondike), prospectors spent 225 million. Most of these millions ended up in the pockets of enterprising people who knew and understood how to make money from human passions.

Photos of the Klondike and its inhabitants:

Gold prospectors and miners climb the trail over Chilkoot Pass during the Klondike Gold Rush

Dawson was the center of gold mining in Alaska.

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The authors used the ambience of the Gold Rush to decorate this, in fact, ordinary classic “Scarf.” Klondike implies a cumulative result, this word suits this game perfectly. Gold, gold and more gold. The better you are at playing solitaire, the more gold you will be able to earn.

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Full screen

A game in the categories Solitaire, Cards, Logic available for free, around the clock and without registering with a description in Russian on Min2Win. If the capabilities of the electronic desktop allow, you can expand the plot of THE GOLDEN KLONDIKE in full screen and enhance the effect of completing the scenarios. Many things really make sense to consider in more detail.

Before the Klondike, humanity was repeatedly gripped by gold rushes. People went to Australia, then to California, then to snow-covered Siberia to dig up this precious metal. However, what happened in Alaska is often called the last great gold rush - there was no more excitement on this scale. This whole story began in August 1896, when Scotsman Robert Henderson landed on Canadian soil. It was he who was to find gold in the Klondike. Moreover, a lot of gold.

Robert Henderson didn't initially find what he was looking for here. However, he did not give up and continued his search away from King Solomon's Dome Mountain. Many streams flowed from it, one of which was called Rabbit Creek. After washing the rock, Henderson was surprised at how much gold was left on the fleecy sluice. Since it was customary among gold miners to share all information, the news about the found deposit instantly spread around everyone local residents. Soon George Carmack and Jim Skookum's Indian came out to "hunt". They were the first to set up a site on Bonanza Creek and quickly broke Henderson's record. Then people from all over the American continent began to join them.

Gold miners and miners. (wikipedia.org)

But the real explosion occurred in the summer of 1897. Before this, it was not possible to remove gold from the Klondike. And when half a million dollars worth of pure metal was loaded onto the Excelsior ship and brought to coastal cities, every American citizen knew about it. Moreover, the next cargo of the Portland ship, more than a ton of metal, only whetted the appetite: all Seattle newspapers trumpeted about it. And it is not surprising that thousands, no, tens of thousands of people poured into the Klondike and Yukon.

However, the road to the deposits was extremely difficult. There were three main routes: the shortest, most popular, and at the same time the most dangerous, ran along the sea, and then through the Chilkoot Pass; the second is upstream the Yukon River; the third - along Canadian rivers and the city of Edmonton. At least 20 thousand people crossed Chilkoot Pass when the gold rush peaked in 1897-1899. Winter in those parts is very cold, and few have made it through numerous treks in mountain gorges without being injured. At the end of the journey, the tired travelers waited for the city of Dawson, where all roads led and where gold miners, prostitutes, gamblers and adventurers flocked.

Gold miners cross Chilkoot Pass. (wikipedia.org)

All life in the Klondike was concentrated in the city of Dawson. It became a capital for gold miners. The city itself grew up around Joseph Ladoux's site. The seeker built a hut and a warehouse for himself, naming the settlement in honor of the famous geographer George Dawson, who studied local gold deposits. Soon the village grew into a full-fledged city, where a special economy and management system developed. For example, due to an acute shortage of provisions, a cow could cost as much as 16 thousand dollars, and salt was equal in price to gold. But the noble metal here has turned into the cheapest product in the world!

The Canadian government became interested in the gold rush. And it’s not surprising, because citizens of neighboring America came to the Yukon and Klondike in droves. In addition, they preferred to use American stamps, and this could not but cause concern among the Canadians - what if Washington decided to take away the entire Yukon River basin. The borders were greatly blurred, and therefore the Canadian authorities formed a separate district, the territories of which were tied not to the meridians, as is customary, but to the gold mining areas. This is how the Canadians managed to establish laws in places where the fever was raging.

Moreover, entire squadrons of the so-called North-West Mounted Police arrived here. Their units not only monitored local order, but also warmly received miners, collecting customs duties from them. Nevertheless, the seekers were allowed to engage in gambling and prostitution. Thanks to the mounted police, the Klondike gold rush is called the most peaceful and calm in history.

Gold Rush Map. (wikipedia.org)

Dawson itself was a democracy - power belonged to the residents. They themselves decided how to manage the settlement and how to punish criminals for theft and other violations. The mines were lined with rivers of gold. As you know, the Klondike flows into the Yukon, and it then flows to the sea, crossing the American border of Alaska. There were searcher sites on both sides of the border.

The Canadian regulatory system that extended throughout the Dominion was built on the rigidity and experience of gold mining in British Columbia. Only the gold commissioner enjoyed greater influence, while the American system turned out to be freer and was not reduced to a list of inviolable laws. Former prospectors from California came to Alaska, where they also found a lot of gold in their time and where the traditions of self-government were established. Important decisions were made by majority vote at general meetings. According to the stories of gold rush participants, the Circle City settlement existed normally without trial or prison.

Camp on the Yukon River. (wikipedia.org)

Klondike fever has left its mark on history and culture. According to the most conservative data, about 200 thousand people took part in it, but only a negligible part managed to accumulate capital. The main phase of gold mining ended in 1899, and outbreaks occurred in Alaska for another ten years. The events of the end of the century caused outrage in the Russian public. The ruling Romanov Dynasty was reproached for giving Alexander II almost nothing to the United States, missing the opportunity to enrich himself.

On June 26, 1925, exactly 90 years ago, the premiere of Chaplin’s famous film “The Gold Rush” took place. Shot 29 years after the Alaska Gold Rush, the film largely recreates that historical phenomenon. To make it even more believable, Chaplin even hired 2,500 tramps who swung pickaxes, imitating the work of miners. However, in 95 minutes of screen time it is impossible to reflect all the details of the life of gold miners. Yes, this was not required, because in a comedy film there is no place for tragedies and collapses of illusions that awaited prospectors at every step. And the screen Charlie, who became fabulously rich and found happiness in the mines, was a rare exception in the Klondike.

In 1896, the Klondike gold rush began - perhaps the most famous in history. She proved that to make money on gold, you don’t have to mine it. On September 5, 1896, the Alaska Commercial Company's steamship Alice sailed to the mouth of the Klondike River. On board were hundreds of miners from nearby villages. They were following in the footsteps of George Carmack. Three weeks earlier, he had brought from these places a hard drive case completely filled with gold sand. Thus began the most famous and large-scale gold rush in history...

Let's find out the details...

Went for salmon, came back with gold

George Carmack

Every natural disaster - and the gold rush for the vast majority of its participants was precisely a disaster - begins by chance, with some trifle. In early August 1896, three residents of the Canadian state of Yukon, bordering Alaska to the north, went in search of the missing Kate and George Carmack. A couple of days later they were found at the mouth of the Klondike River, where they were storing salmon for the winter.

Then these five people wandered around a little and came across the richest placers of gold, which simply sparkled in the stream, and it could be collected with bare hands.

On September 5, George Carmack brought a couple of kilograms of gold dust to the Circle City village to exchange it for currency and necessary goods. Circle City, which was home to about a thousand people, was instantly empty - everyone rushed to the mouth of the Klondike. Exactly the same insanity gripped the residents of the entire area. Thus, in the fall of 1896, about three thousand people gathered to mine gold in the places of its richest deposits. It was they who managed to grab the bird of happiness by the tail. Gold lay literally underfoot, and it was possible to collect it without encountering fierce resistance from competitors. In 1896, there was enough gold for everyone in the Klondike.

These lucky people owed such a lafe to the region’s remoteness from civilization and the lack of transport and information connections with major cities, located much further south. It was these three thousand people, with rare exceptions, who panned gold worth many thousands of dollars. However, not all of them wisely used what they had acquired; most of them had golden sand leaking between their fingers.

Those who earned decent money also include at most a thousand to one and a half people who subsequently arrived in the Yukon from other regions of the world, including even Australia. These people already had to literally fight for gold. And endure incredible hardships, since they were not adapted to hard work in the harsh conditions of the north.

The real gold rush began only after these prospectors brought their gold to the “mainland” at the beginning of summer. On July 14, 1897, the steamship Excelsior entered the port of San Francisco. He was on a flight from Alaska. Each passenger had gold dust worth from $5 thousand to $130 thousand in his hands. To understand what this means in modern prices, feel free to multiply by 20. It turns out that the poorest passenger on the flight had $100 thousand in his pocket.

And three days later, on July 17, another ship, the Portland, entered the port of Seattle. On board the Portland there were three tons of gold: sand and nuggets in dirty canvas bags, on which their rightful owners sat, beaming with a weathered smile between their frostbitten cheeks. After this, the United States of America (and then the rest of the world, civilized and not) went crazy in unison. People left their jobs and families, pawned their last belongings and rushed north. Policemen left their posts, tram drivers left trams, pastors left parishes.

The mayor of Seattle, who was on a business trip to San Francisco, telegraphed his resignation and, without returning to Seattle, rushed to the Klondike. The respectable thirty-year-old housewife Mildred Blenkins, a mother of three children, went out shopping and did not return home: having taken the savings she shared with her husband from the bank, she got to Dawson and flaunted there in cloth pants, reselling food and building materials. By the way, old Millie was right: three years later she returned to her family, bringing with her $190,000 worth of gold dust as an expiatory gift.

“The time has come to go to the Klondike country, where gold is as abundant as sawdust,” wrote the city newspaper The Seattle Daily Times the next day.

And a chain reaction began. Dozens of ships headed north. By September, 10 thousand people left Seattle for Alaska. Winter put a pause on the fever, but the following spring more than 100 thousand fortune hunters took the same route.

Of course, few people understood what he was doing. The easiest route to the Klondike looked like this: several thousand kilometers across the ocean to Alaska, then crossing the kilometer-high Chilkoot Pass, a queue of several thousand people. Moreover, it could only be overcome on foot - pack animals could not climb the steep slope. Horses and dogs on the slope were powerless. True, there were Indians who could be hired to carry luggage at the rate of a dollar per pound of luggage. But such money was only found among eccentric millionaires, who, however, were encountered more often in the Yukon than in the restaurants of Nice. An additional difficulty: in order to avoid famine, the Canadian authorities did not allow him to cross the pass unless the miner had at least 800 kg of food with him. Some swung up and down forty times to carry the load. They crawled so tightly that, having fallen out of line, one could wait five to six hours to get back into line. Frequent avalanches buried both people and belongings.

Prospectors overcome Chilkoot Pass

Those who crossed the Chilkoot cut down timber, built rafts, boats - in short, anything that would keep them and their supplies afloat, and prepared for the final push along the Yukon River. In May 1898, as soon as the river was free of ice, a flotilla of seven thousand so-called ships set off on an 800-kilometer voyage downstream.

The rapids and narrow canyons shattered the dreams and lives of many: of the 100 thousand adventurers who disembarked at Skagway, only 30 thousand reached Dawson - at that time a nondescript Indian village. At best, a few hundred of them made a fortune from the mined gold.

Acquired by back-breaking labor

The statistics of the two-year gold rush, which swept the Yukon and spread to Alaska, are very sad. During this period, about 200 thousand people tried to find their financial happiness in the northern regions. As was said, 4 thousand people found happiness. But there were much more of those who died here - according to various estimates, from 15 to 25 thousand.

Adversity began as soon as the fortune hunters reached Alaska by ship, where it was necessary to overcome the steep Chilkoot Pass, which pack animals were unable to overcome. Here they were met by Canadian police, who allowed only those who had at least 800 kilograms of food to pass through. The police also limited the import of firearms into the country so that large-scale battles would not take place in the mines, which threatened to spread to the territories of Canada located to the south.

This was followed by a crossing of Lindeman Lake, a 70-kilometer off-road trek and an 800-kilometer rafting along the rapids-strewn Yukon River to the Klondike. Not everyone made it to the mines.

In place, a harsh climate awaited people with severe (up to 40 degrees) frosts in winter and sweltering heat in summer. People died from hunger, and from disease, and from accidents during work, and from clashes with competitors. The situation was aggravated by the fact that a significant number of “white collar” workers came to mine gold - clerks, teachers, doctors, unaccustomed to either hard physical labor or everyday hardships. This was due to the fact that America at that time was experiencing far from the best economic times.

And the work was indeed hard. After quickly collecting gold from the surface of the earth, it was necessary to shovel the soil. And he most was frozen for years. And it had to be warmed up with fires. During the California Gold Rush, it was much easier for prospectors.

Aspiring writer Jack London, who was forced to leave the University of California due to the inability to pay for his studies, also decided to try his luck. In 1897, at the age of 21, he reached the mines and staked out a plot of land with his comrades. But there was no gold on it. And the future famous writer was forced to sit on an empty plot of land without hope of enrichment, waiting for spring, when it would be possible to get out of the lands cursed by providence. In winter, he fell ill with scurvy, got frostbite, spent all his cash... And we, the readers, were very lucky that he survived, returned to his homeland and wrote great novels and brilliant short story cycles.

It must be said that the gold recovered during 2 years of feverish mining turned out to be not so much for each prospector. On a modern price scale, this is $4.4 billion, which should be divided by 200 thousand people. It turns out to be only 22 thousand dollars.

But one of the most intelligent and insightful entrepreneurs turned out to be John Ladue. 6 years before the start of the gold rush, he founded a trading post in northern Canada, supplying local residents with everything they needed, as well as prospectors who at that time mined gold in very modest quantities.

When in September 1896 all the surrounding residents rushed to the mouth of the Klondike to the placers discovered by Carmack, Ladue did not stand aside. But he did not buy a gold-bearing plot, but 70 hectares of land that no one needed. Then he brought food supplies to them, built a house, a warehouse and a sawmill, founding the village of Dawson. When in the spring of the following year tens of thousands of fortune hunters rushed to the mouth of the Klondike, all residential buildings and infrastructure buildings were built on Ladue’s land, which brought him huge profits. And very soon Ladyu became a multimillionaire, and the village grew to the size of a city with a population of 40 thousand.

Skagway now: former brothel, now popular pub

It was worse for the gold miners who were just beginning their journey to the Klondike. in Alaska. Since the spring of 1898, about a thousand prospectors passed through Skagway every month on their way to Dawson. Overcrowded communities in southern Alaska became refuges for thousands of men waiting to leave for the north. To entertain this restless public, numerous "saloons" and hangouts sprang up in Skagway.

"Slippery" Smith (center) in his "saloon." 1898

The king of this shadow world of Alaska was a man nicknamed "Soapy". His real name was Jefferson Randolph Smith II. By 1884, "Slippery" was claiming to be the king of crime in Denver by running fictitious lotteries. For excessive claims, rival gangs tried to kill Smith in 1889, but he managed to fight off. It got to the point that Denver City Hall had to repel gangster attacks with guns. Smith realized that his gang would not be able to resist artillery, and in 1896 he chose to move to Alaska.

“Slippery” was a year ahead of the main wave of gold miners and managed to prepare well for it. He acted in the usual way. In Skagway, he first organized a gambling establishment in a “saloon”. Then Smith established the reception of telegrams by arranging a poker game nearby, which ended in an almost predictable loss for the sender of the telegram. It never occurred to the gullible gold miners that the nearest telegraph pole was hundreds of miles away. Not everyone realized that they had been duped. And those who understood were in too much of a hurry to get to the treasured Klondike to waste time complaining.

A year later, Smith had strong competitors. In May 1898, under the leadership of Canadian engineers, construction began on the White Pass & Yukon narrow-gauge railway, which was supposed to connect Skagway with the village of Whitehorse. “Slippery” realized that gold miners who moved without delay from the steamship gangway to the train car would not become his clients, but it was not easy to fight the railway company. The gold miners themselves have become bolder. On the evening of July 8, 1898, a meeting of “vigilants” (citizens engaged in lynching) was convened in Skagway. A tipsy Smith went to this meeting, but he was not allowed there. A verbal altercation began, which smoothly turned into a shootout, during which “Slippery” was killed. The criminal reign in Skagway has come to an end.

Let's start with what it took to get to Dawson. At the height of the fever, Indian porters charged $15,000 at current prices to carry a ton of cargo across the Chinkuk Pass.

Like soldiers in war, Dawson residents lived in the moment. The hostess of the cancan, Gertie Diamond Tooth (the entertainment business was going so well that she inserted one into herself) accurately described the situation: “These unfortunate people are just itching to spend money quickly - so they are afraid to give their souls to God before they dig up everything that is there there's still some left." Pain, despair and frozen corpses in frozen huts coexisted very well with the chansonettes standing ankle-deep in nuggets on the Monte Carlo stage. Feral prospectors spent fortunes for the right to dance with sisters Jacqueline and Rosalind, known as Vaseline and Glycerin.

Of course, prices can be explained by the difficulties of delivery to godforsaken areas. But, of course, greed and monopoly played a role. Thus, the supply of products to Dawson was almost completely controlled by one person - Canadian Alex MacDonald, nicknamed Big Alex. A year after the start of the gold rush, Big Alex's fortune was estimated at $5 million, and he himself received the title of “King of the Klondike.” He not only bought up dozens of “applications”, but also hired bankrupt miners to work in his mines. As a result, MacDonald earned $5 million and received the unofficial title of “King of the Klondike.” True, the ending for the real estate buyer turned out to be sad. Concentrating in his hands huge land, MacDonald did not want to part with them in time. As a result, the price of mountains and forests with depleted deposits fell, and the “king of the Klondike” went bankrupt.

Belinda Mulroney

Dawson also had its own “queen” - Belinda Mulroney. She started out speculating in clothing—bringing $5,000 worth of clothes to worn-out prospectors, which were sold for $30,000—and then switched to whiskey and shoes, selling rubber boots for $100 a pair. And she also became a millionaire. Having learned about the discovery of gold in the Nome area, the “queen” of the Klondike immediately moved to Alaska. She was still resourceful and enterprising. “Queen” Belinda did not receive the throne, but she managed to marry a French swindler who declared himself a count. Mulroney's money was invested in the European Shipping Company. The “Queen of the Klondike” lived in London, denying herself nothing, until 1914, when the war led to the collapse of shipping and the ruin of many companies. Belinda Mulroney died poor.

Samuel Brennan

Most of the miners ended their lives in much the same way. Even after washing millions on the rivers of the Yukon, they could not cope with their passions. Saloons, brothels, casinos - the service industry knew how to get money out of their pockets. The writer Bret Harte, who became famous for describing the life of prospectors, talks about a man who, having sold his plot at a profit, loses half a million dollars in a San Francisco casino in one day. Witnesses of the gold rush in Australia, in their memoirs, shared memories of characters who in local pubs lit pipes with five-pound notes (that’s like a five-thousandth in our reality) and paid cab drivers with handfuls of gold dust.

Queue for gold mining licenses.

Tent city on the shores of Bennett Lake. In this place, gold miners built or bought boats to further sail to the Klondike by water.

Another, more substantial gold mining settlement.

The shortest, but most difficult route to the Klondike was through the Chilkoot Pass, an altitude of more than 1200 meters. The most adventurous and hasty ones crossed this pass even in winter, and at first there were quite a few of them.

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Mining continued all year round. in winter frozen ground hammered with pickaxes or heated with fires.

A team of gold miners at work.

A group of prospectors on the way to the Klondike.

Perhaps the only ones who really and fabulously got rich from the “gold rush” were resellers who bought the precious metal from miners at a low price. The distinguished gentleman sitting on the left poses with bags of gold that he bought over the previous fortnight. There may also be gold in the chests. Of course, a guard with a revolver in such a still life is far from superfluous.

On the left is the cover of the Klondike News from April 1898, with an optimistic forecast that $40 million worth of gold was expected to be mined that year.
And the right drawing from the English magazine Punch for the same year, as it were, warns adventurers what actually awaits most of them in the Klondike.

On August 16, 1896, on Bonanza Creek, which flows into the Klondike River in Alaska, prospectors George Carmack, Jim Skookum And Charlie Dawson discovered a scattering of gold nuggets. This moment is considered the beginning of the Klondike Gold Rush - unorganized mass mining of gold in Alaska in late XIX century.

The systematic development of Alaska by American colonists began only seven years after this icy peninsula was purchased by the United States from Russia. In 1874 Jack McQuestan And Alfred Mayo founded the trading post of the Alaska commercial company Fort Reliance near modern Dawson.

The company traded furs and equipment for prospectors for a percentage of the gold found in the future. Despite the fact that no gold was found at first, trade continued. This changed when gold was discovered on the Stewart River in 1885.

Faced with a small boom, the company closed some of its fur trading branches and focused on goods for miners. Although the gold on the Stewart River quickly ran out, prospectors had even found it on the Fortymile River.

The Fortymile River (Forty Mile) takes its name from its distance from Fort Reliance - it flows into the Yukon 40 miles downstream. The gold discovered here led to the establishment of Forty Mile in the winter of 1887, the first city in the Yukon Territory.

In 1895, $400,000 worth of gold was mined in the Fortymile and Sixtymile areas (60 miles upstream). By that time, about 1,000 miners lived in Forty Mile. Surprisingly, in addition to saloons and shops, the town had a library and a Shakespeare club, an opera house with a troupe from San Francisco, and a tobacco factory. It was in this settlement that the Canadian office for registering gold mining sites was located.

But soon Forty Mile had a competitor. Gold was found in Alaska in the Birch Creek area. New town prospectors was called Circle City, as it was located exactly on the Arctic Circle. Many prospectors left Forty Mile to move to Circle City. However, things have not yet reached a real gold boom.

Its prerequisites appeared after the famous prospector Robert Henderson went in search of gold to the Klondike River, which flows into the Yukon. On the northern shore of the Klondike he discovered several streams, and in one of them (Rabbit Creek) he found a significant amount of gold. The prospector called this place a “gold mine.”

In the summer of 1896, Henderson traveled south to restock food and supplies. On the way back he met George Carmack, his Tagish Indian wife. Keith Carmack, her brother Jim Skookum and nephew Charlie Dawson. Since the prospector needed help, he decided to tell his new acquaintances about the Klondike gold.

Carmack himself was not interested in the news, but it attracted the attention of Skookum, who wanted to become a prospector. He persuaded the others, and as a result, Carmack, Skookum and Dawson reached the “golden mine” in August.

They first panned for gold there, and then moved downstream, where another stream flowing from the south (Bonanza Creek) flowed into Rabbit Creek. It is still unclear exactly who exactly found the first nugget. Each participant told his own version of what happened. But what is certain is that this famous piece of gold was found on August 16, 1896. It weighed about a quarter of an ounce and was worth $4 at those prices.

Taking a closer look, the prospectors discovered a large scattering of nuggets at the bottom of the stream and rushed to collect them. Soon they completely filled the hard drive case with gold. It is not surprising that the stream later received the name Eldorado.

The prospectors staked out their plots and went to Forty Mile, where they were to register them. At first, the company’s office simply didn’t believe Carmack. True, mistrust immediately disappeared when he showed the astonished clerks a gun case stuffed with gold.

The rumor about gold spread with lightning speed throughout the entire community of prospectors in Alaska, and by September the entire area of streams in this place of the Klondike was staked out - there was no free land left there at all. Carmack himself mined $1,400 worth of gold in less than a month. If converted at the gold rate, today it is approximately $133,000.

However, it took another year for the information to reach the wider world. Gold was not exported until June 1897, when navigation opened and the ocean liners Excelsior and Portland took on cargo from the Klondike.

The Excelsior arrived in San Francisco on July 15, 1897, with a cargo worth nearly half a million dollars, arousing public interest. When the Portland arrived in Seattle two days later with an even larger cargo of gold, it was already greeted by a crowd. Newspapers actively fueled interest by reporting on the incredible wealth of the Klondike. The gold rush has begun.

It turned into a real boom after the results of the report became known on the mainland William Ogilvy, who, on behalf of the Canadian government, was engaged in geodetic work in the gold-bearing region of the Klondike. According to him, during the winter of 1896-1897, gold worth $2.5 million was mined.