The tiny, scattered populations of First Nations natives and fur traders didn’t know it, but God had seeded their remote subarctic Country with a substance that, at the turn of the 20th century would bring it to the attention of the world with a bang. During the last decades of the 19th century small gold strikes occurred in Sitka and Windham Bay. In 1880 Joseph Juneau and Richard Harris made a significant strike in Juneau. Word spread, and a
trickle of hardy prospectors began making their way north.
They used, of course, the same trail systems as the primordial tribes and the traders; and they extended them just a bit here and there.
The few early prospectors blended in. They rested, refitted and even made homes at the trading post towns and villages. Some took native brides. And, like their predecessors, they changed the world of the natives, teaching t
hem the value of gold and how to seek it.
Down on the Alaska Peninsula the Tlingit tribe controlled the difficult routes over the coastal mountains into the Yukon interior. They used those routes—one over the White Pass and the other over the Chilkoot—to trade with the tribes of the interior. In the 1890’s “Skookum Jim”, a member of the Tlingit Tribe, worked as a packer on the Chilkoot and
had spent years exploring the White Pass.
In 1896 Jim and his friend “Tagish Charlie” accompanied George Carmack, a prospector from Seattle, to the area around Rabbit Creek in the Klondike. There, on August 17, they made the gold strike that would reverberate around the world.