Small Gold strikes occurred during the last decades of the 19th century in Alaska. Sitka had one. Windham Bay had one. In 1880 Joseph Juneau and Richard Harris made a bigger strike in Juneau.
Then Skookum Jim, his friend Tagish Charlie and George Carmack made a massive strike in Canada, at Rabbit Creek in the Klondike. Prospectors from relatively nearby Forty-mile, Sixty-mile, Eagle and Circle City rushed to Rabbit Creek and turned it into Bonanza Creek.
From the far-off Klondike it took nearly a year for word of the strikes at Bonanza Creek to reach the outside world. But in July 1897 two steamships made their way into harbors in the lower 48.
The Portland docked in Seattle and The Seattle Post Intelligencer breathlessly reported that the ship carried “more than a ton of gold”. When the Excelsior arrived in San Francisco the next day, and The San Francisco Examiner reported that it carried tons of gold; headlined the front-page story, “Streams of Gold from the Klondike.”
The word exploded, an irresistible siren song, across a country mired in recession. Men and women in every state the Union, desperate for opportunity, heard it. Thousands packed, pulled up stakes and followed the siren north.
Thousands of others, caring little for the backbreaking work of prospecting and mining, saw opportunity in the prospectors themselves. Wherever they went they would eat and drink and use up equipment. They would want booze and sex.
These thousands went north to mine the miners.
As a stampede of gold seekers descended on Skagway, Alaska in 1897. Miner miner, Soapy Smith came with them.
As the crow flies Lake Bennett lay just a few miles from Skagway and from Lake Bennett the Yukon River flowed north to the Gold Fields. Unfortunately, the stampeders weren’t crows, and the “few miles” to Lake Bennett climbed thousands of rugged feet–from sea level to the top of the coastal range.
But the stampede pushed up through Chilkoot Pass and White Pass, and miners came to Lake Bennett. And at Bennett, miner miners, John Barret, Frank Turner, and Thomas Geiger turned themselves into hoteliers.
Miner miners who ran steamship lines promoted an alternative to the Skagway/Yukon River route; called it the “All American Trail” (absurd on the face of it since the Klondike lay safely across the border in Canada). A second flood of outsiders flowed to the Port of Valdez on Prince William Sound and headed north over the supremely treacherous Valdez Glacier.
Those miners suffered unimaginably, died in droves.