The bride of the Klondike, Ethel Berry arrived in Seattle from Alaska in July 1897. She wore ragged men’s clothing but she had $100,000 in her bedroll. News of the gold Ethel and her husband Clarence had brought back from the Klondike helped set off the great Klondike Gold Rush in 1898. Link to another …
Tag Archives: Klondike
Bessie Gideon—the Most Persistent Ghost
Bessie Gideon refused to let mere death end her career at the Caribou Hotel. Her husband Edwin died in 1925 and never came back. Bessie died in 1933 and never left. Her friends and neighbors gave her a funeral and buried her in Carcross—but no one knows the location of her grave. Ghosts Haunt the …
Skookum Jim, Kate Carmack’s Brother
Skookum in Tagish means enormously strong, and the young man named Keish earned the new name Skookum Jim, hauling hundred-pound packs up the infamous trail over Chilkoot Pass. In 1892, near Dyea at the foot of the Chilkoot trail he killed a bear with his bare hands. Skookum packed supplies up the rugged Chilkoot with …
First Woman of the Klondike
The first woman of the Klondike struck gold in the Klondike, but still lived the saddest life on record. Born Shaaw Tiaa, native Tagish, she married a Tlingit man and bore him a daughter. A flu epidemic killed them both. When Shaaw Tiaa’s sister passed away she married the widower, a white man named George …
Buffalo Soldiers in Skagway
Buffalo Soldiers from the 24th Infantry Regiment came to Skagway in 1899, forty-four years before the black soldiers of the 93rd came there to build the Alaska Highway. The Klondike Gold Rush had brought hordes of gold rushers who threatened the community and each other. The Army sent Company L of the 24th Infantry to …
Glacier, the Valdez Glacier
Women Came to the Klondike Too The Valdez Glacier looked easy, and in 1897 and 1898 when promoters invited gold rushers to take “The All American Route” to the Klondike, they had yet to learn that hustlers offering helpful advice were just about the only people making money from the Klondike Gold Rush. They …
Women Came to the Klondike Too
Jack London Found a Different Kind of Klondike Gold Women as well as men heard the news of gold in the Klondike. If men endured hell to get there, women did too. With husbands or without them, miners or miner miners, women came north in droves. Some came out of desperation, hoping for money …
Jack London Found a Different Kind of Klondike Gold
Jack London found a different kind of gold in the Klondike. Leaving frustrated poverty behind in Oakland, California, he sailed north with a partner in 1897 to look for the traditional kind. At Port Townsend, Washington, they changed ships and sailed on to Juneau, Alaska. In Juneau, stories about the incredibly difficult and dangerous path …
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Robert Service, Poet of the Gold Rush
Strikes, Gold Strikes, in the Far North Robert Service lived a long way from Northern Canada—in Glasgow, Scotland. Son of an heiress he got a good education; worked in a shipping office then a bank. He wrote his first poem at age 6. Studied literature at the University of Glasgow. Robert found inspiration in the …
Strikes, Gold Strikes, in the Far North
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 …