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Tag Archives: Klondike
Emma Did it Her Way
Emma Kelly lived in Topeka, wrote for a Chicago newspaper, thirsted, as they say, for adventure. In 1897 word came south from the Klondike that men had struck gold, and young Emma decided to head north to Dawson City. She arranged financing, acquired a list of newspapers that would print stories she sent back, and …
Towns Sprang from Nothing
Three towns sprang from nothing in 1896, created by Skookum Jim and his partners. They created them from a distance, from Dawson up on the Klondike. But, fittingly, Skagway, Carcross and Whitehorse sprang up in Jim’s old stomping ground. Defending Skagway First the town of Skagway. A boom town of mythic proportions sprouted on …
A Taste for Exotic Furs—And Gold
A taste for exotic furs swept across the civilized world. Exotic furs grew on exotic animals and a lot of them lived at the far northern reaches of the American Continent. More on Furs On that remote portion of the globe, Native Americans, First Nations if you’re in Canada, had developed a tribal civilization …
Who Got Rich?
Against all odds, thousands of the Stampeders who invaded the North Country in search of gold made it to the Klondike, and some got rich. Dawson City became, for a time, the largest city north of San Francisco. Saloons, dance halls, butchers, clothiers and blacksmiths lined its streets. Down on the Alaska Peninsula, Skagway mushroomed …
Yukon River Route
Our would-be prospectors are headed for the Yukon River route to Dawson City. We’ve followed them by ship to Skagway; watched them climb up Chilkoot Pass to the Canadian border—over and over again until they accumulated a ton of supplies. Now the route led twenty-six miles across Lake Bennett, two and a half miles through …
Chilkoot Pass
The most dramatic, certainly the most romantic, event that ever occurred in the North Country, the great stampede to the gold fields of the Klondike, came down to tens of thousands of men and women facing the timeless challenge—the incredible difficulty of traveling through the subarctic north. Like all their historical predecessors, thousands of rowdy …
Prospectors Already in the North Country Came First
Word of a massive gold strike spread through the North Country and prospectors rushed to the Klondike and Rabbit Creek, now known as Bonanza Creek. But the North Country is a long way from “civilization”. It took nearly a year for word of the events along Bonanza Creek to reach the outside world. On July …
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God Had Seeded the North Country with Gold
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 …
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