THE YUKON - British Columbia: Including the Alaska Highway - page 689

cents' worth per pan—in a creek he went ahead and named Gold-Bottom Creek. He spent
the rest of the summer working the creek, while passing news of his find to fellow pro-
spectors who were in the area. One such man was George “Siwash” Washington Carmack,
who with partners Tagish Charlie and Skookum Jim struck gold in extraordinary quantit-
ies—$3-4 a pan—on nearby Rabbit Creek (soon to be renamed Bonanza). They staked three
claims before word began to spread. By fall, most of the richest ground had been claimed.
Gold Fever
News of the strike reached the outside world a year later, when a score of prospectors, so
loaded down with gold that they couldn't handle it themselves, disembarked in San Fran-
cisco and Seattle. The spectacle triggered mass insanity across the continent, immediately
launching a rush the likes of which the world had rarely seen before and has not seen
since. Clerks, salesmen, streetcar conductors, doctors, preachers, generals—even the mayor
of Seattle—simply dropped what they were doing and started off “for the Klondike.” City
dwellers, factory workers, and men who had never climbed a mountain, handled a boat,
or even worn a backpack were outfitted in San Francisco, Seattle, Vancouver, and Edmon-
ton, and set out on an incredible journey through an uncharted wilderness with Dawson—a
thousand miles from anywhere—as the imagined grand prize.
Meanwhile, the first few hundred lucky stampeders to actually reach Dawson before the
rivers froze that winter (1897) found the town in such a panic over food that people were
actually fleeing for their lives. At the same time tens of thousands of stampeders were head-
ing toward Dawson along a variety of routes, including over the Chilkoot Pass and down
the Yukon River. Most hopefuls were caught unprepared in the bitter grip of the seven-
month Northern winter, and many froze to death or died of scurvy, starvation, exhaustion,
heartbreak, suicide, or murder. And when the breakup in 1898 finally allowed the remain-
ing hordes to pour into Dawson the next spring, every worthwhile claim had already been
staked.