Today in History—August 17: The Start of the Klondike Gold Rush
“Lying George” Washington Carmack would later say there was so much gold between slabs of bedrock that it looked like cheese sandwiches.
But before we get to that, there’s gold in them thar…river confluence. Skookum Jim Mason and Lying George were certain of it.
And on this day in 1896, they staked claims for it, at a spot near where the Yukon and Klondike rivers meet, along a tributary called Rabbit Creek.
Skookum Jim (Tagish name Keish), along with his sister Kate Carmack (Shaaw Tláa), who was married to George, and their nephew Tagish Charlie (Káa Goox, later Dawson Charlie), had set up a fish camp in that area of Canada in July.
The group had been living a subsistence lifestyle for about a decade. George was an American. Kate and her relatives were Tagish First Nation peoples.
One day Nova Scotian prospector Robert Henderson encountered the men and apprised George that he had a promising claim. (Sharing information was part of a miner’s code Robert believed in.) But he said that George’s family was not invited, and he later refused to sell the other men tobacco. He considered himself and George—white men—superior to the local Indigenous people.
And that ended up costing him a fortune.
The group checked out Robert’s claim but found nothing of interest. Instead, very soon after, the group found gold on their own in Rabbit Creek, so much of it that they started calling it Bonanza Creek. At first no one believed Lying George. (I cannot imagine why there was doubt, given his nickname.) But he showed off a pocketful of nuggets, and nuggets don’t lie.
Getting to the Klondike was complicated: It could take two years of travel by land to get there from America. The “rich man’s route” was simplest: take a boat the whole way.
Men rushed to stake claims there. Robert, meanwhile, continued mining his original claim nearby. George did not tell him about the cheese sandwiches.
The original finders prospered, with George, Jim, and Charlie making about $1 million in gold, while word of their discovery spread. In the next year, 30,000 prospectors descended on the Klondike, chasing the same fortune.
It would become one of the largest—and definitely best-publicized—gold rushes in history. But the Klondike Gold Rush burned hot and fast, and by 1899 prospectors had largely moved on to Alaska. (Robert, meanwhile, sought compensation and was eventually awarded a small pension by the Canadian government.)
- 600: Prospectors working Klondike claims before the rush started
- September 1896: Date that all of Bonanza Creek is claimed
- July 1897: Date that word of the discovery reached California
- 1943: The Allied invasion of Sicily comes to an end
- 1945: Indonesia declares independence from the Netherlands
- 1947: The boundary line between India and Pakistan is established
