by Rich Mole
George Carmack’s gold fever lingered on. The moustachioed prospector continued to mine in the Pacific Northwest, with more personal pleasure than financial success. In May 1922, as the featured speaker at Vancouver’s Cabin of the Yukon Order of Pioneers, Carmack read the first chapter of his book in progress, the true story of the discovery on Rabbit Creek. After a round of applause, a resolution was passed naming Carmack the man who started the Klondike Gold Rush. The next morning, he complained of a cold. A week later, with Marguerite by his hospital bed, he died of pneumonia.
Skookum Jim lived out his years in the North with Tagish Charlie. In 1904, Skookum Jim sold his claims to a large mining company and trekked through the Yukon as a solitary prospector. With the help of church officials, he ensured the future needs of his wife and daughter and created a Whitehorse legacy for First Nations people known today as the Skookum Jim Friendship Centre. He died in 1916 at age 60. Tagish Charlie built a hotel at Carcross. Stumbling across a railway bridge after a Christmas celebration, Tagish Charlie, 42, fell to the water below and drowned.
Captain William Moore finally had his day in court, and when that day was done, judges awarded the visionary 25 percent of the value of Skagway’s townsite. Moore was further enriched each time a boat tied up at the wharves that he had conceived a decade before the rush. Moore and his wife lived in northern splendour in a magnificent home that later became Skagway’s world-famous Pullen House hotel.
The Rush is History
One year into the gold rush, the former tent town of Dawson City became a thriving city of 7,000 people, bigger than either Vancouver or Victoria. Business speculators were paying $20,000 for a prime corner building lot, a piece of ground that barely two years earlier had been worthless swamp. At three mills, saws whined constantly day and night, and they still could not satisfy builders’ insatiable appetite for lumber. Grand Forks grew large enough to merit its own police detachment, housed in a log building across from prostitute row.
Frenetic prospecting activity all but obliterated Bonanza and Eldorado Creeks, denuding hillsides and reshaping the topography, littering it with piles of rock. Many claim owners rarely visited the site, content to let gangs of workers toil away in the darkness and the dirt, surrounded by serpentine webs of elevated sluice channels.
Two years after the treasure ships carried the first wealth of the Klondike back to the world, paddlewheelers churning up the Yukon River to Dawson City arrived, carrying a cargo more precious than deckhands could unload down the gangways. The boats brought news of big gold strikes on the Bering Sea. The sands of the beaches of Nome, Alaska, were said to be laced with gold—lots of gold. In August 1899, within a single week, 8,000 people left Dawson City, never to return.
As quickly as it had begun, the Klondike Gold Rush was over.
Bibliography
Adney, Tappan. The Klondike Stampede. New York: Harper & Bros., 1900. Reprint, Vancouver: UBC Press, 1994.
Backhouse, Francis. Women of the Klondike. Vancouver: Whitecap Books, 1995.
Berton, Pierre. Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush 1896–1899. Rev. ed. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart Ltd., 1975.
Bolotin, Norm. Klondike Lost: A Decade Of Photographs by Kinsey & Kinsey. Anchorage: Alaska Northwest Publishing Company, 1980.
Bolotin, Norm. A Klondike Scrapbook. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1987.
Bronson, William. The Last Grand Adventure. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1977.
Dobrowolsky, Helene. Law Of The Yukon: A Pictorial History of the Mounted Police in the Yukon, Whitehorse: Lost Moose Publishing, 1995.
Duncan, Jennifer. Frontier Spirit: The Brave Women of the Klondike. Toronto: Anchor Canada, 2004.
Gates, Michael. Gold at Fortymile Creek. Vancouver: UBC Press, 1994.
Horrall, S.W. The Pictorial History of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1973.
Johnson, James Albert. George Carmack. Vancouver: Whitecap Books, 2001.
Macdonald, Ian, and Betty O’Keefe. The Klondike’s “Dear Little Nugget.” Victoria: Horsdal & Schubart, 1996.
Mayer, Melanie J. Klondike Women: True Tales of the 1897–1898 Gold Rush. Athens, Ohio: Swallow Press, 1989.
Mayer, Melanie J. Staking Her Claim: The Life of Belinda Mulrooney. Athens, Ohio: Swallow Press, 2000.
Minter, Roy. The White Pass: Gateway to the Klondike. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart Ltd., 1987.
Morgan, Murray. One Man’s Gold Rush: A Klondike Album. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1973.
Neufeld, David. Chilkoot Trail: Heritage Route to the Klondike. Whitehorse: Lost Moose Publishing, 1996.
Ogilvie, William. Early Days on the Yukon. Whitehorse: Wolf Creek Books Inc., 2004.
Olive, W.H.T. The Right Way On: Adventures in the Klondyke of 1898. Langley: Timberholme Books, 1999.
Porsild, Charlene. Gamblers and Dreamers: Women, Men, and Community in the Klondike. Vancouver: UBC Press, 1998.
Steele, Samuel B. Forty Years in Canada. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1915. Reprint, Toronto: Prospero Books, 2000.
Stewart, Robert. Sam Steele: Lion of the Frontier. 1979. Reprint, Regina: Centax Books, 1999.
Walden, Arthur T. A Dog Puncher on the Yukon. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1928. Reprint, Whitehorse: Wolf Creek Books, 2001.
Wallace, Jim. Forty Mile to Bonanza: The North-West Mounted Police in the Klondike Gold Rush. Calgary: Bunker To Bunker Publishing, 2000.
Wells, E. Hazard. Magnificence and Misery: A Firsthand Account of the 1897 Gold Rush. Edited by Randall M. Dodd. Garden City: Doubleday & Co., 1984.
Wright, Allen. Prelude to Bonanza: The Discovery and Exploration of the Yukon. Sidney, BC: Gray’s Publishing Ltd., 1976.
Suggested Search Terms
Following is a list of keywords based on the index in the print edition. Variations of these words can be used to search this electronic edition.
Tappan Adney
Alaska
Alaska Commercial Company
Charley Anderson
Bella
Clarence Berry
Ethel Berry
Frank Berry
Bishop William Bompas
Bonanza (Rabbit) Creek
Buxton Mission
George Carmack
Kate Carmack
Chilkoot First Nation
Chilkoot Pass
Circle City
Inspector Charles Constantine
Dawson City
George Dawson
Dead Horse Gulch
Corporal Edward Dixon
Dyea Inlet
Dyea settlement
Eldorado Creek
Excelsior
Thomas Fawcett
forts
Constantine
Cudahy
Herchmer
Macleod
Reliance
Selkirk
Whoop-Up
Yukon
Fortymile gold camp
Fortymile River
Gold Bottom Creek
Grand Forks
Captain J.E. Hansen
Mont Hawthorne
John J. Healy
Robert Henderson
Commissioner William Herchmer
William Johns
Keish
Klondike Nugget
Klondike River
Joe Ladue
Lake Bennett
Lake Marsh
Salome Lippy
Thomas Lippy
Alex McDonald
Dave “Two Fingers” McKay
Bill McPhee
Jack McQuesten
Miles Canyon
Captain William Moore
Belinda Mulrooney
North American Transportation and Trading Company
North-West Mounted Police
Ogilvie trading post
William Ogilvie
William “Cap” Olive
Portland
Portus B. Weare
Rabbit Creek
&nb
sp; Frank H. Reid
Roanoke
San Francisco
The Scales
Seattle
Skagway
Skookum Jim
Jefferson Randolph “Soapy” Smith
St. Michael
Anton Stander
Superintendent Samuel Benfield Steele
Stikine River
Inspector D’Arcy Strickland
Tagish Charlie
Tagish First Nation
Taiya River
Tlingit First Nation
Victoria
Frederick Wade
Arthur Walden
Major James Morrow Walsh
Jim Washburn
Portus B. Weare
Edmond Hazard Wells
Thomas White
White Horse Rapids
White Pass
Inspector Zachary Wood
Yukon River
About the Author
Author and freelance journalist Rich Mole has been a broadcaster, communications consultant and the president of a successful Vancouver Island advertising agency.
Rich is the author of numerous Klondike books, including Murder and Mystery in the Yukon and Rebel Women of the Gold Rush. Other non-fiction titles include Christmas in British Columbia, Christmas in the Prairies, and the hockey histories Great Stanley Cup Victories and Against All Odds, the story of the Edmonton Oilers.
Rich now lives in Calgary, where he is currently at work on a second novel. He can be reached at [email protected].
Acknowledgements
The Klondike Gold Rush was a fitting climax to a tumultuous century, a period of significant social and technological advancements, wars and insurrections, and natural and man-made disasters. Yet, so significant was the Klondike Gold Rush that in the century that followed, no continental event—including Pancho Villa’s Mexican revolution—rivalled its impact. With the exception of the American Civil War, the Klondike Gold Rush was the big story.
Over a century after it began, the rush continues to be among the most voluminously (and frequently inaccurately) reported events in modern history. Just as the sourdough separated “colour” from gravel at the bottom of a pan, the Klondike Gold Rush historian must separate fact from fiction in accounts written at the time and ever since. Like prospecting, it offers both challenge and satisfaction.
Like many other books on the Klondike rush, Gold Fever would not have been possible without Pierre Berton’s Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush. New discoveries made after its initial 1958 publication prompted Berton to revise his classic five years later. Since then, diligent research and lucky finds (such as Hazard Wells’ diaries, Anna DeGraf’s memoirs and George Carmack’s papers and documents) continue to reveal new factual “nuggets,” a phenomenon that Berton himself cheerfully acknowledged in the prefaces he provided for many later additions to the growing Klondike library.
The author wishes to thank Heritage House for the opportunity to expand and revise the original Gold Fever. Few authors have a second chance to improve upon a published book. The bibliography includes works that proved most helpful in preparing both the first and second editions.
Copyright © 2009 Rich Mole
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, audio recording or otherwise—without the written permission of the publisher or a photocopying licence from Access Copyright, Toronto, Canada.
Originally published by Heritage House Publishing Co. Ltd. in 2009 in paperback with ISBN 978-1-894974-69-1.
This electronic edition was released in 2011.
e-pub ISBN: 978-1-926936-21-5
e-PDF ISBN: 978-1-926936-43-7
Cataloguing data available from Library and Archives Canada
Edited by Lesley Reynolds
Cover photo courtesy of University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections, UW7326
Heritage House acknowledges the financial support for its publishing program from the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF), Canada Council for the Arts and the province of British Columbia through the British Columbia Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.
www.heritagehouse.ca
Table of Contents
Title Page
Contents
Prologue
Keeping the Faith
Dreamers and Schemers
The Days Everything Changed
Bonanza
Eldorado
A Secret Locked in Ice
The Treasure Ships
Journey into Hell
Starvation City
The Law and the Lawless
The Beginning of the End
Bibliography
Suggested Search Terms
About the Author
Acknowledgements
Copyright
