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4.2.4.wavIn August of 1896, a gold discovery in Canada brought Alaska and western Canada to the world's attention. An American prospector, George Carmack, was traveling with his Athabaskan wife (Kate Carmack), her brother (Skookum Jim), and nephew (Dawson Charlie) when they found gold on a tributary of the Klondike River in the Canadian Yukon. It is unknown who discovered the gold, but the claim was put in Carmack's name out of fear authorities would not recognize the claim of a Native. When Joe Ladue, a trader along the Yukon River, learned of the strike, he rafted supplies to where the Yukon and Klondike Rivers meet. He staked a townsite named Dawson in honor of George Dawson, head of the Canadian Geological and Natural History Survey.
There turned out to be huge quantities of gold in the Klondike River and its tributaries. When the first of the early prospectors arrived in San Francisco and Seattle the next summer (1897) with $700,000 worth of gold, it caused a frenzy along the West Coast. The headline of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer read "GOLD! GOLD! GOLD! GOLD!". Within days, thousands of people—including Seattle’s mayor—had quit their jobs to seek fortune in the far North. The great Klondike Gold Rush had started.
Over the next two years, an estimated 100,000 'stampeders'—most of them Americans — set off to reach the Klondike goldfields. Ships raced up the Inside Passage carrying stampeders, horses, and mining equipment. Tickets became almost impossible to acquire.
Seattle Post-Intelligencer Headline, July 17,1897
Stampeders boarding the S/S Excelsior in San Francisco for Alaska on July 28, 1897
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