August 16, 1896 was a big day in the Klondike. Skookum Jim Mason, George Carmack, and Dawson Charlie discovered gold on Rabbit Creek, a small(ish) stream feeding into the Klondike River. “Skookum Jim Mason” and “Dawson Charlie” were aliases — but not for any nefarious reasons. Skookum Jim’s real name was Keish, and Dawson Charlie was Káa Goox; they were Native Americans from the Tashish people. They were there because George Carmack’s wife Kate (Shaaw Tiáa) was also Tagish. Keish was her brother, and Káa Goox was their nephew.
It was probably Keish who actually discovered the gold, but the group decided Carmack should file the claims. They weren’t sure the authorities would register mining claims by indigenous people.
Carmack was already a miner; he was known around those parts as Lyin’ George because he was constantly exaggerating everything. In spite of that, though, he was pretty good at prospecting. He found a big deposit of coal; big enough that a village was established to support a mine. The village is still there: Carmack, Yukon.
Lyin’ George didn’t need to exaggerate the Yukon gold strike, though; it was huge. Because he was the discoverer, he received two claims, and both Skookum Jim and Dawson Charlie got their own claims.
It wasn’t news to everybody that there was gold in the Yukon. The Tagish and Tlingit people, who had lived there for millennia, were aware of it but didn’t think the stuff was any use. When Russians explored, they heard the rumors, but ignored them; they were interested in the furs from the area. The same was true of the Hudson’s Bay Company; fur was a lot easier to get and at the time was even more valuable. John Jacob Astor amassed one of the world’s biggest fortunes in the early 1800s, and he was in the fur business.
But by the 1890s, gold was much bigger news than furs. By the end of August, the whole Rabbit Creek area had been claimed, and the stream had already been renamed Bonanza Creek.
It wasn’t until December that the news reached Circle City, a logging town on the Alaskan side of the US/Canadian border. It had been a boomtown based on the logging business, and was known as the Paris of Alaska. But even though the arctic winter was setting in, the place immediately became a ghost town when more than half of the population (which was only about 1,200) left for the Yukon.
It was no easy trek from Circle City to the gold strike, especially in the winter. The Yukon River was only navigable in the summer and was frozen solid the rest of the year. It was probably lucky that the Canadian government would only admit prospectors if they had a year’s worth of food with them.
The fact that the area was iced and snowed in over the winter meant that the rest of the world didn’t hear about the gold until spring, when the river thawed. When the news broke, though, 100,000 people set off for the Klondike. Fewer than half of them actually made it, but it was still a huge population explosion for an area where a 1,200-person town was known as the Paris of the area. In Seattle, the mayor, twelve policemen, and half of the streetcar drivers left for the gold rush at the same time. The governor of Washington showed up, too.
New boomtowns sprang up on both the US and Canadian sides of the border. They were pretty different, depending on where they were located. Skagway was the biggest boomtown in Alaska, and well known for being completely lawless and chaotic. It was run by Soapy Smith and his gang. Their scams included setting up a telegraph office where you could send and receive messages. But it was a fake; there was no telegraph line, and any messages you “received” were just made up. Soapy himself was killed in a shootout in 1898.
On the other hand, Dawson City, the biggest Canadian boomtown, was laid out according to a city plan, and by all reports was pretty civilized. Its biggest problem was fire — there were two big fires in the city, in 1897 and 1898. Both were accidentally started by the same person: Belle Mitchell. But otherwise, Dawson City was patrolled by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (the Mounties), and there were only 150 arrests in 1898, the worst period.
Only a few people got rich from the gold rush, and most of those made their money from something other than mining. But George Carmack and his party really did get rich. Skookum Jim kept prospecting, even though he had a huge fortune. Dawson Charlie lived like a jet setter, but died pretty young in an accident when he was drunk. George Carmack and Kate split up. He moved to Modesto, California and remarried, and his new wife turned out to be good at managing the family fortune, which she turned into an even bigger pile. George, though, could never get rid of his gold fever and kept setting out on prospecting trips here and there for the rest of his life — he lived until 1922.
Carmack probably paid no attention to ships, but it was on the anniversary of his gold strike, August 16, 1913, that the Queen Mary was completed. But it wasn’t the luxury ocean liner you’re thinking of. This was the HMS Queen Mary, the last battleship ever built in England, and also the largest. The better known ship is the RMS Queen Mary, the ocean liner launched in 1934. The ocean liner was much bigger than the battleship, which was sunk during World War I.
Then there’s the Queen Mary 2, the only remaining passenger ship in the world designed as a “liner” instead of a cruise ship. In spite of that, the ship often goes on cruises now, after sitting in port until November, 2021 during the Covid pandemic. I think it might even cruise to Alaska — where they might even schedule a special cruise if somebody discovers gold again.
