The Deadly Stampede

In the 1890s, tens of thousands of people flocked to the Yukon in search of gold but were instead assailed by scurvy, bears and punishing cold. Felicity Aston relates how the Klondike gold rush turned into a grim battle for survival

- Felicity Aston

On the morning of Saturday 17 July 1897, the modest seaport of Seattle awoke to a sensation. The morning papers screamed the headline: “Gold! Gold! Gold! Gold! Sixty-Eight Rich Men on the Steamer Portland! Stacks of Yellow Metal!”

The curious thronged through the streets towards Schwabacher Wharf where the steamship Portland had just arrived back from the Yukon. They cheered as grizzled men wearing new suits and long beards struggled to lift ashore leather satchels stuffed with gold dust and nuggets. Rumour spread through the crowd that the steamship carried “a ton of gold” but they were wrong: the Portland carried nearer two tons.

It had been nearly 50 years since the first great gold rush of northern California in 1849. Since then, persistent rumours of gold in the north had prompted a steady trickle of prospectors to set off in search of it. But the north was still a hostile wilderness of dense forest, short summers and brutal winters. There was no infrastructure and the Yukon river was the only thoroughfare.

On 10 August 1896, veteran prospector George Carmack, his wife, Kate (a member of the Tagish First Nations people), her brother Skookum Jim, and his nephew, nicknamed Dawson Charlie, were on a fishing trip along the Klondike river, a remote tributary of the Yukon, when they found a thick layer of gold in the bedrock of Rabbit Creek.