Imagine 40000 people from all over rushing to Klondike where it's cold af in the winter, to find gold and get rich which could change your entire life.
The first shipment of gold that the first prospectors brought in, was over a billion dollars worth in todays time.
People must've lost their minds hearing that. People quit their jobs, gave up everything they had, just to find gold.

I always wondered how it worked.
They say people had to buy a claim. But who owned these remote pieces of land somewhere in the wild of the klondike area?
How expensive would it be to buy a claim, and since most people were store clerks or tradies, they obviously couldn't afford said claims.
What would happen if you just went there, started digging gold and kept it without buying said claim?
Who prevented everyone from killing each other and just steal other people's gold and equipment since there was no police?

Another thing that always fascinated me, was that some of the richest people coming out of klondike, weren't gold diggers.
You'd think you had to be one of the early prospects to find gold because all the good claims would be taken and most people left completely broke.
But a few smart ones who entered the party late, simply set up businesses with outrageous prices, selling goods, opening a casino etc, they earned even more than the gold diggers without doing any of the hard work.

When we did our Alaska cruise we took a tour thing up to the Canadian Yukon and passed parts of the trails. We started in Skagway and went up through the White Pass and saw the Dead Horse Trail. Pretty interesting stuff.

I remember an episode of Little House on the Prairie about this

Pa gets gold fever and goes out West

Who’s we lady

I was raised in Alaska and spent the better part of my 26 years up there. Just moved to the lower 48 and miss home like crazy. Reading about the gold rush makes me home sick. Had a dream I was back in the mountains a few nights ago and had to reread Call of The Wild and a few other Jack London stories. Life has less meaning down here.

Me, my mom and my sister.Alaska is beautiful. I really hope to go back one day and see more of it.

Basically 200 years later. You cant name one gold digger. But you know the Levi’s name

I'll be heading home soon as I can. The economy is very bad there right now so I'm trying to find decent work before heading up.

Hope you find a job soon!

Ty me too

I’m absolutely fascinated by it. I was only aware of the event in name and surface level information until the other day. Now I’m jumping down the rabbit hole. Imagine giving up everything to travel on a sometimes months long journey to one of the most inhospitable regions of North America. Impassable mountains, temperatures as low as -60°, avalanches, thousands of miles from the nearest city. Horses were allegedly jumping off mountain passes out of exhaustion. Men were dropping dying of exhaustion and freezing to death before they even got to the Yukon.

But when they got there it was insane. Dawson City, Yukon reportedly had a population north of 50,000 in the late 1890s. It was the largest city west of Winnipeg and north of Seattle (bigger than Vancouver even). They called it the “Paris of the North.”



By 1905, the population plummeted to less than 5,000. The gold rush’s end killing the city.

Crazy how big of a deal it was at the time though. I can’t even fathom a parallel event today. One of Edison’s earliest films even captured the gold rush.

This documentary is fantastic for anyone interested:

Look up the story of Samuel Brannan. he basically is the guy responsible for it even though he wasnt a gold miner.

he was a store owner who sold jeans and shovels and stuff needed for mining.

Cornered the market right from the beginning. Ended up basically building and owning like 90% of San Francisco taking it form something like 3k to 100k population all the while being the only guy running whore houses,bars, stores, gambling, everything.

Not a nice guy but certainly a fascinating story. he eventually moved to San Diego after san francisco burned down and he lost ost of everything. Started over in san diego but was pretty much hated. Died and is buried in a local cemetery, was there for years without a stone until not too long ago. Went to see his grave when i was working in that area. Interesting story.

Yes op. Been to the gold rush museum in Seattle, was a blast(seattle was the starting point)

Most interesting thing was that it only lasted 2 years or something. Most never made money. Decades later they talked to and interviewed surviving rushers and nearly all said it was the best and funnest part of their lives(despite not getting rich)


Truly a "the real gold was the friends we made along the way" event(ded fkn srs)

Similar events are the bitcoin rush, people moving to silic9n Valley during the tech boom, and Bakken oil filed rush in early 2010s (where people were just showing up in North Dakota without experience and getting 100k jobs but living in crappy trailers for 2k a month)

It was the Crypto of it's day. Just like Crypto some of the early people got rich AF and a lo of people made money off of others but more people lost.

Another good video showing Edison’s footage restored and colorized:
Fascinating but Brannan died before the Klondike rush began. He was part of the earlier California gold rush. Still an incredible life story.

We have a miscer who does this - forgot his username.

What would you do for a Klondike bar?

Lol.


Was a pretty good show

Does your ex remind you of Mrs olson?

Pretty sure our resident miscer avojomacado or whatever his name is... Works in the Yukon and a gold miner

I think he posts every couple of months because he's usually out mining lol

I knew he lived in the Yukon but I wasn’t aware he actually mined for gold. Pretty fkin cool. He should do an AMA (maybe he already has). It would be interesting to hear what the modern day methods of extracting gold are. I think they have to blast the bedrock and run it through a machine that looks like a waterslide that separates gold from soil/sediment. Sounds like enjoyable work albeit probably long and tiring hours.

No one makes money mining gold. The big corps own all the good land. Some executives in an office building make all the money and pay the tradie miners the bare minimum.

Heard on a podcast that the Gold rush of 1849 started a year earlier and was composed of locals and people from all over the Pacific. Imagine coming out of the woods, seeing the Ocean for the first time and its a China man and a Polynesian mining the stream, true wtf moment.