Different type of prospectors : "Gold ! Gold ! Gold !"

The numbers that I have found often vary, and I have decided to work out the average of prospectors mentioned, not to overflow this post with approximate numbers. Nevertheless, it is to be noted that numbers or percentage in this post are not clearly settled. 

We've already stated that the Gold Rush created a wave of hysteria in the continent and resulted in a mass migration towards the region of the Yukon. Most of the prospectors left their home to find gold in Canada. This general statement raises different questions. 

First : how many people suddenly became prospector and where did they come from ? Around 100,000 estimated prospectors attempted the adventure of the Klondike, many of them gave up du to the difficulties encountered on their way. Some still had enough money to get home, others had to stay and work in Alaska. Of the 100,000, around 30,000 of them actually made it there. Of the 30,000 that arrived to the Klondike region, 4,000 actually found gold and only a few became wealthy. If the prospectors came from many nations, the great majority were American (around 70% of the miners). 

Second : why did they go ? Mostly to find gold, as the newspaper headlines were chanting "Gold ! Gold ! Gold !", but articles also depected the Gold Rush as an adventure, which fed their enthusisasm.  The majority were unexperimented and unprepared for the difficulty ahead of them. As Pierre Berton wrote  :

Most of them were sedentary workers, clerks and salesmen and office help, but once they caught the fever they were not to be dettered by mere words, especially when many newspaper writers, egged on by local chambers of commerce, were painting the journey to the gold-fields in the most vivid and enthusiastic terms.

That is one part of the answer. Newspapers like The Seattles Post-Intelligencer were encouraging gold prospectors to go. In this case, it benefited the city of Seattle by boosting its economy; future miners would indeed need supply and transportation to reach the Klondike. The other part of the answer is linked to the economic context of the time. The country had known a economic crisis, unemployement was high, as poverty, and the demand of gold was high and worth more than paper currencies. My personal opinion is that the memory of the Californian Gold Rush also played a role in that hysteria.

If it had been noted that most of them were poor, some people more wealthy try the adventure, which lead us to a distinction that appears more important than poor/rich in the harsh environment of the Yukon, the distinction between experienced and unexperienced prospectors.
For people used to living in the city, the adventure of the North was a great change of lifestyle. Since the newspaper were minimizing on purpose the risks encountered by saying that "there was no possible chance of famine and that the dangers and hardships and cost of getting through have been greatly exaggerated" (2), budding prospectors often arrived unprepared -or too much prepared.
In this extract from the movie The Call of the Wild (1976), we will see how unexperience is depicted.

After watching this extract, the first thing which came to the mind is the clear contrast between the three rich prospectors, Hal, Charles and Mercedes, and the rest of the town. The other miners in the scene are represented in rags while the three outsiders are loaded with rich clothes and unecessary gears and supplies (for example the cooker which seemed so important to Mercedes "How do you expect me to manage without a cooker?"). Everyone is looking at them and making fun of them, as Jack London wrote : "Both men were manifestly out of place, and why such as they should adventure the North is part of the mystery of things that passes understanding." In other context, it could be interpreted as the distinction between rich and poor, the rich being considered as alien among the poor. But in the Klondike, their attitude and their lifestyle can be seen by experimented prospectors as foolish and even extremly dangerous.

This presentation of the three characters seemed to focus on their ridiculous behavior. This scene is set in the middle of the movie, therefore the spectator has already seen experimented people, postal worker, evolved in the Canadian environment, he is already used to the main precaution : travel light, be cautious of the food supply, be careful of the dogs, etc. The spectator had seen it, but it has also been explained by the workers in casual conversation, which were implicitly directed to the spectator. Because of that, the spectator is put at the same place of experimented prospector, and adopted the same judgemental vision of the characters. In this scene, they are clearly ridiculed, by the laughing of the audience, or by the old man's dance when he grab the fancy hat. 

The real contrast that is built in this extract is the distinction between experience and unexperience. I intentionnaly insist on these word, especcially because it is directly mention in the extract. The woman, in an attempt to help Mercedes, tries to convince them to listen to the miners because "they have experience," : they know that the dogs are exhausted, that the slegde is way too loaded, and that the sledge is stuck because of frost. The direction of this scene is particularly intersting, as the woman try to change Mercedes' mind, Mercedes refuses to listen and leaves the frame. The woman is left alone which give to the scene a dramatic aspect ; she seems to talk to someone who is already far away, someone who is already lost. The fact that they refused to listen to the woman, in other word, since they refused to listen to those who "have experience" will lead them to their doom. Several scene after, they once again refuse to listen to a worker, and fell through the ice and died. 

In the London's novel, the reader has not quite the same position as the spectator. If the reader is also used to the workers lifestyle, the miners of the town does not appear as bitter, and explicitly explained to Hal, Charles and Mercedes what is wrong :

Kind-hearted citizens caught the dogs and gathered up the scattered belongings. Also, they gave advice. Half the load and twice the dogs, if they ever expected to reach Dawson, was what they said. Hal and his sister and brother-in-law listened unwillingly, pitched tent, and overhauled the outfit, canned goods were turned out that made men laugh, for canned goods on the Trail is a thing to dream about. “Blankets for a hotel,” quoth one of the men who laughed and helped. “Half as many is too much; get rid of them. Throw away that tent, and all those dishes – who’s going to wash them anyway ? 

In these conditions, the reader can more easily put himself in the characters' shoes : the miners and the narrator informed both the characters and the reader. Mercedes' nature in the movie is clearly unpleasant to the spectator, while in the novel, she appears as a spoiled child that will gradually be psychologicaly affected by the life in the wild and struck by hysteria crisis. Generally speaking, the movie is build as more as a "road trip", with impressive view and adventure, while the novel can also be seen as a learning journey, as it can be seen in this extract :

 In the nature of Artic travel there was a reason why fourteen dogs should not drag one sled, and that was that one sled could not carry the food for fourteen dogs. But Charles and Hal did not know this. They had worked the trip out with a pencil, so much to a dog, so many dogs, and so many day, Q.E.D.

Here, the narrator describes an objectif notion of nature, a sort of law of the wild, that is not common knowledge, but learned through experience.

Sources :

1. Pierre Berton, Klondike, The Last Great Gold Rush, 1896-1899,  Canada, Anchor Canada, 2001  pp 101-102
2. Ken Anakin, dir. The Call of the Wild, Intercontinental Releasing Corp., 1972
3. Jack London, The Call of the Wild (1903)

Introduction : A great, but old, discovery

The Seattles Post-Intelligencer, July 17, 1897

In this post, we will focus on the discovery in itself, as a quick introduction for the real journey that represents the Klondike Gold Rush for the gold prospectors.


The Klondike Gold Rush as we called it, refers to the massive migration of gold prospectors in the region of the Klondike, in Alaska between 1897 and 1899. In July 1897, steamships from Alaska full of  "stacks of yellow metal' docked in San Fransisco and Seattle. Many rich deposit of gold had been discovered along the Klondike River in 1896. At that moment, the information quickly spread through the continent, newspaper and telegraphs talked about that great discovery that would lead hundred of people to the Yukon, all of them looking for gold. (It would be interesting to see in details in another post who left for the Klondike and why, but also how.)

In reality, that was not a new discovery. According to Gary L. Blackwood's article published Wild West :

There had been rumors of gold in the Yukon as far back as the 1830s, but little was done about it. The harsh land and harsher weather, plus the Chilkoot Indians’ jealous guarding of their territory, effectively kept out most prospectors–until 1878, when a man named George Holt braved the elements and the Indians and came back with nuggets impressive enough to make other prospectors follow his lead. By 1880, there were perhaps 200 miners panning fine placer gold from the sandbars along the Yukon River.

As it is written, gold had not been found during a simple stroke of luck and the region was already scanned by miners long before the actual Gold Rush. If some of the miners were locals, part of them were also foreigners (Russians are mentionned in the article) or coming from the mainland, which suggests that the information about gold in the Klondike was already known and shared by few people around the country. But it was only rumors which attracted miner that "came as much for the solitude as for the gold.", and it took several decades to actually found enough gold to appeal other prospectors from the mainland and start the Yukon fever. 

Blackwood also suggests that the delay between the actual discovery and the frenzy that took over the continent was due to the lack of communication, or rather the impossibility to spread of the information. Indeed, gold had been dug out in one year prior, on August 1896 by the American Georges Carmack and two Indians on Rabbit Creek, along the Yukon River. According to Blackwood, winter had been a great obstacle to the communication between Canada and the United-States. 

If all this had come about early in the year, the news would have reached civilization within a few weeks. But winter was already closing in. Once the rivers froze and the heavy snows fell, communication with the outside was nearly impossible. William Ogilvie, a Canadian government surveyor, sent off two separate messages to Ottawa, telling of the magnitude of the strike, but both were lost in the bureaucratic shuffle.

The harsh climate and land of Alaska is an important aspect of the Klondike Gold Rush, and most of the difficulties encountered by the miners revolved around that. Locals had even made money out of this problem by selling goods and services to fight the wild environement of the Yukon, which would be the subject of another post. This implication of the locals in the Gold Rush is not new either, they had already invested this eventual source of income. In the article, we learn that they were participating in the gold search, Chilkoot Indians were also gold miners. But after the migration of hundreds of American, they seemed to have changed their approach concerning gold. Unlike the miners who intended to make money out of gold, locals made money out of miners.

The law enforcement also mentioned in the article generated a good income. Under Canadian laws, miners had to get a license, and then when they had found a good location, they had to claim it to finally be able to mine and hopefully, find gold.

Source :

Gary L. Blackwood, Wild West (Aug, 1997)  (Document PDF)