The Klondike Gold Rush

[Music] so [Music] the klondike gold rush is a great adventure story and it's always going to be that for many of the guys who had been up there those years in the north remained the most exciting period of their lives they had had the excitement of wondering if they were going to survive and it never left them this was truly the great bonanza of a lifetime it's capitalism at its rawest a poor man could head off to the klondike and come back as a klondike king but the risk was huge gold could drive men crazy but mostly it was the inability to find gold that drove men crazy the lust for gold was not a form of insanity it was absolutely rational starting with no one ended with no one but for a brief period of time there was the most fantastic story that was written in that time the klondike gold rush is made possible by the wilson foundation the cable public affairs channel with additional funding provided by the rogers documentary fund and the rogers cable network fund [Music] one of the incredible things about the gold rush is that even now more than 100 years later we are still discovering new aspects to this history every day with new journals photographs letters and even descendants of the original stampeders coming back and trying to find their roots in the north i'm pam stennik okay i'm carl gerkey the park historian here and i'm up here looking for information about my great great uncle his name was warner dahlstrom i've heard stories for generations about how you know he was involved in all of this and how as a young man he was 22 he came here and he wanted to find his fame and fortune and mostly he wanted to be a writer so he was basically seeking to write a book about the gold rush so he had a manuscript with him when he died well that would be interesting to see and i've always wanted to come here and i know we do have two letters from him and one was on march 20th of 1898 and then stated that he'd made a lot of friends and he was enjoying himself and he was safe and that he felt like it was the right place to be at that time dear folks i'm at present at sheep camp getting along better every day my health is better than it ever was i have more energy than ever the wages are good the climate is splendid there's no danger of a person starving to death the people all seem to have charity i think alaska and the klondike will be the coming countries i'll close this letter hoping to hear from you soon as it takes a letter a long time to get here yours truly w a dollstrom sheep camp alaska and that's why i'm here i'm basically trying to find any information i can find on him okay well i can tell you a little bit the stampeders usually took the train to seattle [Music] we call them stampeders because it was really a stampede once the word got out that there was gold in the klondike in 1897 the united states is locked in a harsh economic crisis unemployment rates soar as high as 43 percent there is no end in sight the 1880s and 1890s were a pretty brutal period in north america there was a huge economic decline banks going bust there were bread lines there were families starving there was a popular song at the time everybody's working but papa which reflects that uh that sentiment and it dragged on for several years by 1890 frederick jackson turner the great american historian said the era of the frontier is over there is no more chance for young men to go out and found a new farm so what could a young man do [Music] and then this news came that there was this incredible gold strike [Music] on july 15 1897 the steamship portland arrives in seattle with astonishing cargo today's equivalent of 30 million dollars in gold it is the richest gold strike in north american mining history suddenly these people coming off a boat dragging sacks and bags and cases filled with gold the discovery is made on rabbit creek a small tributary of the klondike river located just 60 miles from the alaskan border in canada's yukon territory it's in the newspapers on the west coast it reaches the newspapers on the east coast and it's like a match to a tinderbox the news triggers people's hunger people's appetite people's desperation it had the excitement the chaos the drama the romance the distance everything was involved it's made for the front page matter of fact the klondike was front page news in san francisco for six weeks clondisitis just surges across north america and elsewhere [Music] one of the very first pieces of moving film is a edison film shot in 1897 in seattle showing one of the first ships to leave for the klondike to the world at large in 1897 klondike became this magical mystery place this place way beyond the edge of nowhere um and in a very short time it became the most famous place on earth america's best correspondents race north to cover the sensation one of the most prolific is tapanatni who's dispatched to the klondike by the popular harper's weekly magazine adney is an outdoorsman and seasoned canoe tripper he has a deep appreciation for adventure but has never traveled to regions this far north adney i think had the eye for the telling detail so the poignant story so if you really one wants to learn about the gold rush there's no better source than tapping at me on the 30th of july i purchased at the office of the canadian pacific railway in new york a printed ticket reading new york to die i spent the next three days getting together a one years outfit including a complete photographic kit and the best moose hide moccasins tappan adney the first wave of stampeders moved north in july 1897 but nearly all of the original creeks have been staked and claimed a full year earlier in august 1896 george carmack an american who's been up in the north for a decade with his uh clingit wife and some relatives of hers find this gold on rabbit creek which would later become known as bonanza creek but there is controversy over who was the first to discover the gold george carmack locates a discovery claim but the evidence seems to be that it was skookum jim who found the gold who alerted carmack to the clan carmack is ready to give up on rabbit creek but his brother-in-law skookum jim tries one last pan [Music] and the gold as one person said later was as thick as cheese in a sandwich it was the most incredible strike [Music] skookum gym is is recognized in canada on the stamps as the discoverer of the klondike what does it all mean some men have been digging with shovels into the earth and filling large pans with heavy yellow metal which when gathered in bags and old coats made a load that several men could not lift now vessels and men and horses and dogs are set in a violent motion [Music] a stampede unequaled in history was on tap and added people set off with very little clue about where it was or what it meant it was sort of one of those events in history where people are just so swept up in the mass hysteria of it the new bonanza was in the north and it was far away but by god they were going to get their share [Music] men walked off the job really with this idea that this was going to be the start of a new life the california gold rush had shown that you could get rich very fast in 1849 news of gold in california triggered the largest migration of people in u.s history the quest for the california dream was inspired by the great promise that hard work and a bit of luck could bring anyone immense fortune so when the bonanza creek discovery was made what this meant was that somewhere in that mountain over there roughly on the border of alaska had to be the mother lode thousands and thousands of people headed north who had no business heading north it was really going to be far more difficult and dangerous than many of them could have ever realized [Music] most of the stampeders were not miners they were not speculators they had no idea what gold mining was all about they were dreamers and they were gamblers and they wanted to go to this dreamland where they had been told that they could practically pick up nuggets from the river's edge as soon as they got there if they just got lucky their life would be revolutionized if you were departing on your trip to the klondike you get on board one of the hastily revived rust bucket steamboats that had been beached for years anything that could be put back in the water was by september 1897 steamships are operating weekly heading north from all major ports along the pacific coast the journey takes ships two full weeks before arriving at skagway and daiye alaska skagway august 20th we stood gazing in wonder at the scene before us few of us had the inclination to look at the truly grand scenery with which we were surrounded snow and glacier-capped mountains rising thousands of feet from the green sparkling water are for other eyes than those of miners excited by the real commencement of their journey in 1897 when the first rush of stampeders first arrived there was only a handful of people there and just a few wooden buildings suddenly these ships started arriving filled with badly dressed hungry men they're disembarked onto the muddy beach and they look at the wall of centerlias mountains ahead of them and realize they're going to have to climb them most of the people who went had absolutely no idea about this savage and menacing landscape they were about to enter [Music] the north is extraordinarily beautiful but it's a very austere beauty it's icy it's white temperatures can go right down to minus 60 or below the mountains are impassable covered in sheets of ice the rivers are so fast flowing as all the melted snow and ice comes crashing down the tributaries of the yukon river the landscape is magnificent vast but it's absolutely indifferent to you and whether you survive or not is of absolutely no importance after disembarking in skagway and ie stampeders begin planning a seemingly insurmountable task each must carry one year's worth of provisions to the klondike fearing mass starvation canada's northwest mounted police enforce a new law every traveler must register their supplies those who attempt traveling light are denied access [Music] men who had never before handled a horse are trying to put back saddles on them everyone seems to have lost his head and cannot observe or state facts accidents and runaways are occurring every few moments pilfering has been going on and the men who are lying by their goods will shoot at sight nobody stays there for very long because that's not where the gold is and they know they have to keep heading north and they know that the next stage is actually the scariest there are two main routes into the klondike from the town of skagway the 43-mile white pass trail takes longer and has a lower elevation the chilkoot trail from dai runs 32 miles but imposes an extreme incline thousands choose the chilkoot trail conditions here are slightly better and allow those without deep pockets to carry provisions on their backs eliminating the cost of hiring horses the chilku trail from daiy was known as the poor man's route because you could if you tried you could carry your ton of supplies from dai to a point where you could float them down the yukon river system to dawson city [Music] there's this stream of men setting off from day up towards a tiny tiny cleft in the wall of mountains ahead of them [Music] everyone is discouraged whichever way you go you wish you had gone the other there are more inexperienced men per square foot than any place i have ever been to their last words were well boys we'll meet you on the other side we wondered if they would tap and addy the challenging thing of the chiliku pass was the men had to climb it and climb it and climb it again so it's not that they just did it once they had to do it 15 20 times of carrying their loads up over the pass because uh you needed a ton of goods to get into the yukon otherwise the mounties wouldn't let you in and so the real struggle of this is having to climb and recline the pass it's important to remember that the steepness of the angle it's about like if you have a ladder up on the inside of a house this is a journey not of days not even of weeks often it's months it was numbing you were working in snowstorms you were struggling to keep ahead of the crowd people wore themselves out there were people who died of exhaustion on the trail on the choku trail you either did it or you didn't make it now the white pass trail wasn't as high you didn't have the terrible climb that tried everybody's spirit but it was a rough trail depending on the season it could be muddy it could be wet the wintertime was swept by blizzards and deep snow but it was a route by which you could transport your goods using pack horses and they did they worked the poor animals to death terrible hardships horses falling right and left 17 in one place not one in 10 will get over i believe a horse will commit suicide and this is enough to make them there were many animals pack animals that jumped over the edge into the gorges in an act of suicide rather than continue to be worked mercilessly they saw a horse collapse and die on the trail and nobody stopped and the traffic of all these people moving forward over the trail ground the animal to nothing and there was just the the flank on one side of the trail and the head on the other and the rest have been ground away there were many threats along these trails on the chilkoot pass snowslides could bury a man without warning there was a terrible avalanche at one point uh onto the sheep camp which is where many stampeders would stop and camp for a while there was an avalanche that killed several dozen men suddenly they were gone and here they're pulling out a body so um and these bodies were frozen in in very odd positions sometimes did they keep records of who they pulled out and where well um they they tried to um i mean i i guess what i'm saying is right there i could be looking at my great great uncle well it could be it could be if there were 90 people that were killed in this avalanche well uh there were 200 or so people actually in that line and we don't know exactly how many people were killed current estimates around 60 to 70 people were killed so you don't have records to see whether he was actually killed in the avalanche um i do have a list of the victims so there he is we're all a very strong proud family and we're all very much adventurous and i picked up a little bit of that adventurous spirit from him and so i feel like part of him lives on through the rest of us and it definitely lives on through me is it possible to go see the cemetery where they were buried yes indeed the slide cemetery is out there it's in the public view and we can certainly go out there and take a look i would love to do that all right this is a part of my heritage and i can be a part of that and know a little bit more about the man who came here and died here just 22 to have done this to have gone so far it's just amazing once on top a trail crosses a broken yet level summit this puts one into a new and smiling mood the air is grateful and it seems like another country once they've reached the summit for many of them there's just this fantastic sense of achievement they have actually passed that first hurdle but there's still a long way from the gold fields the chilcoot and white pass trails meet at lake bennett this is the beginning of a 500 mile voyage down the yukon river to dawson city and the gold fields but first the stampeders must build their own boats this means sewing down trees making planks to build usually incredibly primitive looking dinghies it's a wonder more of them didn't sink after the boat is built the seams are cocked with oakum and pitched the green lumber shrinks before it gets into the water so the boats as a rule leak like sieves what's scary is that they are going down one of the mightiest rivers in north america it was an extraordinary journey 600 kilometers in these really ticky tacky boats usually packed to the guilds with all the provisions never quite sure what was around the next corner they didn't have maps many of them had no idea they'd never heard of the white horse rapids numerous boats were wrecked and people killed it was extraordinarily challenging experience for anybody just to come out alive october 9th whitehorse rapids no fewer than 40 drownings are to be credited to this bit of water since the river first opened the trail around the rapids is lined with trees blazed and inscribed with the heroic deeds of those gone before tap and adney many of them were swamped and even if the men survived they lost all their provisions they lost everything they'd brought up the chilcoop pass with them [Applause] [Music] if they made it safely through the white horse rapids from there it was a pretty smooth sailing or floating to dawson city the following morning we reload and push off once more in the face of a cutting north wind just at the turn a mile from our camping place we see on the bank a great number of boats tens and people how far is it to dawson we call out this is dawson so after spending months on the trail to come around that final bend and to see that characteristic scar on the side of the moose hype mountain behind dawson city it must have been an absolute sense of euphoria that they had arrived [Music] as one walked for the first time down the smoothly beaten street it was an animated scene and one upon which the newcomer gazed with wonder the saloons and stores were thronged with men dogs lay about the street under everyone's feet the sight was one never to be forgotten tap and add me if you can imagine the smells the raw sewage and the fresh sawdust imagine the sounds the pounding of hammers the howling of dogs music pouring out of temporary structures it was a carnival-like atmosphere once the stampeders arrived in 1897 they learned how to stake claims and they start digging digging and digging mining was back breaking labor because the ground was frozen it was all permafrost they had to burn their way into the ground down to the pastry 20 30 or 40 feet one foot at a time shoveling out these holes when you look down bonanza creek in the in the winter and you saw these smoking holes it looked like hell but it was freezing it was always sort of a question of which was the worst guy to be the guy at the top hauling the bucket up in the bleakest of winds and uh bitterly cold or the guy at the bottom of the shaft who was sheltered from the wind but uh at any moment the shaft might just collapse on him and he'd suffocate the labor is incredible of moving all this dirt gravel and rock hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of tons of it out of the ground all by human power if you're going to be a gold miner and stick with it that requires a level of endurance and fortitude that's found in very few other professions but even people who didn't know what they were doing could get lucky prospecting is inherently gambling miners are the greatest gamblers the world had ever seen they lived on luck they lived on the hope that somehow with the next pan of dirt with the next shovel they might hit that pace break that they were so long looking for there was a warning that was published in a newspaper that i think is kind of a creed of the gold miner the road is long supplies are costly seasons are short and fortune is fickle so they all knew that fortune was fickle and that the challenges were there but if you turned back you never had a shot they kept finding gold but the most productive creek was the original creek if you were in at the beginning and staked bonanza creek you could walk away with a fortune and one of the people who had staked on bonanza was the canadian johnny lind he was a young man another of these guys who saw no future for himself back home and who wanted an adventure [Music] my grandfather believed in a flip of the coin you know it's uh hits tails uh he believed in luck in a way i mean you could create your own luck but he believed in luck he and his partner flipped a coin they were going to either venezuela for oil or alaska for gold one or the other so uh alaska turned up it was 1896 when he went up he got to 40 mile and they said there's a big strike in dawson so he went up to dawson and it was a real phenomenal strike they were pretty lucky my grandfather settled on 26 above on bonanza and he had his cabin there and when they were mining full full blast he had two ships of a hundred men and he paid them twenty dollars a day so there was a four thousand dollar per day payroll on that property so they were really working hard to to get gold there's lots of people who made all kinds of money up there but they thought that this gold would go on forever hitting the town every night there's stories about those guys come into town and lose fifty thousand dollars on one hand in poker and fifty thousand dollars in those days like five million dollars or more five million dollars in a poker hand my grandfather didn't do any of that i think it was determination just absolute sheer determination i have just some of the characteristics yeah for sure [Music] my father started this collection but he wasn't as ambitious as i was on the books i've got several thousand now and all of these books that i have relate to the period between 1895 and 1905 just 10 years i think this period is so fascinating because i think it's life it's that sort of yeah it could be wonderful or god it could be awful i think it's life especially if you take chances i think it is by the summer of 1898 only a year into the stampede dawson city's population expands to over 20 000 people the once remote outpost of only a few hundred is fast becoming one of the largest cities in canada everything in the north is a very short but rapid growing season and that can also be applied to dawson city the town grew under these 21 hours of sunlight in the summer it was not so long before dawson was quite like the communities that it once had been so radically different from the construction of the white pass and yukon railway marks a watershed change in the history of the yukon and dawson the railroad from skagway to whitehorse gets you right to the spot on the river you need to be to head down river to dawson a regular steamship route is formed between lake bennett and dawson city what was once a two-month journey from skagway to dawson now takes mere days dawson city and the klondike gold rush have actually become a tourist attraction because apparently it's one of the wonders of the world it's the city of whiskey women and gold everything was paid for in nuggets and gold flakes and every commercial establishment had a set of scales on its counter four years ago there were four white women in the yukon this winter there were probably 200 all of whom were as intent as the men upon earning fortune they dress in short skirts with leather leggings or rubber boots or else in out and out men's trousers tap anatomy the number of women who went on the klondike stampede wasn't a large percentage however those who went seem to be so much bolder and unfettered and freer than the men not all the men were extraordinary but all the women certainly were there were some pretty amazing women the most obvious is belinda moroni who became the richest woman in the klondike she was a really sassy irish american she heard about the gold rush very early and quickly realized that this could be the great opportunity in her packing she has these long aluminum tubes and she won't tell anybody what's in them she gets to dawson within six weeks she has a restaurant going she is supplying men with outfits and she has a construction business going because what was in those aluminum tubes was incredibly wonderful silk underwear lingerie night dresses and she knew that there were women in dawson and she could sell this stuff to them at a huge profit [Music] little more than a year ago this wilderness now peopled by some thousands of white men resounded only to the wolf's howl and the raven's hollow clock well my one gaze and wonder for the world has seen nothing like this by the end of 1898 dawson city has earned a new title the paris of the north [Music] dawson by now is a complete circus the population spikes at around 30 000 people it's one of the largest cities in canada full of yankees on canadian soil with all the drive and energy of full-blown yankee capitalism [Music] and it's like dawson is turning itself into a midwestern town it got its banks it got its newspapers it got its law suddenly there are children on the streets wives arriving wanting to see what their husbands were doing and it was becoming the kind of place that many of the original miners had run away from is september 1899 news reaches dawson city about a gold strike in nome alaska a tiny wilderness beach near the bering sea in a matter of days 8 000 miners lead dawson to pursue gold fever as it moves north and they leave behind this town which is now running itself quite nicely it's got three newspapers it's got the police it's got a mayor but suddenly it's great raison debt starts to fizzle dawson city september 16 1899 the six day ocean voyage to seattle and the final edges to friends and companions and hunger and plenty in misery and in good fortune all these were a fitting close to 16 months of an experience that none of us can hope to see repeated in a lifetime this imperfect story of what was one of the most remarkable movements of people in the history of the world for the time being has come to an end tapping at me after one year in the yukon adney returns to new york to publish what he witnessed he calls his book the klondike stampede its pages send other young writers north in search of inspiration it's a wonderful story and it's had so many great narrators i mean jack london went up there he was an unpublished writer his gold was all the stories he picked up in the bars and two years after he got out of the north he was the best paid best known short story writer in north america they're great stories and so they really just light people's imagination up this is the cremation of sam mcgee by robert service there's strange things done in the midnight sun by the men who moil for gold the arctic trails of their secret tales that make your blood run cold the northern lights have seen queer sights but the queers they ever did see was the night in the march of lake la barge when i cremated sam mcgee robert service was the great bard of the gold rush robert service himself didn't get to dawson until 10 years after the gold rush and he was a rather puny bank clerk so he's nothing like the sort of macho figures in his poetry he crouched in the sleigh and he raved all day about his home in tennessee but before nightfall corpse was all that was left of sam mcgee he was lashed as a sleigh and seemed to say you may tax your brawn in brains but you promise true and it's up to you to cremate these last remains the cremation of sam mcgee is one of the absolute best robert service poems and one of the best known because it's got so much humor in it and so much wit so filled with dread i bravely said i'll just take a peep inside i'm sure he's cooked but it's time i looked and the door opened wide there's that sam cool and calm in the heart of the furnace roar he wore a smile you could see a mile and he said please close that door it's fine in here but i greatly fear you'll let in the cold and storm since i left plum tree down in tennessee it's the first time i've been warm he captures you know both the sort of struggle of the north and the hideous cold but also this sort of crazy suicidal impulses of some of these guys the northern lights have seen queer sites but the queers they ever did see was the night in the march of lake labarge when accremated sam mcgee thank you the gold rush lasted for only three years in that time nearly 100 000 stampeders set out for the klondike in the end only 30 000 made it to the gold fields for the vast majority the dream of striking it rich was never fulfilled never did so many go so far and come back with so little because most of the miners did not return with very much gold of all the people who went to dawson in fact 2 000 found gold but only 200 found really significant amounts and of those 200 only about 40 50 managed to get their gold out so many of the rest of them just pissed it away in dawson for some like johnny lind it was also the making of them because he came out with enough money to start a very successful business he was unusual and he goes out and he never goes back to the yukon lots of them did lots of them did lots of them who didn't make any money still went back he never did there was still gold in the klondike and so the big companies moved in like guggenheim they came in with big dredges it was no longer going to be the era of what was known as gumboot miners the guys with their rubber boots and their shovels and suddenly these huge dredgers came in and started just churning through the creeks it went on being fairly prosperous gold continued to be found but it started to be so expensive to get equipment up there that dawson went into decline today dawson city has a population of 2 000 people a fraction of its heyday but its frontier spirit has never disappeared dawson city is an example of a gold rush town that survived endured but never grew out of the gold rush dawson still attracts individuals looking for treasure of one sort or another and in many cases now it's not monetary riches it's the quest for adventure thomas argue traveled across canada to get to dawson city this is his first yukon summer i hitchhiked up here took me seven days and seven rides i love dawson city so much i think it's the extremities up here it's so cold and it's so hot and it's so dark and it's so bright i don't know kind of mirrors how i feel in my soul you know all this wilderness and an old tin town a little bit broken down and confused you know it's like the land of misfits the more different you are the more you fit in up here you know when i think of history and how it all happened people came here with the idea that they could take a resource out of the ground and better their lives and fulfill their dreams but because everybody had that in their sights i don't know if people in the old dawson days cared as much for each other as today because they were almost stepping on each other because they were all scrambling for the same thing where dawson today is a lot more relaxed people really care about each other up here that's the goal in the klondike the people's laws [Music] today's dawson is filled with people who have arrived there for a bunch of different reasons often they're running away from something and they really sort of resist the idea that they should ever go south and sort of fit into a more conventional life again sue taylor came to dawson city as a teenager and never left i just wanted to get away from ontario and where i grew up in ontario was a lovely spot stratford ontario theater town but everybody i knew worked in the factories and there was no way i was going to work in the factory and i wasn't going to school anymore pretty much done with that so i came up here and thought i'd see what happened and moved into a tent like everybody else i was very happy to be doing that town was full of mud bought a brand new pair of rubber boots and that was my first day walked down to the westminster hotel the boyfriend he stayed outside he was afraid to go in i went inside with my bright shiny boots on and these big hairy guys took one look at my boots picked me up by my boots shook me until i fell out of it then they poured the jug of beer into the gum boot and they passed it all around and when it got to me i had a drink too and i guess i was just accepted i liked it fine my boyfriend never did come in he left town very quickly but i stayed it's just this place has a calling for people who just want to do be themselves and be who they want to be be who they are dress how they want act how they want sue regularly plays the role of famous klondiker belinda mulrooney in a theater presentation for visiting tourists well as i said i had a pretty good role here in a pretty good place amongst the people i fit into a strange niche but no other women really fit you see i was friends with those prostitutes and those language lilies of soulless love or just down on their luck women however you want to call them melinda morooni was she's a fabulous character and i feel very honored to play her every time they told her she couldn't do something she went and did it even bigger and better than they said she couldn't do and now that's the spirit that's still here oh you bet [Music] almost 120 years after the initial discovery of bonanza creek there is still gold on the very same tributaries of the klondike [Music] most of the gold production is still handled by small family operations which turn out over sixty thousand ounces of gold per year worth nearly eighty five million dollars [Applause] the same rudimentary method is used to extract gold from the ground a method known as placer mining water is used to melt layers of permafrost and expose gold-rich soil called paydirt the pay dirt is then run through a sluice machine once in the machine the heavier gold collects at the bottom of the runs while the lighter material washes away when the cycle is complete the collecting mats reveal gold nuggets and flakes [Music] david miller is mining at gold bottom creek not far from george carmack's discovery site of 1896 [Music] there's about two ounces of gold here which today's world is pretty close to two thousand dollars last year it was three see how fast it goes down come on inside and i'll show you inside my parents came here from the ottawa valley in 1954 on their honeymoon and uh they never left i've been mining on my own for 30 years now so all of these claims are mine i got about 70 claims here works out to just over five miles this is one of the few gold rush areas in the world where they've been continuously mining since the actual gold rush so they're still here we're still continually mining here uh you know i mean we don't find the four ounces to a pan that they find the best we ever found here was we found three quarters of an ounce in one pan which that was pretty exciting when you find it you get really excited and when you don't find it there's an empty feeling in your stomach so up and down that after a few years you learn to regulate yourself because you'd drive yourself crazy if you went with all those ebbs and flows and stuff you just at least i would i wouldn't be able to manage it [Music] simon mason wood has lived in the north his entire life and has ties to the original stampede yeah this is a tough walk for me i'm always afraid of falling down tripping he makes his living as a middleman between the miners and the gold market what i do for the miners sell the gold on their behalf gold mining has never interested me it's just a great way to make a little bit of money out of a lot of money i tell you fellas that are coming up here all enthused to go go money they should just find a great big hole go throw some money in it every day they're still all thinking that there's uh certainly uh gold on the creek that the other people haven't got yet but you know those old miners were pretty smart bunch they didn't miss anything i always say i think they could smell it my great-grandfather came into the gold rod he was in prior to the gold rush he was at 40 mile and he partnered up with a fellow by the name of tex rickard and he and tex were quite successful they had a lot of claims and i think they owned the red feather saloon for a while as well the partnership then they split it up because the tex he thought he had enough he headed back to new york he built madison square gardens and became quite a successful fight promoter and my great grandfather bought a steamboat and on the first or second trip down the river it sunk and he lost everything he had there's good businessmen out there and the ones that are good businessmen are still out there there's still some old-timers people that are born and raised on the creeks still mining i just don't have what it takes to be a good placer miner [Music] you haven't had a lot of visitors like me i guess that want to come out and visit their ancestors no no we've in the in the almost 30 years i've been here you are probably about the third uh visitor that has ties with the stampeders [Music] so here you are how incredibly beautiful [Music] so do you have any unmarked graves any areas where you know that there's a body but there's no marker well there are some markers that talk about being unknown can we go to one of those um i think over here [Music] i guess it would make me feel better to think that i i knew where the resting place was his spirit is still here i'd like to look around for a minute oh sure [Music] fans [Music] that's just strange because i walked right over to here and just felt like that's where he was it completes a loop this is the last piece [Music] it's just incredible for many of those who went to dawson they came away with empty pockets but they'd had a fantastic adventure they'd seen the north they had felt that incredible promise of infinity that the north with its savage climate its endless light its brutal winters can give people it was the big adventure of their life it was their epiphany [Music] the whole point of going to the klondike wasn't getting gold the whole point of going to the klondike was going to the klondike and in a way i think that's probably still true well so much hasn't even changed here so much is exactly the same you can't really get away from it it's a place of dreams a place where people can come to fulfill their dreams that i think is one of the legacies of the gold rush it's the end of the line dawson it's so remote but for that reason it also exerts a power to say you're here you've survived and you're special the klondike gold rush is made possible by the wilson foundation [Music] the cable public affairs channel with additional funding provided by the rogers documentary fund [Music] and the rogers cable network fund to learn more about the klondike gold rush log on to pbs.org [Music] the klondike gold rush is available on dvd to order visit shoppbs.org or call 1-800 play pbs [Music] you

Channel: Buffalo Toronto Public Media

Views: 964,921

Keywords: gold, gold rush, Klondike, stampeders, Sheep Camp Alaska, Dalstrom, North America, steamship, Portland, Rabbit Creek, Klondike River, Canada, Yukon Territory, Tappan Adney, Canadian Pacific Railway, Dyea, Bonanza Creek, Skookum, California Gold Rush, California Dream, Skagway, Alaska, St. Elias mountains, Chilkoot Trail, Dawson City, Whitehorse Rapids, Moosehide Mountain, Johnny Lind, WNED PBS, WNED, PBS, Buffalo Toronto Public Media, Buffalo, Toronto, Public Media, WNED PBS Productions

Id: ZM3h_cSJ4Lw

Length: 56min 41sec (3401 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 20 2022