Seattle Unit
"At 3 o'clock this morning the steamship Portland, from St. Michaels for Seattle, passed up [Puget] Sound with more than a ton of gold on board and 68 passengers."
When this magic sentence appeared on the July 17, 1897 issue of The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, it triggered one of the last—and one of the greatest—gold rushes in the history of North America. Before noon that day every berth aboard the Portland had been sold for the return trip north and telegraph wires carried details of the 68 miners who wrestled suitcases, gunny sacks, pokes, and boxes of gold down the gangplank at the Seattle wharf. When it was actually weighed, the gold amounted to more than two tons, but by then it didn't really matter; the stampede to the Klondike in northwestern Canada was underway, and the effects on Seattle would prove nothing short of astonishing.
The Klondike Gold Rush was already 11 months old when the Portland arrived at Seattle. Prospectors had been dribbling into that vast wilderness of the Yukon River drainage for decades, finding just enough "colors" on feeder streams to buy grub and tools. But the big strike eluded them until August 17, 1896, when a trio—two Indians and a white man—stopped to rest beside a tiny stream called Rabbit Creek, which emptied into the Klondike River. There on the creek bottom they saw glistening flecks of gold, "caught between rocks like cheese in a sandwich."
Skookum Jim, Tagish Charlie, and George Washington Carmack filled a cartridge casing with coarse gold dust. Then, leaving Skookum Jim behind to guard the discovery site, Carmack and Tagish Charlie hurried back down the Yukon River to the settlement at Fortymile where Carmack filed claims. When other miners saw Carmack's gold, they threw their belongings into boats and headed upriver to make claims near the discovery. Immediately the town of Dawson was started at the confluence of the Yukon and Klondike rivers. By the end of 1896 all good river-bottom claims had been staked and the prospectors spent the winter and spring digging out their fortunes. When the ice left the rivers, they rode a paddlewheeler to St. Michael, then piled their gold and belongings onto coastal steamers and headed home. It was 68 of these men who, in the summer of 1897, steamed into Seattle with confirmation of the Klondike's fabulous riches.
The news came at an opportune time, for Seattle, like the rest of the Nation, was still locked in the economic depression that followed the Panic of 1893. Many people were out of work and finding it difficult to feed themselves. But when that magic sentence about "more than a ton of gold" from the Klondike went out over the telegraph wires from Seattle, conditions changed dramatically. Business doubled, then tripled, as thousands of gold-seekers poured into the city from all over the United States and all parts of the world to outfit themselves for their great Alaskan and Yukon adventure. Seattle's mayor resigned to organize one of the many ill-fated Klondike mining expeditions. Farmers, bank clerks, teachers, doctors, firemen, policemen, ministers, con-men, missionaries, and prostitutes packed up and headed north. Most had no idea where the Klondike was; few really cared. And fewer still realized the incredible hardships they were about to face.
Where are you going?
What do you want to do?
