“There are strange things done in the midnight sun by the men who moil for gold.”
There are strange things done in the midnight sun by the men who moil for gold.”
My brother’s recitation of “The Cremation of Sam McGee” was the first time I ever heard epic poetry delivered—as opposed to read—and I was spellbound. (That he followed it up with Ruth Moore’s “The Ballad of the Night Charlie Tended Weir” was icing on the cake.) I loved the poem and went on to read most of Robert Service’s work, but it was years before I really understood the importance of the Yukon Gold Rush.
On August 16, 1896, a group of four people found gold on Rabbit Creek in the remote Yukon Territory of Canada. A Tlingit and Tagish woman known as Kate Carmack; her brother, known as Skookum Jim; her husband, George Carmack; and a third man, nicknamed Dawson Charlie, made up the family group.
Reports suggest that it was Skookum Jim who made the initial discovery, but since his white brother-in-law would be far better able than an Indigenous man to protect his mining claim, it was Carmack who filed the first legal claim for gold on the creek that would soon become known as Bonanza Creek.
Nearby miners rushed to the Klondike to stake their own claims, and news began to filter out to the rest of the world. By the following summer, 30,000 to 40,000 men, known as “stampeders,” had rushed to the Yukon to try their fortunes there.
There were many routes to the gold fields, but most cost a lot of money. The poorest adventurers took the straightest route in, leading them only about 33 miles from the Pacific waterways to a lake where they could buy or build a boat that would take them down the Yukon River to the gold fields. While short, that route took them up Chilkoot Pass: a high mountain pass they traversed by trudging up 1,500 steps cut into ice. The winter journey was easier than the summer version. In the summer, the rocks that littered the path were treacherous.
As Democrats tried to revise the tariff and replace missing revenue with an income tax, Republicans insisted they were socialists. In the 1894 midterms, Republicans blamed Democrats for the economic crisis, strikes, and desperation. They associated the Democrats with economic disaster and anarchy and promised a Republican victory would dramatically improve the economy. In the midterms, voters turned Congress back over to Republicans.
But the fight was not yet over. In 1896, a handsome young Nebraska Democrat speaking at the Democratic National Convention stood firmly for the people. “There are two ideas of government,” William Jennings Bryan said. “There are those who believe that, if you will only legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, that their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea, however, has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up and through every class which rests upon them.”
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