Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush, 1896-1899 Read Online Free
Author: Pierre Berton
school-teacher; helped lay out Skagway and shot Soapy Smith.
Jefferson Randolph “Soapy” Smith , confidence man from Creede, Denver, and Leadville. Operated Jeff Smith’s Oyster Parlor.
On the Trails
Captain W. R. Abercrombie , Second U.S. Infantry, stationed at Valdez, Alaska.
Tappan Adney , correspondent for Harper’s Illustrated Weekly .
Gene Allen , itinerant newspaperman who founded the Klondike Nugget in Dawson.
Jack Dalton , frontiersman. Opened the Dalton Trail over which cattle could be brought from Haines Mission to Dawson City.
E. A. Hegg , Swedish-born photographer from Bellingham Bay, Washington, who photographed the stampede.
Norman Lee , Chilcoten rancher; drove a herd of cattle north along the Ashcroft Trail.
Addison Mizner , adventurer; laid out part of Dawson City and was later key architect of the Florida real estate boom of the 1920’s.
Wilson Mizner , wit and bon vivant , later founder of the Hollywood Brown Derby restaurant. Brother of Addison and of Edgar Mizner, manager of Dawson’s Alaska Commercial outlet.
Inspector J. D. Moodie , NWMP officer assigned to open a trail from Edmonton to the Yukon via the Peace River country.
Captain Patrick Henry Ray , Eighth U.S. Infantry, sent north to investigate possible relief of starvation along Yukon.
Stroller White , itinerant newspaperman who worked for the Skagway News , Bennett Sun , and Klondike Nugget .
W. D. Wood , former mayor of Seattle. Led expedition up Yukon River to Klondike.
The Golden Highway
It was the river that fashioned the land, and the river that ground down the gold .
Long before natives or white men saw it, the river was there, flowing for two thousand miles from mountain to seacoast, working its slow sculpture on valley and hillside, nibbling away at the flat tableland heaved up by the earth’s inner turmoils before the dawn of history .
The main stream had a thousand tentacles, and these reached back to the very spine of the continent, honing down the mountainsides into gullies and clefts – boulder grating on boulder, gravel grinding against gravel, sand scouring sand, until the river was glutted with silt and the whole Alaska-Yukon peninsula was pitted and grooved by the action of running water .
No mass could withstand this ceaseless abrasion, which lasted for more than five million years. The rocks and metals that had boiled up through fissures in the earth’s crust succumbed to it and were shaved and chiselled away. Quartz and feldspar, granite and limestone were reduced to muds and clays to be borne off with the current towards the sea, and even the veins of gold that streaked the mountain cores were sandpapered into dust and flour .
But the gold did not reach the sea, for its specific gravity is nineteen times that of water. The finest gold was carried lightly on the crest of the mountain torrents until it reached the more leisurely river, where it sank and was caught in the sand-bars at the mouths of the tributary streams. The coarser gold moved for lesser distances: as soon as the pace of the current began to slacken, it was trapped in the crevices of bed-rock where nothing could dislodge it. There it remained over the eons, concealed by a deepening blanket of muck, while the centuries rolled on and more gold was ground to dust, while the watercourses shifted and new gorges formed in the flat bottoms of old valleys, while the water gnawed deeper and deeper, and the pathways left by ancient streams turned the hillsides into graceful terraces .
Thus the gold lay scattered for the full length of the great Yukon River, on the hills and in the sand-bars, in steep ravines and broad valleys, in subterranean channels of white gravel and glistening beds of black sand, in clefts thirty feet beneath the mosses and on outcrop-pings poking from the grasses high up on the benchland .
There was gold on a dozen tributary rivers and a hundred creeks which would remain nameless and unexplored until the gold was
Jefferson Randolph “Soapy” Smith , confidence man from Creede, Denver, and Leadville. Operated Jeff Smith’s Oyster Parlor.
On the Trails
Captain W. R. Abercrombie , Second U.S. Infantry, stationed at Valdez, Alaska.
Tappan Adney , correspondent for Harper’s Illustrated Weekly .
Gene Allen , itinerant newspaperman who founded the Klondike Nugget in Dawson.
Jack Dalton , frontiersman. Opened the Dalton Trail over which cattle could be brought from Haines Mission to Dawson City.
E. A. Hegg , Swedish-born photographer from Bellingham Bay, Washington, who photographed the stampede.
Norman Lee , Chilcoten rancher; drove a herd of cattle north along the Ashcroft Trail.
Addison Mizner , adventurer; laid out part of Dawson City and was later key architect of the Florida real estate boom of the 1920’s.
Wilson Mizner , wit and bon vivant , later founder of the Hollywood Brown Derby restaurant. Brother of Addison and of Edgar Mizner, manager of Dawson’s Alaska Commercial outlet.
Inspector J. D. Moodie , NWMP officer assigned to open a trail from Edmonton to the Yukon via the Peace River country.
Captain Patrick Henry Ray , Eighth U.S. Infantry, sent north to investigate possible relief of starvation along Yukon.
Stroller White , itinerant newspaperman who worked for the Skagway News , Bennett Sun , and Klondike Nugget .
W. D. Wood , former mayor of Seattle. Led expedition up Yukon River to Klondike.
The Golden Highway
It was the river that fashioned the land, and the river that ground down the gold .
Long before natives or white men saw it, the river was there, flowing for two thousand miles from mountain to seacoast, working its slow sculpture on valley and hillside, nibbling away at the flat tableland heaved up by the earth’s inner turmoils before the dawn of history .
The main stream had a thousand tentacles, and these reached back to the very spine of the continent, honing down the mountainsides into gullies and clefts – boulder grating on boulder, gravel grinding against gravel, sand scouring sand, until the river was glutted with silt and the whole Alaska-Yukon peninsula was pitted and grooved by the action of running water .
No mass could withstand this ceaseless abrasion, which lasted for more than five million years. The rocks and metals that had boiled up through fissures in the earth’s crust succumbed to it and were shaved and chiselled away. Quartz and feldspar, granite and limestone were reduced to muds and clays to be borne off with the current towards the sea, and even the veins of gold that streaked the mountain cores were sandpapered into dust and flour .
But the gold did not reach the sea, for its specific gravity is nineteen times that of water. The finest gold was carried lightly on the crest of the mountain torrents until it reached the more leisurely river, where it sank and was caught in the sand-bars at the mouths of the tributary streams. The coarser gold moved for lesser distances: as soon as the pace of the current began to slacken, it was trapped in the crevices of bed-rock where nothing could dislodge it. There it remained over the eons, concealed by a deepening blanket of muck, while the centuries rolled on and more gold was ground to dust, while the watercourses shifted and new gorges formed in the flat bottoms of old valleys, while the water gnawed deeper and deeper, and the pathways left by ancient streams turned the hillsides into graceful terraces .
Thus the gold lay scattered for the full length of the great Yukon River, on the hills and in the sand-bars, in steep ravines and broad valleys, in subterranean channels of white gravel and glistening beds of black sand, in clefts thirty feet beneath the mosses and on outcrop-pings poking from the grasses high up on the benchland .
There was gold on a dozen tributary rivers and a hundred creeks which would remain nameless and unexplored until the gold was
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