The Yukon Gold Fields

The original Yukon gold strike

North to Alaska

We’re going North, the rush is on …

On our way out of Dawson City, we went to where it all began on Bonanza Creek (formally known as Rabbit Creek).  It was here that George Carmack first recognized the geographic signs that could mean gold, and did some panning with his two partners, Tagish Charlie and Skookum Jim, who were related to him through marriage to the Tagish woman George had taken as a wife.  George had been panning for gold for a long time, so he was no overnight sensation.

The creek doesn’t look like much, and the Yukon government has taken over the actual sight where the first claim was made.  You can pan there for free.    We encountered these people who were panning, and a young boy shared with me his find.  If you look at the stone carefully about in the middle, you will see a little bump that he thinks is gold!

The area has been torn up by dredging.  After the initial streams had been panned, in 1913, a huge dredge, in fact three dredges were brought in. 

This Dredge #4 came from Marion Ohio piece-by-piece and operated from 1913 until 1959, when it sank.  It has been refloated and made into a museum. So the ground has been worked several times, with each new improvement in the technology.

And it looks like any industrial mining area.  The state has been working on signage and walkways around the original site

I was wondering about the birdhouses, perched on tripods above huge piles of tailings.  They are to house swallows, which the miners think will get the mosquitoes.  Let me know how that goes!

There are about 30 active claims, mostly individuals, going on up this draw.  There were no environmental laws to make the original miners/dredgers fix what they had destroyed.  Plus, everyone was making money off the gold, so who was to initiate anything. 

Now, each miner has to pay into a fund to mitigate the environmental degradation.  However, I guess there is never enough money to fix it right.

There was a miner’s convention in town shortly before we got there.  They almost cancelled it because the miners had not received their licensing to water, and it takes a tremendous amount of water to wash out the gold particles or flour.  Most of them were approved just before the gathering.