Gold in Two Places: Klondike, Nome, and the Rush That Made Alaska

Two gold rushes shaped modern Alaska, and they happened in almost the same decade, in almost opposite corners of the territory.

The first strike was not even in Alaska. On August sixteenth, eighteen ninety-six, Skookum Jim Mason, his sister Kate Carmack, his nephew Dawson Charlie, and his brother-in-law George Carmack found placer gold in a tributary of the Klondike River in what is now Canada's Yukon Territory. Word reached the outside world in the summer of eighteen ninety-seven when ships arrived in Seattle and San Francisco carrying Klondike prospectors and, more importantly, their gold. The United States was in an economic depression. An estimated one hundred thousand people set out for the Klondike. Roughly thirty to forty thousand actually reached it.

The route ran through Alaska. The two main approaches went over Chilkoot Pass or White Pass into the Canadian interior. Skagway, at the foot of White Pass, went from a handful of settlers to a city of twenty thousand in less than a year. The Klondike rush built Skagway, it built Juneau's service economy, it created the White Pass and Yukon Route railroad, and it introduced the idea of Alaska as a place where ordinary people could become rich, an idea that proved useful long after the gold ran out.

The second rush was entirely Alaska's own. In the autumn of eighteen ninety-eight, three prospectors called the Lucky Swedes found gold at Anvil Creek near Nome, on the Seward Peninsula south coast, and the beach sand strike that drew the biggest crowds came the following year. This discovery was different from anything the Klondike had offered. You did not need a mining claim or a sluice box. You needed a shovel and a pan and access to the beach. Tens of thousands of people arrived at Nome in the summer of eighteen ninety-nine and nineteen hundred, many of them from the Klondike fields that were now giving out. At its peak, Nome had as many as twenty thousand residents, making it one of the largest cities in Alaska at the time and one of the most improbable.

Both rushes collapsed in a few years. The Klondike stampede had largely moved on by eighteen ninety-nine, when many prospectors left for Nome, though large-scale mining continued and output actually peaked a few years later. The Nome beach sands were depleted on the surface by nineteen oh three, though dredging continued for decades. What both rushes left behind was permanent population, infrastructure, and an economy for a territory that had previously been administered from Washington as an afterthought.

Alaska got its first civil code in eighteen ninety-nine, partly because the federal government could no longer ignore a territory with thirty thousand people on a single beach.