I had previously asked why the Native Americans living in the hills of California had not tipped off the Spanish to the placer gold that was abundant at the time. The general consensus was that Native Americans didn’t really have a need for gold and there would be no reason for them to report a worthless (to them) rock to the Spanish.
Okay, that still seems hard for me to believe, but I accept it. However at the same time the gold rush was happening in California, Russian fur traders were working the Klondike area were at least some of them must have been aware of the gold all around them.
According to one book I read they apparently kept the gold a secret because they feared it would mess up their fur trading business. Huh? If I was a fur trader and saw large gold nuggets laying around I would quickly change my occupation to miner. Of course at that point it would make sense to keep it a secret.
So let’s assume the Alaskan natives didn’t know there was gold or didn’t care, but why was there no Russian gold rush to the Klondike once the fur traders had discovered it? Did the fur traders not exploit the gold they happen to run into? Wouldn’t they had let relatives know about it? Something doesn’t ring true.
It looks like gold was known and people did go to Alaska before the Klondike gold rush; there were several smaller ones previous to 1897. It was probably a matter of timing: when the Klondike gold was discovered, the US was in the middle of a depression and there was widespread unemployment. It made the idea of prospecting gold more appealing than if the economy was booming.
You have to know what you’re looking for. It takes a semi-skilled eye and a little bit of investigative effort to tell if the color in a stream is really gold and, more importantly, if there’s enough gold in the stream to make trying to get it worthwhile. There’s no reason a fur trapper would necessarily have the skills or tools to make that determination. There are lots of places in the west (some in your neck of the woods) where there’s color in the stream and enough enough gold to satisfy recreational panners, but which aren’t rich enough to support commercial exploitation. A casual observer wouldn’t really be able to tell the difference between one of these and a rich gold stream.
As RealityChuck mentions, discovery of gold != gold rush. Gold rushes happened when well-publicized rich finds coincided with economic disruptions that made leaving hearth & home behind a relatively reasonable decision(*). The Klondike region was especially discouraging to exploitation and miners were required to bring a year’s worth of goods and suppliesto the gold fields with them. the Panics of 1893 and 1896 meant that by the time the news of the Klondike got back to the lower 48, where were as many as 12.4 million American men out of work. In that economic context, gathering up a year’s worth of supplies and heading out for certain hardships with the (slim) possibility of great reward outweighs staying for certain hardships and no reward. Other gold rushes also coincide with or soon follow serious recessions and depressions:
[ol][li]Georgia Gold Rush, 1828 came during a period of recurring recessions that spanned nearly the entire 1820’s, in particular the Panics of 1819 and 1825[/li][li]The most famous gold rush, the 1848 Californiarush followed on the heels of back-to-back recessions in 1845-1846 and 1847-1848[/li][li]The 1858 Pike’s Peak Gold Rush was hard on the heels of the Panic of 1857[/li][li]The 1874 Black Hills Gold Rush came in the midst of the Panic of 1873 and the longest period of economic contraction in American history, the aptly named Long Depression[/li][/ol]
So, even if the Russian fur trappers saw, recognized, and wanted to exploit the Klondike deposits, that would not necessarily have created the conditions for a gold rush. The underlying economic conditions would also play into whether there was a rush or not.
(As an aside, depending on the state of Anglo-Russian relations, Russian trappers might also have had a good deal of explaining to do as to why they were trapping and mining on British territory.)
(*)For example, see Nicole Wollsey Biggart and Gary Hamilton, “The Structural Sources of Adventurism: The Case of the California Gold Rush” in Readings in Economic Sociology, ed. Nicole Woolsey Biggart (Malden, Mass. : Blackwell, 2002.)
They may have known there was “color” but the actual Klondike fields were hwaaaay off the beaten track. There’s a little gold in a lot of places, so it’s likely wasn’t suprising nor exceptional.
The 17th-18th-19th century Russian population of both Canada and California must have been tiny,
and exploration may not have been extensive other than for a few isolated, narrow coastal strips.
Klondike was several 100 miles inland, and separated from the coast by mountain ranges.
Plus the “lower 48 states” would have been redundant before there were non-contiguous states, so I’m guessing the term isn’t any older than 1959.
The trouble with this is that in the second half of the 19th century is that recessions were near constant (it probably would have been easier to name the periods of positive growth!), so saying gold rushes coincided with them isn’t really saying much. You’re right in that the intensity of the gold rush following a new discovery was affected by the intensity of the recession du jour, but gold discoveries never failed to spark off a gold rush and plenty of decent-sized ones happened during the good times. So it’s not as if they knew there was gold up there, but no one bothered with it until a recession rolled around.
Interesting topic. There was a minor gold rush in Northern NH/Western Maine, about 1887.
The gold deposits were small, and exhausted quickly. There was a minor revival during the Great Depression-I met a guy whose garndfather was able to scrate out a living panning gold along the Swift River in NH.
I don’t know the origin of the phrase but my use of it is undoubtedly anachronistic.
I didn’t mean to imply that the Klondike deposits would have generated a “ho-hum” reaction if discovered during good times. But you are incorrect that there were gold discoveries that did not generate sizable rushes. Gold wasdiscovered in Idaho in 1863, although the Civil War undoubtedly deterred more potential rushers than the concurrent economic expansion. Gold was discovered in Montana in 1852, but mining did not start until 1862 during the Civil War and the real rush took off in the post-Civil War recession. 1852 was one of those rare good periods.
Edited to add: Biggart and Hamilton talk about motivations as combinations of push and pull. Gold always was a pull (as you say). What I’m saying is that the economic conditions *usually * provided the push. In good times, the pull was enough for some people but it took a concurrent push to turn mining ventures into mass migrations.
Not so much a nitpick: The Klondike River is in the Yukon Territory of Canada and feeds into the Yukon River at Dawson, YT. The gold rush there took place around 1897. Granted, most gold rushers migrated via Skagway, AK up over the Chilkoot Pass into Canada, and it is often (and mistakenly) called the Alaska Gold Rush. The gold strike that actually took place in Alaska following the one at the Klondike was, oddly enough, on the beaches of Nome, Alaska, and occurred in about 1899.
The OP mentions Alaska Natives in relation to the Klondike strike, hence my correction. Granted, Dawson is just across the river from Alaska, and the native peoples in that area are doubtless related. The OP is more about the general nature of gold rushes and what led to the discoveries. I think.
Such reading as I’ve done indicates the Russians may not have even been aware of the gold. For as long as they occupied Alaska, they did surprisingly little exploration. Their interest was pretty much limited to furs and seal hunting, and their settlements, such as they were, were all located along the coast aside from a handful of Orthodox missionaries who penetrated the interior.
Also important to note, they had only minimal contact with their homeland. It was a brutal trip just to get across the water to Siberia, and a trip to St. Petersburg the capitol could take two years or more. Each way. They were so isolated that even if they had found gold, they had no practical way to capitalize on it.
SS
Once again, the Klondike gold rush (actually Bonanza Creek) was not in Alaska, but rather in Canada, where the Hudson’s Bay Company held sway in the fur trade.
While gold had been found there, furs were worth much more. As to the notion that local natives didn’t know or care about gold: of the three discoverers of the Bonanza Creek find, two were Tagish Indians, who were guiding George Carmack .
Re: Alaska. Until they knew its worth, Alaska Natives had no use for gold and it probably never crossed their minds that anyone would want it so badly. They were only interested in providing furs and ivory to the Russians in exchange for food and goods.
The real problem is that there were neither adequate transportation routes nor methods. Fur trapping had been going on for quite some time. The routes back to market were well set out, and not much could go wrong with properly prepared pelts. Klondikes were a different story. Though the area was ostensibly cooler than the lower forty-something, the lack of rapid, direct transportation and refrigeration meant that whatever resources were pulled out and converted into bars melted long before making it to sale. Fortunately, there were enough rugged pioneers who did whatever it took for a Klondike bar, which led to today’s situation.
I recall seeing a line of prospetors climbing up the Chilcoot Pass-I wonder how many of these men survived? And of those that did, how many made any money?
I also recall that the Canadian police (the RCMP) made it mandatory for anybody entering Canadian territory, to have 6 month’s provisions.
the entrepreneurs in Dawson made a good living off the prospectors-eggs went to $3 each, at one point.
Question: when the rush was over, how many people remained in the Yukon Territory?