Well, Alaska and/or the Yukon.
There’s one problem with this idea, and having lived here in Fairbanks I, like any Interior resident, am all too familiar with it: permafrost.
From the north side of the Alaska Range upwards to the Arctic Ocean on the North Slope you first encounter discontinuous and then completely permanently frozen ground, usually about a couple feet down at the southern edge, about a foot or so down by the time you are in Fairbanks, and less than a foot down by the time you are above the Yukon River.
Most of the gold rush took place in the Dawson area and its environs which are roughly on a parallel with Fairbanks.
What happens with burrowing mammals and permafrost, is unless they are digging into an exposed hillside where the ground has thawed they can only go down until they hit that ice layer and then no further. Even if they could dig into the permafrost it would be like living in a freezer.
The goldbearing strata are usually down at bedrock level and that is most often several feet underground unless you are working a stream or river that has cut through enough to hit bedrock and wash the gold out, carrying it along in its bed.
So, those busy little fellers would have a very tough time of it up here. The amount of effort training them, getting them here, and maintaining them would far outweigh any profits from the meager amount of gold they may turn up.
(BTW, we do have a small…very small…population of gophers here in Fairbanks. It is the only population in the whole state and no one really knows how they got here. They survive in an area that was worked as a farm so the soil had a chance to thaw down to some fair depth. But, despite Fairbanks being founded as a gold-mining community, no gophers were ever employed in the process.)
(I’d suggest a better way to make money would be to act as a hunting guide for mammoths. A story was written shortly after the gold rush purporting to be a narrative of a hunter who located the last living mammoth. Mark Twain should have written it!)
Maybe I’m missing something but I don’t understand why Cecil is dismissing the possibility that the gopher company was a real scam. Is the plethora of Nigerian scams any less bewildering?
Cecil didn’t have enough room to put it in his column, but there are some other very interesting folklore and facts about animals finding minerals.
The prowess of canine noses for sniffing out drugs, bombs, and escaped felons is well known, so it’s no surprise folks have tried using dogs to find mineral deposits. Dogs have been used to find sulfur-bearing minerals in four countries. In a Finnish contest between an Alsatian named Lari and a human prospector, Lari put the human to shame by finding 1,330 sulfur-bearing rocks to the human’s 270. Lari also found a copper deposit so valuable the Finnish government paid $2,000 to Lari’s trainer; Lari received 4 frankfurters.
Cecil and I didn’t find any reference to a dog finding gold deposits, but if one can let’s hope they get a better reward than a measly 4 frankfurters.
In just the Alaskan/Yukon context there is a noticeable difference in that the marmot tends to be a larger animal. Also, marmots in these areas are GENERALLY (I stress that because there are a few sub-montaine populations) to be found living above tree line on talus slopes and bouldered area. They make their homes within the rocky material and thus don’t rely so much on burrowing as mainly creating a den within the rocky interstices.
Gophers tend to be more a creature of grasslands and are very good burrowers creating a den in the ground.
Taxonomically they are different genera.
Except for the odd exception here in Fairbanks, gophers can’t survive in areas subject to permafrost because they can’t dig deeply enough to create a safe den. Marmots, living amongst rocks, boulders aren’t faced with this problem.
Google Books turns up only that one hit for Trans-Alaska Gopher Company, Consolidated or otherwise. Even if you cut back to just gold rush and gopher you get the same single hit.
Wouldn’t a great juicy story like trained gophers be picked up by many people if it were true? Or even two? Isn’t it more likely that it was a joke or tall tale or bit of gossip that Harris heard about but didn’t bother to check out?
I can’t be sure at this distance, but I’ve done lots of primary historical research. You learn to distrust singletons. The more repeatable a singleton is, the less you should trust it. If it was that good, every writer would have jumped on it at the time. You may have found the one report that managed to get published and survive the years, but the odds are as low as a gopher with its cheeks full of gold nuggets.
The problem is a lack of documentation. Besides this one book, there are no newspaper articles, no ads, etc. If this was a scam, you’d probably see evidence in New York and San Francisco about it. The gist of the scam wasn’t so much selling gophers to miners*, but setting up a profitable company that would pay a handsome dividend as the stockholders sit back in their dens sipping warm brandy and watching their earnings grow.
There may have been a scam selling gold sniffing gophers to the unsuspecting which could explain that population of gophers in Fairbanks, but that would be more on the level of seniors selling elevator tickets to incoming high school sophomores. You might net a few unsuspecting noobs, but probably less than scams selling gold seeking dousing rods.
Did you know it is illegal in 30 states to sell gophers to minors?
You don’t have to go to Alaska and look around for old stock certificates to determine that this was not a real scam. A simple search of the Alaska corporations database, myAlaska - Welcome, shows that there was never a Trans-Alaskan Gopher Company, Consolidated or otherwise.
But, you may ask, if it was a complete scam, would they have taken the trouble to file papers to establish the corporation as a legal entity? Yes, they certainly would have. Otherwise they would be unable to open a bank account in the corporation’s name, which is a key step in a successful scam. Forming a corporation is an easy thing to do and does not result in scrutiny of the corporation or its promoters (many corporations are simply shells, usually for entirely legitimate reasons), so there would be no reason to avoid formation.
The name “Trans-Alaskan” led me to believe that the company, if it existed, likely would be in Alaska. It’s probably possible to conduct a similar search of Yukon companies, but I don’t have time to check on that right now.
And there were plenty more; those were just the first three corporations, in alphabetical order, that had “gold” in the name and were formed before 1900. The dissolve dates tend to clump on certain days; I assume that means that, from time to time, the government office would do a cleanup and dissolve corporations that hadn’t filed in a long time.