50 Fun Facts About Klondike Gold Rush

What did Canadian authorities make every Klondike stampeder bring before crossing into the Yukon?

A year's supply of food, about 1,150 pounds of it, was demanded so that nobody would starve. With tents and tools added, each person hauled close to a ton.

Which US president's grandfather got rich running a restaurant and hotel for Klondike stampeders?

Donald Trump's grandfather Friedrich never dug for gold: he opened the Arctic Restaurant and Hotel on the trail in 1898 and earned his stake from the men heading north.

Which silent star eats his own shoe in a 1925 comedy inspired by Klondike stampede photographs?

Charlie Chaplin built The Gold Rush around photographs of the Klondike stampede and the story of the snowbound Donner Party. He said it was the film he wanted to be remembered by.

Which Disney comics tycoon strikes it rich in the Klondike in his own life story?

Scrooge McDuck reaches the Klondike in Don Rosa's The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck. A running joke has him boring his nephews with tales of his prospecting days.

Which luxury did Swiftwater Bill allegedly buy up across Dawson City to spite a woman he loved?

Eggs were a costly luxury in Dawson City, so the gambler allegedly bought every one in town, had them boiled and fed them to dogs. She adored them and had dined with another man.

Which kitchen staple became worth its weight in gold in Dawson City in the hungry winter of 1897?

Salt ran so short once the rivers froze that it matched gold ounce for ounce. Nails for building reached $28 a pound that same winter.

Which department store chain began as a shoe shop funded by its founder's $13,000 Klondike windfall?

Nordstrom began in 1901 as Wallin & Nordstrom, a shoe store John Nordstrom opened after selling his disputed claim. He first read about the strike while working at a sawmill.

Dawson City dance-hall star Gertie Lovejoy wore which gem fixed between her two front teeth?

A diamond in her smile made her Diamond Tooth Gertie. Canada's oldest casino, opened in Dawson City in 1971, carries her name and stages a vaudeville show inspired by her.

Since 1973, a Dawson City hotel bar has served a cocktail holding which preserved human body part?

A toe sits in every Sourtoe Cocktail, and drinkers join the club only if their lips touch it. Swallowing it brings a $2,500 fine.

Which US city's mayor resigned in 1897 to join the Klondike rush, as did twelve of its policemen?

Seattle lost Mayor William Wood, who quit to start a company shipping gold-seekers north. Many of the city's streetcar drivers walked off the job too.

Which future novelist joined the Klondike rush at 21 and later set the story To Build a Fire there?

Jack London earned more by working for other prospectors than by digging, but the Klondike became the setting for some of his first successful stories. Illness there cost him four front teeth.

Which pack animals died in such numbers on the 1897 trail from Skagway that it was named after them?

Horses died in huge numbers on paths as narrow as two feet, and the route became Dead Horse Trail. By late 1897 it was closed, leaving about 5,000 people stuck in Skagway.

Which crime boss of gold-rush Skagway ran a fake telegraph office whose wires ended at the wall?

Soapy Smith charged stampeders to send messages that never left the building. Vigilantes turned on him, and he died in a shootout on Juneau Wharf in July 1898.

The Klondike rush ended when prospectors left Dawson City for beach gold at which Alaskan town?

Nome pulled the stampede away from Dawson City: its gold lay in the beach sand, where anyone could dig without staking a claim.

Klondike old-timers were nicknamed after which staple of the prospector's camp kitchen?

Sourdough starter worked where yeast and baking soda failed in the cold, so old hands prized it and took its name. The word outlived the rush as a label for any northern old-timer.

In the 1903 Klondike novel The Call of the Wild, which dog is stolen from a California ranch?

Buck, a 140-pound St Bernard cross, was modelled on a real dog the author met at Dawson City. In the story he is sold north to pull a sled.

Which vegetable has a popular variety, bred in Ontario, named for the Klondike rush and its river?

Potato breeder Gary Johnston developed Yukon Gold at Guelph in the 1960s, crossing in a yellow-fleshed Peruvian variety. Its early name was simply Yukon.

Which war, declared in April 1898, pushed the Klondike stampede off newspaper front pages?

The Spanish–American War took over the headlines in spring 1898. The public soured so fast that telling someone to go to the Klondike became a popular insult.

Which natural disaster killed more than 60 stampeders on the Chilkoot Trail on April 3, 1898?

An avalanche of wet, heavy snow swept down on the climbers after storms loaded the slopes. Slides were a constant threat on the route to the summit.

Roughly how many people set out for the Klondike, though fewer than half ever reached Dawson City?

100,000 is the usual estimate of those who set out, yet only 30,000 to 40,000 arrived. Of those, no more than about 4,000 struck gold.

Which prospector filed the Klondike strike's first claim, a find many credit to his brother-in-law?

George Carmack took the finder's double claim because the party feared officials would not recognise an Indigenous claimant. Historians usually credit Skookum Jim, his Tagish brother-in-law.

Rabbit Creek, site of the Klondike strike of August 1896, was renamed which creek by its miners?

Bonanza was the miners' tribute to the millions of dollars found along the stream, and every foot of it was staked by the end of that month. Half of all Klondike gold has come from it.

Which Bard of the Yukon wrote The Cremation of Sam McGee yet never joined the Klondike rush?

Robert Service was a bank clerk posted north in 1904, and he first saw Dawson City in 1908, ten years after the stampede. His verse sold so well that he quit the bank to write.

What did workers carve into the ice below the Chilkoot summit, then charge climbers a fee to use?

A staircase of 1,500 steps, nicknamed the Golden Steps or Golden Stairs, ran up the last slope. It was so narrow that climbers went up in one long single file.

What obstacle did Klondike miners overcome by lighting wood fires at the bottom of their shafts?

Permafrost lay only about six feet down, so miners thawed it roughly 14 inches at a time with fires and dug out the gravel. The frozen walls could stand without timber supports.

Dawson City's worst blaze destroyed 117 buildings in April 1899 while which group was on strike?

Firefighters of the newly formed brigade had walked out, and a saloon blaze spread unchecked. Damage was put at more than $1 million.

Which disease did English prospectors in the Klondike nickname Canadian black leg?

Scurvy struck in winter, when fresh produce could not reach the camps and miners went without vitamin C. Untreated, it could kill.

What punishment could Mounties give anyone caught working on a Sunday in gold-rush Dawson City?

Chopping firewood for the police post was a penalty under Dawson City's strict Sunday laws, which also shut every saloon at midnight on Saturday.

Which city replaced Dawson City as Yukon's capital after the Alaska Highway passed it by?

Whitehorse sat on the new highway, 518 kilometres to the south, and became the hub that Dawson City could no longer be. It had begun as a campground for stampeders.

Which Mountie, who thought Skagway the roughest place in the world, commanded Dawson City in 1898?

Sam Steele ran the force from mid-1898, a year that ended without a single murder in Dawson City. His men's conduct made the Mounties famous around the world.

Belinda Mulrooney, reputedly the Klondike's richest woman, began by selling silk underwear and what?

Hot water bottles and cloth worth $5,000 went over the Chilkoot Pass with her and sold in Dawson City for six times that. She went on to build its finest hotel, the Fair View.

The railway from Skagway, finished in 1900 for the Klondike trade, climbs which mountain pass?

White Pass got its narrow-gauge line just as the rush faded, with the last spike driven in July 1900. The line reopened in 1988 as a tourist railway.

At which lake did stampeders build thousands of boats in spring 1898 to float down to the Klondike?

Bennett became a tent city of thousands, and 7,124 boats set off once the ice broke in May 1898. By then the forests along its shore had been cut down for timber.

Which coastal people traded over the Chilkoot Trail long before packing loads for the Klondike rush?

Tlingit packers charged up to a dollar a pound on the upper trail. Many Tlingit women carried loads too, sometimes with their babies on their backs as well.

Which coastal sea route carried Klondike stampeders north through a maze of islands to Skagway?

The Inside Passage was so busy that old paddle wheelers, fishing boats and coal ships full of dust were pressed into use. All were overloaded, and many sank.

Which city sold itself as the back door to the Klondike, though under half its travellers arrived?

Edmonton's routes were barely trails: of about 1,660 people who tried them, only 685 arrived, some after 18 months. The town nevertheless grew from 1,200 people to 4,000.

Which boomtown at the foot of the Chilkoot Trail, once Skagway's rival, emptied into a ghost town?

Dyea died when the railway builders chose the rival trail that began at Skagway. Only a few homesteads remain in its valley.

Which business did the Hudson's Bay Company prefer to chasing early rumours of gold in the Yukon?

Fur trading paid quicker profits, so the company's explorers ignored the rumours and left the gold in the ground for decades.

Which Dawson City-raised historian narrated the 1957 film City of Gold and wrote a Klondike history?

Pierre Berton grew up in Dawson City, where his father had come for the stampede. The film's slow pans across old photographs later inspired the Ken Burns effect.

Which Klondike stampeder, left by her husband on the trail north, became Canada's second woman MP?

Martha Black crossed the Chilkoot Pass in 1898, later ran a sawmill, and at 69 won the Yukon seat in the 1935 election by 134 votes.

Which Chinook Jargon word, meaning newcomer, did Klondike veterans use for a green arrival?

Cheechako joins the Chinook Jargon words for new and come. Skookum, from the same trade language, means strong, which is how the packer Skookum Jim got his name.

Klondike miners dug which kind of deposit, loose nuggets and dust washed from veins into creek beds?

Placer gold lay 15 to 30 feet under the creek beds, and some Klondike creeks proved fifteen times richer than those of California.

Which future theatre tycoon began as a Dawson City waiter and partner of dancer Klondike Kate?

Alexander Pantages saved his wages as a waiter and opera-house porter to buy into Dawson City show business. At his peak he owned or ran 84 theatres across the United States and Canada.

Which Yukon holiday on the third Monday in August marks the strike that began the Klondike rush?

Discovery Day recalls the gold find of August 1896 and echoes the Discovery Claim: the first claim on a creek, whose finder could stake a second one as a reward.

What did Dawson City's Klondike Nugget print its news on when stocks ran out in winter 1898–99?

Butcher's paper kept the Nugget going through the shortage. News was so scarce that one man charged a dollar a head to hear a single newspaper read aloud.

What was dug up in 1978 from beneath an old Dawson City hockey rink, having lain there since 1929?

Old movie reels, 533 of them from the silent era, had been buried there as unwanted stock and were preserved by the frozen ground. They included titles believed lost.

Which Swedish-born photographer took the famous image of stampeders filing up the Chilkoot Pass?

Eric Hegg photographed Skagway and Dawson City from 1897 to 1901. His archive later supplied the photographs for the prize-winning documentary City of Gold.

Which Nova Scotia-born miner, nicknamed the Big Moose, was hailed as the King of the Klondike?

Alex McDonald owned 28 claims by the autumn of 1897 yet lived plainly. He kept buying worthless ground after the boom and died alone in a cabin in 1909.

Dawson City is named after a Canadian who mapped the region in 1887 and followed which profession?

Geologist Dawson had explored the region nine years before the strike. Joseph Ladue laid out the town on mudflats where the Klondike meets the Yukon.

Which steamship reached San Francisco in July 1897 with the first Klondike gold on board?

Excelsior arrived just ahead of the Portland, and the press put the two ships' gold at $1,139,000. Even that turned out to be an underestimate.