The peak of the gold rush was very short, and lasted less than a year. The population of Dawson City was at its highest in 1898, but by the summer of 1899, people had already started to leave the area. Gold had been discovered in Nome, Alaska, over the winter and many of the gold seekers in Dawson City decided to go there. Most of them hadn’t found enough gold in Dawson to make the trip worthwhile, since by the time they had made their way up North all of the good spots to mine gold along the Klondike had already been taken. They thought they might have better luck in Alaska.

Others who found themselves unable to make a living in Dawson decided to go back home. Many people had spent all their money just to get to Dawson City, and so had to take whatever odd jobs they could find to save up enough money to travel back down south. 

That didn’t mean Dawson City was suddenly deserted, however. The miners who had good gold claims continued to mine them. In fact, the most gold was taken from the Klondike creeks in 1900, two years after the height of the gold rush. 

This was also around the time that big mining corporations started buying up old mining claims that had been abandoned, or from miners who wished to sell their claims. These companies were able to use more effective mining strategies to find what gold was still left in the Klondike.

New Mining Methods

As the gold rush began to wind down, the old methods of mining were no longer useful. The amount of gold buried in the ground had begun to decrease, and it became harder and harder to find gold simply by putting one shovelful of dirt at a time through a sluice box. That’s when companies started to use hydraulic mining techniques instead. 

This type of mining involves using high-pressure jets of water to move large amounts of dirt at a time. That dirt is then pushed into sluice boxes to sort out the gold. These jets were aimed at creek banks along the Klondike, as well as hillsides, because gold had also been found in the hills by prospectors during the rush, where ancient gold-bearing creeks were hidden.

Dredging was introduced around this time as well. Early dredges were huge machines that floated along the creeks. They would scoop dirt, sand, and rocks out of the creek and into big steel buckets. All that muck went into a big cylinder which had holes to sort out small objects, like gold, while the bigger objects like rocks were dumped out behind the dredge. The rocks and mud that were deposited behind the dredge are called tailings. These tailings can still be seen in the land around Dawson City today.

It was no longer as simple as working hard with a pan and a sluice box to find gold. All of a sudden, large amounts of money had to be spent on expensive mining equipment, and only corporations could afford this. Prospecting still continued in Yukon—people still prospect there even today!—but once the big mining companies took over most of the mining around Dawson City, that’s when the gold rush was officially over.