Other Historical Gold Rushes

Several famous gold rushes took place in North America during the first half of the 19th century, such as:

• The Georgia Gold Rush in 1829 (this is where the phrase “Thar’s gold in them thar hills” comes from)

• The California Gold Rush in 1849 (the biggest gold rush before the Klondike)

  • This gold rush had huge impacts on the area. Roads, schools, churches, and small towns were built to house the growing number of people. In 1850, one year after the gold rush began, California became a state. At the same time, Indigenous communities were being attacked and chased from their lands by gold seekers. As the number of miners increased, food sources began to disappear, and the toxic waste from mining operations destroyed many natural habitats.

As the California Gold Rush died down, gold was discovered in other mountainous regions, most notably parts of the Rocky Mountains in British Columbia.

Gold discoveries in BC include:

• The Queen Charlottes Gold Rush in 1851

• The Fraser Canyon Gold Rush in 1858

• The Cariboo Gold Rush in 1861

• The Cassair Gold Rush in 1873

Following the trail of gold, prospectors began to move farther and farther north, until they eventually reached the Yukon River.

The First Gold Seekers

Ever since the Fort Yukon trading post was built by Alexander Murray in 1847, rumours had been circulating among the fur traders that there was gold along the Yukon River. These rumours eventually made their way to prospectors farther south, who were looking for new gold deposits after most of the gold had been mined from California and British Columbia during the earlier gold rushes.

In 1872, three men decided to explore the mining possibilities in Yukon: Leroy Napoleon McQuesten (who went by the nickname Jack), Arthur Harper, and Alfred Mayo. These men never found any gold themselves, and instead became fur traders in order to make a living. They built a trading post called Fort Reliance in 1874. The post was located a little bit north of where the Klondike and Yukon rivers met (an area that would later become Dawson City).

It was because of the supplies available at this trading post and others like it along the Yukon River that more and more prospectors were able to spend time in Yukon searching for gold. McQuestern, Harper, and Mayo also set up the “grubstake” system. Under this system, traders could give a winter’s worth of supplies and equipment to prospectors, who would then pay back the traders with money earned from whatever gold they found.  

Over the next 15 years, a few miners made some small gold discoveries that got more and more people interested in Yukon. By the mid-1880s there were about 500 newcomers in the area. It was around this time that Jack McQuesten realized he could make more money selling supplies to the miners than he could trading furs with the Indigenous people. Soon the trading frontier began to fade into the background, and the mining frontier began to take centre stage. 

In 1886, the first big gold strike in Yukon was made at Fortymile River, which was named because it was 40 miles (almost 65 km) away from Fort Reliance. This led to a smaller gold rush, with over 100 nearby miners rushing to the area. During this time, McQuestern, Harper, and Mayo set up another trading post at Fortymile River, which eventually turned into the first permanent town in Yukon, called Forty Mile. This town was the centre for activity in Yukon until the great gold discovery near the Klondike River in 1896, after which it was pretty much abandoned.

By 1894, two years before the Klondike gold strike, there were around 1,000 men searching for gold in Yukon (and a few women as well—some of the miners brought their wives along.) Most of the miners at this time were experienced. They had mined at some of the earlier gold rushes and knew what they were doing. They were patient and practical, the complete opposite of many of the wild-eyed gold seekers who travelled to Yukon during the height of the Klondike Gold Rush. 

These miners didn’t take risks if they didn’t have to. Few of them travelled in the winter; they would stay as close to a trading post as possible, so they would have easy access to food and supplies and wouldn’t starve. During the summer, they moved from one place to the next, looking for opportunities. They were highly mobile, and had only their mining equipment and personal items to carry with them.

The Yukon Mining Frontier

The gold mining community in Yukon before the great discovery of 1896 didn’t follow any official laws. Until police arrived at Forty Mile in 1894, there was no one from the government to enforce Canadian law. Miners often travelled back and forth over the border between Yukon and Alaska without realizing it. And even if they did know, it didn’t matter. No one cared. Everyone came and went as they pleased, depending only on themselves and their partners for survival.

Mining partnerships were very casual at this time. Miners would work together to search a certain area for gold, but if one or several of them decided that it wasn’t worth the effort, they could leave at any time with no hard feelings.

For years the miners made and followed their own rules. Often these rules were enforced through miners’ meetings, which were the main way to solve arguments between miners. Anyone could call a meeting and all of the miners who were nearby would attend. At the end of the meeting, all the miners would vote, and if the person in question was found guilty, they would often be banished from the community.

The miners had their own system of justice, and the miners’ meetings were a big part of that. These meetings did more than just enforce the rules, they encouraged good behaviour from all miners in the community. Miners did most of their work alone, but there was always a chance they would need to get help from someone else while travelling through the North. A person’s survival could depend on the kindness of a stranger, so it was essential that miners could rely on each other for food and shelter. It would have been unthinkable back then to refuse to help a stranger. Miners also needed to be able to leave their food and equipment unattended for long periods of time without having to worry that their things would be stolen. Theft was treated as a very serious crime by the miners.

Selfish people who refused to help others, stole things, and only cared about themselves posed a very real threat to the entire community. These people needed to be dealt with strictly, to show everyone else that it wasn’t OK to act this way. That’s why miners would often vote to banish these people at miners’ meetings. It was their way of saying that such behaviour would not be tolerated. 

Miners’ meetings did a surprisingly good job of preventing conflict as well. In one case, two miners named Matlock and Wickham got into a violent argument: Wickham stabbed Matlock, and Matlock shot Wickham in return. Both men were lucky enough to survive, but at a miners’ meeting that was called to deal with the incident, the two of them were told that if they got into any more fights, they would both be banished. After this, they ended up becoming good friends. 

The Arrival of Police

Police didn’t come to Yukon until 1894. The North-West Mounted Police first arrived in Forty Mile after the missionary Bishop Bompas sent several letters to them. In the letters, Bompas complained about the rowdy and immoral activities of the miners in town. He and other missionaries worried that the miners’ actions would corrupt the local Indigenous people that they were trying so hard to convert to Christianity. 

Inspector Charles Constantine and Staff Sergeant Charles Brown were the first two police officers to arrive. The two spent the summer at Forty Mile, checking out the town and seeing how the people in it behaved. To their surprise, they found that for the most part things were pretty quiet. However, Constantine still decided to create a small police station across the river from Forty Mile, which he named Fort Constantine. And the next year he brought 20 more officers back to Yukon with him.

The Canadian government gave Constantine a lot of power: he was in charge of the police force, and was also the judge and jailer. He immediately got rid of the miners’ meetings, and began enforcing the laws of the Canadian legal system. He had no interest in the local Indigenous people, and mostly just ignored them as long as he thought they wouldn’t interfere with the development of the mining industry in Yukon.