Реферат: Yukon Settlement Essay Research Paper Yukon SettlementBy
“Filing claims and announcing their discovery at Forty Mile, they
galvanized the miners who promptly headed upstream as fast as they
could go. Within days, the town was all but deserted. By mid-September,
prospectors had staked every inch of Bonanza Creek as well as it’s smaller
tributaries and were taking out gold that ran $25 to $50 per pan and
occasionally as high as $500 per pan.”(Anderson, 42-43) They are no
exact numbers as to how many prospectors were involved that far, but the
fever would take time to reach to the rest of the world.
The trip into the rich North was often began at Chilkoot Pass, the
start of a long journey through many perils. “For centuries, powerful and
wealthy Tlingit natives controlled the Chilkoot Trail, an inland trade route
that meandered undisturbed from Pacific water into the headwaters of the
Yukon River. Then, in 1897, the trail’s silence was replaced by the din of
thousands as the news spread from Seattle to San Fransisco to New York:
Gold! Gold in the Klondike!
The gold seekers, looking for the cheapest and quickest passage to
the Klondike, quickly discovered that the 33-mile inland passage would
take them from the now-defunct town of Dyea, Alaska to Canada’s Lake
Bennett and the headwaters of the Yukon River. From the lake, they could
raft the remaining 400 miles to Dawson., where streams where reportedly
“busting with gold.” But soon they discovered that the route to the
Klondike was ponderous, and the Chilkoot Trail was far more formidable
than they imagined.” Heimbuch, T1)
With the onset of winter, difficult living conditions became nearly
impossible, but the lure of gold drove them onward. Subsisting on flour,
beans, and sometimes smoked salmon, many of them contracted scurvy.
They were sickly and ridden with lice. Home was a hastily constructed
hut, lean-to, or tent, filled with smoke and icy cold. Burrowing into the
frozen ground, miners built fires to thaw the gold-bearing gravel then