Klondike Gold Rush-Seattle National Historic Park

Klondike Gold Rush-Seattle National Historic Park

Seattle Gateway to Gold

Gold! read the headlines in July of 1897. After years of struggling through a depression, the people of the nation were intrigued by the possibility of riches. Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park preserves the story of the 1897-98 stampede to the Yukon gold fields and Seattle’s role in this event. The park offers a glimpse at the stories of adventure and hardship of the gold rush.

Klondike Gold Rush-Seattle National Historic Park Park Information
Hours/Seasons: The Seattle unit of Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park is open daily from 9:00 am to 5:00 pm. The park is closed Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's Day.

Directions: Take the James Street exit from I-5. Proceed down the hill and turn left at Second Avenue, then veer right onto S. Washington Street. Street parking is available, but difficult to find during business hours; parking meters are free on Sundays and major holidays. Public parking lots can be found throughout the neighborhood.

Fees: Free!

Weather: Seattle has a marine-type climate. Winters are cool, and summers are mild and pleasant. The average annual temperature is 53 degrees, with an average low of 36 degrees in the winter and an average high of 69 degrees in the summer. The average annual rain fall is 39 inches, with 100 rain free days per year, and an average of 49 percent sunshine during the daylight hours.

History
In July 1897, the steamship Portland arrived with a cargo of gold. In the weeks that followed, and throughout the Klondike Gold Rush, Seattle dominated the outfitting trade. Thousands of people from across the United States and around the world arrived to purchase tons of food, clothing and equipment and to book passage north. Guidebooks and newspapers lauded Seattle’s facilities. The Chicago Record boasted that "the outfits purchased in Seattle by twenty experienced miners on the way to the Klondike are regarded as models by miners who have returned from that region."

Many stampeders arrived in Seattle by train and left for the gold fields on a ship. Seattle’s role in the gold rush was defined, in part, by its role as a transportation center. Until the coming of the Great Northern and Northern Pacific Railroads, Seattle’s most reliable connection to the outside world was by sea. City leaders lobbied for a transcontinental rail link to ship timber and imported goods east in exchange for finished goods and passenger service. By 1897, the region had steamship service north to Alaska and rail service over the Cascade Mountains as well as north to Vancouver, British Columbia and south to San Francisco and Los Angeles, California.

Seattle’s success as an outfitting and transportation center was due in part to geography and economic conditions. The rest was due to an aggressive marketing campaign. Seattle’s merchant community recognized the opportunity that the Klondike Gold Rush represented and embarked upon a media blitz with an extraordinary reach. In the weeks following the arrival of the S.S. Portland in Seattle, the Chamber of Commerce and merchants formed a Klondike Advertising Committee. The wealth and fame that Seattle gained during the gold rush is, in large part, the result of this committee and the efforts of its intrepid leader, Erastus Brainerd.

The image of stampeders and merchants in Seattle as white males of European descent is only partially true. Seattle by 1897 was home to Asian, African-American, and diverse European cultures, many of whom worked as outfitters or left to go to the Gold Fields. Women who made the trek north found jobs in a variety of places, including saloons and dance halls; many also started their own businesses including bakeries, laundries, restaurants, and hotels. In Skagway and along the northern trails, many coastal Indians worked as guides, packers, and traders. The choices below tell the stories of several people involved in the Rush.

As a result of the Gold Rush, Seattle earned a reputation as the commercial center of the Pacific Northwest. In the decade following the rush, the population doubled and the city expanded to the surrounding hills. Gold Rush tax revenues financed comprehensive water and sewage systems, the locks between Lake Washington and Lake Union, and regrades of the steep hills and wetlands in the downtown area. In 1909, Seattle celebrated its new fame with the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition.

Programs

Audio Visual Programs
Throughout the year, the park offers to visitors a number of audiovisual programs that tell the stories of the Klondike Gold Rush. Are offerings include:

Days of Adventure, Dreams of Gold (27 minutes): Using vintage photographs, this film provides a broad overview of the events of the Klondike Gold Rush. Narrated by Hal Holbrook, the program follows the stampede north to Skagway, telling the story of the arduous journey over the mountain passes and down the Yukon river to Dawson City and the gold fields. The film is available in open captions for those with hearing impairments

Seattle: Gateway to the Goldfields (15 minutes): This slide program focuses on the role that Seattle and Pioneer Square played as the chief outfitting and transportation center during the Klondike Gold Rush. Using vintage and contemporary photographs, the program helps visitor understand the pivotal role Seattle played in preparing the stampeders for their arduous journey north to the Klondike Gold Fields.

Hiking the Chilkoot Trail (15 minutes): For many of the stampeders headed to the Klondike Gold Fields, ascending the Chilkoot Pass was the defining moment of their journey. Today, thousands of adventures retrace the steps of the miners, making the Chilkoot Trail one of the most popular trails in Southeast Alaska. This slide program gives potential hikers a taste if what it is like to hike over this historic trail. The program has open captions for the hearing impaired.

Interpretive Programs
Gold Panning Demonstrations are offered throughout the year; on request from September to June and on a set schedule June through Labor Day. These demonstrations illustrate the historic prospecting techniques that were used by the stampeders in the Klondike gold fields. Learn about who made the fortunes and who lost it all in the gold rush. 15 to 20 minutes.

Walking Tours of Pioneer Square Historic District are offered every morning during the summertime at 10:00 am. The ranger's take small groups of visitors on a sixty minute stroll through the streets and alleys of the historic district, recounting the role that the neighborhood played in the development of early Seattle and the Klondike Gold Rush.

All children must be accompanied by adults. No reservations are taken in advance and groups cannot exceed twenty four people. The tour is wheel chair accessible. PLEASE NOTE: This is not the Seattle Underground Tour. For information on Seattle's underground, please call (206) 682-4646 or 1-888-608-6337.

Ranger Programs are offered every morning during the summer, including slide programs that tell the many stories of the Klondike Gold Rush including readings of Robert Service's poetry.

A Junior Ranger Program is available throughout the year for children age 6 through 12. The workbook is available at the front desk of the visitor center; feel free to pick one up when you visit the park.

A Short History of the Klondike Gold Rush

“GOLD! GOLD! GOLD! GOLD!” screamed the banner headline of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer on July 17, 1897. Smaller headlines following told of "Sixty-Eight Rich Men on the Steamer Portland" and "STACKS OF YELLOW METAL!" The news of the gold strike on the Klondike River, a tributary of the Yukon River in northwestern Canada, near the border with Alaska, excited people across the globe, especially in North America. By noon that July day eager fortune seekers had booked the last berth on the Portland for the return trip to Alaska.Once there, they headed by riverboat up the Yukon to a mining camp near the gold strike called Dawson City, soon, though briefly, to become a boomtown.

Prospectors had tried their luck for decades in the wilderness of the Yukon River valley, finding only small amounts of gold. But on August 16, 1896, a member of a local Tagish tribe named Keish (known as Skookum Jim Mason by English Speakers), his nephew Kaa Goox (called Tagish Charlie or Dawson Charlie), and his American brother-in-law, George Washington Carmack, struck pay dirt on a tributary of the Klondike they named Bonanza Creek. They filed claims the next day, triggering a scramble among prospectors already in the area for similar rich claims. Within a few months every potentially valuable claim along Bonanza Creek and nearby streams and hillsides had been staked, All this took place before word of the great discovery reached the outside world. When it did, almost a year later, the Klondike Gold Rush began.

Gold fever affected people from all walks of life. Even Seattle's mayor quit to join the stampede. Most were Americans and Canadians, but some came from almost every corner of the globe. Few had any idea of the hardships that awaited them on the way to, and in, the frozen north: climbing the steep, 3,000-foot Chilkoot Pass 40 or 50 times, for example, each time laden with a heavy load on one's back in order to bring into the desolate Yukon region enough food and supplies to last a year. Nor was taking the treacherous White Pass alternative any better. So many horses perished on this narrow, boulder-strewn route that it became know as the Dead Horse Trail. Once in the Yukon region, imagine yourself and a partner spending a dark and frigid winter chopping down trees so the logs could be whipsawed into planks or boards for a boat or raft. Such watercraft would be needed when the ice broke in the spring on the Yukon. Then you'd load your boat or raft with food and supplies, get in, push off, and hope you'd safely negotiate dangerous rapids, sandbars, and other obstacles. Finally, some 560 downstream miles later, you'd reach Dawson City. Imagine discovering, soon after arriving, that your dreams of riches are mostly just that: dreams. Historian Pierre Berton put it this way: "One hundred thousand persons, it is estimated, actually set out on the Klondike Trail; some thirty or forty thousand reached Dawson... a few hundred found gold in quantities large enough to call themselves rich. And out of these fortunate men, only the merest handful managed to keep their wealth."

The Klondike Gold Rush of 1897 and 1898 increased the awareness of Americans and Canadians to the possibilities of developing mining, timber, and other resources in the vast lands of Alaska and the Canadian Yukon. It provided an economic shot in the arm to merchants, especially in Seattle, who supplied the naïve but determined stampeders. In so doing it helped bring to an end, at least in the Pacific Northwest, the terrible effects of the Panic of 1893, one of America's worst economic depressions. It also enriched many of the men and women who participated in the Klondike Gold Rush and who returned home with scarcely a nugget or ounce of precious dust. Many spoke glowingly long afterwards of the grandest adventure they had ever experienced.

Klondike Gold Rush NHP - Seattle Unit
117 South Main Street
Seattle, WA 98104
(206) 553-7220 ext 0