Discover the last Great Gold Rush of the 19th century. Occurring in the 1890s in modern day Yukon, this gold rush is fascinating for its scale when considering its isolation and ruggedness of the location.
Does anyone remember the Walt Disney Donald Duck comics? In them, Donald's rich uncle Scrooge McDuck was given a backstory: he made his fortune in the Yukon Gold Rush, and they carefully explained how he found no gold, but made his fortune selling luxury goods to the miners (no mention of whorehouses, of course). That was the first I heard of the Yukon, as a kid. Then there were Jack London's stories, and the catchy poems of Robert Service, both of whom had experienced the rush. Canadian historian and journalist Pierre Berton was born in Whitehorse, and spent his early childhood in Dawson city in the 1920s, when it was nothing but a huge ghost town of abandoned buildings surrounding the few remaining inhabitants. His books about the Klondike are fabulous... every Canadian should read them. Finally, as an adult, I had the pleasure of hitchhiking to the Yukon with a friend, going all the way up to Dawson city, and then continuing north along the lonely Dempster Road all the way to Inuvik in the NWT. The Yukon remains my favourite part of Canada. It was still a bit of a challenge to get there when I visited. Now, much of the old ruined town has been fixed up, and there are regular flights from Germany, where it is considered a very romantic destination (by Germans who read books about the Yukon in their childhood).
The Porcupine Gold Rush was both later and far more lucrative and contained (contains) far more gold than the Klondike. The Porcupine lead the the KL Camp, and Val D'Or Camps as well. The Porcupine is the last Gold Rush as we think of them. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porcupine_Gold_Rush
