t came as a surprise to learn that although there is--please pardon the pun--a gold mine of literature about the world's last great gold rush, there is really not much written for the collector about the actual material produced in the region, especially regarding collector specimens. This article provides an overview of locality information of the Yukon Territory gold fields and of the morphology of well-developed crystals that have been found there.

It is not my intention to review the crystal morphology of gold. Francis (2004) discussed gold and its crystal forms in the previous issue, and the reader is referred to this article for further, if not prior, reading. A Brief History

As alluded to in the introduction, the stories and history that have been written about the Klondike gold rush and the surrounding areas in the Yukon Territory and Alaska could fill a library. The events, conditions, and area of the rush inspired fantastic and widely read works by such world-famous authors as Robert Service, Jack London, and Pierre Burton. Rather than challenge these masters, I offer a much more concise and less-romantic version of events--"just the facts," if you will.
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Gold-seekers in the late nineteenth century began exploring parts of the Yukon River near what is today the Alaska-Yukon Territory border. The big strike is generally credited to three men--George W. Carmack, Dawson Charlie, and Skookum Jim Mason--who found gold near the confluence of the Bonanza and Eldorado Creeks in 1896, after receiving a tip about the general area from Robert Henderson. It is Henderson who is actually credited by the Canadian government with the initial discovery of gold in the Klondike area and thus received a $200 annual "reward" pension for life. Nonetheless, it was the larger Carmack party strike that caught the attention of other prospectors in the Yukon and Alaska. It took two years for word to get around and for the stampeders, or cheekakos, to come flooding into the area in what was not the largest, but the last and undeniably the most exasperating, of the great gold rushes. By summer 1898, Dawson City, at the confluence of the Klondike and Yukon Rivers, swelled to nearly 20,000 people--30,000 in some accounts (e.g., McConnell 1905)--a quarter of which were toiling out in the creeks. The rush was over almost as soon as it had begun. By the time the bulk of the gold-seekers arrived in 1898, most of the good ground had already been claimed. Within a year much of the population had given up and moved to other areas, such as Nome, Alaska, where gold had just been discovered, or the interior of the Yukon. Many just went home, broke.

Much of the surface gold was worked out within five years, and production peaked in 1900. The first dredge began working on Bonanza Creek in 1899 (McConnell 1905), and by 1906 mining had generally changed from individual claim holders and operators working by hand, to large companies holding larger tracts of land and operating large machinery and dredges, which sifted through ground at a rate and volume impossible with hand labor. These floating beasts gobbled their way through the gravels, leaving tell-tale remains, much like earthworms moving through soil. Dredging continued for most of the twentieth century and ended with the shutdown of Yukon Gold Corporation's dredging operations in November 1966.

Since the end of the dredge era, gold mining in the Klondike has been a declining industry of small, mostly private, family operators. During the 1980s and 1990s, environmental restrictions placed a further stranglehold on what had been, and still is for a few, a hard but satisfying way of life.

Localities

Figure 3 shows the locations of several major gold fields in the Yukon Territory, as defined in the placer activities reports published by the Yukon Geological Survey (e.g., Placer Mining Section 1993). This article focuses primarily on those in the Dawson City area: the Klondike, Indian, Lower Stewart, and 60 Mile River drainages. A few other notable occurrences are also mentioned.

[FIGURE 3 OMITTED]

Most of the activity of the actual Klondike gold rush took place in the Klondike and Indian River drainages (fig. 2). An excellent reference to the "popular" creeks of the time is map 868 by McConnell (1900). This map has been reprinted and is included in Sabina (1992), which is available from the Geological Survey of Canada and at many bookstores.

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

A few notes are necessary at this point concerning the nomenclature used in identifying the place from which a specimen may have come. Pup is the term used for a small seasonal creek. Claims in the region were commonly identified with numbers increasing away from the discovery claim. A locality may be given as "#5 below, Eldorado Creek." This means that the specimen came from the fifth claim downstream from the discovery claim on the Eldorado Creek. A similar system is applied to pups. The "#24 above pup on Eldorado" is the twenty-fourth pup upstream from the confluence of the Eldorado and Bonanza Creeks. Right limit and left limit refer to the direction from which a tributary is coming in, as one faces downstream.