Big Pan-Out: The Klondike Story

The Klondike in Yukon, north-western Canada was a massive scale gold field, with significant strike after strike at its peak between 1893 and 1899. Names like Bonanza, Eldorado (all one word) became household names, and others like Eureka Creek, Skookum and Bear Creek well recognised.

Travel Book Club books are usually quite specific, and this book doesn't really fit the mould, as it is pure history, with some sideline biographical information on a number of the prospectors & miners. There is no author travel, and the only real travel involved is the complicated journey to the Klondike. Nevertheless, even out of sort for TBC, this book is an engaging read.

The few minor points of negativity, are that it goes a little overboard with recording of statistics, such that they become overwhelming and stop having meaning. There are paragraphs which list what $$value gold was taken each year from each claim. Also being non-linear in narrative, it ends up repeating itself a number of times, sometimes leaving some confusion as to whether an event is happening again, or not.

For the most part though, the book works well. Some of the interesting aspects were the way the Canadian Government enforced law on the largely American miners, who outnumbered the law by hundreds to one. Taxation and legal limitations on pegging claims were seen as restrictive, but from Canada's perspective there were millions of dollars in gold disappearing over her borders with little benefit to Canada. As you can imagine corruption and bribery were an issue, but on the whole this seems to have been minimised to favouritism.

Speculation and luck seem to have played a huge part in the individual fortune (or not) or each miner. A man can stake a claim, dig for a week and find nothing, then sell on his claim to another who digs out thousands of dollars of gold in the following week. The gold is not evenly distributed in the ground, so pockets of gold occur in isolation, easily missed, or easily misinterpreted as being a big strike. Some of the successful claims continued to produce vast quantities of gold, and were sold on at astronomical values.

Interestingly, towards the end of the heyday, when gold production dropped off very steeply in Klondike, all of the claims were bought up by large corporations. These large scale companies, with new technology such as electric dredges, were processing the tailings (what is left after the gold has been taken from the sluiceboxes) and taking out small amounts, but very efficiently.

Electric dredges were moving 1,500 cubic yards of gravel a day, at a cost of less than $100, working two-cent dirt and making more for shareholders than the same dirt had paid the original stakers. There were dumps n every creek with dirt worth more than two cents to the pan. The profits were enormous. The gumboot miner had worked all day to move one cubic yard of gravel - 206 shovelfuls. This gave him 103 pans to wash. They had to be worth more on average than two cents. (In order to pay his way.)

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