The Yukon Gold Rush

The rush for gold did not occur until the fall of 1897 when it became sudden and overwhelming. At the beginning of 1896, only several thousand non-Indian miners, traders and missionaries resided in the Yukon. Two years later, the territory was overrun with tens of thousands of newcomers who quickly wrought serious and far ranging changes to the land. The federal government, concerned primarily with maximizing resources extraction, did little to ensure environmental protection.

Sadly, and for the most part, Alaska and the Klondike were places to exploit, reap the harvest and ignore the consequences, so few bothered to make observations about the environmental impact. Gold seekers flooded into Alaska and the Yukon bringing with them a "get rich

He argued that the Yukon Territory was "not the same as any other gold mining country in the world and the difference consists in the fact that it is good for nothing except mining which in all probability will be temporary. The miners were not going to reinvest their profits in developing the country. There would be no long term benefit for Canada unless some of the profits were skimmed off at

For them, the gold rush meant a drastic reduction in moose, caribou, and small game as prospectors hunted these for food. In many areas, gold mining resulted in destruction of salmon streams. Contact with white men also had consequences like drinking and disease. Prior to the 1896 gold rush the indigenous communities had lived in harmony with the land for centuries. The impact of the gold rush on the Native peoples of the region was considerable. The Tlingit and the Koyukon peoples prospered in the short term from their work as guides, packers and from selling food and supplies to the prospectors. In the longer term, however, the Han people living in the Klondike region especially suffered from the environmental damage of the gold mining on the rivers and forests, as well as from the creation of Dawson. The Han, who fished at the site of Dawson, experienced chaos and dislocation. Within a very brief time, the Han banks and their neighbors gained and then lost a large and profitable market for their meat and fish, and with it a key source of cash and trade goods. Depleted wildlife populations disrupted Native subsistence patterns, and the white hunters and fishers who remained in the goldfields competed with Natives for those resources that remained, for specific fishing sites, and for the right to sell food to miners. Their population had already begun to decline after the discovery of gold along Fortymile River in the 1880s but dropped