The most powerful impression left on me by the 2009 Yukon 1000 Mile Canoe Race is from the experience of paddling between the towns of Whitehorse and Dawson City in Yukon Territory, Canada. Both cities owe their existence to the Klondike gold rush of the late 1800s.

The Rush started on August 16, 1896, when George Washington Carmack and two Native American friends found a gold nugget in Rabbit Creek, a tributary of the Klondike River that empties into the Yukon River. The rest of the world caught Klondike gold fever the following July (1897) when 68 scraggly miners, some carrying buckets of gold nuggets, arrived at the docks in Seattle and San Francisco with more than two tons of gold. This touched off the largest gold rush in history as an estimated 100,000 people quit their jobs, sold their possessions and headed for the Yukon.

In Seattle, streetcar drivers left their trolleys, a quarter of the police force quit and even the mayor resigned to buy a steamboat to carry passengers to Alaska. The gold seekers were called “stampeders,” and quickly overwhelmed the existing transportation options. The stampeders who made it to Alaska still had hundreds of miles to travel before arriving at the gold fields. Many were forced to turn back as they found the cost of hiring horses or mules to move their provisions to be too expensive. For the more determined Klondikers there several trails to choose from. One of the trails, Dyea Trail, featured the infamous Chilkoot Pass – a severe, four mile long slope that was too steep for pack animals to traverse.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police required each would-be gold miner to have approximately one ton of supplies and gear before they were allowed to travel to the Klondike area. In the winter of 1897, over 20,000 stampeders toiled night and day to move their loads over the Chilkoot Pass; making the trek over and over with what they could carry on their back. The Dyea Trail ended at Lake Bennett which feeds into the Yukon River. Here the stampeders were forced to spend the remainder of the winter in tents waiting for the spring thaw and constructing rafts to transport them 500 miles on the Yukon River to the gold zone at Dawson City.

The town of Whitehorse is named after the historic rapids on the Yukon River which resembled the flowing manes of charging white horses. These rapids had to be bypassed by the rafters. Two entrepreneurs capitalized on this problem by building a tramway on both sides of the Yukon River. For a fee, their horse-drawn tram cars carried gear and small boats around the rapids on log rails. The stampeders erected tents beyond the rapids, and a roadhouse and saloon was soon built to provide for the thousands of gold seekers. In 1900, a railroad from Skagway, Alaska to the area was completed, and Whitehorse started to grow.

After leaving Whitehorse, the rafting stampeders still had to travel 460 miles to reach Dawson City. The Five Finger Rapids were the last major obstacle to be overcome on their journey. These rapids consist of five massive basalt boulders stretching across the Yukon River. I doubt the stampeders would have had instructions on the best path through the whitewater as we did. They would have rounded the bend in the river, seen the massive boulders and heard the roaring water. Their cumbersome rafts would have been at the mercy of the strong currents and rocks. In 1898, many stampeders drowned in the rapids when their rafts were destroyed. The Canadian authorities required stampeders to hire certified river guides in the ensuing years.

For those whose craft withstood the rapids, the new gold boom town of Dawson City awaited. Here the final disappointment occurred when the stampeders found out that every gold-bearing creek in the region had been staked out. Most of them sold their gear at this point and returned home by whatever means possible. A few found jobs in town or working on someone else’s claim.