Gold! We leapt from our benches. Gold! We sprang from our stools. Gold! We wheeled in the furrow, fired with the faith of fools.
—ROBERT SERVICE, “THE TRAIL OF NINETY-EIGHT,” 1910
Fortymile, Circle, and the Sourdoughs of Rabbit Creek
The Trails of ’98
Two Towns and a Railroad
One Man’s Summer Vacation
Last Stops of the Mining Frontier
Crest of the Continent
Copper, Kennecott, and One Heck of a Railroad
Preserving the Bounty
The Day the Sky Turned Black
The American mining frontier began in 1848 with a whisper of “gold” on the banks of the American River near Sutter’s Mill. By the following year, that whisper had swelled to a frenzied battle cry that sent tens of thousands of “forty-niners” crossing the North American continent. In the short span of two years, California went from a quiet land of Spanish haciendas to the thirty-first state of the Union.
The American mining frontier was quite unlike the colonial frontiers of Russia, Great Britain, France, and Spain that had pushed their respective borders in steady geographic advances. The mining frontier was explosive and geographically erratic, characterized by a rapid boomtown growth wherever the cries of “Gold!” and “Silver!” were raised. For fifty years, the American mining frontier raced sporadically about the West: First, gold in California, then the Pikes Peak country in Colorado, the Fraser River valley in British Columbia, gold and silver in Arizona, silver in Nevada’s Comstock, back to Colorado again for the silver mines of Leadville, gold and silver in Idaho, gold in the Black Hills of South Dakota, and finally gold at Cripple Creek, Colorado.
Most times, the promises far outweighed the results, and for every miner who struck it rich, there were a hundred who came away disappointed. For every town that boasted of becoming the richest Eldorado on earth, a hundred ghost towns remain. But the American mining frontier was the vanguard of permanent settlement. In the half century between the California gold rush of 1849 and the Klondike gold rush of 1898, the great expanse of the American West was settled with towns, roads, and railroads.
By 1896, silver had been demonetarized and the bimetallism of a generation resolved, with the United States and much of the world firmly committed to the gold standard. In the wake of a national depression, there was to be one last great gold rush where the individual prospector—not the corporate conglomerates of the twentieth century—was still king. In the last great act of the American mining frontier, tens of thousands once again responded to the cry of gold and struck north for the Klondike. There would have to be a geography lesson or two about what country the Klondike was in, but the stampede that followed the arrival of the steamers Excelsior and Portland in San Francisco and Seattle would change Alaska forever and thrust upon it another new frontier.