QUARANTINE BLOG # 516

August 28, 2021

Gold Mines, Glaciers, and Ghost Towns: the Conclusion.

The huge quantities of gold coming through Dawson City encouraged a lavish lifestyle amongst the richer prospectors. The major saloons each ran their own gambling rooms. A culture of high stakes evolved, with rich prospectors routinely playing for a $5,000 ($125,000 today) poker pot. The biggest recorded poker game in Dawson occurred between the well-known gamblers Sam Bonnifield and Louis Golden. $200,000 ($5 million) was put into the pot, which Bonnifield won with a hand of four kings. 

The largest modern poker payout at World Series of Poker was $18.3 million won by Antonio Esfandiari in 2012 at the inaugural Big One for One Drop Texas Hold ‘Em Tournament. That was for a tournament that started with 48 entrants. Bonnifield was playing for one pot. He later suffered a nervous breakdown and died in poverty.

As Dawson grew, so did the fortunes of those who made the right business decisions. Big Alex McDonald bought up the claims of discouraged miners and hired others to work them for him. He earned $5 million ($75 million) and the title ‘King of the Klondike’ without ever lifting a pick or shovel. 

The ‘Queen of the Klondike,’ Belinda Mulroney, arrived in the Klondike in the spring of 1897 with $5,000 ($125,000) worth of cotton clothing and hot-water bottles, which she sold for $30,000 ($750,000). This was followed by a lunch counter, a construction company, and a successful roadhouse. 

But that was not ambitious enough for Mulroney. She went on to build the grandest hotel in the Klondike – the Fair View, which boasted brass beds, fine china, cut-glass chandeliers and chamber music in the lobby, even electricity generated by the engine of a yacht anchored in the harbor.

For a brief time, Belinda and Big Alex became partners in a scheme to salvage the cargo of a wrecked steamboat. Big Alex got to the wreck first and made off with the most valuable supplies, leaving Belinda with a large inventory of rubber boots. ‘You’ll pay through the nose for this,’ she promised. When the spring thaw turned the ground in the gold fields to mush, McDonald was in dire need of boots for his men, and Mulroney was happy to provide them – at $100 ($2,500) a pair.

Big Alex became obsessed with buying up unwanted claims and eventually found himself stuck with a lot of worthless real estate. He died broke and alone. 

Belinda Mulroney married a fake French count and lived in style for several years, until her husband invested her money in a European steamship company – on the eve of World War I, which put an end to merchant shipping. She died penniless.

Three years after the discovery of gold on Bonanza Creek, the great gold rush was over. News came of a bigger gold strike in Nome, Alaska. In the spring of 1898 the Spanish-American War removed Klondike from the headlines. 

“Ah, go to the Klondike!” became a popular phrase to express disgust with an idea. Unsold, Klondike-branded goods had to be disposed of at special rates in Seattle. During one week in August 1899, 8,000 people deserted Dawson for the beaches of Nome which were open to all, no claims were allowed.

The Klondike gold rush was over.

Gold production actually increased until 1903 as a result of the dredging and hydraulic mining but then declined; but by 2005, approximately 1,250,000 pounds of gold had been recovered from the Klondike area. 

But away from Front Street following those stampede days, Dawson became increasingly deserted, jammed with the refuse of the gold rush: stoves, furniture, gold-pans, sets of dishes, seltzer bottles, piles of rusting mining machinery, boilers, winches, wheelbarrows and pumps. By 1912, only around 2,000 inhabitants remained compared to the 30,000 of the boom years and the site was becoming a ghost town. In 1972, only 500 people were living in Dawson. Tourism has brought people back – 1,300, give or take, living there now.

The three discoverers of the Klondike gold had mixed fates. 

George Carmack left his wife Kate – who had found it difficult to adapt to their new lifestyle – remarried and lived in relative prosperity. When George took up with Marguerite Laimee, Kate filed for divorce. George offered her a sentiment of $2,500 ($62,500). She asked for $100,000 ($2.5 million) but was unable to prove she was George’s lawful wife. Kate died back in the Yukon with her family in 1920 from the worldwide influenza epidemic of 1918-1920. 

Skookum Jim had a huge mining royalties but continued to prospect until his death in 1916. 

Dawson Charlie spent lavishly and died in an alcohol-related accident.

Alaska currently produces more gold (725,000 troy ounces annually) than any state except Nevada. Gold accounts for 15% of the mining wealth produced in Alaska. A total of 40 million troy ounces of gold from 1880 through the end of 2007 [$52 billion at $1300/troy ounce]. The Dawson City/Klondike Fields rank #9 in total world production with Johannesburg, South Africa #1 – 40% of all the gold ever mined came from the South African mines 2.4 miles below the earth’s surface.

I’ll wrap up this series, “Gold Mines, Glaciers, and Ghost Towns” with “Sourdough: The Miner's Song,” a video I made when this was cruise talk back in 2016 (when The Bride of My Youth, The Bro, CJ, and I sailed into some of the cities you have visited in this series).

👍  Today’s close is from New Morning Mercies, by Paul David Tripp.

Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for He who promised is faithful. And let us consider one another in order to stir up love and good works, not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as is the manner of some, but exhorting one another, and so much the more as you see the Day approaching. (Hebrews 10:23-25).

We all do it in our own way. We all work to convince ourselves that we are better off than we are. We all want to believe that we are not that sinful after all. We compare ourselves to those who seem more sinful than us. We evaluate ourselves by looking into mirrors other than the one truly accurate mirror, the mirror of the Word of God. We list our good deeds to ourselves. It is a shocking denial of sin and a minimizing of the grace that is a sinner’s only hope.

God knew that this would be our tendency. He is fully aware of the self- righteousness that still lives inside all of us. God knew that we would convince ourselves that we are okay when we’re not okay. So he designed a means for us to be confronted again and again with the depth of our sin and the expansive glory of his provision in the person and work of the Lamb, the Savior, the Redeemer – the Lord Jesus Christ. 

He ordained that we gather again and again in services of corporate worship and be confronted with our true identity as both sinners and children of grace. You see, when you understand the free gift of God’s provision of grace, you aren’t afraid to admit to the depth of your sin, and it is only when you have admitted the disaster of your sin that you are excited about the grace of Christ Jesus. 

Corporate worship really does confront us with the fact that we are worse off than we thought and that God’s grace is more amazing than we ever could have imagined. We will continue to need that reminder until our sin is no more and we are with him and like him forever. Corporate worship is not a thankless duty for the religiously committed. No, it’s another gift of mercy from a God of glorious grace.

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