The Bells resource Guide
McCarter Theatre Center Created in conjunction with Mccarter Theatre production

 
In August of 1896, prospector George Carmack struck gold on the Bonanza Creek, a tributary of the Klondike River in Yukon Territory in the far northwest of Canada just over the Alaskan border. It was the richest gold strike ever made, and destined to change the history of Alaska and Western Canada. Small numbers of miners immediately descended on the area which would become Dawson City. Within two weeks all of Bonanza Creek was staked, and local prospectors had moved on to the nearby streams. But it was not until July of the following year, when the steamship Excelsior arrived in San Francisco and the S.S. Portland landed in Seattle, carrying a combined $1.5 million in Klondike gold, that the fever began to spread like wildfire. People from around the country, and around the world, abandoned their lives as they knew them, dropped everything and headed for the Klondike.

How They Mined

Surface gold was not necessarily proof of deep veins. Only by getting to the bedrock could miners find out what a claim was worth. That required slow, hard digging through the permafrost. First, the miner had to thaw the ground, which required cutting and hauling lumber to the claim. A hole was cleared on the surface, and a fire built on it. Once the fire died, the ashes and thawed dirt were cleared, and another fire built, until bedrock was reached. Clearing about a foot a day, with bedrock five to twenty-five feet down, this process took weeks. Once the prospector reached bedrock the process was far from over. Instead he began “drifting”—building a fire beside the shaft, thawing, shoveling, hauling, and repeating the process until he was successful or gave up. After their hard labor miners were left with a pile of dirty gravel (“pay dirt”), and were forced to wait for spring when the streams thawed to start “sluicing,” the process of washing it to separate the gold and small gravel out of the dirt. Once it was separated the resulting mixture was panned for gold. “There is no doubt,” reported William Ogilvie, the dominion land surveyor, “that this is the hardest country in the history of mining in which to prospect.”

From One Man’s Gold Rush by Murray Morgan, University of Washington Press, 1967.
From One Man’s Gold Rush by Murray Morgan, University of Washington Press, 1967.

The journey to the gold fields in the region of Dawson was long and treacherous. From Seattle, the major outfitting center in the United States for Klondikers, miners traveled north on steamships to the towns of Skagway and Dyea in Alaska, the closest saltwater ports to the Klondike gold. From these outfitting towns,

Klondikers still had to travel 600 miles north to the gold fields via one of two routes: the White Pass from Skagway or the Chilkoot Pass from Dyea. The journey on these paths was difficult. The passes were steep, hazardous and overcrowded. The miners carried heavy packs and gear, and the trails were so narrow that they had to make multiple trips to transport all of their belongings. It took some Klondikers upwards of eight months to move their belongings from Dyea to the summit of the Chilkoot Pass. Some perished along the way from exhaustion and starvation, others finally gave up and turned back. Only 40% of the miners who set out made it through the passes.

Men and women hauling a supply sled over the snow-covered trai
Men and women hauling a supply sled over the snow-covered trail throught the Dyea Canyon. Yukon Archives, Winter and Pond Collection.

Those that survived this part of the journey and arrived at Lake Bennett still had 500 miles to travel by water to Dawson City. Miners had to build boats and rafts by hand to travel on the Yukon River to the gold claims. Again, the Klondikers faced severe challenges from the elements; travelers would drown, and the boats were often caught in freezing waters along the trip.

Almost a full year after departing from Seattle, the miners arrived in Dawson City, where they were shocked to discover that all of the claims had been staked by local prospectors well before word of gold arrived back in the United States. After this relentless journey, some Klondikers turned back and returned home. Others stayed and worked the claims for other prospectors, never striking it rich themselves.

In 1899, prospectors struck gold in Nome on the western coast of Alaska. Eight thousand miners departed the Klondike for the beaches of Alaska; a new gold fever had taken over. The pinnacle year for gold production in Alaska was 1900. The money earned from mining fell significantly after that, and the Gold Rush ended almost as quickly as it had begun.


"During the first, frozen, fantastic winter after [the first strike], men became millionaires—but millionaires in frozen muck, millionaires short of cash in a town short of goods….Nobody starved, but scurvy claimed some and crippled others; alcohol far more. Tensions rose as the winter wore on. The Mounties permitted no men to carry sidearms; there were no shootings, but fights were not unknown, even among Dawson’s female population. A surviving copy of the town’s first handwritten newspaper carries the good word that Mountain Molly had regained the consciousness she lost when brained with a bottle by a colleague during an argument over a customer. ‘Women are few and we can’t spare any,’ the editor cautioned….Dawson was a town where everybody soon knew everybody, and anybody’s business was everybody’s business."

–Murray Morgan, One Man’s Gold Rush

The Play & its contents
Introduction
Plot Summary
Character Profiles
Glossary
Introduction to the Alaskan Gold Rush
The Gold Rush and Popular Culture
Modern Melodrama
Source Material
Drama in the Classroom
About this production
Additional Resources


The Bells
March 22-April 10, 2005

written By
Theresa Rebeck

directed by
Emily Mann

Study Guide
McCarter Theatre Center

Web Design
Dimple Parmar
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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