Klondike Goldfields
Bonanza Creek Road
Km 0.1 - Guggieville
The Klondike Goldfields is a 1,000-square mile area extending from the Klondike River in the north to the Indian River in the south, and from the Yukon River in the west to Dominion Creek in the east. There are two major creek drainages: the Klondike River with its major tributaries Bonanza, Eldorado and Hunker creeks; and the Indian River with its major tributaries Quartz, Dominion and Sulphur creeks.
Although Bonanza Creek is a relatively small stream, it was one of the richest creeks in one of the richest gold fields in the world. It was the discovery of gold on this creek in 1896 that sparked the Klondike Gold Rush and changed the Yukon forever.
Soon after the August discovery, the entire length of Bonanza was staked. A few of the claims on Bonanza produced more than a million dollars in gold and claims worth a quarter million were common. (At the time, gold was priced at less than $20 per ounce.) By 1904, the Klondike was home to the largest gold-producing field in Canada and the fourth largest in the world.
The Goldfields
The gold found in the Klondike is in placer deposits. A placer is a water-borne deposit of sand or gravel containing minerals that have eroded from their original bedrock. Over many thousands of years these gold deposits became sorted and concentrated by the continuous action of the ancient rivers.
Since gold is so much heavier than water and other rock, it tends to resist erosion. The sluice boxes employed by gold miners use water and gravity to mimic natural forces. Gravel and sand containing gold is washed down a sloped surface so that the heavy gold is trapped by irregularities on the bottom, called riffles, and the lighter waste gravel is carried away by the force of the water.
This area, unlike most of North America, was not glaciated in the last ice age as evidenced by round ridges and smooth-sided valleys. The age-old gold deposits were not carried away by the action of the ice. In areas that were glaciated, the great ice sheets carved out steep valleys and scoured away all the loose rock and metals or minerals.
Bonanza was originally called Gha dak by the local Han-speaking people and Rabbit Creek by the miners. When the first claims were staked, the miners changed the creekâs name to Bonanza.
Guggieville
In the first days of mining in the Klondike, claims were very rich and individual miners could work them with basic equipment like wheelbarrows and sluiceboxes. By the turn of the century, these primitive efforts had given way to larger groups of miners using mechanization, pressurized water (hydraulicking) and steam power. This stage in turn gave way to the era of dredges. New regulations allowed large corporations to buy or lease huge numbers of claims. By using powerful equipment and mining large areas of land, they could make a profit mining even marginal ground.
By 1906, U.S.-based entrepreneurs the Guggenheims, had consolidated a large block of claims on Bonanza and Eldorado creeks. They amalgamated their Yukon holdings as the Yukon Gold Company (YGC) in February 1907. Within a year of being established, YGC owned 90 percent of Bonanza, Eldorado and Hunker creek claims.
The company mined millions of cubic yards each season using a hydraulic method. They also operated as many as nine enormous dredges, ran a power plant on the Twelvemile River, and constructed the 113 km Yukon Ditch. YGC operated dredges in the Klondike until 1926. Their headquarters at this site was known as Guggieville. It housed a machine shop, warehouses, dredges, stables, pumping plant, blacksmith shop, assay office, residences and a mess house.
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