Klondike gold rush!
Gold was discovered in Klondike Creek in Canada on this day in 1896. The news took ten months to reach the U.S., but then a gold rush of Americans started, and people from as far away as Australia and South Africa came, as well. At one point there might have been more than 40,000 people in Klondike, and the possibility of famine seemed possible.
Possibly because of other gold rushes, such as “THE Gold Rush” to the California gold fields in 1849, many men who came to try their luck in the Klondike area knew that they weren’t likely to strike it rich. They came partly for the adventure, and many happily turned to other ways of earning money, and stopped short or went further than the gold fields as well. For this reason, the Klondike gold rush helped develop the economy of Alaska, Western Canada, and the Pacific Northwest.
Celebrate!
- Eat a Klondike bar!
- Play a gold rush game.
- Check out this website that shows what Fool’s Gold (pyrite) looks like in a 3-D molecular model. First, click the molecule diagram. Use your mouse to rotate the molecule (or to click the box “spin the molecule”), and use the mouse with the shift key to zoom in and out, as specified at the bottom of the window. Cool!
Now compare the pyrite molecular model to the molecular model of gold.