The Phil Lind Klondike Gold Rush Collection – To the Klondike!
To the Klondike!
An estimated 100,000 people set off for the Klondike – but only a third completed the arduous journey. A few hundred struck it rich, but many lost their newfound wealth in the saloons and gambling halls of Dawson City. The Phil Lind Klondike Gold Rush Collection comprises nearly 3,000 items, including books, ephemera, letters, maps, and photographs acquired by Phil Lind over five decades.
The collection goes beyond the years of the Klondike Gold Rush (1896–1899) to include items covering gold mining in the Yukon before the rush, as well as items documenting the continued fascination with these events. In 2021, the Department of Canadian Heritage recognized this extensive collection as a “cultural property of outstanding significance.”
Materials in the collection reflect the frenzied and international mythologizing of the Klondike as a site of adventure, heroism, and excessive wealth. They also reveal the harsher realities of the rush—colonization, environmental devastation, and the hazards of prospecting in remote subarctic conditions.
“Thursday June 14, 1894 – Made 10 miles today by hard work. In fact, there is nothing but hard work all the time, in fact the hardest I’ve ever done.” – Johnny Grieve Lind
A Grandfather’s Tale
John “Johnny” Grieve Lind was born in 1867 and raised on a farm in Pond Mills, Ontario. After working as a bridge engineer, Johnny yearned for something new. In 1894, he flipped a coin to decide whether to head north for gold or south for oil.
The coin toss sent him north to the mining district of Forty Mile, located in traditional Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in territory and part of the Northwest Territories at the time (today’s Yukon Territory). Here, Johnny and his new partners worked existing mines and staked their own claims. When they learned of Klondike gold in 1896, they moved quickly, by dogsled, that winter.
Using money earned in Forty Mile, Johnny and his partners purchased about a dozen claims on the now legendary Eldorado and Bonanza Creeks in the Klondike. Johnny’s team hired some 200 men to work tirelessly on these claims, mining stunning amounts of gold worth hundreds of thousands of dollars at the time, equivalent to millions of dollars today. Months would pass before the flood of stampeders showed up. Johnny Lind and his cohort, having arrived early with their mining know-how, had already amassed magnificent wealth.
Discovery on Rabbit Creek
Who was the first to strike gold in the Klondike? There are multiple versions of the story, but historians generally agree that an Indigenous family first discovered gold in the area.
In August 1896, a Tlingit-Tagish man named Keish (Skookum Jim Mason), along with his nephews Káa Goox (Dawson Charlie) and Kooŧseen (Patsy Henderson), travelled down the Yukon River searching for Keish’s sister Shaaw Tláa (Kate Carmack), who had left home with her American husband, George Carmack, several years since.
The party found the couple at the confluence of the Klondike and Yukon Rivers, catching and processing fish for the winter months. Keish, Káa Goox, and George Carmack set off to hunt in the vicinity of Tha-Tat-Dik (Rabbit Creek). When Keish drank from the stream, he saw shimmering gold. Keish attributed his discovery to a frog helper-spirit who accompanied him. However, George Carmack staked the first gold claim on Rabbit Creek, later renamed Bonanza Creek. Keish registered a claim at the adjacent spot, “1 Above Discovery,” while Káa Goox registered for “2 Below Discovery.”
Keish (Skookum Jim Mason)
Keish (Skookum Jim Mason) was a member of the Inland Tlingit Dakl’aweidí clan, which shared ties with the Tlingit and the Tagish.
These connections secured his access to the ancestral trade routes around Dyea, Alaska, a coastal entry point for travellers heading to the Klondike on foot. There, he gained the name Skookum (Chinook for “strong, brave”) for his ability to pack heavy loads of more than 100 pounds. Keish, who assisted with early trail surveys, was highly respected for his knowledge of the vast terrain he regularly traversed.
Keish was generous and had a sense of responsibility toward his community. Long after his gold discovery, he continued packing long distances to care for his relatives. When he died in 1916, he left behind a trust fund to improve the health and education of Indigenous communities in the Yukon. In 1962, funds from this trust were used to build the Skookum Jim Friendship Centre in Whitehorse. The first of its kind in the Yukon, the non-profit organization is still active today in its commitment to supporting the spiritual, mental, and physical well-being of First Nations Peoples.
Ramping Up
On July 14, 1897, the Excelsior steamship from Alaska docked in San Francisco with a reported “half a million dollars in dust.” Three days later, the Portland steamship arrived in Seattle carrying more than a million dollars in gold dust and nuggets. These events are widely cited as catalysts for the stampede north, making front-page headlines worldwide.
The Phil Lind Klondike Gold Rush Collection includes newspaper clippings of miners in the Klondike as early as 1894 and crowds thronging the San Francisco docks in 1896. But the 1897 arrival of the Excelsior and Portland steamships, with miners hauling heavy boxes of gold off the gangplanks, was a tipping point. The sensational story captivated the public’s imagination during a severe economic depression, prompting thousands of people to abandon their homes and jobs in search of the quickest path to the Klondike.
