Mass Media, Mass Hysteria
While thousands of people surged to the Klondike in search of gold, mass communication technologies exploded, as printed materials, photography, and films were created and shared faster than ever before.
In search of an unforgettable story, photographers, artists, and writers flocked to the region. The fledgling motion picture industry capitalized on the excitement, capturing hyperbolic tales of Dawson’s beautiful dance hall women and men pitted against the wilderness. Early 1940s movies such as Klondike Kate, Klondike Fury, and Queen of the Yukon reveal tropes of myth-making and heroism long after the rush had ended.
Adventure Journalism
The Klondike attracted many of the world’s most adventuresome journalists, who endured the journey to report from the front lines.
Tappan Adney, an American-Canadian writer, photographer, and canoe expert, spent about 16 months covering the stampede as a special correspondent for Harper’s Weekly. He published his vivid accounts and photographs in a book titled The Klondike Stampede (1900), one of the most detailed and widely cited accounts of the gold rush.
Alice Freeman, writing under the pseudonym of Faith Fenton, was one of Canada’s first female journalists. Working for Toronto’s Globe newspaper, she travelled to the Klondike via the treacherous “all-Canadian” inland route. Fortunately, she joined a well-prepared entourage that included the Victorian Order of Nurses and the Yukon Field Force. The Globe featured her riveting accounts of the journey on the front pages of their paper.
Local news stations also set up offices in Dawson in 1898. Key publications included the Yukon Midnight Sun, Klondike Nugget, and Dawson Daily News. The newspapers reported on local and global events, providing a much-needed source of information for newcomers.
The Klondyke Nugget Show
American showman Samuel Franklin Cody wrote and performed in The Klondyke Nugget, a stage play that toured in Europe from around 1898 to 1904. Cody altered his appearance and changed his last name to capitalize on the fame of Buffalo Bill Cody, basing the play on his unverified claim of having prospected in the Klondike.
Like many other “Wild West” shows of this period, The Klondyke Nugget romanticized frontier life and reinforced harmful racial stereotypes of diverse cultural groups. Early stereotyping of different peoples like those who appear in The Klondyke Nugget centred and privileged whiteness in the gold rush and in the dominant narratives that followed.
The Bandit of Skagway
As individuals careened between poverty and wealth in the wake of the gold rush, any newfound bounty was often quickly lost in saloons and gambling halls. People like Jefferson Randolph “Soapy” Smith II, an American crime boss and notorious outlaw, ran several scams out of Skagway, Alaska, capitalizing on the flow of gold leaving the mining industry and entering businesses in nearby towns.
He earned the name Soapy by running “prize soap” cons with his accomplices in Denver, Colorado. The gang fooled crowds into buying ordinary soap bars, promising they had hidden prize money in some of them.
Smith was killed in a shootout after one of his confederates conned a miner out of a large sum of gold in a card game. The shooting occurred on a pier, where concerned citizens were meeting to discuss what to do about Smith. The Jeff. Smiths Parlour Museum, housed in the same Skagway building that Soapy once occupied with his gang, commemorates these events.
Next: The Perilous Journey