In July 1897 the steamer Portland docked in Seattle. Among its passengers were a few dozen lean and grizzled prospectors fresh from the newly discovered Klondike gold fields in Canada's Yukon.

In "leather sacks, caribou hide pokes, trunks, belts, and bottles," they offloaded $700,000 in gold dust and nuggets, a payload worth about $42 million in today's dollars.

America was in the grip of a depression, and 5,000 Seattle citizens flocked to the docks to greet them. Seattle's newspapers trumpeted the strike. (The Times described the Klondike as a land of "fabled riches.") Within days gold fever swept the country.

In a few years Dawson City, in the remote northern Yukon, exploded from a camp of scattered shacks and tents to a settlement of more than 30,000. Prospectors, businessmen, bankers, prostitutes, priests, newspapermen and women, and government officials swarmed the remote outpost.

... Dispatch continues