By the way, to this day, the Eagle Gold Mine near the town of Mayo, Yukon, operated by Victoria Gold Corp., remains the largest gold mine in Yukon’s history and is currently experiencing a revival. The number of workers has already reached 400 people, and many employees are now relocating their families to Mayo and Dawson City.
It’s fair to note that any work experience in the Yukon guarantees you permanent residency status, provided you make it into the 2025 quota. The language requirements are minimal, and you need at least one year of work experience.
In the landmark year of 1896, gold was first discovered by three prospectors who had spent several years unsuccessfully trying their luck in the Alaskan goldfields before their lucky break. One of them was named George Carmack, and it was he, along with two friends, who discovered major gold deposits along the Klondike River, near a creek called Rabbit Creek.
The enterprising men didn’t rush to fill bags with gold but instead registered their claim to the land the very next day. News of the gold discovery quickly spread across Canada and the U.S., and over the next two years, up to 50,000 hopeful miners arrived in the region. Rabbit Creek was renamed Bonanza, and even more gold was discovered in another Klondike tributary, which was named Eldorado.
The "Klondike Fever" reached its peak in the United States in mid-July 1897, when two steamships arrived in San Francisco and Seattle from Yukon, carrying a total of over two tons of gold. Thousands of young men bought elaborate “Yukon kits” (sets cleverly put together by marketers, including food, clothing, tools, and other essential equipment) and headed north. Few of them found what they were looking for, as most of the land in the region had already been claimed.
An interesting fact is that one of the unsuccessful prospectors was a 21-year-old Jack London, whose stories based on his Klondike experience became his first book: “The Son of the Wolf” (1900).
As for Carmack, he got rich from his discovery, leaving Yukon with $1 million worth of gold. Many individual prospectors in the Klondike eventually sold their claims to mining companies, which had the resources and machinery to extract even more gold. Large-scale gold mining in Yukon continued until 1966, and by that time, the region had produced about $250 million worth of gold. Today, there are around 200 active gold mining operations in the region.
Oleksandra Melnykova, Immigration and Refugee Consultant in Canada.
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