Bonanza Creek, the Klondike

Before 1896 this was called Rabbit Creek. Then somebody found gold in it, and tens of thousands of people came north.

Bonanza Creek runs about 20 miles from King Solomon's Dome down to the Klondike River in Yukon, Canada. In the last years of the 19th century and the first of the 20th it was the centre of the Klondike Gold Rush, and miners renamed it in honour of the millions of dollars in gold taken from it and the ground around it.

Mining changed the creek physically. The course was altered drastically during operations, the valley was heavily developed through the early 20th century, and by the 1950s it had been largely abandoned. A handful of small gold-mining operations still work it, but the creek is now known mainly for what happened here. Two National Historic Sites of Canada are designated along it, one of them the Discovery Claim, formally Claim 37903, where the rush began.

The other tells the less romantic half of the story. Dredge No. 4 is a preserved bucketline sluice dredge for mining placer gold, sitting at its last place of work on Bonanza Creek just outside Dawson City. It was built in 1912 and 1913 by the Canadian Klondike Mining Co. to work the gravels of the Klondike River Valley, and was dismantled in 1940 when the paying gravel ran out. The Yukon Consolidated Gold Corporation then refurbished all its major mechanical components, encased them in a new wooden hull and superstructure built on Bonanza Creek, and worked it from September 1941 until the autumn of 1958. It sank on its present site in 1959.

Canada designated it a National Historic Site as a symbol of two things: how important dredging was in the Yukon between 1899 and 1966, and how Klondike gold mining shifted from labour-intensive work by individuals to corporate industrial extraction. Both stages are standing on the same creek.