Heather Cox Richardson
speaker
7,649 appearances
90 recordings
10 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 2d ago
Heather Cox Richardson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 89 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 26.
Appearances
A Tlingit and Tagish woman known as Kate Carmack, her brother, known as Gukum Jim, her husband, George Carmack, and a third man, nicknamed Dawson Charlie, made up the family group.
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Reports suggest that it was Skookum Jim who made the initial discovery, but since his white brother in law would be far better able than an indigenous man to protect his mining claim, it was Carmac who filed the first legal claim for gold on the creek that would soon become known as Bonanza Creek.
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Nearby miners rushed to the Klondike to stake their own claims, and news began to filter out to the rest of the world.
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By the following summer, thirty thousand to forty thousand men, known as stampeders, had rushed to the Yukon to try their fortunes there.
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There were many routes to the gold field, but most cost a lot of money.
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The poorest adventurers took the straightest route in, leading them only about thirty three miles from the Pacific waterways to a lake where they could buy or build a boat that would take them down the Yukon River to the goldfields.
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While short, that route took them up Chilcoot Pass, a high mountain pass they traversed by trudging up fifteen hundred steps cut into ice.
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The winter journey was easier than the summer version.
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In the summer the rocks that littered the path were treacherous.
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Stampeders had to carry their gear and the year's supply of food the Canadian authorities required to prevent starvation.
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Altogether, the supplies one hundred and fifty pounds of bacon, four hundred pounds of flour, one hundred twenty five pounds of beans, fifteen pounds of salt, ten pounds of coffee, mosquito netting, axes, two suits of heavy underwear, and so on, weighed about a ton, transported by fifty to eighty pound packs and left at a cache while the prospective miner went back to the
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back down to make the ascent anew with more gear.
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Most of the stampeders were unprepared for the harsh environment of the Yukon and had little knowledge of prospecting.
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They died of disease, violence, avalanche, exposure, scurvy, and malnutrition, and
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Men and a few women made the trip to the unforgiving Yukon because it seemed their best bet in a nation crushed by a depression and torn between the haves and the have nots.
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In eighteen ninety two, just five years before the Stampeders struck out for the Goldfields, voters had put Democrat Grover Cleveland in the White House and Democrats in charge of Congress, giving the Democrats full control of the government for the first time since before the Civil War.
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Their vote was a rejection of Republican President Benjamin Harrison and his pro business administration that had added six new states to the Union to make sure they could control the Senate, had raised tariff rates, and was responsible for the eighteen ninety Wounded Knee Massacre.
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As soon as it was clear voters had put Democrats in charge, Republican industrialists panicked.
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Their industries were protected by a high tariff that had enabled them to dominate the domestic market and raise prices, while a lack of labor laws and protections for farmers drove down workers' wages and agricultural profits.
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The tariffs had made industrialists very rich indeed, and they insisted that Democrats promise to lower tariff rates to help the workers and consumers who paid the tariffs would collapse the economy.
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Showing 2421–2440 of 7,649 · page 122 of 383
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