Legends of the Old West - KLONDIKE GOLD RUSH Ep. 3 | “Race to Nome”

Episode Date: March 18, 2026

While Jack London tries to conquer the Chilkoot Trail, the town of Skagway explodes to life at the beginning of the White Pass Trail. Infamous conman Jefferson “Soapy” Smith sets up a criminal emp...ire in Skagway, which leads to a deadly showdown with respectable citizens. Meanwhile, three Scandinavian men discover gold in a stream north of Nome, Alaska and ignite a second gold rush, one which lures legendary lawman Wyatt Earp to the last frontier of the West. Thanks to our sponsor, Quince! Use this link for Free Shipping and 365-day returns: Quince.com/lotow Join Black Barrel+ for ad-free episodes and bingeable seasons: blackbarrel.supportingcast.fm/join Apple users join Black Barrel+ for ad-free episodes, bingeable seasons and bonus episodes. Click the Black Barrel+ banner on Apple to get started with a 3-day free trial. On YouTube, subscribe to LEGENDS+ for ad-free episodes and bingeable seasons: hit “Join” on the Legends YouTube homepage. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Starting point is 00:00:11 The summer of 1898 was the season of transition for the Klondike Gold Rush. The experience of soon-to-be-famous author, Jack London, was emblematic of the average stampeter who raced to the middle of nowhere in Yukon territory. In the summer of 1897, Jack had taken a steamship 1,500 miles north from San Francisco, California, to Juneau, Alaska. Then he took a canoe another 100 miles north to the booming town of Dai, Alaska. Then he hauled hundreds of pounds of supplies over the 33-mile Chilcote Trail from Dye to Lake Lindemann in Canada, which included the incredible climb up to Chilcote Pass in the coast mountains on the border between Alaska and Canada.
Starting point is 00:00:56 Then he and his four companions built a boat and traveled 500 miles up the Yukon River toward their destination of Dawson City before winter stopped their progress in early October 1897. By the following spring, April of 1898, Jack was nearly dead from scurvy. Eight months of relentless, bone-chilling winter had nearly done what hundreds of miles of traveling could not. Famous Canadian author Charlotte Gray wrote a book about the gold rush in which she said, The landscape is magnificent, vast, but it's absolutely indifferent to you, and whether you survive is of absolutely no importance.
Starting point is 00:01:36 That was an accurate depiction of the unforgiving reality of the trip to the Klondike. But Jack London survived. By May of 1898, the Yukon River had thawed to the point where he could finish the trek to Dawson City. But by the second week of June, his health was still so bad that his chance to find gold was gone. He had spent four months fighting through 600 miles of a journey from Dye, Alaska to Dawson City, and he had endured eight months of a Yukon winter in a primitive log cabin, and he had completed his goal. He made it to Dawson City,
Starting point is 00:02:12 and he spent no time looking for gold. After all that, he went home empty-handed, and his story ended the same way as most of the others. Roughly 100,000 people attempted the journey over the Chilcote Trail or the White Pass Trail from Alaska to the Klondike Gold Strike near Dawson City. Of the 100,000, an estimated 30,000, completed the first leg of the trip by making it over the coast mountains from Alaska to Canada. Of the 30,000, an estimated 4,000 people found gold in some quantity,
Starting point is 00:02:52 and only a few hundred found enough gold to make the trip worth it. When the Palm Sunday Avalanche killed between 60 and 70 people and effectively wiped out the Chilcote Trail in April 1898, lots of stampeters abandoned the trip. Even if they didn't know how rare it was, to find gold in the Klondike, the price was too high and the attempt wasn't worth it. But news of the discovery of gold traveled fast, and the news of a decline or a bust traveled much more slowly. Those who were still determined to find their fortune in the Klondike shifted from the Chilkut Trail over the coast mountains to the White Pass Trail. In the process, the boomtown
Starting point is 00:03:33 of Daiyi slowly died. At its peak, 40,000 stampeters poured through Dai'i's hastily built hotels, brothels, and supply houses. Saloons outnumbered churches, 39 to 1. Within two years of the avalanche, Daiye was virtually empty. Within five, it was all but a ghost town. But as Daiyi faded, Skagway brightened. The town of Skagway, just a couple miles east of Daiyi, was the starting point for the White Pass Trail.
Starting point is 00:04:04 Its population exploded from the summer of 1897 to the summer of 1898. In the spring of 1898, at the same time Jack London finally reached Dawson City, enterprising businessmen began construction of a railroad from Skagway through the Coast Mountains to Lake Bennett in Canada. Eventually, stampeters would be able to ride the rail instead of tackling the 45-mile trail on foot. But as other enterprising businessmen knew, the best way to make money in a gold rush was to mine the miners. As Skagway boomed, it also became the battleground for a small war between legitimate operators and hustlers. And the hustlers were led by one of the most notorious characters of the Old West, Soapy Smith. From Black Barrow Media,
Starting point is 00:05:04 this is Legends of the Old West. I'm your host, Chris Wimmer, and this season we're telling stories of the Klondike Gold Rush, where famous author Jack London and 100,000 other people raced through Alaska to the Yukon in search of riches. This is episode three, Race to Nome. brief exception of ventures in other cities, Jefferson Smith ruled Denver's criminal underworld from 1879 to 1893. The man who would become the West's most notorious con artist during that time started with a scheme so simple it bordered on genius. Standing on a street corner, Smith sold bars of soap which he had purchased for 10 cents each. He wrapped them in paper and then offered them for sale at the outrageous price of $5 per bar. But the hook was that he told his prospective
Starting point is 00:06:04 customers that a random bar of soap could contain $10 in the wrapper, or $20, or even $50. It was a game of chance, like a lottery. And to encourage passers-by to participate, he made sure that a buyer won one of the prizes. The winner celebrated loudly and joyously, which enticed other people to step up to the table and buy a bar. And, of course, it was all an act. The people who looked like winners were part of Smith's gang, and none of the bars of soap that were sold to the public contained prizes. The swindle worked beautifully, for a while anyway,
Starting point is 00:06:41 and it earned Jefferson Smith the nickname Soapy. Soapy Smith expanded his criminal empire over the years to include exotic and elaborate hustles, his reputation as a prolific con man, and his bank account grew rapidly. to buy goodwill and to keep himself out of jail, he donated to charities and politicians. But a con man's time in one place was always limited. It was inevitable that he would eventually burn all his bridges and need to leave. The panic of 1893 made people more watchful over their
Starting point is 00:07:16 money, and the citizens of Denver were ready to run him out of town. So he drifted around the until he heard the same news that Jack London heard in the summer of 1897. There was gold in the Yukon, and there were a pair of boom towns in Alaska, which were ripe for the picking. Dai'i and Skagway were the twin cities of the Klondike Gold Rush in Alaska. They were only a few miles from each other, and each was the starting place of a trail over the coast mountains to the Yukon. The Chilkut Trail started at Dai'i, and the White Pass Trail started at Skagway.
Starting point is 00:07:54 The Chilcote Trail was shorter, so it held a slight edge as the preferred route for Stampeders before the spring of 1898. It was also harder than the White Pass Trail, but until the infamous Palm Sunday Avalanche on the Golden Stairs portion of the Chilcote Trail in April 1898, Stampeders mostly chose the hard route over the long route. After the deadly avalanche, Stampeters mostly abandoned the Chilcote Trail, and businesses quickly abandoned Dyei. The switch from the Chilcut Trail to the White Pass Trail made Skagway's already booming population explode. For those who had already established themselves in Skagway, they were in the perfect position to capitalize on the increased action. One of those who benefited enormously was Soapie Smith. Soapie arrived in August 1897, at about the same time
Starting point is 00:08:49 that Jack London was starting his trek up the Chilcote Trail from Dyei. Soapie's most loyal gang members traveled with him, and they reinvented their empire with a telegraph scam. Soapy promised home-sick stampeters that he would send messages to their worried families back home for a fee. But the stampeters, many of whom were heading off into the wilderness, didn't know that there were no telegraph lines in Skagway at that time. It was a low-risk, low-effort, easy-money swindle. Next, Sopi charmed his way into Skagway's power structure. He publicly championed law and order while privately orchestrating chaos.
Starting point is 00:09:31 He led patriotic parades, supported charities, and befriended influential citizens. At the same time, he corrupted a U.S. Marshal and bribed the lawman to protect him from federal interference. Smith partnered with a saloon owner to open Jeff Smith's parlor. The front bar served drinks while the back room hosted rigged card games where the house always won. As in every city where the conman operated, it didn't take long for whispers about his schemes to reach dangerous levels. Smith countered with his usual tactics, bribed the lawmen to do nothing, and bribe the newspapers to write slanted stories or no stories at all. Over the course of a year, from the summer of 1897 to the summer of 1898, while Jack London was battling his way to Dawson City, Skagway split into two camps, those who saw Soapy Smith as a charismatic community leader, and those who recognized him as a thief and a liar.
Starting point is 00:10:36 In May 1898, the reckoning began. A prostitute named Ellen Wilson was murdered in the tiny shack that was her home and workplace. Madam Maddie Sickles, who was a rival of Soapy Smith's in Denver and who had followed the gold rush to Skagway, publicly accused Smith of the killing. Simultaneously, miners who had returned from Dawson City and had been swindled out of their gold, loudly voiced their opposition to Jeff Smith and his parlor of rigged games. By July 1898, victims were organizing public protests and calling Smith's games what they really were. robberies. Smith maintained his victims had lost fair and square, but too many people knew the truth.
Starting point is 00:11:21 The situation was growing hot, and at that point, many criminals would have decided to cut their losses and vanish into the night. Sobe Smith did the opposite. He raised his public presence and essentially bet that he was too big to bring down. In response, leading citizens of Skagway
Starting point is 00:11:39 turned to a common strategy in the Old West, the vigilance committee. Word spread through the Yukon that Skagway was being run by conmen, but the town experienced the same dynamics as nearly all boom towns in the American West. Lawlessness reigned early, but it started to calm as families put down roots, churches and schools rose from muddy lots, and legitimate businesses lined the streets. For many stampeters, Skagway wasn't a stopover anymore, it was home.
Starting point is 00:12:14 The town couldn't afford to let Sopi Smith's reputation or his actions, kill its future. In the spring of 1898, a citizens group called Committee 101 was born. Thomas Witten, owner of the prestigious Grand North Hotel, was the chairman. He handpicked a crew of guards,
Starting point is 00:12:34 led by city engineer Frank Reed, a man who had helped build Skagway from nothing and wasn't about to watch it fall to criminals. By the summer of 1898, Committee 101 had gained serious momentum. It claimed more than 100 members, all of whom were united against Soapy Smith. Tension was building, but there had not been a confrontation until the brazen robbery of John Stewart, a minor who had just arrived from Dawson City with pockets full of gold.
Starting point is 00:13:04 After Smith's gang robbed the minor, Committee 101 posted a public warning on the streets that read like a declaration of war. All con men, bunco, and sure-thing men, and all other objectionable characters are notified to leave Skagway and the White Pass Road immediately. Failure to comply with this warning will be followed by prompt action. Soapy Smith fired back with his own warning in which he claimed that he ran the real Law and Order Party, and he boasted 317 members in his committee, as opposed to the roughly 100 in Committee 101. Soapy declared that no blackmailers or vigilantes would be tolerated. He dubbed his crew, Committee 303 in mockery of Committee 101. But his numbers were a bluff.
Starting point is 00:13:55 He didn't have 317 supporters, though it didn't stop him from challenging Frank Reed and the committee that did have the numbers. On the evening of July 8th, members of Committee 101 crowded into a warehouse on Juno Wharf, which stretched out into the waters of the Chilcote Inlet. Frank Reed and four others stood guard outside. While the committee members discussed ways to get rid of Soapy Smith once and for all,
Starting point is 00:14:25 Soapy guzzled whiskey and brooded on his situation. He knew a confrontation was coming, and after enough liquid courage, he decided to act first. At 9 p.m., he marched down to the wharf with a rifle slung over his shoulder. In the hazy darkness of an early summer night, Soapie approached the warehouse. He shouted at the guards to let him through. According to the legend, he barged past three of the guards and came face to face with his arch enemy, Frank Reed. Reed and Soapie argued.
Starting point is 00:14:57 Soapy reportedly lifted his rifle. They grappled for control of the weapon, and Frank pulled his pistol. A brief gunfight erupted on the pier. Soapy took a bullet, stumbled backward, and crashed to the ground. as he did, he fired a shot at Reed. The bullet tore into Frank Reed's gut. Committee 101 members rushed to Frank's side. They found Sopi Smith dead on the pier, but Frank was still alive.
Starting point is 00:15:22 He muttered, he may have got me, boys, but I got him first. Frank Reed held on for 12 painful days before he died on July 20th. As the town grieved the loss of one of its leading citizens, it also mutely celebrated the downfall of its most notorious outlaw. The return of some stability happened none too soon for Skagway. It's not like it turned into the perfect picture of law and order all of a sudden, but there was definitely improvement. And the town needed it that summer because it was experiencing its second population boom. The deadly Palm Sunday avalanche three months earlier had driven nearly all
Starting point is 00:16:02 traffic away from Dai. Nearly everyone who still wanted to go to the Klondike was now moving through Skagway. The first few miles of the new railroad along White Pass Trail had just opened. Skagway needed to continue to upgrade itself in order to be the vital artery for the gold rush. But as every miner knew, fortunes changed fast. In mid-September 1898, just two months after Frank Reed's death, gold was discovered along Anvil Creek near Nome, Alaska. Nome was 860 miles north of Skagway, but it was right on the water. Stampeders could bypass Skagway and sailed directly to Nome. The exodus was immediate and devastating. In the deepest part of the winter of 1898, while Jack London was suffering the effects of scurvy in a cabin in the Yukon,
Starting point is 00:17:00 and Soapy Smith was building a new criminal empire in Skagway. A 24-year-old Norwegian man named Yoffet Lindberg was learning that a plan to use Siberian reindeer to haul supply supplies to the miners in the Yukon was not going to work. It was called the Klondike Reindeer Project, and it had a certain amount of logic based on the climate and the terrain, but there were a host of unexpected problems and the project shut down. Lindberg was one of many Norwegians who had signed contracts with the American government to travel to Alaska as reindeer herders. The man who had dreamed up the idea and had organized the project was based in an area north of Nome, Alaska.
Starting point is 00:17:41 When the project fizzled out, Lindbergh found his way to a mining camp about 60 miles from Noem. There he met Eric Lindblom and John Brinteson, both of whom were from Sweden. Lindblum was a tailor-by-trade, was the oldest of the three, and had the least amount of mining experience. But he was fascinated by the American West and had studied mining in school. He moved his young family to the U.S. in 1886 and became an American citizen. In the spring of 1898, he couldn't resist news of the gold rush any longer. His family stayed in San Francisco while he headed north in search of riches. John Brinteson was the muscle and the experience of the trio.
Starting point is 00:18:26 He grew up poor in Sweden and moved to Michigan at age 16 to work in the copper and iron mines. By the time he headed for Alaska, he was a hardened miner and a naturalized American citizen. With their shared Scandinavian roots, they became, known, inaccurately, as the Three Swedes. After careful deliberation, they set their sights on the Seward Peninsula at the mouth of the Snake River. In the spring of 1898, the three Swedes were quietly working the streams north of a village called Anvil City, which later became gnome. In September 1898, they struck it rich on Anvil Creek. For upwards of 10 days, they kept their discovery a secret. They quietly staked as many claims to be that they quietly staked as many claims
Starting point is 00:19:15 in the area as they could before the news inevitably got out. Alaska in 1898 was the Wild West in its purest form. It lacked the law and order that defined the Canadian gold fields. In Canada, the government made the rules, and the Northwest mounted police enforced them. A man could only stake one claim. He had to register it, pay a fee, and share a percentage of his findings with the government. Alaska was a free-for-all. Claim boundaries were vague, and the number of claims that a single person could stake was even more vague.
Starting point is 00:19:50 Miners registered their claims with local community officials, not a legal government entity. Rules changed from one district to the next. Claim jumping was rampant. Minors disputed claims for any reason they felt justified. They were ready to mine on top of each other or simply kick a man out. When news broke of the Anvil Creek strike, it triggered in a round. eruption. Before the Stampede, Anvil City was home to about 500 native villagers. One month after gold was discovered, it was renamed the Cape Gnome Mining District. In less than four months,
Starting point is 00:20:28 Noam's population rose to more than 10,000 people. The following year, it rose as high as 20,000. In less than 12 months, a village of 500 people ballooned to a city of 20,000. It changed its name to Nome, and it became Alaska's largest city overnight. The federal government wasn't ready. The military wasn't ready. Local committees weren't ready. Discouraged Americans who had found nothing in the Yukon flooded into Nome, only to discover that three Scandinavian men had already locked up 30 to 40 of the best claims.
Starting point is 00:21:04 The new miners were outraged. There was only one law with any semblance of clarity in Alaska. Only American citizens, or those in the process of becoming citizens, could stake a claim. Two Swedish men, Lindblum and Brintzen, were American citizens by that point, and had been for some time. Yoffet Lindbergh, the Norwegian, was in the process of gaining American citizenship. Their claims should have been solid, but with so much gold on the line, angry, broke, and exhausted stampeters were determined to find a loophole. And it couldn't be a classic Old West story of a small group of underdogs battling a mob
Starting point is 00:21:43 if it didn't feature a showdown in a saloon. As it happened in this case, the saloon was owned by a new friend of Wyatt Earp, who always seemed to find himself in the middle of a feud. In 1896, just before news of gold in the Klondike broke, Wyatt Earp and his wife Josephine were scraping by in San Diego during the economic depression. They dabbled in saloons and real estate, and they were trying to set up a new mining venture in Yuma, Arizona, when they heard about the Klondite gold rush. In the summer of 1897, they started their trek north. They made it as far as Juneau, Alaska, before returning to San Francisco.
Starting point is 00:22:28 The following year in 1898, they left San Francisco and headed north again. They decided to take the water route, which was sometimes called the Rich Man's Route. They traveled around the coast of Alaska to the port of St. Michael. From there, they took a boat up the Yukon River to try to reach Dawson City. In doing so, they were moving along the same route in the opposite direction as Jack London while he was heading home to San Francisco. Like Jack the previous year, they were stopped on the river by winter. They spent a long, hard Alaskan winter in a tiny outpost called Rampart,
Starting point is 00:23:06 about 100 miles northwest of Fairbanks. In Rampart, Wyatt Earp forged a friendship that defined his time in the north. He met George Lewis Rickard, a former marshal from Henrietta, Texas. By the time the weather warmed in the spring of 1890, there was no reason to continue the long trip to reach the isolated and overcrowded hub of Dawson City. The new hotspot for gold was in an Alaskan boomtown called Nome. The three new friends traveled back down the Yukon River to St. Michael, which sits on the banks of a half-moon-shaped body of water called Norton Sound.
Starting point is 00:23:49 Nome is a relatively short trip across the Sound from St. Michael. When the travelers reached St. Michael, they split up. Tex Rickard hurried across the Sound to Nome and opened the Northern Saloon. Wyatt and Josephine stayed in St. Michael and opened a shop that sold tobacco and liquor. Business was good at the Earps store, but they kept receiving letters from Tex Rickard, which playfully taunted them by calling their profits chicken feed, compared to the fortune they could make in Noam. The Herbs gave in and moved across the sound to Noam. Noam was a five-mile strip of mud along the Alaska coast. The main road was a quagmire two
Starting point is 00:24:30 feet deep that was lined with flapping tents and hastily constructed wooden buildings. When rain didn't assault the area, dust did. The town was high in sickness, low in sanitation, and almost totally devoid of law. In other words, it was a typical boom town in the west. In the middle of it all, Tex Rickard's saloon became a popular joint. When Wyatt and Josephine arrived, Wyatt didn't partner with his fellow lawman in the venture. Wyatt partnered with a local businessman named Charlie Hoxie to start a saloon called the Dexter. It was a formidable, two-story building with a discreet brothel upstairs. Josephine, who was basically the marketing director for the business,
Starting point is 00:25:15 shrewdly downplayed the brothel and promoted the Dexter around town as a better class of saloon, a place for business deals and political campaigns. Coupled with the legend of Wyatt Earp, her strategy worked. The Dexter's business boomed, and luckily for the two former lawmen, the competition did not hurt their friendship. As the summer of 1899 progressed, Wyatt and Tex became two of the most powerful and trusted men in Nome. But halfway through the summer, the simmering tension between the new miners and the three Swedes
Starting point is 00:25:48 started to boil. In July of 1890, a new wave of angry, desperate stampeters washed into Nome, only to learn what the previous waves had learned. The three Swedes had already staked every good claim near Anvil Creek. Feeling cheated and furious, the new miners turned to the two men who ran the town's social centers, Tex and Wyatt. Neither man wanted any part of the feud, but it nearly came to a head in Tex Rickard's northern saloon. After staking most of the claims near Anvil Creek, about four miles north of Nome, the three Swedes formed the pioneer mining company. Each man held an equal share. Yoffet Lindberg, despite being the only one who was not yet a four,
Starting point is 00:26:39 American citizen was named company president. He had more business savvy than his partners, and they trusted his leadership. Eric Lindblum and John Brinteson were naturalized citizens, and they believed that majority ownership by two citizens and Lindbergh's clear intention to naturalize made their claims ironclad. Desperate stampeters were determined to test that belief. They argued that the U.S. commissioner who issued Lindbergh citizenship papers in San Francisco Papers in St. Michael had no authority to do so. If Lindberg's papers were invalid, his legal right to stake a claim vanished. If he couldn't stake a claim, then his company couldn't stake a claim.
Starting point is 00:27:20 If his company didn't legally own any of the claims, then all that territory was up for grabs. The stampeters conveniently ignored the fact that Lindberg's partners were citizens, and the Stampeders moved to take the claims of the Pioneer Mining Company. By mid-July 1899, the miners against the three Swedes numbered in the hundreds. The stampeters formed an attack plan, and phase one of the plan happened at Tex Rikers' northern saloon. More than 600 livid stampeters crammed into the space. They made two arguments at once. They said the Swedes were not citizens, but even if they were, they had no right to stake
Starting point is 00:28:05 so many claims, especially in one area. The citizenship argument had a couple facets to it, since Yoffet Lindbergh's process was not yet complete. But the argument about the number of claims was murky at best. None of that mattered to an angry mob. Six hundred stampeters shoved their way into the northern saloon to confront the three Scandinavian miners. At the same time, another group of stampeters waited four miles north at Anvil Creek. If the mob's six succeeded in taking the claims from the three Swedes, the group in town would light a giant bonfire. That would be the signal for the men at the creek to charge onto the Swedes' claims and take the land for themselves. The three Swedes stood their ground in the saloon. They
Starting point is 00:28:52 defended their gold, their citizenship, and their honor, but they were hopelessly outnumbered. Just as the mob reached its breaking point, Lieutenant Oliver Spalding and six soldiers from St. Michael, burst through the doors. They carried rifles with fixed bayonets. Spalding shouted over the noise of the crowd and declared that claim jumping and intimidation would not be tolerated. And while he was at it, firearms were now forbidden in the mining district of Nome. There wasn't going to be any vigilante aggression or drunken, angry gunfights in town. The disgruntled stampeters reluctantly dispersed, but the anger was far from extinguished. Lieutenant Spalding and his team, tiny force wouldn't be able to keep the lid on the powder keg for very long.
Starting point is 00:29:39 And then, a miracle happened. A few days after the saloon standoff, gold was found scattered across the beaches of Nome. It wasn't buried deep in the frozen earth, and hopeful miners didn't need to haul 2,000 pounds of gear over deadly trails to get to it. All a person needed was a shovel and a bucket. As the formerly furious, now jubilant miners raced for the shoreline, the three owners of the Pioneer Mining Company hurried back to Anvil Creek and worked with feverish urgency to capitalize on their claims. In the process, they made millions. But not everyone moved on after the saloon standoff and the discovery of gold on the beach. A powerful North Dakota political figure, Alexander McKenzie, and a corrupt federal judge,
Starting point is 00:30:36 Arthur Noyes, tried to twist the law to take the claims from the three Swedes. The two officials succeeded in forcing the three Swedes off of their claims during a messy legal battle, but the officials ultimately failed in their effort. In August of 1900, a circuit court judge ruled that McKenzie and Noyz had committed a highly illegal abuse of power. McKenzie was sentenced to a year in jail, but was pardoned by President William McKinley after serving just three months. Judge Noyes was fined $1,000. He avoided jail, but President Theodore Roosevelt removed him from office. By that time, 1901, the gnome gold rush was slowing.
Starting point is 00:31:21 Wyatt and Josephine decided it was time to move on. They sold their saloon and headed back to California. By one estimate, they made approximately $85,000 in Alaska, more than $2.5 million today. Tex Rickard held on for two more years before moving to nine. Nevada, where he opened another northern saloon and hired Wyatt's brother Virgil to assist the operation. He also became one of the most prominent boxing promoters in American history. The gold rushes in the Yukon and Alaska had burned bright, but also burned short. The glory
Starting point is 00:31:58 days of each lasted for about three years, after which the populations of Dawson City, Skagway, and Nome plummeted. More than half of the people in Skagway had sprinted to to Nome, and when the gold ran out in Nome, most of them left Alaska altogether. Of those three towns, Dawson City had one more treasure left to be discovered in the ground. In 1978, construction workers tore up an old ice skating rink and found hundreds of film reels which had been shipped to the remote corner of the Yukon for the viewing pleasure of roughly 1,000 people who had remained after the gold rush. Most of the reels were silent movies, but mixed in with them was what turned out to be the best surviving copy of film of the infamous 1919 World Series.
Starting point is 00:32:48 Preserved for history under the ice were some of the few moving images of the notorious Chicago White Sox baseball team, known ever after as the Black Sox. Thanks for listening to the story of the Klondite Gold Rush and the Alaska Gold Rush here on Legends of the Old West. Next up, we'll tell more stories of outlaws, including Doc Middleton, Clay Allison, Cherokee Bill, and more. Stay tuned. That's next time on Legends of the Old West. To binge all the episodes of a new season and to listen to every episode of the podcast with no commercials, subscribe in Apple Podcasts, or sign up through the link in the show notes or on our website, Black Barrel Media. This series was researched and written by Mandy Wimmer. Additional research and writing by me, Chris Wimmer.
Starting point is 00:34:10 Original music by Rob Villeer. Thanks again for listening.

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