Alaska's gold: how the millions received by Russia for the sale of overseas land drowned

Gold Rush: Untamed Excitement

Before the Klondike, humanity was repeatedly gripped by gold rushes. People went to Australia, then to California, then to snow-covered Siberia to dig up this precious metal. However, what happened in Alaska is often called the last great gold rush - there was no more excitement on this scale. This whole story began in August 1896, when Scotsman Robert Henderson landed on Canadian soil. It was he who was to find gold in the Klondike. Moreover, a lot of gold.

Alaska's gold: how the millions received by Russia for the sale of overseas land drowned

If you ask a Russian about Alaska, then most likely he will say that we once leased it out. And in fact?

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There are a great many legends about the mysterious Russian ownership of American land and its transfer to the United States. What actually happened in 1867, why was such an important event for the country carefully hidden, and where did the gold from the deal go?

Secret treaty

Transferring or selling one's own lands has always been considered not only unprofitable, but also shameful. Maybe that's why there are still so many conflicting rumors about the sale of Alaska? For example, that 1.5 million square kilometers of Alaskan lands were leased to the United States by Catherine II . But that's not true. The deal was completed in the strictest secrecy under Alexander II . Moreover, the Americans helped preserve the honor of Russia.

By 1866, Russia and the United States were in dire need of money. During the three years that the Crimean War lasted, the state treasury was greatly emptied. , who came after the death of Nicholas I , received a country with huge problems that required both mandatory intervention and money. However, it took him 10 years of reflection to decide to sell the distant land.

On the other hand, the United States ended a 4-year civil war between North and South in 1865, and the country also had no funds. They say that if the Russians had not been in a hurry to sell and had concluded a deal ten years later, they could have demanded an amount five times greater than what they received.

But the treasury urgently needed to be replenished, so in December 1866, a Russian diplomat, Baron Eduard Stekl . He held secret negotiations for the sale of the northern colonies.

Seventeenth President of the United States Andrew Johnson. Source: wikipedia.org

Interestingly, at a meeting held back in Russia, the minimum transaction amount was determined - 5 million dollars in gold. The Baron agreed on 7.2 million.

And in March 1867, an official legal deal was already concluded. It was here that the Americans showed their flexibility.

Having kept negotiations with the baron secret, US President Andrew Johnson sent an official telegram to Alexander II with an offer to sell Alaska.
Thus, Russia saved its face, since the United States initiated the deal.

Links[ | ]

• https://web.archive.org/web/20080915122807/https://www.aslavskaya.com.ua/zolotaya-lixoradka-na-alyaske/
• Klondike. The Chicago Record's
  book for gold seekers (1897) (Digitized by the Library of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
• Klondike: The Quest for Gold (documentary film)
• Victorian Order of Nurses Official Website
• Women of the Klondike
• Map of the Chilkoot and White Passes
• The life of Jack London as reflected in his works
• Skagway: Gateway to the Klondike
• Gold Fever!
  Seattle Outfits the Klondike Gold Rush, a National Park Service Teaching with Historic Places (TwHP) lesson plan
• University of Washington Libraries Exhibit Alaska and western Canada collection
• Eric A. Hegg photographs
• Frank La Roche photographs
• William E. Meed photographs
• Henry M. Sarvant photographs
• Arthur Churchill Warner photographs
• Chilkoot Pass photographs

California gold hunt

The real gold rush in the United States really began in California. The first person to find the nugget was an ordinary American carpenter, James Marshall. On the American River he was engaged in the construction of a sawmill, which was owned by John Sutter. Marshall told the owner about his discovery, and he subsequently confirmed that they had almost pure gold on their hands.

The essence of the discovery was that placers of sand with a high admixture of gold were discovered in the American River Valley. There was so much of it in the sand that the precious metal could be mined using:

• sieves;
• shovels;
• basins

This method of washing sand is usually called schlich, while people engaged in such activities are called prospectors. The owner of the sawmill, John Sutter, tried his best to keep the find a secret, as the resulting excitement could prevent him from developing his own agricultural settlement of New Helvetia. However, the secret always sooner or later becomes clear.

So Sutter’s secret ceased to be such thanks to businessman, journalist and newspaper publisher from San Francisco Samuel Brennan, who personally went to the sawmill to find out everything about the big find. They say that he, being in seventh heaven, bought all the shovels in the city, and on May 12, 1848, he ran through the streets of San Francisco with a bottle of precious sand in his hands, informing everyone about a new large gold deposit on the American River. This started the California gold rush.

As a result, carpenter Marshall, who, like many other miners, unsuccessfully tried to launder the precious material, lost his job. The owner of the Sutter sawmill, in turn, lost not only his own investments, but also his land. And only the cunning Brennan was the winner: he opened several stores for prospectors and became the first local millionaire, which in the future made him a large landowner, and later even a California state senator.

Most of the inhabitants of San Francisco quit their jobs and went in search of gold, even sailors deserted from warships. During 1848–1849, in addition to the Americans, many people arrived in California: Latin Americans, Hawaiians, Chinese and other representatives of Asian countries. By the end of 1849, about 90,000 miners arrived there, and by 1853 their number numbered more than 300 thousand people.

The incomes of gold miners were high (10–15 times higher than the average earnings of a simple worker). They did not require investments, but only at the first stage: the need gradually arose for expensive equipment for better washing and crushing of rock. The times of lonely prospectors came to an end - the period of technology gradually began.

At the cinema[ | ]

• The film "The Gold Rush" (USA, 1925) - directed by Charlie Chaplin, starring Charlie Chaplin, Georgia Hale, Tom Murray, Mack Swain.
• The film “By the Law” (USSR, 1926) - directed by Lev Kuleshov, starring Sergei Kuleshov, Alexandra Khokhlova, Vladimir Fogel, Porfiry Podobed.
• The film "Trek of '98" (USA, 1928) - directed by Clarence Brown, starring Dolores del Rio, Ralph Forbes, Karl Dane, Harry Carey.
• The film "The Call of the Wild" (USA, 1935) - directed by William Wellman, starring Clark Gable, Loretta Young, Jack Oakey, Reginald Owen.
• The film "Annie of the Klondike" (USA, 1936) - directed by Raoul Walsh, starring Mae West, Victor MacLachlan, Philip Reed, Harold Huber.
• The film "The Scoundrels" (USA, 1942) - directed by Ray Enright, starring Randolph Scott, John Wayne, Marlene Dietrich, Harry Carey.
• The film "Beauty of the Yukon" (USA, 1944) - directed by William A. Seiter, starring Randolph Scott, Gypsy Rose Lee, Bob Barnes, William Marshall.
• The film "The Road to Utopia" (USA, 1946) - directed by Hal Walker, starring Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, Dorothy Lamour, Hillary Brooke.
• The film "The Far End" (USA, 1954) - directed by Anthony Mann, starring James Stewart, Ruth Roman, Corinne Calvet, John McIntyre.
• The film "North of Alaska" (USA, 1960) - directed by Henry Hathaway, starring John Wayne, Stuart Granger, Ernie Kovacs, Mickey Shaughnessy.
• Mini-series “Klondike” (USA, 1960-1961) - directed by William Conrad, Sam Peckinpah, Elliott Lewis, starring Ralph Tager, James Coburn, Marie Blanchard, Joey Lansing.
• The film “The Call of the Wild” (Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, 1972) - directed by Ken Annakin, starring Charlton Heston, Michel Mercier, Rick Battaglia, Raymond Harmstorff.
• The film "The Whale and Company" (GDR, 1974) - directed by Konrad Petzold, starring Dean Reed, Rolf Hoppe, Manfred Krug, Renata Blume.
• Mini-series “Smoke and the Kid” (USSR, 1975) - directed by Raimondas Vabalas, starring Veniamin Smekhov, Gediminas Girdvainis, Vytautas Tomkus, Antanas Shurna.
• The film "Klondike Fever" (Canada, 1980) - directed by Peter Carter, starring Jeff East, Rod Steiger, Angie Dickinson, Gordon Pinsent.
• Mini-series “Alaska Kid” (Russia-Poland-Germany, 1993) - directed by James Hill, starring Mike Pillow, Donovan Scott, Alexander Kuznetsov, Vladimir Soshalsky.
• The film "The Call of the Wild" (Canada, 1996) - directed by Peter Svatek, starring Rutger Hauer, Bronwen Booth, Charles Edwin Powell, Richard Dreyfuss.
• The film "North Star" (USA, 1996) - directed by Niels Gaup, starring James Caan, Christopher Lambert, Burt Young, Catherine McCormack.
• The film "Gold Rush" (USA, 1998) - directed by John Power, starring Alyssa Milano, Bruce Campbell, Stan Cahill, Tom Scholte.
• Mini-series “The Call of the Wild” (USA, 2000) - directed by James Head, Zale Dalen, starring Nick Mancuso, Shane Mayer, Rachel Hayward, Ben Cardinal.
• TV series “Murdoch Investigations” (Canada, 2008-2012), episode “Murdoch in the Klondike” - directed by Larry Lind, starring Yannick Bisson, Aaron Ashmore, Matt Cook.
• Mini-series “Klondike” (USA, 2014) - directed by Simon Kellan Jones, starring Richard Madden, Abbie Cornish, Tim Roth, Sam Shepard.
• The film "The Call of the Wild" (USA, 2020) - directed by Chris Sanders, starring Harrison Ford, Omar Sy, Dan Sievens, Karen Gillan. Song Yukon by Lindemann[7]

Notes[ | ]

1. History of Mining in Yukon
2. Newmont 2021 Annual Report
3. University of Washington Special Collections - Klondike Gold Rush (unspecified)
   . Access date: August 16, 2008. Archived March 15, 2012.
4. History Detectives. Investigations. Feature - Klondike Gold Rush (undefined)
   . Access date: August 16, 2008. Archived March 15, 2012.
5. Julie Cruikshank. Reading Voices.
   Oral and Written Interpretations of the Yukon's Past . Vancouver & Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre, 1991, p. 124.
6. Pierre Berton - Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush, 1896—1899
   Espn 0-385-65844-3 and other editions.
7. Lindemann - Yukon (HQ) (Russian) (undefined)
   . Date accessed: November 14, 2021.

Origin of the phenomenon

The gold rush in America, as a separate process, originates in North Carolina in 1799, when a simple boy named Conrad Reed found a large and beautiful stone in the water of a stream. The find had a yellowish color and was rather heavy. Conrad began using this sun-hued cobblestone as a support for the barn door.

Three years later, the father of the Reed family noticed an unusual stone. After cleaning, the find was shown to a jeweler, who determined that the cobblestone was pure gold weighing three kilograms. The very next day, Conrad and his father managed to discover a five-kilogram nugget of precious material. Since then, they began to regularly take gold from the surface, and then set up production for the extraction of the yellow metal. Residents of surrounding farms also began testing streams in Cabarrew County for gold.

Subsequently, visitors from all over America began to engage in similar gold mining. The excitement continued until the end of the 20s of the 19th century. A new wave of fever broke out in Georgia in 1829. This region was very popular until the mid-1940s, when gold miners turned their attention to California.

It is no wonder that a relatively simple and uncomplicated method of getting rich, which was also relatively accessible to ordinary people, enjoyed unprecedented success.