The individual prospector, who had been king since 1848, had a final glorious fling to finish his century. Two prospectors, Robert Henderson and George Washington Carmack, were fishing for salmon on the Thron-diuck (which quickly became 'Klondike') tributary of the Yukon river in the far north of Canada, one August afternoon in 1896, when the gleam of gold caught their eye. For several decades there had been wild rumours of gold in these streams of the far north, but few of them had lived up to expectation. The best source of gold had been in the creeks lower down the Yukon in the United States territory of Alaska, where a bustling community called Circle City had grown up with a music hall, two theatres, eight dance halls and no fewer than twenty-eight saloons. It was gaily christened the 'Paris of Alaska'. Henderson's and Carmack's discovery on Thron-diuck made it a ghost town overnight. In that first autumn, as everyone from Circle City stampeded up the Yukon and the little community of Dawson City was born, the far north kept its discovery secret. Despite the desperate shortage of supplies (salt fetched its weight in gold), the prospectors held out against disease and starvation. A barber in Dawson City got a small slice of one claim, went out and dug up $40,000 in gold. In Harry Ash's Saloon in Dawson City, there was so much gold mingling with the sawdust on the floor that one enthusiast panned for gold right there. According to legend, he grubbed up $275 worth of gold dust that had filtered out of miners' pockets.

In the spring of 1897, the first packet steamers sailed south to Seattle and San Francisco, laden with gold stuffed into buckskin bags, glass fruit jars, tomato tins and blankets tied with string. It was a tonic for which the West Coast had long been waiting. The heady excitement of California was over and there had been little prosperity to follow it. Now, in one final insane rush, everyone was off to the Yukon. Fifteen hundred people sailed north from Seattle within ten days of the first news of gold. The mayor of that city, who was on a visit to San Francisco when the news came through, wired his resignation and raced north. Steamer offices were in a state of siege, and tickets were selling for $1,000. By February of 1898, forty-one ships were on the regular run from San Francisco to Skagway, the nearest port to the gold fields. From Skagway, the prospectors had to make the long haul up over the Chilkoot or the White Horse Pass, then down the Yukon to Dawson City. It was a harsh journey. Among the thousands who embarked on it, many failed. Pierre Berton, in his excellent book on the Klondike, reckons that of the 100,000 who set out for Dawson City, 30,000 to 40,000 actually arrived. Of these, perhaps 5,000 searched for gold; a few hundred got rich.

Along the way, they fell victim to the weather and to men like Jefferson (Soapy) Smith, who ran the town of Skagway, cheating all comers and killing any who argued. One horrified traveller wrote, 'I have stumbled upon a few tough corners of the globe but I think the most outrageously lawless quarter I ever struck was Skagway. It seemed as if the scum of the earth had hastened there to fleece, rob or murder. There was no law whatsoever; might was right, the dead shot only was immune to danger'. Skagway, of course, was on US soil, but to reach Dawson City the prospectors, tramping in a never-ending line up the snow-clad mountainsides, had to cross the Canadian border at the top of the pass. Here a handful of men from the Canadian Northwest Mounted Police sought to bring some sort of order to chaos. At gunpoint, they refused to let through prospectors who were not carrying a year's supply of food. Major J. M. Walsh of the Northwest Mounted Police reported, 'Such a scene of havoc and destruction can scarcely be imagined. Thousands of pack horses lie dead along the way, sometimes in bunches under cliffs, with pack saddles and packs where they have fallen from the rocks above'. Those who did get through swelled the population of Dawson City so fast that by the summer of 1898 it had become the largest Canadian city north of Winnipeg. It was a frenzied yet pathetic community, so short of supplies that the police would not bother to arrest a man unless he had his own provisions. Most boats that did come up the Yukon carried whisky instead of badly needed food. One year all the eggs were rotten when they arrived; hungry citizens had to wait a year for a fresh supply. When the governess of the local bishop's children married a missionary, the only thing he could find to give her for a present on her wedding day was a pot of marmalade.

It was all over as fast as it had begun. There was plenty of gold in the creeks around Dawson and some digging on a commercial basis continued until the winter of 1966, but the horde of prospectors had picked the cream off the field by 1900. The Klondike rush probably yielded about 75 tonnes (2.4 million ounces) of gold in the last three years of what was certainly the most exciting century in the history of gold.