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For What it's Worth
In 1896 a young sailor George Washington Cormack decided to leave his old job on board an American ship for a better life. He deserted and made his way to the Yukon where after a time married a Siwash Indian girl and settled down with her family. One day he and some of his new found brothers were in a creek of the Yukon river looking for wood when he noticed something sparkling in the sand at the waters edge. Siwash George as he was then called had found the first gold in the Yukon, News of George’s find soon spread and prospectors began to arrive in large numbers with the pans and picks at Rabbit Creek on the Klondyke where gold was there on view for all to see. Locals from the small town of Forty Mile nearby poured down to the river to pan for gold and rumors of the Yukon strike filtered through to the outside world. A few months later in June 1896 two ships arrived in Seattle harbour the Excelsior and the Portland, carrying the first gold from the Yukon. On the Portland alone there was one tonne of gold, then the rush began in earnest. Men with little or no knowledge of living in the wilderness or gold poured into Canada heading for the banks of the Klondyke river and Dawson City which at that time was the home of some 500 people.Within 2 years the population grew to 30,000 and in that year alone 3 1/2 million £’s worth of gold was taken from the creeks of the Klondyke and its tributaries. Australia too had her gold rush in 1850 long before the Klondyke, Edward Hammond Hargreaves a prospector on returning to New South Wales empty handed from California struck it lucky at Ophir. People on hearing the news flocked into places like Bendigo Creek and Ballarat again causing untold damage to the environment and creating a similar increase in population.
The great discovery of the century however was made in the Transvaal by a George Harrison sadly he was killed by a lion before he could benefit from his good fortune. This gold rich quartz reef at Witwatersrand stretches 300 miles from the Eastern Transvaal up into the Orange Free State and in places goes down to 10,000 feet below the surface.
Even today new mines are being sunk and it is still producing prodigious quantities of gold along its untapped length.
It is interest to note that the initial one tonne of gold in 1896 was worth £2,700,
In January this year when the financial crisis was at its height the same amount would have cost £430,000.
The price of Gold has fallen in recent months thankfully and the Euro’ rate is improving.
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