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  3. Yukon Gold Rush Discovery In August 1896, three people led by Skookum Jim Mason headed north, down the Yukon River from the

Yukon Gold Rush Discovery In August 1896, three people led by Skookum Jim Mason headed north, down the Yukon River from the

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问题                             Yukon Gold Rush
Discovery
    In August 1896, three people led by Skookum Jim Mason headed north, down the Yukon River from the Carcross area, looking for his sister Kate and her husband George Carmack. The party included Skookum Jim, Skookum Jim’s cousin known as Dawson Charlie and his nephew Patsy Henderson. After meeting up with George and Kate, who were fishing for salmon at the mouth of the Klondike River, they ran into Nova Scotian Robert Henderson who had been mining gold on the Indian River, just south of the Klondike. Henderson told George Carmack about where he was mining and that he did not want any Indians near him. The group then headed a few miles up the Klondike River to Rabbit Creek to hunt moose.
    On August 16, 1896, the party discovered rich gold deposits in Bonanza Creek. It is now generally accepted that Skookum Jim made the actual discovery, but some accounts say that it was Kate Carmack. George Carmack was officially credited for the discovery because the "discovery" claim was staked in his name. The group agreed to this because they felt that other miners would be reluctant to recognize a claim made by an Indian, given the strong racist attitudes of the time.
Gold Rush begins
    The news spread to other mining camps in the Yukon River valley, and the Bonanza, Eldorado and Hunker Creeks were rapidly staked by miners who had been previously working creeks and sandbars on the Fortymile and Stewart Rivers. Robert Henderson, who was mining only a few miles away over the hill, only found out about the discovery after the rich creeks had been all staked.
    News reached the United States in July 1897, when the first successful gold seekers arrived in San Francisco on July 15 and in Seattle on July 17, setting off the Klondike Gold Rush. In 1898, the population in the Klondike may have reached 40,000, which threatened to cause a famine.
    Most gold seekers landed at Skagway, Alaska, or the nearby town of Dyea, Alaska, both located at the head of the Lynn Canal. From these towns they traveled the Chilkoot Trail and crossed the Chilkoot Pass, or they hiked up to the White Pass into the Yukon Territory and proceeded to Lake Lindeman or Lake Bennett, the headwaters of the Yukon River. Here, some 25 to 35 miles (40-56 km) from where they landed, gold seekers built rafts and boats that would take them the final 500-plus miles (800-plus km) down the Yukon to Dawson City, near the gold fields. Gold seekers had to carry a year’s supply of goods—about a ton, more than half of it food—over the passes to be allowed to enter Canada. At the top of the passes, the gold seekers encountered a Mountie post that enforced that regulation. It was put in place to avert shortages like those that had occurred in the previous two winters in Dawson City.
A hard life
    The climb to the Chilkoot Pass was steep and dangerous, rising a thousand feet in the last half mile (300 m in 800 m). It was too steep for pack animals, and gold seekers had to pack their equipment and supplies to the top. Some 1,500 steps were carved into the ice to aid travel up the pass.
    Even though it was not as high, conditions on White Pass were even worse. It was known as the Dead Horse Trail, since about 3,000 animals died along the route.
    Others took the Copper River Trail or the Teslin Trail by Teslin Lake, and some used the all-Canadian Ashcroft (the Edmonton trails). The other main route was by steamer about 1,600 miles (2,600 km) up the Yukon River. In 1897, many using this route later were caught by winter ice below Fort Yukon, Alaska, and had to be rescued, but use of this route was implicit in the discovery of gold finds at Nome and St. Michael near the Yukon estuary, and at Fairbanks, Alaska.
    An estimated 100,000 people participated in the gold rush and about 30,000 made it to Dawson City in 1898. By 1901, when the first census was taken, the population had declined to 9,000.
    The Klondike field continues to be worked today, although most of the original deposits were removed in the early 1900s when small claim holdings were consolidated and were worked by large-scale industrial extraction methods, notably steam dredges.
Cultural legacy
    Among the many to take part in the Gold Rush was writer Jack London, whose books White Fang, The Call of the Wild, and "To Build A Fire", a collection of short stories, were influenced by his northern experiences, and adventurer "Swiftwater" Bill Gates.
    Charlie Chaplin’s silent movie The Gold Rush (1925), one of the highest grossing movies ever, was set in the Klondike, as was the silent epic The Trail of ’98 (1928) and Mae West’s Klondike Annie (1936).
    The Gold Rush is an important event in the history of the city of Edmonton, which, until 2005, celebrated Klondike Days, an annual summer fair with a Klondike Gold Rush theme. During the rush, Edmonton was believed to be a viable departure point for travel to the Klondike and was heavily advertised as such by local merchants wanting to profit from people’s ignorance, but only a handful made it from that embarkation point long after the rush was over, because of the immense distance and subarctic travel conditions. The tenuous, and arguably fraudulent, connection of Edmonton with the Klondike Gold Rush was a source of much ridicule for years; its origin being but an attempt in the 1960s to imitate the burgeoning success of the Calgary Stampede by finding a historic event the city was in some way involved in to function as a theme. This finally led to the renaming of the city’s annual summer exhibition in 2006 as Capital EX.
What do we learn about the nearest location to the gold fields?
选项 A、It was Dawson City.
B、It was The Chilkoot Trail.
C、It was the White Pass.
D、It was Skagway.
答案A
解析 原文该段前三句描述的是掘金者到达金矿的路径，先后经过的次序为：Skagway，The Chilkoot Trail，the White Pass，Dawson City。文章虽没有明确说出“最近”的地方，但根据此路线，不难确定答案为A。
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