1 Information Sharing During the Klondike

• Main Authors: Gold Rush, Douglas W. Allen
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 1896
• Subjects: Bonanza; Canada; Indian; Klondike River; Yukon; Yukon river; Alaska
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.507.2178; http://www.sfu.ca/~allen/klondike.pdf

he freely shared the details and started what would eventually be three waves of rushes. This reflected a social norm of the Klondike, namely that any miner who struck gold would share this information. Miners did not behave this way in other nineteenth-century gold rushes. The article’s hypothesis is that the extreme mining conditions and local geography of the Yukon led to very secure property rights over mining claims. Therefore, it took only a small incentive payment to induce miners to act in the social interest. tarting with the California Gold Rush of 1849 a series of gold rushes occurred along the western side of North America as miners searched for the elusive yellow mineral.1 Eventually these efforts cul-minated in the last, and perhaps greatest, gold rush: the Klondike rush of 1898–1899.2 Located close to the Alaska border, but within the Yukon territory of Canada, the Klondike River is a tributary of the Yukon River. Although called the “Klondike Gold Rush, ” gold was ac-tually found in the smaller creeks that run into the Klondike and Indian Rivers.3 As Figure 1 shows, the entire area was relatively small, and most of the gold was extracted from a half-dozen creeks—Bonanza