Title: Lying Prospectors

General Information about Item:

• Legend, Verbal Lore
• Language: English
• Country of Origin: United States/Canada
• Trail of Origin: Chilkoot
• Informant: Sam D
• Date Collected: 11-10-19

Informant Data:

• Sam is a 40-year-old man from Juneau, Alaska. Sam grew up in Southeast Alaska, and currently works for the state government. Sam hiked the Chilkoot trail in 2015.

Contextual Data:

• Historical Context: First used by the Tlingit people of Alaska as a trade route, the Chilkoot became an important trail for miners and prospectors coming to Alaska during the Klondike gold rush at the end of the 1800s. The trail was mostly abandoned after the end of the gold rush in 1898, until the trail was restored for recreational hikers in the 1960s. (Source)
• Cultural Context: During the gold rush, there was minimal law enforcement around prospecting sites, so people searching for gold were reliant on being able to protect themselves from people who may want to cause harm, such as other, jealous prospectors. One of the few regulations during the gold rush were claims to land, where a prospector could search for gold. Once a claim was filed, the prospector effectively owned the gold located on that plot of land, and could claim ownership of it.
• Cultural Context: Gold panning is a method of finding gold that has been deposited in streams. A gold panner uses a small dish to scoop up a mixture of water dirt from the bottom of the stream. They swish the water and silt around in the pan, splashing some water out of the pan, then collecting more water from the stream (without adding any more silt). As gold is more dense than water and the dirt around it, the gentle motions will allow the gold to be deposited at the bottom of the pan, while the dirt is washed away in the stream.
• Social Context: Sam brought up this story when asked about famous figures he heard about on the trail, explaining why most successful prospectors wanted to stay anonymous.

Item:

• The informant told a story about a man he met who would find suspicious plot claims from the Klondike Gold rush, which are archived by the Canadian government. The man looked for claims held by prospectors for long periods of time, but did not show a significant amount of gold found on the site. Gold rushers would usually be quick to give up claims on sites that were not yielding gold, so this man deduced that the prospectors who held onto plots of land were especially successful. However, the prospectors lied about finding gold, as they did not want to be targeted by the unsuccessful prospectors, who may want to steal from their land.

Transcript:

• “Another thing to take into consideration is that a lot of times the people who did strike it rich weren’t telling everybody. The smart ones weren’t saying ‘Oh yeah, I just got 500 ounces of gold up at my spot.’ That drew the kind of attention you don’t want. I met a super interesting guy who works on the ferry system… He told me that he would go to Whitehorse, to their equivalent of the MPM*, where claims are filed, and he would research old claims from that area, that had expired long ago. He would go out to those places and check them out. He said that people were required to leave an account of what they had gotten from their land… He looked for [claims] that had been low return, but had been out there for a long time, like years and years, but kept coming back saying ‘low returns.’ Because he figured those people lying, if they kept doing it for a long time. He would go out and do panning at those locations.”
• * MPM: Mineral Property Management, a division of the Alaska Department of Natural Resources

Collector’s Name: Soren Thompson

Tags/Keywords:

• Legend
• Chilkoot Trail
• Thru Hiking