"At 3 o’clock this morning the steamship Portland, from St. Michaels for Seattle, passed up [Puget] Sound with more than a ton of gold on board and 68 passengers." When this magic sentence appeared in the July 17, 1897, issue of The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, it triggered one of the last and greatest gold rushes in the history of North America. The great gold rush attracted worldwide attention and caused the first true exploration of Alaska and the Yukon by outsiders since its acquisition from Russia in 1867. From the early 1880s to the eve of World War I, the gold discoveries stretched from the Bering Sea to the Canadian Interior and from the Gulf of Alaska to the Brooks Range. While a few individuals "struck it rich," most of the gold strikes did not meet the miners' dreams of riches.

The discovery of gold set off two great rushes, the Klondike rush to goldfields near Dawson City and the rush to the hills beyond Cape Nome. Fueled by the economic depression of the mid-1890s, the dream of untold riches caused a mass migration to the north country from the United States and Canada. Beginning in 1897, argonauts set off by ship from Seattle or San Francisco and headed north to Dyea or Skagway, after which they headed up trails, then floated down the Yukon River to the Klondike goldfields. Two years later, thousands would head up to Nome by ship to take advantage of the second gold rush.