Despite early problems such as skirmishes with the original inhabitants, floods, and economic insecurity, Seattle slowly grew. In 1860, the first federal census of Washington Territory counted 302 people in King County, most of them in Seattle. By 1870 Seattle's population had topped 1,100, and in 1880, 3,500. Cultural and social advances accompanied population growth. In 1861 the "Washington Territorial University" - today's University of Washington- opened although 15 years would pass before it granted Clara McCarty its first baccalaureate degree. The city's first newspaper, the Gazette, creaked off an old press in 1863. And in 1864 the first 11 " Mercer girls" arrived. These young women, recruited in the east by Asa Mercer, the Territorial University's youthful president, added substantially to the pool of marriageable women in a frontier society where men outnumbered women by a 10-to-1 ratio. Mercer brought another contingent of 34 marriageable young women to Seattle in 1866.

A devastating fire in 1889 destroyed the city's commercial district. Rebuilding started immediately, the burned wooden structures replaced with more fire resistant brick and stone buildings, many of them still occupied, like the former Cadillac Hotel, now home to the Seattle unit of the Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park. By 1890 Seattle's population had reached 42,000, an astonishing 12-fold increase since 1880, growth stimulated by railroad building, the construction frenzy set off by the 1889 fire, demand for lumber, development of the port, and increased shipping activity. Even greater growth lay ahead.

A Short History of the Klondike Gold Rush

“GOLD! GOLD! GOLD! GOLD!” screamed the banner headline of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer on July 17, 1897. Smaller headlines following told of "Sixty-Eight Rich Men on the Steamer Portland" and "STACKS OF YELLOW METAL!" The news of the gold strike on the Klondike River, a tributary of the Yukon River in northwestern Canada, near the border with Alaska, excited people across the globe, especially in North America. By noon that July day eager fortune seekers had booked the last berth on the Portland for the return trip to Alaska.Once there, they headed by riverboat up the Yukon to a mining camp near the gold strike called Dawson City, soon, though briefly, to become a boomtown.

Prospectors had tried their luck for decades in the wilderness of the Yukon River valley, finding only small amounts of gold. But on August 16, 1896, a member of a local Tagish tribe named Keish (known as Skookum Jim Mason by English speakers), his nephew Kaa Goox (called Tagish Charlie or Dawson Charlie), and his American brother-in-law, George Washington Carmack, struck pay dirt on a tributary of the Klondike they named Bonanza Creek. They filed claims the next day, triggering a scramble among prospectors already in the area for similar rich claims. Within a few months every potentially valuable claim along Bonanza Creek and nearby streams and hillsides had been staked, All this took place before word of the great discovery reached the outside world. When it did, almost a year later, the Klondike Gold Rush began.

Gold fever affected people from all walks of life. Even Seattle's mayor quit to join the stampede. Most were Americans and Canadians, but some came from almost every corner of the globe. Few had any idea of the hardships that awaited them on the way to, and in, the frozen north: climbing the steep, 3,000-foot Chilkoot Pass 40 or 50 times, for example, each time laden with a heavy load on one's back in order to bring into the desolate Yukon region enough food and supplies to last a year. Nor was taking the treacherous White Pass alternative any better. So many horses perished on this narrow, boulder-strewn route that it became know as the Dead Horse Trail. Once in the Yukon region, imagine yourself and a partner spending a dark and frigid winter chopping down trees so the logs could be whipsawed into planks or boards for a boat or raft. Such watercraft would be needed when the ice broke in the spring on the Yukon. Then you'd load your boat or raft with food and supplies, get in, push off, and hope you'd safely negotiate dangerous rapids, sandbars, and other obstacles. Finally, some 560 downstream miles later, you'd reach Dawson City. Imagine discovering, soon after arriving, that your dreams of riches are mostly just that: dreams. Historian Pierre Berton put it this way: "One hundred thousand persons, it is estimated, actually set out on the Klondike Trail; some thirty or forty thousand reached Dawson... a few hundred found gold in quantities large enough to call themselves rich. And out of these fortunate men, only the merest handful managed to keep their wealth."

The Klondike Gold Rush of 1897 and 1898 increased the awareness of Americans and Canadians to the possibilities of developing mining, timber, and other resources in the vast lands of Alaska and the Canadian Yukon. It provided an economic shot in the arm to merchants, especially in Seattle, who supplied the naïve but determined stampeders. In so doing it helped bring to an end, at least in the Pacific Northwest, the terrible effects of the Panic of 1893, one of America's worst economic depressions. It also enriched many of the men and women who participated in the Klondike Gold Rush and who returned home with scarcely a nugget or ounce of precious dust. Many spoke glowingly long afterwards of the grandest adventure they had ever experienced.