George Carmack
American
1860 – 1922
George Carmack was an American prospector who registered the Discovery Claim on Bonanza Creek in August 1896, the strike that set off the Klondike Gold Rush. Historians today generally credit his Tagish brother-in-law, Skookum Jim Mason, with the actual find.
Biography
George Washington Carmack was born on September 24, 1860, in Contra Costa County, California, the son of a forty-niner who had come west during the California Gold Rush. He went north in 1885, packing goods over the Chilkoot Pass, and unlike most white prospectors he settled into life among the Tagish people, marrying Kate Carmack (Shaaw Tláa) and working alongside her brother Skookum Jim Mason.
In August 1896, while fishing for salmon near the mouth of the Klondike River, Carmack, Skookum Jim, and their nephew Dawson Charlie prospected Rabbit Creek at the suggestion of prospector Robert Henderson. On August 16 they found gold lying thick between the slabs of bedrock. Carmack staked the Discovery Claim and registered it in his own name the next day, and the creek was renamed Bonanza. Accounts differ over who actually spotted the first gold: Carmack claimed the honor all his life, but Skookum Jim's family maintained the find was Jim's, and many believed the claim was registered under Carmack's name because a claim held by an Indigenous man might not have been respected.
The strike triggered the Klondike Gold Rush, and Carmack took more than a million dollars in gold from his claims. He left Kate in 1900, married Marguerite Laimee, and settled on the Pacific coast, investing in real estate and mining. He died in Vancouver, British Columbia, on June 5, 1922, still celebrated—if not entirely accurately—as the discoverer of Klondike gold.