This blog post is part of RBSC’s new series spotlighting items in the Phil Lind Klondike Gold Rush Collection and the Wallace B. and Madeline H. Chung Collection.
When Phil Lind’s grandfather, John (Johnny) Grieve Lind, arrived in what was then part of the Northwest Territories in June 1894, he first traveled to a mining town on Fortymile River. Following the discovery of gold on Bonanza Creek in August 1896, Johnny and several business partners purchased interests in a dozen mining claims in the Klondike – including one of his most famous and wealthy claims, 26 Above Bonanza, pictured below.[1]
26 Above Bonanza ca. 1897, Yukon Territory. RBSC-ARC-1820-PH-0966
With his partners, Johnny bought half of 26 Above in January 1897 for $12,000 cash (around $360,000 today). To prepare it for mining, they purchased lumber, provisions, nails, and tools at high prices and built sluice boxes, flumes, dams, a food tent, and a cabin. By spring 1897, they employed 200 men working two shifts per day. Their payroll alone cost their business $4,000 a day, and Johnny recalls that the returns were “at times enormous and at other times hardly anything.”[2] Sometimes, however, the pay dirt was fabulously rich – in a single day, 26 Above once yielded over $50,000 in gold dust and nuggets. For every dollar Johnny and his partners made, they re-invested it into other claims, until they grew to be large operators; in February 1898, they purchased the other half of 26 Above for $200,000.
In July 1897, when Dawson’s nouveau riche arrived in Seattle and San Francisco carrying half a million in Klondike gold and setting off a mad stampede north, they also carried some of the gold mined from 26 Above Bonanza. Johnny, who cashed out of the Klondike in 1902 and established a cement company in St. Mary’s, Ontario, with his mining partners, was always proud of his role in helping to ignite the famous Klondike Gold Rush (1897-1898).
This image is currently on display at the Chung Lind Gallery. For more information or to plan your visit, please visit the Chung Lind Gallery website.
[1] Mining claims were staked in relation to the first claim, or Discovery claim, on each creek. As Johnny wrote in his family memoir; “Discovery did not have a number, but was always know[n] as discovery. The first claim downstream was No. 1 below, next No. 2 and so [on], as far as they were staked.” John Grieve Lind, 40 Mile River and the Klondike [Unpublished Memoir] (1983), 24.
[2] Lind, 40 Mile River and the Klondike, 25.