How did the Klondike Gold Rush affect the development of Yukon culture? originally appeared on Quora, the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world. You can follow Quora on Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus.

Outsiders had been turning up in the Yukon since the 1870s, gold prospectors and fur traders and missionaries and government officials, but it was with the discovery of the Klondike gold that the floodgates really opened. During the few years of the Klondike Gold Rush over 100,000 prospectors came into the country, many of them arriving in Dawson City the same way I did, floating down the Yukon.

The Klondike’s first big strike came in 1896. In 1897 the population of Dawson hit 5,000. By 1898 it was 40,000. By 1902, the city had government buildings, a power plant, four newspapers, several churches, a library, a court of law, a water-works department, several schools, a swimming pool, a bowling alley and a curling club. But gold extraction had already peaked. In 1900 a million ounces were taken from the ground; in 1904 it was down to 400,000 ounces, and the population was down to 5,000. Today the population of Dawson City is 1,375.

Dawson City still celebrates its Gold Rush history, and tourists flock there every summer. It has kept its wonky boardwalks, and left its streets unpaved. Diamond Tooth Gertie’s Gambling Hall has three cancan shows a night. The poet Robert Service’s cabin is there, and one half of Jack London’s (the other half a museum in Oakland, California). By law any new buildings must give the impression that they were constructed at the end of the nineteenth century. In Maximilian’s Gold Rush Emporium you can buy nuggets and antique panning equipment and mammoth ivory and Jack London first editions. Men and women dressed in petticoats and buckskin will show you around the historic post office, the historic bank, the historic paddle steamer; they will tell you stories of courageous men and lascivious dancing girls, and strange things done under the midnight sun.

But the Gold Rush has another legacy as well. Before 1897, life had not changed significantly for the indigenous Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in for several thousand years. It was late spring, 1897, when the first influx of Gold Rushers arrived, and within weeks the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in had been displaced from their fish camps on the Klondike. The natives crossed to Dawson, only to find that the land had already been occupied by speculators and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. In the space of one season they were evicted from lands that their people had known for ever. Their traditional fishing grounds had showed scant trace of their millennia-old presence except for some stakes to set the weirs and a few simple dwellings. Now there were several hundred tents, a sawmill, two saloons, a red-light district and a typhoid epidemic. The Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in called it, in the new language they were acquiring, Lousetown.

The missionary Hudson Stuck, writing in 1917, was a hundred years, if not more, ahead of his time, when he said that ‘the great stampede to the Klondike of 1897 and 1898 brought nothing but harm to the native people’.

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