The discovery of gold on Bonanza Creek and the subsequent stampede of 1897-98 marked the culmination of some 20 years of prospecting for gold in the valley of the Yukon River. The first significant report of gold in the region was made in 1863 by the Reverend Robert McDonald, a Church of England missionary (Robert Campbell, a Hudson's Bay Company trader, had noted gold colours along the Pelly River 21 years before). Because the Yukon Valley, insofar as the white man was then concerned, was the private preserve of the fur trader and the missionary, and because the fur traders and missionaries regarded the exploitation of gold as inimicable to their interests, neither report was followed up.

Beginning in the 1870s small parties of prospectors began to trickle into the area, borne by the northward extension of the western mining frontier. During the '70s gold-bearing gravel was noted on the Porcupine and Yukon rivers and some mining was done on the Sixty Mile, a tributary of the latter stream. It was not until 1883, however, when fine gold was discovered on the Stewart River that mining was undertaken on any scale. The discovery of coarse gold on the Forty Mile in 1886 and later on the headwaters of the Sixty Mile led to the virtual abandonment of the Stewart River diggings and resulted in the establishment of the first "permanent" mining camp in the Yukon at Forty Mile. Birch Creek, on the American side of the boundary, was opened up in 1893-94 with Circle City, Alaska as its base camp. During the 1890s the Big and Little Salmon rivers were prospected, as was the McQuestern, but the absence of supply facilities in these areas - a pre-requisite for mining - postponed their development.

The rush to the Klondike occurred in three stages. The first consisted of prospectors, miners and traders already in the area. Within a month of the discovery 200 claims had been staked on Bonanza and its tributaries, and rich prospects had been turned up in the Indian River region. By November prospectors were working on Bear and Hunker creeks. In fact claims outside the district, that had been worked profitably before the Bonanza Creek discovery, were unceremoniously abandoned; the town of Forty Mile was virtually deserted. There were sound reasons for this which went beyond the obvious one of miners not wishing to miss out on a potential discovery. Hitherto most of the miners in the Yukon had only made enough to carry them over from one year to the next and wages and mining regulations reflected these conditions. In the wake of the opening up of the Klondike wages rose rapidly and fees for renewing working claims showed a commensurate increase. This made it extremely difficult to continue work on claims, the yields from which were much smaller than their Klondike cousins.

The second stage of the gold rush occurred in early 1897. It was composed for the most part of miners and would-be miners on the west coast who were the first outsiders to learn of the Klondike strike. Although there are no confirmed estimates as to the number who participated in this phase it would appear that as many as 3,000 people were involved. The landings in July 1897 of the Portland in Seattle and the Excelsior in San Francisco, each laden with what the newspapers of the time described as a ton of gold, provided the impetus for the final and most famous phase of the rush - the stampede of 1897-98. The great stampede of '97-'98 saw some 30,000 to 35,000 people converge on the Klondike gold field.