Back in the late 1800s, a fair number of Central Illinois residents found themselves in the wilds of Canada's Yukon Territory panning and digging for gold. | From Our Past page

Not surprisingly, most returned from that unforgiving landscape a little poorer and a lot wiser to the ways of the wider world.

The Klondike Gold Rush began in earnest during the summer of 1897. Fortune seekers flocked to a stretch of eastern Alaska and the Yukon where rich gold deposits were discovered a year earlier. Area residents were among the thousands of would-be miners who risked life, limb and the family nest egg (often losing one or more in the process) to gold fever.

In August 1898, George Lurshen of the DeWitt County community of Weldon returned from the Klondike having lost $1,000. "Mr. Lurshen comes back to his wife and little family with not much beyond a pair of strong arms and willing hands," said The Pantagraph.

Life was cheap in the Klondike. Suicides were common, as were drownings from inexperienced miners navigating boats through the swift, choppy waters of the region's glacial rivers and streams. Local resident George E. Case recalled five miners drowning in a single day on the White Horse River. "They seemed like people possessed of the devil and devoid of good sense," wrote Case of those who were killed running the rapids blind.

In a letter to local resident George W. Stubblefield, Case said there were a fair number of women in Dawson City, the great boomtown of the Yukon gold fields.

"Most of them are dressed in a rather flashy manner," he wrote in a veiled reference to prostitution. Case also noted that Dawson City was "full of idle men" dumbstruck by failure.

In early November 1898, Robert L. Maxton of Saybrook recounted his experiences in the Great White North. Maxton, a veteran of the Black Hills gold rush three decades earlier, had left for the Klondike with other local adventurers. "He chased the golden will o' the wisp for 5,000 miles, yet it appeared ever ahead, shadowy, yet attractive," commented the Bloomington Daily Bulletin.

After spending 50 days prospecting along upper Copper River, Maxton concluded that whole region was a "fake so far as mining is concerned." Gold was everywhere, but never in "paying quantities." He believed that this latest gold rush was a "gigantic swindling scheme" perpetrated by the railroads and steamship lines to boost traffic.

One of the more remarkable Klondike stories was told by Bloomington-born Kate Rodenbach, whose father Herman Boeheim, was a hired man for Judge David Davis.

Orphaned at the age of 12, Kate became a "nurse girl" to a prominent family before leaving Bloomington and eventually marrying John Rodenbach, a brakeman for the Chicago & Alton Railroad.

After his death in 1891, Kate worked as a Pullman car cleaner, among other tough jobs, before becoming a housekeeper to a sister and brother of Klondike millionaire Clarence Berry of Salem, Oregon.

Rodenbach then traveled to Dawson City with Berry and his new bride.

While Berry became one of the more successful miners and speculators of the Klondike, Rodenbach struck out on her own. She became a cook in a mining camp and then proprietor of a boarding house.

"The miners used to come twenty miles in the freezing winter and ask me to bake for them," she recalled. "I have been given $5 many a time for a loaf of hot bread."

At her hotel she cared for a Swedish miner, whose frostbitten feet were crudely amputated. Before he died, Rodenbach promised to look after his daughter, who was in Sacramento, Calif. In exchange, the dying Swede handed over a deed to a claim on Hunker Creek. As fate would have it, the claim earned Rodenbach a tidy sum.

After her wild and wooly Dawson City days, she settled in California with an estimated $60,000 or more to her name. "The woman who had to work early and late in a cheap lodging house at Los Angeles in the winter of '94 and '95," The Pantagraph noted, "lives nowadays at the most costly hotel in the state, has her private coach and coachman and orders her gowns from the most fashionable modistes in San Francisco and Los Angeles."

Despite the raft of failures, there were a few success stories in the pitiless Klondike. "I advise none but the most rugged and experienced miners to go into that horrible arctic region," said the 37-year-old Rodenbach in December 1898. "The days for getting rich there suddenly have almost wholly gone."