“At 3 o’clock this morning the steamship Portland, from St. Michaels for Seattle, passed up [Puget] Sound with more than a ton of gold on board and 68 passengers.” When this magic sentence appeared in the July 17, 1897, issue of The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, it triggered one of the last and greatest gold rushes in the history of North America. The great gold rush attracted worldwide attention and caused the first true exploration of Alaska and the Yukon by outsiders since its acquisition from Russia in 1867.