"Wealth-laden gravel in new El Dorado. Gold for the digging! No piece of news the wires can flash will set more hopes to work than this; for gold means money, ease, comfort, freedom from thousands of cares..."

Gold was discovered in 1896 in the Yukon. By 1898 thousands of adventure hungry, gold crazed migrants swarmed into the Klondike Goldfields; a grueling trek through hundreds of kilometers of wilderness in the desolate arctic. For three years Dawson City was a thriving metropolis where gold dust was the primary form of currency and fortunes could be gained or lost by a lucky claim or an unlucky round of cards. By 1899 almost all had departed, most no richer than when they arrived. The legacy of gold in the land of the midnight sun, however, is still apparent to this day in Dawson City, and the tales of grizzled prospectors remain strange, horrifying and entertaining.

The Klondike Gold Rush contains five units or chapters:

	The Yukon and its Peoples - discusses the climate and geography of the Yukon and the interior of Alaska, and the first peoples who migrated from Asia across an ancient land bridge near the Bering Strait.
	A Lusterless Klondike - Russian and English Fur Traders - details the exploration of Alaska and the Yukon by Russian and English fur traders in the early nineteenth-century. It concludes just after the Russian sale of Alaska to the United States in 1867 and the sale of the Hudson's Bay Company lands to the new country of Canada in 1869.
	Pioneer Prospectors and the First Golden Discovery - explores the shift in economic focus from fur trading to mineral prospecting in the Yukon River valley in the 1880's. The unit also covers nineteenth century gold prospecting techniques, law and order in the Klondike region, and the discovery of gold on Bonanza Creek which sparked the gold rush.
	Trails to the Golden Mecca of the North - recounts the commercial frenzy on the west coast of North America as tens of thousands of ill-prepared dream-deluded, would-be millionaires prepared to journey to the gold fields. You can also enjoy the many exciting tales of fantastic luck and outstanding achievement of the gold-seekers, the darkly humorous incidents of failure -- and sometimes death.
	Dawson City -- The New Eldorado - describes the evolution of Dawson City from a tent town at the swampy confluence of the Yukon and Klondike Rivers in 1896 to a ramshackle, poorly planned metropolis of over 40,000 people -- the largest Canadian city west of Winnipeg!

Open new worlds of understanding, discover the mysterious, bizarre unexplainable and sometimes horrifying behavior of the earliest explorers of North America. Understand how the cruel, daunting polar environment lured many to their doom in the lonely wilderness, or imagine the outrageous excesses of Dawson's golden demigods and demi-monds.

Enter a truly interactive world in the History Alive Series of high quality educational software products. Each module contains over one hundred archival photographs, drawings, paintings and ancient maps; numerous modern slide shows; sixteen beautiful interactive modern maps and timelines; an extensive gallery of interesting personalities; over sixty-five revealing and poetic excerpts from the original journals of explorers, fur traders and gold-seekers; narrations, animations, sound effects and historical folk songs; and 50,000 words of rich, well researched text with an extensive bibliography for further reference.

Carve through the vast database with powerful interactive tools -- skim the unit summaries, read it like a book, search with key words and an electronic index, enter spatially through interactive maps, and temporally through interactive timelines. Use the "Themes" button to view history from the perspective of cannibalism, death in the north, inter-racial conflict, the environment, the economy and more (over twenty different themes are designed for each module). Learning and understanding history has never been so exciting or alive.