1898:

Close to twenty-five articles and advertisements appear in the ten pages of the Vancouver Daily News-Advertiser, all of them aimed at Klondike-bound miners and prospectors, as the fledgling city attempts to cash in on Gold Rush Fever. The Yukon Gold Rush, touched off only the year before by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s report of a “ton of gold” sailing into Seattle’s harbour will bring thousands of prospectors and hopefuls through Vancouver, on their way north.

“This is undoubtedly the greatest mining camp the world has ever seen,” exclaims one article, published that same week, and referring to Dawson City, “and there will be more gold shipped from here in the next two or three years than has ever been shipped from one camp[...] If prospects hold out, there is room within a radius of one hundred miles from here for two hundred thousand miners to be employed successfully.”

“The rush has begun!” declares another. “There is plenty of gold at the other end. Every advice from there is more encouraging.”

Perhaps the most tenuous advertisement appears toward the back of the paper, placed by the Cheeseborough Manufacturing Company.

“No man,” it declares, “should start for the Klondyke without taking a supply of Vaseline.”

Image: Johnson, Kerfoot and Company, at 326 Cordova Street, circa 1898. Image Courtesy of the Vancouver Archives.