"The modern history of Dawson begins with about the middle of 1896, shortly after the public discovery of gold in the Klondike tract. Three or four months previous there was hardly a habitation, whether tent or of logs, to deface the landscape, and the voice of animate Nature was hushed only in the sound of many waters. At the close of the past year, as nearly as estimate can make it, there were probably not less than from fourteen thousand to fifteen thousand men, women, and children, settled on the strip of land that borders the Yukon, both as lowland and highland, for about two miles of its course near the confluence of the Klondike..." Angelo Heilprin was American naturalist, geologist, and traveler.