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Alaska and its environs have had three significant gold rushes, the Klondike Gold Rush near Dawson City that happened from 1896 to 1899 in what is today the Yukon Territory about 100km from the Alaska border, the Nome Gold Rush from 1899 to 1909 on the western Alaskan coast, and the Fairbanks Gold Rush from 1903 to 1911 in the Alaskan interior. considering how much gold rushes tend to attract population to an area suppose that the Russian colonists were a bit more exploratory and adventurous and managed to discover the gold deposits much earlier than OTL, let's say in the early 1800's, maybe around the War of 1812.

Could the discovery of gold, no matter how transitory, have attracted enough colonists or government interest to the area that the empire would hold on to it and establish more of a presence there? And if so, how might that have affected colonization in the Pacific Northwest and Northwestern Canada?
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