Klondike Gold Rush 30 years earlier?

What would have been the effect of the Klondike Gold Rush occurring in 1866, instead of 1896? Would Alaska have gone from distant white elephant to the jewel in the crown of the Russian Empire? How would this have affected Russian military priorities? If Russia began to assert itself as a Pacific power, how would this have affected the Russo-Japanese War? It's easy to see the Trans-Siberian Railway completed a decade earlier on the strength of Alaskan gold, allowing for easier troop deployments at Vladivostok. Given the claims of Russian America to parts of Canada and California, how would a more assertive Russia confronted British and American territorial ambitions?
 
I think Anglophone miners would be more likely to exploit the region at first, due to the lack of easy access to Alaska from European Russia. This could lead to a Texas-like situation in Alaska where American or British settlers stage a revolt against the Russian rulers and attempt to join either other power. Given that relations between Britain and Russia were rather poor in the late nineteenth century, this could ultimately become a trigger for a general Russo-British War in Alaska, Central Asia, and the Ukraine (Crimean War II).

It could also trigger earlier exploration and exploitation of gold reserves in the Russian Far East--geologists and gold-miners start spreading out and looking for gold anywhere that's an easy boat trip from Petropavlovsk or Vladivostok. Kolyma Gold was one of the financial engines of Stalin's USSR, and it was exploited pretty much entirely by hand using Gulag labor--it's not unthinkable that, once the trans-Siberian RR is complete, the Tsar could do the same.
 
I think Anglophone miners would be more likely to exploit the region at first, due to the lack of easy access to Alaska from European Russia. This could lead to a Texas-like situation in Alaska where American or British settlers stage a revolt against the Russian rulers and attempt to join either other power. Given that relations between Britain and Russia were rather poor in the late nineteenth century, this could ultimately become a trigger for a general Russo-British War in Alaska, Central Asia, and the Ukraine (Crimean War II).

It could also trigger earlier exploration and exploitation of gold reserves in the Russian Far East--geologists and gold-miners start spreading out and looking for gold anywhere that's an easy boat trip from Petropavlovsk or Vladivostok. Kolyma Gold was one of the financial engines of Stalin's USSR, and it was exploited pretty much entirely by hand using Gulag labor--it's not unthinkable that, once the trans-Siberian RR is complete, the Tsar could do the same.

Well, Kolyma is pretty far from the Transiberian anyway.
 

TFSmith121

Banned
One of the issues is simply that the Klondike is a LONG

What would have been the effect of the Klondike Gold Rush occurring in 1866, instead of 1896? Would Alaska have gone from distant white elephant to the jewel in the crown of the Russian Empire? How would this have affected Russian military priorities? If Russia began to assert itself as a Pacific power, how would this have affected the Russo-Japanese War? It's easy to see the Trans-Siberian Railway completed a decade earlier on the strength of Alaskan gold, allowing for easier troop deployments at Vladivostok. Given the claims of Russian America to parts of Canada and California, how would a more assertive Russia confronted British and American territorial ambitions?

One of the issues is simply that the Klondike is a LONG way from anywhere; the Klondike River is a tributary of the Yukon River in (present day) northwestern Canada, and even in 1896, when the Bonanza Creek strike was made, it still took months for any real news to make it to the outside world.

The other issue of course is that even in 1866, the Klondike country was British North America (via the HBC concession) in what was still - officially - Rupert's Land, and so the reality a strike that far away from anywhere has to deal with is the almost simultaneous strikes/diggings in Nevada, NE Washington, the Fraser and Cariboo rivers in what is today British Columbia, etc., ... and even if the Klondike strike is made early, there are/were potential (although difficult) "all British" routes to the Yukon-Klondike system.

The big strikes in Alaska proper were in Nome and Fairbanks, and those came at the turn of the century or after...Nome, since it was largely beach sands, was actually much easier both to get at and to get to than the Klondike, so an earlier strike there might actually be more likely to sustain Russian interest; still not easy to get to Nome, though, in the 1860s.

I suppose the question would be, given the fact that the entire Sierra Nevada/Cascades/Rockies/Canadian Rockies was known to be rich in minerals by 1867 (dating back to the '48-49 strikes in the Sierra foothills in California) why hadn't the Russian government mounted a sucessful geological survey of Russian America in the 1850s?

I'd expect the answer was a lack of resources and interest; it's not like Russia was lacking in mineral poential in the same period, and generally in places easier to get to...

Best,
 
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