August 16 · This Day in America
On a tributary of the Klondike, a party led by American prospector George Carmack and two Tagish men, Skookum Jim and Tagish Charlie, finds gold shining in the gravel of a creek they call Rabbit. They rename it Bonanza, and the name is not an exaggeration. Word takes nearly a year to crawl out of the frozen North, but when a steamer reaches Seattle in July 1897 heavy with miners and sacks of gold, the country loses its mind. An estimated 100,000 people quit jobs, sell farms, and head for the Yukon — most through American ports and over the brutal Chilkoot Trail, where the law required a ton of supplies per man before they were let into the wilderness. Few struck it rich. Many never came home. But the last great gold rush remade Seattle, the Pacific Northwest, and the American imagination of the frontier. The North was suddenly, ferociously close.
Source: www.nps.gov
Also on this day · 1977
On an August afternoon in Memphis, Elvis Presley is found unresponsive at Graceland and pronounced dead at 42. The truck driver's son who fused gospel, blues, and country into something the whole world danced to had been the most famous entertainer alive. Outside the gates, the crowd grows into the tens of thousands. A radio bulletin said it plainly: the King was gone. American music has not stopped echoing him since.
Source: www.history.com