VOTE.GOV

Heather Cox Richardson’s August 16 Letter from an American gives a brief yet very powerful review of the Alaska Gold Rush which began with discovery of gold in the Yukon in 1896, and had major political consequences back home in the U.S.  The commentary is very much worth your time.

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(To my knowledge only one member of my families of origin followed the allure of any of the Gold Rush’s.

He was born in 1864 at about the time his entire family moved from Quebec to then-St. Anthony (later Minneapolis).  He married in ND in 1889.  They had three children>  His wife died in 1898 in British Columbia where he was prospecting.

Family lore is that “grandfather, Joseph Collette, was a gold prospector. While prospecting in British Columbia my grandmother died of  Typhoid fever. Joseph brought the three children. Dad [Ernest J, six, Olivine, four, and Edmund (Pete), two, back to their maternal grandparents, Simon and Philomena Huard. There they were raised and stayed in the Grand Forks [ND] area.”  (page 129-130 of Bernard-Collette family history, 2010)

Joseph died in a rooming house in 1923 in what is today St. Anthony Main in Minneapolis and buried in St. Mary’s cemetery in south Minneapolis.

He died at 59, only a few blocks from where he first lived as an infant in 1864…  It is not known if he ever saw his kids again.  I met two of them, Ernest and Olivine, in their older years.)