The coming of the dredges marked the beginning of the corporate mining era in the Klondike. These huge machines were far faster and more efficient than individual mining methods, but they required large amounts of land, water, and electricity, a substantial investment, and a large workforce.
The first small dredge arrived in the Yukon as early as 1899. Joe Boyle and his Canadian Klondike Mining Company launched corporate dredging in 1905 at Bear Creek with a dredge whose endless chain of digging buckets held a modest 7 1/2 cubic feet of gravel each. In 1910, Boyle had a second dredge operating -- the world's largest, with buckets holding 16 cubic feet of gravel each. It cost half a million dollars to build, and made money almost immediately.
Boyle went on to commission and install two more huge dredges in the next couple of years. Boyle's sometime partner, A.N.C. Treadgold, and his backers, the Guggenheim family, also invested heavily in dredging operations. In 1913, the peak production year for gold dredging, a dozen dredges were operating on Klondike creeks. They worked their way through raw gravel and the tailing piles of the hand miners (rich in gold missed by earlier mining methods), leaving behind the huge mounds of washed rocks that still characterize the landscape around Dawson City.
Rising costs and fixed gold prices all but killed gold dredging in the Klondike in the 1920s, but the industry revived in the late 1930s and the 1940s, with higher gold prices and new equipment. Dredging continued in the Klondike into the early 1960s, but low returns and the high operating costs were eating away at the dredging industry. In 1966, the Yukon Consolidated Gold Company shut down its Yukon operations, ending the era of the gold dredges.
