(click to enlarge photos)
Published in The Seattle Times online on July 17, 2025
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on July 20, 2025
In 1898, their grandfather and a school chum answered the cry of ‘GOLD!’
By Jean Sherrard
On July 17, 1897, after the steam ship Portland docked in Seattle bearing treasure from the Yukon, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s front-page-topping headline incanted, “GOLD! GOLD! GOLD! GOLD!”
A day later, the New York Times ran its own front-page article, “Wealth of the Klondike.”
With the rest of the country, two Cornell Law School students, Mark Odell and Ellis Aldrich, read these accounts of vast easily acquired wealth and tossed their hats in the ring.
By March 1898, the ambitious chums had secured funding from a syndicate of investors, likely including Syracuse’s Lyman C. Smith, after whom Seattle’s Smith Tower was named. They dropped out of school and boarded a train for the Northwest.
In their just-released book, “From Cheechakos to Sourdoughs: Two Ivy Leaguers’ Quest for Yukon Gold,” Odell’s maternal grandsons Steve and John Lundin tell a compelling tale drawn from journal entries, letters and 12 rolls of photographs found in a shoebox.
Hot on their grandfather’s trail to the Yukon, the Lundins offer an indelible portrait of the young “stampeders” and their transformation from greenhorns (“cheechakos”) to veteran prospectors (“sourdoughs”).
Within a week of arriving in boomtown Seattle, the industrious Odell and Aldrich purchased more than a ton of supplies from local outfitters and booked passage on the S.S. Alki to Skagway. Throughout, Odell’s observant voice enlivens the narrative.
Steaming up the Inside Passage, he marvels at the “wonders of the sea” whose “delicate changing azure tints” seemed to conceal “mermaids [who] had just slipped off into the dark green waters.”
Arriving in lawless Skagway on April 3, the pair prepared for the first of their countless ordeals — many days of hauling their mass of supplies over
legendary Chilkoot Pass. “From a distance … it looks much like a string of ants creeping up a small mound,” Odell wrote. “Such scenes I never saw nor imagined.”
Over grueling months, the partners continued their northbound journey, often narrowly skirting disaster. Building a cabin near Wolverine Creek, a Yukon River tributary, they mined and prospected throughout a brutal winter, digging 30-foot deep
“placer” shafts through permafrost in forbidding temperatures. “Holy Smut!” Odell noted on Nov. 11. “It was 51 degrees below last night!!!!!”
Approaching mental and physical exhaustion, the two ended their quest for treasure, making a laborious
return from the Yukon February-March 1899, a full year after setting out.
After 126 years, the Lundins write, one mystery remains. Contemporary newspaper accounts suggested that Odell and Aldrich arrived in Seattle laden with gold. But both sourdoughs firmly denied it to the end of their lives.
WEB EXTRAS
For a narrated 360 degree video of this week’s column, click right here.
For a fascinating 90-minute PNW Historians Guild lecture by the Lundins, head in this direction!
