Teaching with Historic Places in the Parks: Teaching the Klondike Gold Rush

An advertisement selling boots to those heading north for the gold rush. NPS.

Selections from “Creative Teaching with Historic Places:” A Thematic Issue of CRM: Cultural Resource Management Vol 23 No. 8 2000
Published by the National Park Service, Cultural Resources


by Marc Blackburn

Five years ago, when I was invited to participate in a Teaching with Historic Places (TwHP) workshop, I was apprehensive – how could I write a lesson plan in just five days? I was never trained as a teacher; I had no idea what to do. Fortunately, the TwHP template is easy to use and can be applied to any historical site, public or private, prehistoric or modern. Attending the workshop turned the process into a collaborative effort, bouncing ideas off my peers, finding out what worked and what did not. With a small assortment of secondary and primary sources pulled from the park’s library and vertical files, I was able to write a tightly focused lesson plan that allows students to explore how Seattle was affected by the Klondike Gold Rush. Five years later, the publication and subsequent digitization of the park’s lesson plan has given the staff a tool to reach literally thousands of students who are unable to visit the park during the course of a typical school year.

Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park (NHP) has two units, one in Seattle, Washington and the other in Skagway, Alaska. Because of the great distance between them – approximately 1,000 miles, both units are administered as though they were separate parks. The interpretive programs tell two different parts of the story of the Klondike Gold Rush. In Seattle, the program centers on how miners prepared for their trip in Seattle and how the 1898 gold rush affected the United States. In Skagway, their story revolves around how the gold rush affected southeast Alaska. Skagway controls 2,400 acres of land and about a dozen historic buildings; the Seattle unit is in a storefront in Seattle’s oldest neighborhood, Pioneer Square. Because the Seattle unit of Klondike Gold Rush NHP is a small park, with limited staff, a comprehensive, off-site outreach program is beyond what the park can offer. The TwHP lesson plan is used as a tool to bring the park’s story into classrooms that are unable to visit the park. In 1997-1998, when the park celebrated the centennial of the Klondike Gold Rush, the lesson plan became one of the key components for an outreach program. A grant from the Parks as Classrooms program allowed the park to purchase nearly every lesson plan that was in the publisher’s inventory and distribute them to area teachers for free. In the past few years we have mailed hundreds of lesson plans not only to teachers in the Seattle-Tacoma region, but all over the United States.

The success of Seattle’s lesson plan prompted Skagway to write a lesson plan. The author, a park volunteer, did not have the benefit of attending the workshop, but the directions in the TwHP “Guide to Developing Lesson Plans” provided directions for writing a lesson plan according to the established formula. The advantages of having a pair of lesson plans Is enormous; we can tell the story of the gold rush in a way that encompasses the resources of both units. Now that both lesson plans are free and available on the web, we hope to reach a wider audience, especially since so many schools now have high speed access to the Internet. While feedback from our clientele has been limited, comments have been generally positive. It is now up to the park to spread the word.

At the time of publication, Marc Blackburn was Education Coordinator, Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park, Seattle, Washington.