Eureka!

It's Discovery Day in the Yukon!

On August 16, 1896, three men discovered gold in a tributary of the Klondike River. When ships arrived in Seattle and San Francisco laden with gold the following year, the Klondike Gold Rush was on. More than 100,000 people from all over North America migrated to the harsh and forbidding landscape in search of wealth.

Today's photograph of a San Francisco "forty-niner" capitalizes on the gold rush phenomenon in a different way. The figure is thought to be a street advertiser for food!

Pictured: Unidentified Artist, "Forty-niner" Street Advertiser in Studio, San Francisco, 1890, albumen print on paper, 7 3/8 x 4 7/8 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase from the Charles Isaacs Collection made possible in part by the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment.