This pair of earrings miniaturizes a miner’s pan and fills each one with three tiny natural gold nuggets. The metal is untouched by modern refining, so the shapes and surfaces are exactly as they were pulled from the ground. These little clusters would have read as proof of luck and hard work to anyone familiar with frontier life. They’re marked “Dawson,” a reference to Dawson City in the Yukon. The town exploded into being during the Klondike Gold Rush of 1896, when prospectors flooded the region in search of placer deposits along the Klondike River. Jewelers in Dawson often made souvenir pieces for miners who struck it rich, or at least wanted to look like they had. A maker’s mark from Dawson places these earrings directly within that short, intense moment when the far north became the epicenter of gold fever.
MATERIALS: 14k gold (marked), 6 gold nuggets
AGE: c. 1890
CONDITION: Very good - marked "Dawson"
SIZE: 1" length including the bale, 1/2" at the widest point