We spend a lot of money on the welders and everything else and we have nothing for it.

So, don’t you think you guys maybe should get going and find something else?

While Gold Rush cameras capture Tony Beets screaming at his crew and bulldozing through the Klondike, there’s one person running a multi-million-dollar mining empire behind the scenes that most viewers completely overlook.

Minnie Beets has been the financial backbone of the largest family-owned gold mining operation in the Yukon for over forty years.

She controls every dollar that flows through Tamarack Inc., a company sitting on 337 placer claims across the Klondike.

Their operation has turned over more than $30 million worth of gold in just seven years.

And get this, the woman managing all of that started out flipping burgers in a Dawson City hamburger joint.

When we were super young, Dad used to take off every winter to work and mine every summer, and Mom would have two or three jobs.

We used to live down the hill so Johnny didn’t have to drive into town and we could see him at the end of the day.

The life many lived before Gold Rush, from a 400-person Dutch village to the frozen gold fields of the Yukon, is a story the show barely scratches.

“I come home one time and he goes, ‘Well, I’m going to Canada.’

I go, ‘Oh yeah?’

He says, ‘Yeah.’

Well, I says, ‘So, when are we going?’ because he thought he was going to go by himself.

I go, ‘No, no, no, no, that’s not how that works.’

So then from then on we started planning it together.”

She buried a child, built an empire from nothing, held a family together through decades of brutal conditions, and somehow became the only human being on the planet Tony Beets can’t say no to.

This is the real story they never told you, from Holland to the Klondike.

Minnie Beets was born in 1960 in Berg, a village in the Friesland province of the Netherlands with a population of about 400 people.

Her parents ran a bakery and she was one of five children.

Life was small, quiet, and predictable.

Then a seven-year-old boy named Tony Beets moved in next door, and Minnie was six at the time.

In an interview with Monsters and Critics, she recalled the moment clearly and said, “First of all, I met Tony on the street about 55 to 56 years ago when he moved into the neighborhood at seven and I was six, and we lived in Holland in the Netherlands, and that’s where it started.”

Two farm kids in a tiny Dutch village, and nobody in that neighborhood had any idea those two would end up running one of the most successful gold mining operations in Canadian history.

They started dating when Minnie was twenty, married a few years later around 1984, and then came the decision that would change everything.

Tony had grown skeptical about the future of agriculture in the Netherlands and had heard that workers in the Yukon were earning $1,000 a week in the mines, the equivalent of over $3,000 today, and that was it because the lights came on and Tony wanted to go to Canada.

“We heard about the Yukon like two months after we came to Canada and we heard you could make good money there, so Tony went in March of 1981.”

Here’s the catch, Minnie didn’t just agree to the move, she threw herself into it completely.

They immigrated to Canada with almost nothing, and Tony first landed in Alberta and then British Columbia where he worked on a dairy farm near Salmon Arm, but farming was never the plan because the real money was up north.

Tony moved to Whitehorse and then to Dawson City and started working as a machine operator in someone else’s gold mine at twenty-five years old, and he never looked back.

For the first several years in Dawson, Minnie did whatever it took to keep the family afloat while Tony was building the mining operation from the ground up, working in home healthcare for thirteen years, working in retail, and eventually buying and managing a hamburger restaurant in Dawson City where she didn’t just work at it but owned and ran the business herself.

She was already an entrepreneur before anyone ever called her one.

While Minnie was grinding through those early years in Dawson, she and Tony were also starting a family in one of the most isolated regions in North America, with Kevin born in 1988, Mike in 1990, and Jasmine in 1992.

Jasmine Beets died on March 1st, 1993, before she was even three months old due to a chromosomal abnormality that ultimately took her life.

Tony carries a jasmine flower tattoo on his hand with her birth and death dates, and that ink has been visible in hundreds of episodes of Gold Rush even though most viewers have no idea what it means when they see it in close-up shots during gold weigh-ins.

After Jasmine’s death, Monica was born later in 1993 and Bianca followed, making five children total with one gone before she could even reach her first spring, and Minnie kept going because she didn’t collapse and she didn’t leave.

She raised four surviving kids in one of the most remote and demanding environments in North America where winter temperatures plunged to minus forty and the mining season swallowed every waking hour for seven months straight.