Dawson City, Yukon

So there we were in Dawson City, Yukon, at what we might call “ground zero” for the Klondike gold rush!   It was like coming full circle from our initial introduction to this event back in Skagway, Alaska, in the month of June.   This was, after all, the very place where the big gold strike happened back in 1896 that inspired hundreds of thousands of stampeders to leave home and country and endure all manner of hardship to get here to stake a claim and get rich.   These past three months we saw the impact the Klondike gold rush had on the people, the natural world, and the future of this region of the world.   It’s been utterly fascinating to learn more and more about it at every stop along our way, and Dawson City was like “finishing school”!   We were here for three days and incredibly busy every minute!   If we weren't attending lectures and presentations or walking historic routes through and around the city, we were perusing museum collections, riding ferryboats, poking around a sternwheel paddleboat or mining equipment, or whooping it up at a can-can show!  

Dawson City shimmers in the sun at the confluence of the Yukon and Klondike Rivers

The guys who started in all by finding gold on Bonanza creek here back in 1896--Dawson Charlie,
George Carmack, and Skookum Jim

Bonanza Creek, just a pretty little creek off the Klondike River--until the $4 million
gold strike of 1896

To reach Dawson City from the west one must take a ferry boat across the mighty Yukon River.   Since we camped on the west side we had numerous crossings by ferry and were thrilled each time to be floating through history like this.   The Yukon is very, very swift, and it took obvious skill for the captain to maneuver the MV George Black through the current and into port.  

Ferry boat required to cross the Yukon

It hauls everything and in really swift current

We see Dawson City ahead on the horizon from the ferry boat

Dawson City in early morning light

It is tremendous fun to walk the streets of Dawson.   Clearly, Parks Canada who acquired the historic site in the 1980s, has worked very hard to restore the buildings and set the place up as a wonderful destination for visitors.   The city boasts a population of abut 2000 persons and tourism is just one of the businesses going on here.   It is an active and vital community in every way, with a huge library and school, public swimming pool (hey, Mercer, wouldn’t that be nice?), hiking trails, hospital, fire and police departments, and the coolest mercantile store you’d ever, ever want to see!   In short, Dawson City has all the things one would want in a “real” town and we found the people friendly, generous and helpful.  We were impressed!

Home built from old steamboat lumber.   All the homes in this town are either
restored historic buildings or at least decorated to look the part.

Parks Canada restoration of the British Bank of North America...

...Here's the original ca. 1900

Restored old saloon

Inside as well as out, and "on tour"

The original.

One of our tour guides of Dawson City in period costume

Another, named"Fred", gave us an evening tour called "Strange
Events in the Midnight Sun" which was really fun!  

Dawson Trading Post, a merchantile in town we enjoyed shopping at,
with "unusual" items for sale...

Everything you could need to pan for gold 

Even sluice boxes...

And signs to protect your claim!!

Patterns for making parkas to keep you warm, and all supplies for the job

Hunks of wooly mammoth tusk...apparently commonly found by gold
miners in their dredging area creeks!

Furs and leathers from every animal of the north!

Including grizzly bear!

This location, near the confluence of the Klondike and Yukon Rivers, was a large fish camp used by the native people, the Tr’ondek (from which is derived “Klondike”) Gwech’in for millennia prior to the arrival of the stampeders.  When an estimated 30-50,000 of them arrived in this very spot within just a few weeks of each other aboard some 7000 homemade “watercraft”, the peace and serenity of the place was forever gone!   The town sprang up quickly to become the largest city north of Seattle and west of Winnipeg!   It was said that a person could buy absolutely anything there and that everything was for sale.  Law and order, however, was not a problem due to the very strong and early presence of the Canadian Mounties in the town.   They turned a blind eye on prostitution, however, the feeling being that presence of any women at all among this sea of lonely males would have a beneficial effect on society and their behavior—aren't we just so surprised??   

Dugout canoes of the native peoples, the Tr'ondek Gwech'in, on Yukon River ca 1900

Early Dawson City

The "mounties" in Dawson City ca 1900

Thousands of homesick men in miserable quarters doing miserable work

One of the early bordello owners, "Ruby", ran her business until the
early 1960s!

"Ruby's Place" restored by Parks Canada

Another Dawson City madam, named "Bombay Peggy"

What d'ya think?

"Bombay Peggy's Place" in Dawson City

Unlike other gold rush towns, Dawson City did not dry up and acquire ghosts in 1890 when the majority of the stampeders rushed off to the next gold strike in Nome.  Far from it!   Many decided to stay here, sent for their families, established businesses, and settled down.   Over the next few years a city of considerable sophistication developed.

Dawson City ca 1906

A very respectable Victorian town

The theatre, "Palace Grand" ca 1906

Theatre-goers

Beautiful restoration by Parks Canada with shows at present time

By then, the White Pass and Yukon Railroad came here from Skagway, Alaska, and a fleet of some 250 sternwheel paddleboats established routes upriver to Whitehorse and downriver to the interior of Alaska and all the way to the Bering Sea.   The Canadian government itself gave a big vote of confidence to the city of Dawson, making it the territorial capitol and sending architects to design six regal-looking buildings downtown, hoping to encourage further investment by such actors as the Guggenheims and the Rothschilds of the world—with success!  

Post Office--restored

Territorial capitol building--restored and made into wonderful museum

Territorial commissioner's (governor) residence--on tour

Beautifully restored and on tour

Much of their entrepreneurial interest was related, of course, to gold.   In 1904, the Klondike was the largest gold producer in Canada and the fourth largest in the world.   Hand-mining for gold was a phase which lasted for only about three years after the initial strike, and exhausted the really rich ground with its big nuggets.   At that time, the claims were consolidated into big blocks and large machinery employed to dig out the gold-laden gravel.   The most amazing, and hideously ugly, machines used for this were the dredges.   Parks Canada acquired and restored one with the glamorous name of “Dredge No. 4”, which were toured.   It was the largest gold dredge ever used in North America, eight stories high and 200 feet in length.   It moved along in a pond of its own making, digging gold-bearing gravel as far as 50+ feet deep, at a rate of 22 one ton buckets per minute, 24 hours per day, April through November.  It “panned” all this gravel inside in a rotating drum, collected the gold in sluice boxes, and then spit out all the gravel in enormous worm-like shapes all over the countryside.  Gold dredges like this were used starting in 1910, with 13 of them operating in the Klondike alone.   They ceased operation in the 1960s due to reduced profitability.   Before it was retired, Dredge No. 4 unearthed nine tons of told, grossing 8.6 million dollars over a 40 year period, with 95% extraction efficiency.   Amazing.   Ugly as sin.  But amazing.    

Dredge No 4

How dredges worked...if you're interested

Touring Dredge No. 4--everything big and ugly

One ton buckets conveying gold laden gravel into the dredge

Sluice boxes from which the gold was collected every couple weeks

Dredge sitting in its pit of ugly gravel worms

...still visible today

Gold mining is very much alive and well today in and around Dawson City though the dredges are gone.   We visited one of the gold buyers in town which was also a jewelry store to look at some of the stuff and learn more.   We also drove out along the Klondike and saw lots of mines in operation.    The gold is primarily dug out of the ground nowadays with caterpillar machinery scooping it into sluice boxes, sometimes by blasting through permafrost with high pressure water hoses.  Its all pretty gross, we think!!

Lovely young woman in gold-buying and jewelry store in Dawson City
shows us big gold nuggets for sale

We learned that the gold coming out of all the different creeks around
Dawson City have different colors and "textures" depending on amount and
kind of other minerals associated with them.   Also vary in their
"purity" from 40-90+ percent.

Common gold mining operation in 2015

Bernie drawn to the sparkle in Bonanza Creek--you never know!!

Let’s change the subject!   We also toured the “Keno”, a sternwheel paddleboat docked in Dawson City.   In their day, the sternwheel paddleboats were the lifeblood of this place, carrying everything from eggs to large scale mining equipment.   A telling quote from a person who lived in that era was, "Our lives were ordered by the seasonal cycle of first and last boat, break up and freeze up, around which existence in Dawson revolved.”   Indeed the boats had just five months to deliver a year’s worth of goods—May to October.  The sternwheelers ran on wood—lots of wood.  It required one-and-one-half cords of wood per hour to power one of them downstream, four cords per hour upstream.  They could carry only some of their fuel, necessitating frequent stops to load more wood, and "wood camps" were developed about every 20 miles along the river to accommodate them and had to be moved about as the tree supply was exhausted.  At one time there were up to 70 of these majestic craft plying the Yukon, but there are only two left now, the Keno being one, and it was very fun to tour.  

Keno on tour, restored by Parks Canada

A gorgeous boat!

Keno ca 1937 hauling silver ore

Lifeblood of Dawson City ca 1900

Launch of paddle wheelers in Spring must've been a sight!

Bernie checks out the innards of the ship

While Peggy checks out the kitchen

Wood being loaded onto a sternwheeler.   Fueling these things provided lots of jobs
in the logging business.

Dawson City has what can best be described as “shrines” to two literary giants in Canadian history, poet Robert Service and novelist, Jack London.   Both had cabins here and our tours of each were greatly enhanced by Parks Canada staff providing readings and information about their lives.   Jack London, of course, was the author of the very famous “Call of the Wild” which most of us were required to read, and then fell in love with, back in junior high school!  He wrote many more novels in his literary career, primarily about the north country, inspired by his own experiences here.   Born desperately poor in Oakland, California during the depression of the late 1890s, he was one who heard “hope” in the news that gold was found in the Klondike, and with money scraped together by his family, came, at age 20 to Dyea, to hike up the Chilkoot trail, and all the rest of it.   He did make it here to Dawson City, actually staked a mining claim on a nearby creek, and worked it, but to no avail gold-wise.   The experiences he had, including the people he met en route, however, gave him a wealth of inspirational writing material to “mine" for the rest of his writing career! 

Jack London's cabin and food cache in Dawson City.  Actually only half of his cabin is
in Dawson City, the other half is in Oakland, California.

Photo and signature of the famous Jack London

Photo of Jack hiking the Chilkoot trail--he is the young man right of
center with hands in pockets

Copy of mining claim with Jack's signature

Wonderful Parks Canada staff who gave us tour.   She holds photo
of herself as young woman working heavy machinery in
gold mine job she held for several years

Robert Service was an amazingly talented poet of the early 1900s, whose prose we encountered throughout our trip through "gold country”, and found so wonderfully expressive of the gold rush era.  He also had a cabin here in Dawson City where he “retired” at age 34 from his bank clerk job, so successful was he as a poet, even back then!   Parks Canada has a staff member in period costume reading his poetry outside the cabin—exceedingly entertaining!   His poetry covers topics other than gold prospecting, and I’d like to give you a sample which seemed apropos to Bernie and my retirement, our summer on the road, and all the previous adventures we've enjoyed in canoe/kayak/dogsled/snowshoe/hiking boots/skis, always in as much wilderness as we could find.   It is an excerpt from his poem called, “The Land of Beyond”, and it goes like this:

Have ever you heard of the Land of Beyond,

  That dreams at the gates of the day?

Alluring it lies at the skirts of the skies,

  And ever so far away;  

Alluring it calls:  O ye the yoke galls,

  And ye of the trail overfond,

With saddle and pack, by paddle and track,

  Let’s go to the Land of Beyond!


Yes, lets!!!

Robert Service's cabin in Dawson City

Wonderful Parks Canada staff reader of his poems--although he dresses in period
costume he insists he is not impersonating Robert Service, at the
request of the poet's family.

Another high-falutin’ cultural activity in which we engaged was the can-can girl show at Diamond Tooth Gertie’s place one night, and was that ever fun!   The young ladies were not only beautiful, dressed in splendid colors, and very talented, athletic dancers—I’m not kidding—but the crowd was largely gold miners in from the bush for a quarterly mining association meeting, so the whole evening felt quite “authentic"!   

Diamond Tooth Gertie's Dance Hall
WHOO-HOO!!

Very entertaining old time can-can dancing (which you'll have to imagine as I was
unable to capture that much action with my camera.  

    

EGAD!   I promised myself I wouldn’t prattle on and on in this post about our visit to Dawson City post, but to write about it is to relive it, and we loved it!!!   So, from here we leave civilization again to enter “The Land of Beyond”, along the Dempster Hwy...following our favorite direction...NORTH!