Day 10 - Dawson City

On 16th August 1896 three men - George Carmack, Skookum Jim and Tagish Charlie - discovered gold flakes in the rocks at Rabbit Creek on a river the Indian name of which white men could not pronounce properly.  They gathered together enough flakes to fill a Winchester rifle cartridge casing, and headed down to Fortymile near the Alaska border to stake their claims.  The name of the river was Tr'ondëk, but it became better known as the Klondike.

The story of the Klondike Gold Rush is better told in other places, but the upshot is that in the late 1890s more than 100,000 men (and some women) headed up to Alaska and the Yukon to try and make their fortunes in the latest stampede (it being just one of many, and probably the last great one).  Of those 100,000, less than 30,000 made it to the Klondike region, and only a handful of those made it truly and permanently rich.  A lot were fleetingly rich, but quickly squandered their new found fortunes on drink and ladies of the night and foolish ventures.

One man - Joseph Ladue - saw beyond the immediate need to amass gold, and realised that the prospectors would need somewhere to live, and somewhere to spend their new-found wealth.  He spent all his money on lumber and a sawmill, and shipped it all to the place where the Klondike River ran into the Yukon.  There he started to build a town, with houses and saloons and hotels, and the prospectors flooded in.  He named the new town Dawson City, after Canadian geologist George Dawson, who had surveyed western Canada in the 1870s.  It was people like Joseph Ladue, who became the service industry for the prospectors, who made true and lasting fortunes for themselves.

We breakfasted this morning while Andy Murray won a deserved Men's Wimbledon Final back in England.  It was a warm day, and after walking down to the river to take a few photos, we soon came back and changed into shorts and sandals.  It seems insane to be this far north, wearing shorts and sandals because of the heat, when the ground just a few metres below us is permanently frozen.  This is a feature of northern Canada, and something not well understood by the people who constructed the first buildings here; a number of those buildings are twisted and cockeyed, as the warmth they generated seeped into the ground, melted the permafrost, and skewed the foundations.  More modern buildings here and further north are built on raised stilts, not to avoid the snow, but to avoid heating up the ground.

We walked along the edge of the Yukon River, on a raised dike that was built to prevent the river from flooding the town during the spring ice break, when blocks of ice can block the river lower down and cause it to spill its banks.  Initially this dike was a source of disgruntlement for some of the inhabitants of Dawson, as it separated them from the river which they saw as the raison d'être of the town, but when they realised it was also helping to keep their feet and homes dry, they came to accept it.  It's also been made into a real feature, with informative boards and picnic areas dotted along its length.

At one end of the town the Klondike flows into the Yukon, and at the other a ferry takes traffic across the river, from the Klondike Highway and over to the Top Of The World Highway which we shall be following in a few days time.  At the end of the dike we turned and went back through the town; Front Street, facing the river, and the first couple of streets back, continue the Gold Rush theme, it's only when you get further back you find the residential and administrative buildings.  Billy Connolly visited Dawson during his time filming his Journey to the Edge of the World series.  He described the town as being tired, trying too hard, and not to his tastes.  It's true that Dawson is a bit of a one trick pony, and could easily become a caricature of itself, but it must be pointed out that this is a town with very few options: the question must be asked, if not the Gold Rush, then what else?  No one travels this far north on a whim, and the historical aspect of Dawson in relation to the last great Gold Rush cannot be denied or ignored.  I think Dawson succeeds far more than it fails.  My Moon "pamphlet" of The Yukon & The Northwest Territories describes Dawson City as a "delightful salmagundi of colorful [sic] historic facades and abandonded buildings", and I think that sums it up admirably.

We picked up some sandwiches and drinks from the Bonanza Market, and sat on a bench on the edge of the river, reading and watching the Klondike Spirit taking old Americans on a journey up and down the water.  We'll be going on it later in the week, I'm sure.  After a while we headed back down to the confluence of the Klondike and the Yukon, and through the back of the town to find Robert Service's cabin.  Robert Service was born in Preston, England, and arrived in the Yukon in 1904.  He wasn't a prospector but rather a bank clerk, yet his love of the characters and stories of the Gold Rush led him to write verse that became famous for capturing the spirit of the era.  He made so much money that he left his job at the Dawson branch of the Canadian Bank Of Commerce, and took up residence in the little cabin on 8th Avenue, where he remained until he left Dawson in 1912.

By now it was beer o'clock, so we came back to the hotel for a Yukon Gold (the beer, not the potato) and a glass of wine for Sandra.  Tomorrow we have quite a long day planned, so it's an early night for us.