Another Day, Another Dawson City Experience

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The tour group I had met in Inuvik was also experiencing Dawson City. Some had taken a trip up the Top Of The World Highway the day before, and now they were back in town. One of them, Alice, hadn't gone and I met her the day before. She mentioned that she had heard of the Paddlewheeler Graveyard. That sounded intriguing and nostalgic. She was going to go and find it, and I asked if I could go along. I was welcome.



We met at 9:30, along with their tour leader Tony, and took the ferry (another free one, do you hear that provinces?) across the Yukon River. Then we walked through the government campground and onto a path into the forest. When the river is lower it is possible to walk along the sandy bank to the graveyard, but this day, the river was still too high.



We hiked through the forest and then the hulking skeletons of the riverboats loomed through the trees. The twisted remains of seven of the old paddlewheelers sit rotting away in the forest along the Yukon River west of Dawson City. With the completion of highways to Dawson City, and west to Alaska, the river highway system became obsolete. The paddlewheelers that had provided the only link for supplies to the outside world became obsolete. But in a time of use and throw away, the paddlewheelers were just tossed aside. I suppose most must have been run aground at various spots along the rivers, but seven were put up on the shores just west of Dawson City. And that is where we found them.



Although not as eerie and atmostpheric as I was hoping for, the site still left me with thoughts of the stories that could have accompanied those old boats. I can imagine someone writing the stories of them. The Paddlewheeler Graveyard: MV Seattle's story. I think it could be a good series. Someone could go and dig up the people (not literally) who had taken that boat to and find out their story. There must be some interesting ones.



As we were walking back, Tony asked me if I was going to go to the Robert Service Cabin for the interpretive presentation. It was going to be at 1 in the afternoon. When I confessed that although I knew one of the poems that he had written, I actually didn't know who the man was, Tony and Alice both looked at me with mouths agape. What had education come to that I didn't know who he was? (By the way, Robert Service is the man who wrote “The Shooting of Dan McGrew” and “The Cremation of Sam McGee.”) They told me that I had to go. I had planned to go, but now I was under orders. I guessed that I wouldn't be following my other plans as a result. I had thought I would head to the Jack London place for its interpretive presentation, but the times conflicted. I also wanted to head up and see where the whole Klondike gold rush madness had started at Discovery Claim, and the Dredge #4 site. I wasn't sure if there would be time for that. And then there was the matter of the Danoja Zho Cultural Centre. I figured I could always stay one more day. There is no absolute reason I have to leave. I would see. And I would attend the Robert Service presentation.



I had some time before the presentation, so I took in the SS Keno while I was waiting to head up to the Service cabin. The SS Keno is the last paddlewheeler that plied the Yukon area. It actually plied the Stewart River because it was shallower than the Yukon and wouldn't float the larger paddlewheelers like the SS Klondike. When silver was discovered up the Stewart River the only way to get it down to the Yukon was building a smaller paddlewheeler, and the SS Keno was the one. When the highways were completed, the Keno as well was retired. Others would be run aground on the side of various rivers, but the Keno was sailed one last time down to Dawson City and put on shore as a memorial and museum to that now-gone era.



It's also another of the sites in town that is covered by my Canada Parks Discovery Pass. Cool.



All in all, it was just a way to pass a bit of time. There were information plaques to explain how it worked and how many people it took to get from point A to point B. There was also a short video about the final voyage of the Keno. It was from 1960 and was produced by the CBC. It was quite interesting, and I met Evelyn and John, from the Tuk tour, again.



After looking around the boat for a few minutes, it was time to head over to the Robert Service Cabin for the presentation. It's a neat little cabin up at the edge of town and backed by forest on the side of the mountain. It's unassuming and it's the place where the man lived for only a short time.



Robert Service was born in the British Isles somewhere and lived a rather aimless life in many ways, moving from here to there in an effort to do as little work as possible while still being able to make a living. He was a banker, a ranch hand, a failed cowboy, and a hobo, much of that after moving to North America. He eventually used a good reference from a bank manager in England to get a job with a bank in Canada. As a single man, he was easy to move about from branch to branch. Eventually he was sent up to Dawson City. Robert Service was fairly shy around people and did a lot of letting other people talk to him. He learned many local stories of the Klondike gold rush and was convinced to put some of them to verse. Despite having not been here during that time himself, he proved adept at capturing the essence of it in what he wrote. When he was convinced to send some of it in to be published, the buzz it created made it sell very well and he became wealthy enough to think he could make it a career.



With the blessing of his current bank manager, he quit his job, rented this cabin in the woods on the edge of Dawson City and wrote. He is most famous for his irreverent verse, but he also wrote some novels and even having a few stories adapted to film. It is quite a story.



After he left Dawson for a correspondent position covering the First World War. During that time he met the woman he would marry and they lived in Europe for the rest of their days. His rental cabin in Dawson was enshrined and preserved for his possible eventual return and for about a hundred years, there have been gatherings of those who see where he once lived and who would hear some of his poems.



This was the last I saw of my friends from the Tuk tour. They left there and headed into town to get lunch or shop, or just rest. I wanted to use the rest of the afternoon to go up and see what brought Dawson City such fame.



The original spot where the big gold strike was discovered is about 20 minutes from downtown Dawson City. It's called Discovery Claim. A little down the valley from that point is one of the dredges that took up the cause of mining after the individual miners moved on to other rush areas.



When they did that, there was still lots of gold to be gotten, but the “easy” stuff was mostly gone. Individuals needed lots of money if they wanted to go after the rest of the gold. Other gold rushes had the promise of more easily obtained riches, and the individuals rushed off to find it. People with the big money started sniffing around and, with the wooing and encouragement by government through things like balls and parties at the Commissioner's Residence, corporations started getting hold of larger tracts of land in land concessions. They brought in large equipment, worked out how to bring water in from far away in large enough quantities to drive their operations, and got to work. Great dredges started working over the creeks and rivers. They resulted in great movements of gravel from the creek and riverbeds being brought up, processed and left behind them in great furrows that are called tailings. From high above, they look like nothing other than giant worms. Its quite a sight, even though I was left wondering how they were allowed to leave it all a mess like that. It was a different time, of course, when we acted as though it was our right to change the world as we wished and do anything we liked without cleaning up after ourselves. I suppose not much has changed.



Dredge No. 4 was one of the dredges that worked over the area. It was working one day, towards the end of the era of the big local company that was mining gold, when a dam burst upstream and washed it away into a pond, where it sank and became encased in ice for about 30 years. Once again, in a story I heard over and over while in Dawson, Parks Canada took over the dredge and began its refurbishment, another project to preserve a part of Canadian history. And in a story I have also heard over and over, after spending lots of money to refurbish the dredge and make it ready for visitors, with the cuts to Parks Canada budgets, the work will stop next year as the money runs out and guided visits to see the inside workings of the dredge will cease.



But no matter. I got the tour. The first thing the guide wanted us to know, and the one thing he wanted to make sure we would know as we left, was that the dredge is a boat. A giant pond is dug out and the dredge is assembled in the dry pond. The dredges were all too large to just come in whole. Dredge no. 4 was massive. Some parts of it couldn't even come in over the mountains and down from Whitehorse because they were just too big. They had to come in the long way, around the entire coast of Alaska and up the Yukon River. It was put together in its pond and then the pond was filled and the dredge floated. It was anchored to the surrounding hills and it began its work. In slow circles it would turn at the edge of the pond, digging the pond's sides away, sending the gravel and dirt up in buckets to go into the belly of the machine and get cleaned and sorted.



A giant turbine with holes turned, letting all the small stuff through and sending the big rocks and other stuff through to go out the back into the tailing piles. The small stuff was where the gold was going to be found. This would go into the sluices and be processed with water to separate the gold from the rest of the small dirt and rocks, which was sent out into the tailings as well.



The front of the dredge scooped up ten tons of dirt every minute in giant scoops on a rotating belt. The whole operation used 10000 gallons of water every minute. And it moved a staggering 10 to 12 feet a day up the river. But even so, the cost of bringing the dredge up to the Klondike and assembling it was somewhere around four hundred thousand dollars. And the first in operation produced four hundred thousand dollars in gold. It was already paid for. There was still big money in the area, if you had the means to get to it.



The dredge was humongous, and it was amazing to hear that it still only required 4 people to run it. The most boring of the four jobs sounded like the one where one person had to sit and watch the rocks go by to make sure it didn't get backed up. That could sink the dredge in a remarkably short time. However, despite there only being four employees to make the dredge do its work, there was a small army of people to make sure it kept running. There were all the trades, electricians, carpenters, engineers and any trade you can imagine all employed on stand by in case something broke down or needed repair. The dredges were making lots of money, but only as long as they were running. They ran 24 hours a day, every day. With all the moving parts and the wear and tear, these crews still managed to keep the dredges working with only an average of a half hour or so out of service per day. Then there were the people preparing the land so the dredge could do its work. The had to clean off any trees and other vegetation. Then the top part of the land had to be removed to reach permafrost. The permafrost had to be melted away and removed to reach the gold bearing layers of the ground.



(The environmental damage this causes makes me shudder, but nobody really blinks an eye about it around here and there are lots of places that have stickers up saying they support placer mining.)



All of these people were paid a mere pittance for their efforts. Yet there were plenty of people there to do the work. We were told that the employees were allowed to go panning through the tailings to supplement their income, subject to some “tip” to the company for being allowed the privilege.



There was also no seeming problem with people trying to make off with the gold. This was for the same reasons that there was little crime in Dawson City. The isolation made it difficult to really get away. If someone disappeared and there was a suspicion that they had made off with some of the gold, the RCMP would just contact Whitehorse and have them arrested as they got off the boat arriving, a few days later. The better transportation opportunities afforded by the highways changed that somewhat, of course, but the company still wasn't overly concerned about the matter, from what I could see. It wasn't much longer after the highway arrived that the company shut down operations in any case, so they didn't have much time to really find out how unsafe their procedures were.



The amount that the YCGC (the Yukon something Gold Corporation) was paid a small sum for an ounce of gold at the beginning of its operations (35 dollars or something like that), and that never changed. Even though the price of gold kept going up, they were paid the same fixed price. Eventually this became economically unsustainable and in time the company ceased operations. This caused a bit of a depression the area, until tourism started picking up the slack. Recently, however, with the rise in the price of gold, new corporations have started mining operations again.



The Discovery Claim is where those three famous fellas, Skookum Jim Mason, George Carmacks, and Dawson Charlie, made the strike that touched off the Klondike Gold Rush. Their names are everywhere in the Yukon as a result. From mountains to rivers to buildings to towns are named after them. No wonder given the influence their little discovery had on the development of the north in general and the Yukon in particular. They went to visit a friend of Carmacks. Robert Henderson. “Unfortunately,” Henderson had an issue with people from the First Nations. When Carmacks showed up with Skookum Jim and Dawson Charlie, he offered Carmacks something to drink, but ignored the other two. Feeling unwelcome, the two left and Carmacks went with them. They stopped at a spot on what is now called Bonanza Creek. Skookum Jim noticed something in the water. It was gold. They looked around the creek and found the best spots, staked them for claims and then headed down to the claims office to register their claims. On the way they told others about the creek. They felt no need to tell Robert Henderson anything about it. Imagine that.



And the gold rush was born. Millions of ounces of gold were pulled out of the creek and the nearby creeks and rivers over the next decades and, with the rise in gold prices of late, there is a new mini-gold rush taking place now. The photos of the time are incredible with a line of men and a few women following each other up the Chilkoot Pass on their way to the Klondike. The number of people headed to the area was around 100000 with about 30000 actually making it.



It was interesting walking around the trail at the Discovery Claim. There were a number of interpretive panels and trees everywhere. The panels presented the history of the claim, as well as information about the methods of mining. But it was just a walk. The history of it was in the air, but it was surrounded by areas with big dump trucks and modern mining operations and equipment, as well as the environmental effects of those modern methods.



The whole area seems to support placer gold mining as it is currently done, and there appears to be a lot of pride in it all, but it just seems to have something wrong with it. Hillsides are stripped of trees, the topsoil is blasted away with water, steam melts millenia-old permafrost and ice remnants, and then everything that's left is picked up, shaken, rearranged, and dumped back willy-nilly all over the landscape. In a world that is changing in many ways because of the actions of humanity, here is a place that actively turns a blind eye to what is happening.



Following my walk through the Discovery Claim, I continued up the road to the only free claim around. At Claim Number 6, anyone can bring a pan, step into the river and have a go at fame and fortune. Of course, the fact that it is an open claim, free to anyone, probably means that there is very little there. But that's the cynic in me.



I watched a couple of hopefuls taking their shot, but then I headed back down to town. I went back to the visitor centre to see the three movies they have playing. The movies are about Dawson, the gold rush, and the Yukon. I watched a couple of them, but I was really not that interested in them.



As they were playing a guy came through and set something up in the adjacent area. He was going to be presenting something. As he started I went and had a look. It was a presentation about bears, how to predict what they are going to do, and what to do if they attack. It seemed to be far more interesting than the three films. So I went and joined in on that instead. The man was a conservation officer for the area. He showed a film about bears that showed what to do when encountering them, what to do if they approach, how to evaluate their intentions when they approach, and what to do if they should attack. I learned a lot, although it was really fairly common sense in a lot of ways. But it did sort of scare the willikers out of me. And when he said that he always carries bear spray with him, I became a bit more dismayed. Should I be doing that? That was the question someone asked him. Yes, of course, he replied. All the time, any time you are in the bush on a hike. Hmmm...



Maybe I should be dead for all the time I have been wandering around in woods without bear spray.

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Photos

Sternwheeler Graveyard
A number of old sterwheelers lie abandoned in the woods downstream of Dawson City on the Yukon River.

Sternwheeler Graveyard
A number of old sterwheelers lie abandoned in the woods downstream of Dawson City on the Yukon River.

Sternwheeler Graveyard
A number of old sterwheelers lie abandoned in the woods downstream of Dawson City on the Yukon River.

Sternwheeler Graveyard
A number of old sterwheelers lie abandoned in the woods downstream of Dawson City on the Yukon River.

Sternwheeler Graveyard
A number of old sterwheelers lie abandoned in the woods downstream of Dawson City on the Yukon River.

The SS Keno
A retired sternwheeler was restored and now sits on the shore in Dawson City. It is managed by Parks Canada.

Robert Service Cabin
This is the cabin where Robert Service lived and worked and got to know the glories of the north.

Dredge #4
The guts of the Dredge are huge. The gear wheels inside the machine couldn't be flown in and had to be brought in on the river, after the spring break-up.

The Control Room of Dredge # 4
Despite its massive, the whole vehicle could be controlled by one person from this spot.

Discovery Claim
Somewhere in this area up the valley from Dredge # 4, George Carmack, Skookum Jim Mason and Dawson Charlie discovered the gold that started the largest gold rush in history.

The SS Keno
A retired sternwheeler was restored and now sits on the shore in Dawson City. It is managed by Parks Canada.

Robert Service Cabin
This is the cabin where Robert Service lived and worked and got to know the glories of the north.

Dredge #4
This massive piece of mining equipment basically chews up a bunch of the lanscape in a creek, washes it down to get the gold and then spits the remains out the back end.

Dredge #4
The guts of the Dredge are huge. The gear wheels inside the machine couldn't be flown in and had to be brought in on the river, after the spring break-up.

The Control Room of Dredge # 4
Despite its massive, the whole vehicle could be controlled by one person from this spot.

Discovery Claim
Somewhere in this area up the valley from Dredge # 4, George Carmack, Skookum Jim Mason and Dawson Charlie discovered the gold that started the largest gold rush in history.

An Open Claim
The Dawson City region maintains an open claim where people can go and pan for gold, without having to pay. Somehow I doubt that there is much gold to be found in the claim, being free and all.