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Published: August 19th 2010
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We started the day by calling Jodie to wish her a happy birthday!
Then we drove out to “the creeks”. The road was built at the top of the hills because at the bottom, were the gold claims, and also, there was soft muskeg and other road-building problems. We came to a park sign explaining roadhouses. It seems that a roadhouse was built almost every mile in the area, providing food and shelter to the miners and those traveling to and from the creeks. It made us curious about Rich’s great-grandmother’s connection to roadhouses since she ran one in California after the gold rush.
Something else to research. We found Caribou Creek and took pictures up and down, where the family claims were. A claim was five hundred feet of creek bottom and a thousand feet out on either side of the creek. The whole area had been dredged and re-dredged over the years, so of course it looked nothing like it would have back in 1898. The way they mined the creeks then was surprise to us!
From the Klondike book, “Mining in the sub-Arctic is unique because the permanently frozen ground must be thawed before the bedrock can
be reached; it is this bedrock ten, twenty, and even fifty feet below the surface, which contains the gold. At first the miners let the sun do the work. This was a long, laborious process: a few inches of thawed earth were scraped away each day, and an entire summer might pass by before the goal was attained. Soon, however, wood fires replaced the sun. The gold-seekers lit them by night, removed the ashes and the thawed earth in the morning, then lit a new fire, burning their way slowly down to form a shaft whose sides remained frozen as hard as granite.” (Miners also used wood to shore up the shafts and tunnels in case the fires caused thawing where they didn’t want it.) “This method allowed miners to work all winter…The pay dirt thus obtained was hoisted up the shaft and piled in a mound, known as a dump. In spring, when the ice broke and the creeks and water gushed down the hillsides, the miners built sluice boxes… to trap the gold in the gravel.”
No one knew until spring how much their claim was yielding. Several claims were different on the Klondike. “One heavy bucket was
Dominion Creek
At Caribou Creek - The Claims hoisted up a shaft and it had nuggets sticking out like raisins in a pudding and fine gold glistening everywhere.” Another man’s wife would go to the “dump” when she needed money, hammer at the frozen dirt, and pick out a nugget to take to the store. This is the type of news that started the rush!
We continued down Dominion Creek for awhile hoping to see another old roadhouse. Instead, we found a group of houses that were lived in. We stopped to ask about a possible old town in the area, and who should walk up the path, but Noreen, the woman we had met yesterday in the claims office! She visited with us for awhile. She told us how after the dredges started to be used, people put pipes in grids into the permafrost and pumped water into them to melt it. The permafrost would stay melted for four years and that’s how far ahead of the dredge they had to be to make it all work. Wow.
She also told us that because of the miners, there hadn’t been a tree left in the whole area in those days. They were used for cabins, firewood, sluice
boxes, windlasses, and for shoring up the shafts and tunnels. It reminded us of Tahoe during the Comstock - no trees left for the same reasons. We told her that the ladies at the mining claims office couldn’t help us with a map of the old claims. She said she had a map she could show us and that they had it, too. She invited us into the log house and offered us coffee, which we declined. She pulled out a map and showed us how to read the claim numbers, old and new. She said to go back to the office and tell them Noreen sent us and that we wanted that particular map number. She showed us where several of her family’s claims were all over the area. Then, we asked her what it was like out there in the winter. She said, “We don’t stay here in the winter. We go to Vancouver or somewhere warmer.” She also told us where there had been a town, but nothing was left, and that there used to be ruins of roadhouses but they were all gone now, too. We thanked her for her help and headed back to town.
Dawson City from Dawson Dome
The bicycle rider just went over the edge! It had turned out to be a beautiful day, up to 90 degrees! It’s the warmest day we’ve had since we left home!
Back in town, we went to the claims office and bought the right map for two two-nies. Then we went back to the archives and Nancy asked to see a map of the original staked claims. They brought out the actual original, no copies have been made! She drew a copy of the original claims on a piece of paper to compare with the new map.
We looked around the nearly deserted town and saw a side-wheeled paddle steamer at the dock. Rich wondered what it would cost for a ride. We found out that it had a dinner cruise every night, so we bought tickets. We had time to go back to the camper and feed Daisy. Then we took the map and compared the claims and found out that Noreen was exactly right about where the old claims would have been. Wow.
The evening was perfect. The ride on the river was nice and cool. We had Arctic char for dinner that tasted like trout. We went downriver as far as a First Nation village
Dawson City
The bright colors on buildings in the north help cheer up snowy, white winters. and past the wreck of an old steamboat and past the cave where Caveman Bill has lived for fifteen years in his cave. Then we came back towards town, and we could see what the stampeders saw as they approached Dawson from the Yukon route, except the town was a tent city at first. Then we cruised past the town upriver until it was out of sight. We visited with another couple who were wheat farmers in Alberta. They were captivated by the history of this place, too. They suggested that before we left the area, we should drive to the top of the mountain right above town because the vistas were fabulous. As we approached town from upriver, we could see what the gold-seekers who had been over the Chilkoot Pass and the White Pass would have seen from their homemade boats. It was a lovely cruise.
Afterwards, we did drive up to the top of Dawson Dome and the scenery 360 degrees was gorgeous. A bicycle rider was dropped off at the top and just started riding over the edge and dropping almost straight out of sight, Jodie. Like the Flume Trail, I guess.
Back to our little house after another incredible day of adventures!
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Jodie
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Soo beautiful! What a wonderful story, you guys. Memorable day!