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Published: August 19th 2010
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We started the day thinking that we needed to call Jodie and wish her happy birthday. She didn’t answer, so we sang her a message.
Next, we stopped at the museum and archives. We had a lot of questions and weren’t sure how to find the answers. The young ladies there tried to help us, but we weren’t having much luck with our ideas. While they were dragging out files and looking on the computer, Rich was looking at a file of old newspaper reports about each claim. He thumbed through and found the claims on Dominion Creek. There, in black and white, was A.L. Stewart and his brother and another partner, owning four claims! We wrote down the numbers and locations. We were jazzed! Then, we went to the mining claims
office to see where exactly on Dominion Creek the claims were located. The ladies there patiently explained that the claim numbers had all changed over the years and sadly shook their heads that they didn’t know how to help us. “But, wait a minute, Noreen lives up there. Let me see if she can help you. She’s still here.” A small woman who was at the claims office on
business came out and said, “Yes, I’ve lived up here for fifty years. Let’s see the map. Here’s Caribou Creek. I have claims there where it goes into Dominion Creek. Those claim numbers are probably along in that area.” We talked with her some more and thanked her a lot.
Now we’re ready to drive out there tomorrow and take pictures!
In the meantime, we got our Yukon Gold passports and went to have several sites stamped. One site in every town is the visitor center, of course. Another site in every town is a Native American center. In Canada, the native people are called First Nation. The museums and centers we visited have all been very interesting. We went up to the Robert Service cabin. It was a tiny, two room cabin that he lived in when he arrived in about 1909 until 1912. The gold rush was over by then and his Klondike poems had already been written when he was living in Whitehorse, Yukon. There was a Canadian National Parks guy there who would do readings at various times during the day. Rich wanted to know how he sounded when he performed because Rich had an idea
how the poems should be read. He asked him to say the first two lines of “Sam McGee”. Rich was disappointed! Another tourist was there and he began reciting a long poem called The “Ballad of Blasphemous Bill“. When he finished we all applauded. Rich would have read for them, but he didn’t really want to have to borrow the park guy’s book. The cabin looked just like his description of it in “Good-bye Dear Little Cabin”.
Our next stop was the Jack London cabin. It was a tiny one-room log cabin a few houses down from Robert Service’s. London went to the Yukon in august of 1898 right after word of the gold reached San Francisco . He and his brother-in-law went up to Skagway on a ship and then climbed the Chilkoot Pass. The brother-in-law left after two days, but London , aged 21, managed to make the climb back and forth until after 30 days he had his 1000 pounds of goods (required by the Canadian government before anyone could enter Canada) collected at Lindeman lake near the source of the Yukon River. He built a boat with his friends and arrived in Dawson City in the fall of 1897. He staked a claim up Henderson Creek about 60 miles from Dawson city and lived in a small cabin there with his friends. He didn’t find any gold, and after a three month bout with scurvy, he returned home to Oakland in July, 1898. The information about the cabin said that half of the logs were original and the other half of the original logs were in a replica cabin in Jack London Square in Oakland!
Can you just imagine the squabble that must have gone on that made the two towns/factions/countries arrive at this half and half compromise?
1. This is where he lived during the gold rush.
2. Yes, but he didn’t write anything while he lived there.
1. It would be more authentic to keep the cabin where he actually lived.
2.Yes, but who’s going to travel to the Yukon to see it?
1. A log cabin would sure look out of place in Oakland!
2. At least people could see under what conditions he lived.
1 and 2 Okay, we’ll split up the logs and each have a cabin.
Sounds ludicrous to me! In fact, it was so ludicrous, I didn’t even take a picture of half of a cabin moved to a new site.
Another house to see belonged to Pierre Berton, the author of the Klondike book Nancy’s been reading. He actually grew up in Dawson City across the street from the Jack London cabin.
We had lunch at the Jack London Grill at a hotel that looked like one from around 1900.
Later, we drove out to see a gold dredge to get a stamp in our book. It’s really a huge floating factory that digs up gravel, spins it to separate out the gold, and then deposits the gravel behind itself. It keeps itself floating in a pond and keeps moving the pond up the creek, and therefore itself, too. Fascinating! It was closed for tours when we got there though.
On the way back, we saw beaver ponds and an industrious beaver very near the road, Jan. Back in town, we hit the gift shops and an ice cream shop. The main street, Front Street, has small, colorful buildings lining one side, and the river is on the other. Back in the day, the docks would have been bustling with people and loads of goods and steamships and any assortment of other boats that could get there.
After our tour, back at the camper, we saw the first grasshopper we’d seen on the whole trip! Jodie returned our call and said that she was delighted that we were the first to wish her a happy birthday, since her birthday isn’t until tomorrow! Who knows what day it is when you’re far up in the Yukon?
Besides, she got mixed up on Rich’s birthday.
It was a good day, but we’re still full of questions. Tomorrow will be interesting!
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Janet
non-member comment
Rich, you should have borrowed the park guy's book and performed a definitive reading!!!!