Northern Trails And Tales

That’s 1898 when the gold rush hit Dawson City.  Today, it’s a funky town where the spirit of ‘98 lives on and you can pan for gold (Dave is doing it as I type),gamble, watch the powerful Yukon River roll by, see the folks in period costumes, and generally feel you’re in the middle of some old western.  The buildings is town range from restored boom era stuff to shacks that haven’t been painted since the gold rush ended.  But in an ironic way, despite its tough veneer, Dawson City is known for it’s writers as much as anything else.  Robrt Service, the “Bard of the Yukon” lived here and worked as a bank teller.  Jack London author of “Call of the Wild” and “White Fang” ,  both assigned reading for all of you in high school and completed by a very few, had a cabin for a while only a couple blocks away.  Pierre Burton of “Klondike” fame, and one of Canada’s truly famous writers, though not well known in the States, was born and lived here  much of his life.  This morning I visited the two cabins, though I am going back to the Jack London site tomorrow, and I listened to a reading of Robert Service’s poems.  They are really verses, and easy to memorize, much like Rudyard Kipling’s “Barrack’s Ballads.”  I can do a couple myelf, including “The Shooting of Dan McGrew.”  But don’t ask Charmi to ask me to recite it!…..  Dave has forwarded a bunch of great pictures of Dawson City to Dan (who is very busy right now) and hopefully some of them will make their way to the blog…  Dawson City is also known as ” a drinking town with a fishing problem.”  If this gets around, you can expect a second coming for this neck of the woods.  But it is truly an interesting place.  Outside town the rocks (tailings) that were harvested in the mammouth gold dredges,  are piled ten or more feet high for a couple miles on end.  To the north and east of downtown is a mountain called the “Dome.”  It’s a couple thousdand feet up but you can drive your car to the top (carefully) and Dave and I did this morning.  The views are superlative!. Still when the day comes to an end around here, and at this time of year the sun sets after 11:00 PM. if it weren’t for the tourists, they’d chop up the wooden sidewalks, make a big bonfire in the middle of the muddy streets, and have one last marshmellow roast….  Yesterday, we drove up from Whitehorse on the Klondike Road through caribou and grizzly country but weren’t fortunate enough to see either.  The highway is rather rough in spots, and in some places gravel, loose at that, as opposed to paved, but we covered the distance in fine shape.  The ride was long, pretty in places, but again pales in comparison to the earlier rides through the Rockies.  We stayed in Whitehorse only overnight and din’t see all that much of the town, but it is similar to Dawson City, though much larger, in that it’s sole function is to keep tourists entertained.  But it, too, got it’s start as a gold rush town.  It was at Whitehorse that the Klondike “stampeders” stayed to dry out after ascending the Yukon rapids and re-stock supplies.  So the tie to Dawson City is close— and many of the same stage shows are presented in both towns….   We’re here for one more day, so I’ll let you know if we find anything realy interesting.  In the meantime, from Robert Service:

                                          I wanted the gold and I sought it;

                                          I scrabbled and mucked like a slave.

                                          Was it famine or scurvey, I fought it;

                                          I hurled my youth into the grave.

                                          I wanted the gold, and I got it—

                                          Came out with a fortune last fall—

                                          Yet somehow life’s not what I thought it,

                                           And somehow the gold isn’t all…..