Dawson City, Canada – Home of The Gold Rush

Welcome to Dawson City, Home of the Gold Rush and the most Northerly Town we visit on our Yukon road trip!

Rolling into Dawson City after our long drive, Rosie couldn’t believe what she was seeing.  The whole town is surrounded for miles by the lunar landscape of snaking, gravel mounds left over from the aftermath of dredging for gold through the ages, but the town itself, it was like stepping back in time!  Oh yes, Dawson City lives and breathes the rich history of its past and, with it being designated as a National Historic Site, its appearance has remained largely unchanged since those heady days of the 1900s.

The roads in the town are unsealed, smooth,and clay like in colour and texture, after rain, the surface shines in the sun and sticks to everything!   The colourful, wooden buildings of downtown are in a line on Main Street that face the Klondike River and straggle out a couple of tight small blocks, in typical small town grid like precision as straight as arrows.

A series of wooden boardwalks or footpaths lace the town and are handy for not getting the sticky roading surface on your shoes and clothes.  Outside every store and building is a series of shoe brushes to scrub the inevitable worst off before you enter. It still makes no difference as everyone of those shops still has a trail of muck leading from the doorway and tapering off the further you get inside.

Rosie couldn’t believe how quiet it seemed as we slowly drove into Dawson, queue cowboy music and a tumble weed rolling down the main street and the scene has been well and truly set.

When Gold was discovered in 1896 by the handful of prospectors working here, a town site was staked at the mouth of the Klondike River and Dawson City was born!  It boomed almost overnight with 6,000 people arriving before winter that first year and thousands more following after the first ships with Klondike Gold arrived in American ports and word got out.  The Gold Rush of 1898 was underway!

Owing to the fact that only the most adventurous, determined and fevered explorer, prospectors and entrepreneurs completed the trip to the Klondike, Dawson City was a dangerous and exciting place to be at the turn of the century when the population boomed to 30,000 at the height of the Gold Rush.

Brothels (the last which closed in 1961) and gambling halls sprung up in the wake of newly discovered fortunes, eager to take gold from the miners as quickly as they could unearth it.  During Dawsons short lived boom, its collection of muddy tents and ramshackle cabins were replaced by elaborate hotels, residences, churches and saloons as wealthier residents and savvy business people took up shop.  These shops and buildings in some cases were literally thrown up overnight to cope with demand from the influx of people.

A couple of years after the initial strike and the easy gold was stripped from the land people started leaving, chased also by Typhus outbreaks which saw the population diminish further as people died and fled the area.  By 1902, when Dawson was properly incorporated as a town…there were fewer than 5,000 residents.  Today, Dawson City is home to 3,000 residents in the summer dropping to 1,300 in the winter.

The population increases in Dawson in the summer due to summer tourist work and seasonal logging and mining. The summer season is short and lasts from May to September. At the end of September a lot of restaurants, tour companies and bars shut down for the winter, the mines close and the summer workers leave town.  It is a town today where only the hardy, and slightly crazy…yes, Rosie is speaking literally…survive the brutal seven month winter where most of it is in perpetual darkness, thick, sitting snow and temperatures as low as -40c below. The lowest temp ever recorded in Dawson was -58c in 1947!  Rosie couldn’t even start to imagine what it would be like surviving a winter here in that cold.  Imagine, the first wave of Gold Rush prospectors did it in tents!

Rosie and The Operator went on a historical walking tour on our first evening to orientate ourselves with the town and its background. Our tour guide was fantastic and totally made the town come alive!

Our first stop was the bank,  every gold rush town needs a bank to exchange gold for cash.  The bank would them melt the gold into bars for easier handling and transportation. The wooden town of Dawson City burnt down to the ground three times in the first two years of the gold rush…..only to be rebuilt, entirely again, within days….this is the third bank….which still stands today…the first bank, was a tent.

After the town burnt for the third time, in 1900, Dawson appointed a fire inspector. They did their best to fireproof the town. They lined the exterior of buildings with corrugated iron. Made stoves and fires be a certain distance from walls and then line the wall with tin behind the fires….they even had a huge warehouse outside the town where copies of all important deeds, banking ledgers and city paperwork was kept. It wasn’t needed. Dawson never had another fire, hence why it all looks so original today.

Every shop in town however, had a set of scales and was happy to accept gold in any form as payment for goods and services, as was the case with  The Red Feather Saloon which was an original Gold Rush bar. Men during the gold rush had a pouch called a ‘poke’ that they carried their gold in.  Pokes were thrown onto the bar regularly to pay for drinks and minor spillage of gold sometimes occurred, so much so that when the bar was removed to renovate the saloon in the 1960s a line of gold dust was found around the edge of the removed bar where gold had been dropped and fallen through the cracks.  True!

Come inside The Post Office, Dawson never had one before the Gold Rush, it was built out of necessity when bags of mail started arriving on the paddle boats from the miners families. The bags were tipped out on the docks and anyone expecting mail sorted through the pile till you found your envelope.  This was not efficient and tidy and Canadians, even back then, like efficient and tidy so the Post Office was built.

The Dawson Daily News was one of many newspapers in operation during the gold rush.  Reporting back to the rest of the world the accounts of the riches discovered and also printing newsworthy articles for the town folk on single sheets of paper twice a day.  The paper was in operation from within the first month of the Gold Rush up until 1953 when the paper finally closed….due to nothing newsworthy every happening in this town to report…as read the final obituary on the death of the newspaper from the sole employee left.   The printing presses on site are the originals and the building is closed up except for walking tours and special printing emporiums they host here using these antique machines.

This is Fred, our guide for the night, he is a historian who works for Parks Canada whose govt organisation maintains the heritage buildings in the town. He is standing out side the cabinet makers in town who quickly diversified into coffin making as more people were dying in the Gold Rush aftermath from epidemic outbreaks….than needed new furniture. He then became the self designated undertaker, coroner and embalmer, all self taught of course like a true entrepreneur.

The undertaker had a big problem to overcome like these old wonky, listing and leaning buildings below. Permafrost.  The top layer of soil is normal, under that is permafrost, a frozen layer that never thaws in this climate, until it does, mostly from the heat of the buildings sitting on top. When the permafrost melts the soil and the moisture mix, soften and become boggy, allowing the old foundations, which normally sat on top of the hard, frozen permafrost, to sink and the houses to tip.

The undertakers problem with permafrost was that it was impossible to bury people at any time of the year except for summer so he would anticipate the need and pre dig holes in the cemetery that waited for occupants.  If an epidemic scuppered his predictions, as many as possible would go in one hole, or, the undertaker would stack the bodies in the shed at the back of the mortuary and wait till summer.  The bodies would keep by freezing naturally in the cold weather.

Because most of the buildings were thrown up very quickly in Dawson a lot of foundations are suffering because of the permafrost. Most are being restored, the wonky ones above are there to show us history as it unfolds naturally.

This is just a beautiful wreck, just sitting there empty since the 1970s, and the church which is currently being given a new lease of life and undergoing restoration after sitting a little wonky for decades.

Most though are straight and true and these buildings are quite magnificent!

This street has had its foundations redone and a face lift to keep the buildings standing for another couple of hundred years. It is almost too perfect looking compared to the rest of Dawson, and kind of makes the town feel a bit fake when it’s not.  At the same time they are replacing the water mains, check out the insulation that surrounds the pipes to help it stop freezing!

Most of the cars have a three pin plug hanging out the front of the grills connected to a block heater so they can be plugged in while the car is not in use to keep the engine oil and coolant warm and to trickle charge the battery to keep it working in the freezing winter. Most public car parks, hotels and employee car parks had out door plugs available to keep the cars alive.

On the outskirts of town The Commissioners House was built in 1901 to show a strong government and lawful presence in the Gold Town, showing the world that Dawson City was here to stay.  The town stayed, but the Commissioner left Dawson City in 1916. His house though is beautiful.

The General Store is the building on the left. It is the hub of modern Dawson City today and houses the supermarket inside as it has done since 1989. It is the only supermarket in town and absolutely everything gets road freighted into Dawson. There are no chain stores here or fast food outlets. Everything is either local or trucked in.  Everyone seems to know everyone in this store and people linger to gossip and catch up on the news.  The hot topic is the pending winter and who is staying and who is leaving town before the freeze.

The everyday streets where the residents of Dawson live on are dirt as well. Huge fuel oil tanks sit outside every house and that is what predominantly heats the houses in winter. Some houses also have log burners.  Most of the houses are quite big, and boxy and most have yards in various states of untidiness with junk seemingly strewn everywhere waiting for the snow to cover it and make it tidy…funny how Rosies pics don’t show this though.

Rosie and The Operator are staying off main street at the Triple JJJ. Our hotel was one of the few that stays open over winter and it has a great wee saloon bar and a fab restaurant frequented a lot by locals.  We are all settled in and know we are going to enjoy our time here in this interesting small town.  The nights are drawing in and it is already getting cold as soon as the lukewarm sun leaves the sky, Rosie needs abit of help to warm up whilst her heating kicks in.

Tomorrow we are going to explore a couple of Gold Rush Cemeteries, one houses the hardy prospectors of the day and their stories and another is quite unique, the forgotten graveyard of the mighty paddle boats that plied the Yukon River during this era.  Plus, we have a great night out and The Operator joins an exclusive Dawson City Club.