City of Gold, Part II

I said in my last blog that Dawson seemed a lot less hokey than Tombstone, Arizona, another legendary town from about the same time period and with a similar boom-bust mining heritage.  I couldn’t quite put my finger on the reason. Now I have it.  We felt we were missing something, so we stayed an extra couple of days to try to find it.  “It” was right at the visitor center.  We’d just missed it earlier.

We happened by about 8 pm, just as a walking tour of town was starting out in the bright sunshine.  So we joined in.  The 90-minute tour was billed as “Strange Things Done in the Midnight Sun,” in reference to a poem by Robert Service.  A young man in Victorian costume led it.  He was a hoot. 

It turns out that many of the buildings from Gold Rush Dawson were falling apart by the 50s.  So was Dawson. It had fallen upon hard times as mining slowed.  The Canadian parks service, Parks Canada, bought and preserved more than 40 of them. I had wondered earlier how Dawson could support a daily newspaper.  Turns out what appeared to be a paper was one of the historic buildings preserved, equipment and all.  “The great thing about Dawson is how far it was from anyplace else,” out guide explained.  So when a business failed, the owner couldn’t afford to ship it south and both buildings, furnishings and equipment were abandoned where they stood.  And got preserved by Parks Canada,

Our guide took us to the Post Office, the Dawson Daily News, Bank of British Canada, Billy Biggs Blacksmith shop and the restored bar at the Red Feather Saloon.  And told us stories about the times.

Parks Canada has staffed Dawson with a cadre of enthusiastic interpreters who host visitors at the visitors center, take tours and even act in plays.  We went to one at the Palace Grand Theater, a structure that far outstrips Tombstone’s Bird Cage Theater in size and elegance.  The interpreters had the audience participate in their Greatest Klondiker contest to pick the most influential person of the period.  

Klondike Kate assigned judges, and even a timer, and then had interpreters playing three famous characters from the gold rush period argue why the honor should fall to them.  Theater owner Arizona Charlie Meadows, an English teacher/reporter whose name I missed, (but it sounded a lot like "Faith Hill") and Mountie Superintendent Sam Steele argued back and forth with the audience peppering them withe questioning.  Marsha got to be a judge.  Kate had an Applause-O-Meter on stage which she said was scientifically tuned to measure votes cast in the form of wolf howls from the audience. Steele got the most howls and a nice “Klondike” sash to go over his red coat.  Hmmmm.  The mountie looked a lot like our guide from the walking tour.  Then everybody went out to the lobby and visited while they took photos of us all with the cast.  And gave us prints on the spot.  Pretty neat.  Nothing like that in Tombstone.

We did another Parks Canada walk with a lady who really knew how to pan gold.  She’d done it for a living; testing out core samples being drilled at a claim to find the most likely places to mine.  She showed me how to shake the gold to the bottom of the pan while flipping out the rocks with water.  It was a lot harder than it looked and the water was cold.  She also explained how claims were, and are today, registered, how big they can be, etc.

Parks Canada isn’t alone in this effort.  The Dawson City Museum has terrific interpreters, too.  Two of them showed us how a rocker box was used to separate gold from gravel and sand on hillside claims where you don’t have unlimited water. 

They salted a bucket of sand and gravel with two real gold nuggets then sluiced away.  The rocker picked up both of them immediately.  Then they showed us how the gold got melted down into bars.  We got to hold a freshly melted ounce of gold worth about $1400. It was bigger than I expected.  It would take quite a few nuggets to make an ounce.  Darn.

 Next door the same nice young lady from the museum showed us their collection of antique locomotives and explained how they were used by the Klondike Railroad to haul ore down from Bonanza and Eldorado Creeks on narrow gauge tracks. Nothing ever went back south. The history stayed here.

Finally, we ended up at the Nugget jewelers, where Marsha and I bought matching wedding rings made of gold nuggets from local Klondike streams.  [Photo on that when I can pry it out of the internet]. 

Ok, so now I feel like we did Dawson. But it took five days to do it right.

In my next installment I promise to tell you about our trip across Top of the World Highway (whew!) and then our upcoming visit to the all-nighter (well, all dayer) Midnight Sun Festival in Fairbanks where they have music, food and vendors in an all-night event (there I go again) on the longest day of the year—24 hours of daylight.  Don’t try THAT at home.

John and Marsha

(All photos copyrighted 2013 by John B. Taylor)