Dawson and Klondike Gold

When the infamous Soapy Smith ruled Skagway, one of the many scams he used to separate the arriving gold stampeders from their money was his telegraph. He charged what would have been several months of a normal wage back home just to send one telegram from his “telegraph office,” where the wire ran no further than out the back door.  We suspect that Soapy is now running the Internet in the Yukon.  It doesn’t seem to work.

The “free” Internet at our Whitehorse campground turned out to be free because it worked only sporatically. Before leaving Whitehorse Friday we spent two hours at a Starbucks trying to send out a message telling you that we’d posted our Whitehorse blog the day before. It wouldn’t send.  We finally got away so late in the day that we made it no further than a roadside rest stop about 100 miles short of Dawson. 

The scenery continues to amaze.  This is the Five Fingers rapids (above), where paddle wheeler steamers had to fight their way upstream against a fast current caused by the narrows.  The only way they could get through was to use a cable from a cliff to winch themselves through the tiny gap on the far left, between the cliff ashore and the first island on the left.

We followed the Yukon River all day, and about 8 pm camped beside it and its primary mosquito herd.  We moved out early the next morning without ever having left the bus.  Morning is a relative term up here, where it gets dark sometime after 1:30 am and light again before 3 am. If it gets dark at all.  We stopped for breakfast about two miles down the road at the Moose Creek Lodge. 

Everyone there, staff, guests and owners, spoke German.  Guten Morgan!  We had a good breakfast and got away just ahead of the Holland America bus, which returned from a tour of something with a full load of, you guessed it, German tourists.  Or Swiss, maybe.

We hit Dawson about noon on Saturday and went right to the library, fearing it might close for the weekend.  It had Internet that worked!  I found that the message that wouldn’t send from Starbucks in Whitehorse must have sent itself some hours later.  Then, we went in search of a barbershop. 

A nice Italian-speaking woman cut my hair for about $30 and told me about the town.  It has somewhere around 2000 permanent residents and a bigger bunch of seasonal folks who get the heck out of town before winter hits.  Including her. Apparently, in the winter one night in town seems like it last forever.  Maybe because dawn comes in six months or so.

Dawson sits right on the Yukon River, where the Yukon comes together with a smaller river called the Klondike. The Klondike was in all the papers about 120 years ago when wealth beyond imagination was available on several of its smaller tributaries simply for the scoping. Provided you were lucky enough to file a claim while you still could get one.

My grandfather, Pop, wasn’t that lucky.  He arrived on the frozen river in the winter of 1897 driving a dog team.  He was too late before he even left home.  As were the other 60,000 stampeders who arrived at Skagway or Dyea after he did, and the 20,000 of them who actually made it to Dawson.

Or were they?

We have learned that people like Pop, who didn’t get to stake a claim of their own, earned an average of $150 a day working someone else’s claim.  To put that into perspective, a clerk or accountant in San Francisco earned $300 a year at that time. So Pop could have earned a whole year’s income every two days!  If he stashed his gold (the owners paid them daily by scooping up nuggets off the ground) he may have come home a very wealthy 20-year-old.

He always told me that when I was old enough, we’d come to Dawson together and “paint the town red.”  Sadly, he died when I was eight. Tomorrow I’m going to find a hardware store and check out paint swatches. I think it would look nice in a tomato red.

Marsha and I drove up the road along Bonanza Creek on Sunday, just on the south edge of town, and saw what happened since the boom of ‘97. Gold mining got mechanized, and huge dredges were brought in to dig the ground down to bedrock and rip the gold out by the ton.  The creek is still there, more or less, but dredges have chewed it all up in the years since the stampeders did the work by hand.  The claims are still active.  With gold running $1600 an ounce, there is a lot of activity on the creeks.

There is a free claim on the once fabulously rich Eldorado Creek. It is at a former town site where once 4000 people lived and worked until the dredges arrived.  It’s now owned by the visitor bureau and available to anyone to pan.  You get to keep anything you find.  We went equipped with a pan and hand pick.  It wasn’t enough. 

I dug up some dirt across the road and brought it back to the creek to pan out.  I found that while I could wash the dirt out pretty easily, there was so much small rock that didn’t wash out I panned the same load for an hour and wasn’t any further along.  After knee surgery I can’t squat in the stream, either.  And the banks of the stream were pretty steep, so I had no place I could easily perch a stool.  Hmmmm.  Ok, I need some instructions.  Maybe tomorrow I’ll find someone who can explain the process.  It is a lot harder than it sounds.

The big problem is that I can’t tell gold from mica or pyrite or any of the other glittering rocks on my pan. Everything here seems to sparkle. Including the dust in my pan that I keep washing away with each swirl of water. It is probably real gold dust, but I have no idea how to salvage it.

We did drive around a 60-mile loop to King Soloman’s Dome, which appears to be the source of all the gold found on creeks running down from it.  No one has ever found this "mother lode" but they keep looking.  The claims numbers went into the dozens as we topped the heights.

This (right) is an old roadhouse near the top of the dome.  Lower on we found this second roadhouse sitting on a claim (below right).

We stopped back in town of some supplies.  The local grocery has Borax on its shelves.  Imagine that.  I haven’t seen Borax since Ron Reagan quit selling it on TV in the fifties.  And it features one other very imaginative breakfast cereal you don’t see at home. My reaction was, well, Holy Crap!

We have been staying at the Klondike River Yukon Government campground about 10 miles east of town.  The commercial campgrounds here make Walmart parking lots look spacious. We have only a few neighbors and every night the rangers bring around free firewood.  But since the sun never sets here , sitting around a fire in broad daylight doesn't have much appeal.

The way back to the US from Dawson is via a ferry that runs across the Yukon.  It is amazing to watch as it pulls away from shore, gets swept downstream by the swift current, then fights its way back to the other shore.  There are no docks.  The ferry drops its ramp on the dirt and uses engine power to stay in place while you drive off.  That will be fun with the motorhome.

From there it is 67 miles to Alaska, across the Top Of The World Highway, said to run waaaayy up high along a long ridge.  It’s unpaved.  It may be an adventure.