Dawson City, Yukon Territory

This is one of the hottest gold rush towns of the late 1890’s. It grew from a spot on the map to a population of over 30,000 when the word of gold discoveries made the news.


Dawson now has a population of 1,700 (+/- ) permanent residents with income split nearly equally between tourism and gold mining. That, of course swells with all the fair weather business owners and their help that come back each summer to help the tourist unload their pockets.

The town is beautifully restored and all new buildings have to be built to look like they would have in the early 1900’s. It is fairly authentic down to Diamond Tooth Gerties Gambling and Dance Hall. Here a tourist can lose his money at the tables or to the girls (except now the girls take your money as admission to the show). Sorry, this isn’t a picture of Gerties place, I guess I got so distracted by the girls that I forgot to take any pictures.

I did remember to take a picture in the “locals bar”. Slightly left of center there had been a local Indian sitting, but just before I took the picture he ducked out of sight (by falling out of his chair). The bartender had cut him off about 10 minutes earlier, seems as thought the bartender was a little late. The bartender then came over our table and said that tourists were welcome to come in and drink, but put the camera away. Seems as though this spot was the locals haven from the shutter clickin’ tourists.

Yukon gold is all placer gold, that is it is found as dust, flakes, or small nuggets in the gravel of stream beds. This is the kind of gold that the old miners used to pan for starting with the discovery of gold in 1897. When commercial (corporate) mining entered into the fray they used dredges like old number 4 here.

Dredging was a fascinating way to go for the gold, but it did scar the earth by leaving piles of rubble in its wake. You see this monster followed a stream bed by floating in a pond if its own making. It did this by eating up the ground in front of it, filtering out the loose gold, and then spitting the rocks out behind it. In this manner, it could move up a stream bed for miles, a few feet a day.

Whitehorse, Yukon Territory

I am finding that it is going to be impossible to keep up with postings to this blog. It is often several days between spots with Wifi and in the intervening period I been to several sights and taken 100 or more pictures. So for the foreseeable future, I am just going to hit the highest of the high spots. There is so much to see and not enough time to pass it along.

The Klondike II was the largest vessel to ever to steam the Canadian portion of the Yukon River. She was launched at Whitehorse in 1937 to replace the original SS Klondike which had sunk in 1936. The Yukon River is wide but not normally deep so the superstructure had been salvaged and used in the building of the II.



As was her predecessor, the II was a wood burnin’ (piled on the right) and beer haulin’ (stacked on the left) boat that served the mining towns along the Yukon River. The downriver trip from Whitehorse to Dawson City took about one day while the upriver return took 4 or 5. This may seem backwards if you are looking at a map since Dawson City is North of Whiotehorse, but the Yukon River runs Northerly.



Here we seen the Chief Engineer standing by the telegraph from the bridge. Well, that’s where he would have stood if the ship was still in use, however, this nice Historic Sites guide was standing in. Don’t the Canadians pick cute guides, so far most have been like this.




Dinner at the Captains table was by invitation, and from the first class list only. Second class stayed below decks with the cargo, even though their passage cost them as much as a months wages.