Dawson, Yukon

Dawson Creek, Yukon
We spent the day as tourist in Dawson Creek, Yukon and this is quite a pleasant town. Gold was first discovered here on what is now Bonanza Creek about 5 miles from the present town. The town was set up away from the claims and was about 30,000 miners after the gold was discovered for a very few years. Most left broke.
We took a walking tour and most of the buildings are being restored as this has been it looks like taken over by Canadian Parks. The mortuary is still there, the post office, the two banks, the telegraph office, the houses of ill repute.
Also in Dawson are Jack London’s cabin and Robert Frost’s cabin. Both were either writers or poets of the Northern Gold rush experience.
At night we took in a show at Diamond Tooth Gertie’s famous saloon and dance hall. The show was good and the can can dancers did a nice job. Hard to imagine what it must have been like in this remote area in 1898. Cold winter -40 below and no mail or any outside sources of news for months.
The miners led a lonely life and few achieved any wealth. Even today Dawson has a population of about 2000 persons in winter. The school had a graduating class of from 8-12 students and is still in the same original building.
The town is nice from a tourist point of view in that they still maintain wooden boardwalks and dirt streets and all of the buildings new or old must have the same look on the outside.
We are at the Provincial campground on one side of the river across from the town and a ferry takes us over to the town. It runs on about a 15 minute schedule and is free. In Sept they haul the ferry out of the water and there is no road service until mid November when the Yukon river freezes over and then there is an ice road across until about April when the spring breakup occurs and they can again use the ferry. So, for 6-8 weeks twice a year you do not get across the river by auto. But then the road on the other side of the river closes all winter long.
Well that is all for tonight.
Lorne