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THE PLAY BY PLAY

Dawson City here we come.  Klondike bound (with a whole lot more comfortable gear than the original miners who came here in 1898!) .

We left Whitehorse well provisioned with water, fuel, and food, twizzlers, turtle chips (thanks Kelly B, I have been rationing them), and moose buns.  No, I did not run into the wrong end of a large herbivore, Heidi kindly gave me the end of the moose steaks and I had the end of the home made buns that mom gave me before I left home.  The drive to Dawson was uneventful (just how I like my drives) and beautiful.  The Wrong Lake fire had been causing problems on the highway North of Pelly Crossing and they had been taking people through with pilot cars when it was safe.  I am not sure how happy I would have been following a pilot car through a fire and smoke so one could hardly see the tail lights on the car ahead.  Fortunately, by the time we headed North it was away from the highway and they had it contained in the area. There wasn’t even much smoke.  There were places where the fire had jumped the road and the trees were burned right to the shoulders on both sides but I only saw one small bit of flame which looked to be a controlled burn pile. I was really glad not to have been driving through with a pilot car with things on fire near the road.   It was interesting to see the burn pattern in the trees with some not burned, others right beside then nothing but charred sticks, pieces of grass still green immediately beside patches of black charred dirt. I can’t imagine how any of them end up surviving, given the heat and scope of the fire.  Huge thanks to the wildfire crews here in the Yukon, who were helped by crews from BC.

I have not seen a lot of wildlife so far.  I saw one moose cow and calf and a fair number of gophers… all of whom but one were still alive to run across the road again after I left. I suspect that the reason I am not seeing a lot of wildlife is that I still have to watch the road.  I missed one frost heave and maxed out my shocks with a great clunk so was busy watching for the inanimate road hazards more so than the animate ones.  I also wondered if the fire had simply caused a lot of the wildlife to decide that being elsewhere would be a good idea.  Other than where the fires were, the scenery was mostly trees that went on for miles, and mountains.  The trees are a mix of greens that make them look like god had been doing a paint by numbers canvas… green # 3 to the left in small patches, green # 6 in lines across the middle of the mountains,  green # 2 in large patches along the bottom of the mountains, green # 8 along the creeks and rivers.

Dawson as a launch/landing pad was a great stay.   I had 3 nights before I headed North at a place called “The Dawson Bunkhouse, and 2 nights before I set off back to Whitehorse.  If you are ever in Dawson and looking for a place to stay it is the cheapest in town and the most friendly.  I opted for a private room with a shared shower/bathroom but they also have en suites.  It caters to a lot of folks who are headed to or from The Dempster.  I met a whole lot of bikers, including one who had been there a week when I arrived and was still there when I came back, waiting on a part for his bike which he had had to have towed off the highway.  There was also a fellow who stays there when he is in town who drives a semi on the graveyard shift to Mayo and back every night.  Then there was the afternoon shift desk clerk, Annie, who it turns out is a psych nurse from The Netherlands whose partner always wanted to go to Dawson and she decided she needed a break from nursing so away they went to Dawson, found jobs and had been there  6 months.  They are off to Australia next on working holidaymaker visas for young travellers.  I think we need to have “working granny” visas for retired old ladies who want to go somewhere and work a little/travel a little without having to mess about with immigration criteria and just want to make a bit of pin money to supplement their pensions (first cheque coming Aug 1).  Everyone there seemed to hang out on the front steps in the sun visiting and comparing notes.  I missed the Dawson City Music Festival but met one of the volunteers when she stopped me to ask if I might give her a ride to the airport the next morning as Annie said I might be willing.  As it turns out there is one cab in town, who charges $60 per person for the 15 minute, at most!, drive to the airport, and he had been snarky to her on the way in when she arrived.  It is that sort of place, kind of half travellers hostel and half motel.  I would stay there again in a heartbeat.

Dawson is an interesting town.  It is an overlap of gold rush history and present industry.  It reminded me of Wells/Barkerville but with the two overlapped.  It is a Parks Canada historical site, so all the buildings have to maintain at least an exterior look of the gold rush era, and the roads must all be dirt.  One of the tours I was on included the information that the material on the main road along the river cost a kings ransom as it needed to be sealed enough to be the main route through town and to the ferry across to West Dawson and on to the Top of the World Highway but also appear to be period appropriate.  However, it is also a current home to a couple of thousand people and industry (mainly mining and tourism).  Some of the buildings that look full on 1899 have modern services such as the employment outreach service, the liquore store, and the Yukon government services… which all share a building… you can pick up your booze and your drivers license at the same place.

I decided that I would avail myself of as many of the local tour and food options as I could.  I managed to take in almost all of the Parks Canada tours and eat in about 70% of the restaurants, although I ended up skipping a few in favour of returning to a couple of my favourites more than once.   The tours offered by Parks Canada are well researched and presented.  The guides are in period costume but are not playing characters or interpreting like the do in Barkerville (NO ONE interprets like they do in Barkerville!).

I started with a walking town tour to get a lay of the land and get oriented.  The tour was led by a woman who is a school teacher there in the winter and does tours in the summer.  I ended up on two of her tours and then she was also staffing the office at a third that I attended.  I had to convince her that I was not in fact stalking her.  I was struck by how short the gold rush actually was in the Klondike.  The initial strike was found in 1896.  Word got out locally and folks in the area promptly staked out most of the claims.  It was a year later that news reached the rest of the world and “the rush was on”.  They came through Alaska, overland, and over the glaciers and Dawson soon swelled to a town of 16,000 people, with 40,000 in the area.  This is mind boggling.  Like all the gold rushes, it was mostly men, and a small number of enterprising women, not all of whom worked in the “oldest profession”.   The local Indigenous community (Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in) community in the area had been living in the territory for millennia.  They were led by a wise man known as Chief Isaac who realized that they were  about to be overrun by a whole bunch of people who were not likely to do the community much good (for instance miners, needing places to live, entered into transactions with the local people… only problem was that the Indigenous people thought they were selling the cabins and the miners thought they were buying the land), so they packed up and moved down river lock stock and barrel to 40 mile.   Since that time the community is one of 11 Yukon Nations who have signed self government and land claim agreements with the Yukon and Federal Governments and are in the process of building housing on the original village site.

In Dawson across from the Parks Canada/visitor centre there is the Dänojà Zho Cultural Centre which provides education on the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in people and history and also provides space for their community members to gather and to work on traditional skills.  I was sad that I missed the Moosehide Gathering, and annual event attended by many Indigenous people and settlers from across the Territory where there is feasting, music, drumming, dancing and all manner of celebration at Moosehide, a traditional Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in camp 3 km downriver from Dawson.  Maybe I time my next visit for that gathering like I timed Inuvik this trip for the Great Northern Arts Festival.

The second tour I did was possibly the most interesting.  They have a tour called Red Serge, Red Tape.  This is a tour which looks at the impact of the gold rush and colonization on the Indigenous people of the local area, from the time before the gold rush to the 1970’s when the Yukon Native Brotherhood went to Ottawa  to start the process of negotiating the agreements that 11 of 14 Yukon nations now have in place for self governance and land claims.   Part of the tour is a ”conversation” between the local Anglican missionary and the Northwest Mounted Policeman, which is created verbatim from their letters to their respective head offices.   The tour was created in a partnership between Parks Canada and the local Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in community.  It is presented by a Parks Canada staff member with the permission of the local Indigenous community for the stories to be told.   It takes place in the commissioners home and ends with a fascinating art piece, a dress made of red duct tape with words pertaining to the residential schools and the impacts of colonization on the back  and words of healing and reconciliation on the front.  It ended with us putting words on black cut out ravens which will be used in an installation similar to the 1,000 origami cranes for peace.   The tour guide was kind enough to print me an article on the tour and how it was developed.  I am wondering if there is some opportunity in Barkerville for something similar using St. Saviours, with a partnership between the local Indigenous communities, Barkerville, and the Anglican church.

By 1899 half of the gold rush people had left and by the time the town was incorporated in 1902 there were less than 5,000 people there.    After the rush, the town was dwindling and the government wanted to keep the new territory alive, so along came industry in the form of Joe Boyle who created a dredging machine which could mine in places unsuitable for panning/pick and shovel mining.  He was granted a 45 square mile concession and began dredging…. Enter my tour at Dredge 4.  This gigantic machine very slowly dug up creek beds on one end, sifted all the rocks in a drum then sluice boxes, and tossed the rocks out the back.  This created the undulating piles of rock seen all around Dawson.  This tour was particularly good and the presenter offered a great mix of the technical information to allow us to understand how the Dredge worked but also the political and economic context for it’s creation and continued use.   Dredge No 4 was the largest to work the area and eventually sank in a pond in 1960 having been shoved over by a flood on the creek.  Parks Canada bought it and has now restored it.  If you are in Dawson it is well worth the drive out to it for the tour.  It is also situated up a road that has some of the current mines along side so you can see them for comparison.  Most of the mines in Dawson are small operations, family owned and have 20ish employees.  Some make some money, others less so.  One person who has the mine closest to town on that road is described as doing very well and is in the process of “moving a mountain”… which of course is what gives rise to some of the environmental and political debate around placer mining.  A debate which is visible in Dawson with businesses sporting signs that say “this business supports placer mining, placer mining supports this business”.

The next tour I did were a tour ogf the SS Keno, a sternwheeler that is beached in Dawson and provided a look at how folks came and went from Dawson more recently than the rush.  Again, the history was fascinating to hear.  Many of the captains of these boats were local Indigenous men who were the only ones who knew the shifting sand bars of the rivers well enough to navigate them.  One, Frank Slim, started by asking for a job on a boat then, when it ran aground, he showed the captain where he went wrong and eventually worked his way up to his own captaincy… but not before he had to give up his status card so he could go to school and then work, Indigenous people not being allowed to do such things, nor were they often thought capable.

Lastly I did a tour of the Palace Grand Theatre.   This one had a little less political content. The Place Grand was set up by a proprietor who had come from the Wild West shows in the US and who built a theatre based on the Paris opera houses, with three levels, boxes, a bar out front for gambling and drinking (necessitating a side door for ladies to come into the theatre without having to be exposed to such things).  Entertainers and dancers stayed in apartments upstairs at the theatre, with the headliners apartment decked out in very nice furniture and all the niceties of home.   Of course the highlight of the theatre tour was getting to see the backstage and finding the signatures of such luminaries as Damon Calderwood and Sara-Jeanne Hosie on the walls of the modern era dressing rooms from the 1990’s rather than the 1890’s.

Speaking of dancing girls, I did have to go and check out Diamond Tooth Gertie’s.  The current casino/bar/dancing girl show.  Overall it was OK.  The program is run by the Klondike Visitors Association and the funds go to local causes like crime prevention and housing, and provide for local employment.  I have always said I am too good at math to gamble, but I did contribute a bit by having dinner, and paying the entrance fee.   The schnitzel burger was really good and the wine both good and affordable.   The show was… odd. It did involve some can can and was hosted by “Gertie” but the two shows I saw (I did not stay up for the midnight one) were sort of can can, cross over with vegas show girl numbers (think flashing led’s in wing like costumes) and a budget cruise ship show.  It featured such classic gold rush era tunes as “9 to 5”. The whole thing seemed to have a through line of some sort of romantic machinations between Gertie and a male co-performer.  Musical theater school revue would be how I would describe it. In the end it was entertaining and the dancing was good and Gertie had a good voice. However, I think someone needs to talk to the door people who I heard telling potential visitors that they kept it “as close to as it would have been as we can” about the perils of false advertising.

The food at Gerties is good but not worth the $20 door fee you have to pay to get in to have it, and there are lots of other options.  The Riverwest Bistro makes a proper large americano, using 4 shots.  It was so cute each time I ordered one they checked to make sure I knew what I was getting into.  Then there was Cheechako’s (a term for someone who has spent a winter in the Yukon) Bakery which had a breakfast sandwich with proper crispy bacon and a home made English muffin.  Apparently it is so popular locally that the raven in the park where I sat down to have my breakfast determined that I should in fact feed it to him.  He got so vocal and in my face that I thought I was going to have to fight him for it.  He has a nasty beak but I had a kobo in my hand and I was not afraid to use it!  Lunch at Bonton and Company offered excellent local offerings for their charcuterie board and for dinner I ate at Aurora twice.  I went there the night before I headed up the Dempster (just in case I did not make it back, one always wants a good meal if it is their last) and went back for dinner the night I got back from the Dempster, to celebrate having survived (and had the Maple Bacon Whiskey Float for dessert which I promised by self on the return trip if I survived)!  I also have to give a shout out to Triple J’s where the food takes a while but is excellent (twice I arrived and was told that food would be an hour but, as they could serve me drinks while I waited,  I went for it).   The real kudos go to the young bartender/server/busperson who, when asked if they could make a negroni (to celebrate the great Susanna Bell-Irving’s birthday), responded “what’s in it?  If we have the things I can make it”.  I told her what went in it and she went away, scoured the back of the bar cupboards and came up with gin, Campari and dry white vermouth.  We decided to give it a go, and it was not half bad.  Full marks for her!

So, I think that is about all we managed to get up to in Dawson.  It is a happening little town, with music, arts, all kinds of outdoor pursuits and lots of friendly people.  In talking to people there, the winter population is a couple of thousand people and has been for 20+ years.  When I was offered a job there about 15 years ago they told me that it went down to just a few hundred.  I wonder what the last 15 years would have looked like if I had known that it was not a frozen ghost town in the winter (they even have 4 teams in their women’s hockey league).  Who knows maybe I can find some locum work once I retire and find out. 

Next up “The Great Gravel Getaway”.. but that is for another post.