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Tuesday 17th June Dawson
Up at 8.45am visiting the Klondike Historical Gold Rush area in Dawson.
First stop was the Discovery Claim which was the birthplace of the Klondike Gold Rush. There is a plaque bolted to a large boulder honouring the mining claim. Nearby, in the trees, are hiking trails leading to Bonanza Creek. Near the creek are some picnic tables and some wooden mining artifacts consisting of a mining shaft and drainage pipe.
16th August, 1896 An American prospector named George Carmack, his wife Kate Carmack (Shaaw Tláa), her brother Skookum Jim (Keish) and their nephew Dawson Charlie (Káa Goox) were travelling through the area south of the Klondike River. Resting by the side of a small stream that the miners called Rabbit Creek, one of them noticed a metallic glitter in the creek. They had found gold. The next morning, August 17, they staked their claims. Carmack took credit for the find, staking the discovery claim — the first claim on the creek — which entitled him to a second claim. They registered the claims at Forty Mile on September 24, within the 60 days required by mining regulations. The closest mining recorder was at Forty Mile, 80 km away.
News of their discovery raced down the Yukon River. Miners abandoned their claims on Fortymile and Sixtymile creeks and Circle City, rushing to the Klondike and staking any ground they could find on the stream — soon renamed Bonanza — and its tributaries, as well as other creeks in the district. A small townsite, Dawson City, started to develop at the confluence of the Yukon and Klondike rivers. It was a year before the news reached the outside world. The gold that was mined that first winter couldn't be shipped out until June, 1897, when the navigation season opened. The miners and their rich cargo travelled downriver from Dawson to St. Michael, at the mouth of the Yukon River, where they boarded ocean steamers Excelsior and Portland for the journey down the west coast. The Excelsior arrived in San Francisco on July 17 with a cargo of half a million dollars in gold, igniting public interest.
Winter of 1897, 20,000 Stampeders spent winter at Bennett and 10,000 at Lindeman building boats and waiting for the Yukon River to thaw and break up. In May 1898 7,000 vessels left Bennett for Dawson. In the summer of 1898, 50,000 people arrived at Dawson and the Klondike Goldfields and by August that year most gave up and went home. In the winter of 1898 gold was found in Nome and this signalled the end of the Klondike gold rush. Between 1898 and 1900 the White Pass and Yukon Route railroad was built from Skagway to Whitehorse.
We then moved onto the site of Dredge No 4 which is the largest wooden hulled bucket dredge in North America. This dredge was built in 1912 and it moved along in a pond of its own making, digging gold bearing gravel at a rate of 22 buckets per minute. It operated 24 hours per day from April to November and unearthed nine tons of gold grossing 8.6 million dollars over 46 years.
We then visited Claim No 33. We did some gold panning here and the small specks of gold that Pete and I found had it made into a necklace. Back to Dawson and we headed to Sour Dough Joes Cafe for lunch. After lunch we visited the information centre and had a guided walking tour of Dawson at 1pm. We collected a Yukon passport here as a souvenir and if you collect enough stamps from selected locations you can go into a draw and win prizes. The guided walking tour to us to the Old Post Office, the Bank, Rubys Place, the old Printing Store and the Red Feather Salon. It was raining heavily by the time we finished out walk at 2.45pm. Les picked us up in the coach and took us to Robert Services' cabin where a volunteer dressed in period costume read us some of his stories including Bessy Boil and My Cabin. Robert Service immortalised the gold rush and brought Canadian literature to a worldwide audience.
Pete and I decided to walk back into Dawson, even though it was still raining. We walked past Jack Londons' cabin and interpretive museum. We visited Front Street, took some photos of the SS Keno, the last sternwheeler to run between Dawson and Whitehorse, picked up some groceries then back to the hotel to pack, recharge our camera batteries and meet Lee and Tony for pre dinner drinks. We went back to Gerties and had another turkey sandwich and paid the slots for a while. Pete had a small win!!
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