Street scene showing men and supplies, Dawson, Yukon, circa 1899

• Other Authors: University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections Division
• Format: Other/Unknown Material
• Language: unknown
• Subjects: Crowds > Yukon > Dawson; Streets > Yukon > Dawson; Wooden buildings > Yukon > Dawson; Freight and freightage > Yukon > Dawson; Dawson (Yukon) > Buildings; structures; etc; Yukon; Northwest Territories; Canada; Bonanza; Saloon; Dawson City; Sixtymile; Dawson; Nome; Alaska
• Online Access: http://cdm16786.contentdm.oclc.org:80/cdm/ref/collection/alaskawcanada/id/571

Filed in Yukon Territory Following the historic discovery of gold on Bonanza Creek in August of 1896, Dawson City grew out of a marshy swamp near the confluence of the Yukon and Klondike Rivers. In two years it became the largest city in Canada west of Winnipeg with a population that fluctuated between 30,000 and 40,000 people--not as large as Seattle, but much larger than Victoria or Vancouver. Its founder was Joe Ladue, a former prospector-turned-outfitter who was on the scene early. He knew from experience that merchants in gold camps prospered more than miners. He had a sawmill at the mining camp of Sixtymile and, while miners staked their claims, Ladue staked out a townsite instead. Anticipating the coming building boom, Ladue rafted his sawmill to the new townsite, which he had already named Dawson City, in honour of George M. Dawson, a government geologist who helped survey the boundary between Alaska and the Northwest Territories. Fortune smiled on Ladue. Everyone bought his lumber. He owned 160 acres, the government owned 22 acres, and his home doubled as Dawson's first saloon. He sold the first lots at prices ranging from $5 to $25 to $300. Town lots later fetched as much as $40,000 each. On paper, Ladue's fortune grew to $5 million. It happened fast, and the pace never let up as wave after wave of gold-seekers arrived. With them came the characters who transformed Dawson from a mining camp into one of the most bizarre cities in all of North America. Dawson's reputation as a booming, bawdy frontier town was largely the result of over-zealous writers. The rush was a phenomenon that they all hyped and exploited to sell their newspapers, guide books and magazines as gold fever swept the continent and abroad. Some reports contained accurate facts and descriptions while others were embellished, exaggerated or contained complete falsehoods. Later in their memoirs, many sourdoughs coloured their experiences and observations the way some miners 'coloured' their pokes of gold dust with brass filings. Corner lots sold for as much as $20,000. The price of Front Street lots along the river often went for more than $40,000--in a community of tents and log cabins that was built on a bog. There were miseries and tragedies along the various trails as thousands of stampeders rushed to the Klondike. Rags-to-riches stories of miners were popular subjects. Dawson had plenty of dance halls, saloons and brothels. It had tons of gold, vats of whisky, and it had gamblers and 'scarlet women' caught up in a riotous swirl of social activity with an international cast. Dawson could have been a wide-open town where 'anything goes', but it also had the North-West Mounted Police. The reality is that the period of chaos lasted only for a few months in 1898. Constables of the North-West Mounted Police earned $1.25 a day. They worked long and hard to maintain law and order through the rush. Dance-hall girls and prostitutes also worked long and hard, and they earned ten times more money. The North-West Mounted Police instilled law and order, which confounded many Americans. They expected the anarchy of American mining camps, and were shocked to learn that handguns were illegal in Dawson. Others openly resented having to behave themselves and obey Canadian laws. By the summer of 1898 the carnival atmosphere gave way to the raw reality of heat, mosquitoes, mud, filth, stench and disease. Horses got stuck in the muck of the streets and wagons sank up to their axles. Pedestrians waded knee-deep through what writer T.C. Down described as "this festering mass of putrid muskeg." Typhoid broke out in July and was rampant throughout the summer. The town's two small hospitals were filled to capacity. Just when order was being created out of all the turmoil, a major gold discovery was made in Nome, Alaska, and an exodus began. News had filtered into Dawson during the winter of 1898, prompting hundreds of gold-seekers to head out along the frozen river. Many more waited until the opening of navigation, and the first steamboats of 1899 left Dawson crammed full of passengers. As the Klondike gold rush subsided, the drain continued throughout the following two decades. A solid core of permanent residents refused to leave. They stayed on to supervise the town's continued, if sporadic, development. That same core exists there today, with a year-round population of about 2,000 people. To them, Dawson may be a city with a past, but its future still looks bright.