THE CAPITAL OF THE YUKON
I write of Dawson, the capital of Yukon Territory, the metropolis of
the Klondike, and for years the richest mining camp of the world. In
the height of its glory it had more than thirty thousand inhabitants,
and in the region about there have been more than sixty thousand
people. To-day the population of the town is less than one thousand.
With the gradual exhaustion of the gold the population is decreasing,
and it may be only a question of years when the precious metal will all
have been taken from the ground and the chief reason for a city here
will have disappeared. One of the great hopes of the people is in the
discovery of rich quartz mines or the mother lode from which all the
loose gold came. The hills have been prospected in every direction, but
so far no such find has been made.
Dawson lies just where it was located when gold was discovered. The
houses still stand on the banks of the Klondike and Yukon rivers where
the two streams meet. The town is laid out like a checkerboard, with
its streets crossing one another at right angles. They climb the sides
of the hills and extend far up the Klondike to the beginning of the
mountains of gravel built up by the dredgers. The public roads are
smooth, and the traffic includes automobiles and heavy draft wagons.
There are more than fifty automobiles in use, and two hundred and
fifty-five miles of good country highways have been made by the
government in the valleys near by.
Dawson has been burned down several times since the great gold rush,
and vacant lots covered with the charred remains of buildings are still
to be seen. Most of the stores are of one story, and log cabins of all
sizes are interspersed with frame houses as comfortable as those in the
larger towns of the States. Scores of the homes have little gardens
about them, and not a few have hothouses in which vegetables and
flowers are raised under glass. Empty houses and boarded-up stores here
and there show the decline in population.
This is the seat of government of Yukon Territory and the district
headquarters of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Here the judges hold
court, and here the commissioner has his residence. The government
house is a large yellow frame building with a wide porch. In front of
it is a beautiful lawn, and beds of pansies border the walk that leads
to the entrance. At the rear are gardens filled in summer with the most
delicious vegetables grown in the Yukon, and near by are the hothouses
that supply the tomatoes and cucumbers for the commissioner’s table.
Yukon Territory is next door to Alaska, and its resources and other
characteristics are so similar that it might be called Canadian Alaska.
Its southern boundary is within thirty miles of the Pacific Ocean, and
the territory extends to the Arctic. It is a thousand miles long and
in places three hundred miles wide, and it comprises almost as much
land as France. It is one third the size of Alaska from which it is
separated by the international boundary, which crosses the Yukon River
about one hundred miles from here.
The Dawson of to-day has none of the earmarks of the Dawson of the
past. It has now several churches, a city library, radio concerts,
women’s clubs, sewing societies, and afternoon teas. The palatial bars
where beer cost three dollars a bottle and champagne twenty dollars
a pint have long since disappeared. The hymns of the Salvation Army
have taken the place of the songs of the dance halls, and in the hotel
where I am staying is a Christian Science lecturer who is drawing large
crowds.
The order on the streets is as good as that of any town in New England,
and educationally and socially the place is the equal of any of its
size in the States. There is still a large proportion of miners, but
most of them are connected with the great dredging and hydraulic
operations, and the independent prospectors are few. There are many
business men and officials, as well as lawyers and doctors. Now and
then Indians come in to sell their furs to the traders. The stores have
large stocks of goods and handle most of the trade of the Yukon and
some of that of eastern Alaska.
For the first few years after gold was discovered in the Klondike
everything was paid for in gold dust or nuggets, and the store-keepers
had their gold scales, upon which they weighed out the price of their
goods. Every miner then carried a gold poke, and paid for a cigar or a
drink with a pinch of dust. To-day the only place where one can use any
coin less than a quarter is at the post-office, and there the change is
in stamps.
Visiting a grocery store, I saw cantaloupes selling at seventy-five
cents apiece, chickens at three dollars, and eggs at a dollar a dozen.
These are the summer prices. In the heart of midwinter, when the hens
go on a strike, eggs soar to five dollars a dozen. In early days they
sometimes sold for eighteen dollars, and were cheap at one dollar
apiece. In a butcher shop hard by I saw salmon that had been brought
seventeen hundred miles up the Yukon, and the finest of porterhouse
steaks. As I have said, the beef has to be brought in from southern
Canada or the States, and the freight rates are so high that the
butchers cannot afford to import skinny animals. Indeed, I am told that
the transportation charges are quite as much as the first cost of the
meat.
“All game here is cheap,” said a butcher I talked with. “We sell moose
and caribou steaks and roasts at twenty or twenty-five cents a pound.
As to bear, the people won’t eat it; it is too tough. In the winter
we have plenty of caribou. The Indians kill deer in great numbers and
bring in the hind quarters, peddling them about from house to house.
The fore parts of the animals they feed to their dogs. This country
is also full of grouse and ptarmigan, and any one can get game in the
winter if he will go out and hunt for it.”
The commissioner of the territory tells me that the Yukon is one of the
best big game regions of the North American continent. All shooting is
restricted and licensed, and, so far, there is no indication of the
animals dying out. There is an abundance of moose, mountain sheep,
and mountain goats, and ten thousand caribou may sometimes be seen
moving together over the country. Such a drove will not turn aside for
anything. One can go moose hunting in an automobile within twenty-five
miles of Dawson. The moose are among the largest of the world. Their
horns have often a spread of five or six feet, and it is not uncommon
to kill caribou with antlers having more than thirty points.
At a drug store I paid a quarter for a bottle of pop. The proprietor,
a pioneer gold miner, had a store in Pittsburgh before he came to hunt
for gold in the Klondike. He did fairly well mining, but decided there
was more money in drugs.
“My prices are small, compared with what I got when I first started
business,” he said. “I used to charge a dollar for a mustard plaster,
a dollar for a two-grain quinine pill, and fifty cents an ounce for
castor oil. I sold my Seidlitz powders at a dollar apiece, and flaxseed
for thirty-two dollars a pound. The latter was used largely to make a
tea for coughs and colds. I remember a cheechako, or tenderfoot, who
came in during those days. He asked me for ten cents’ worth of insect
powder. I looked him over and said: ‘Ten cents! Why man, I wouldn’t
wrap the stuff up for ten cents.’ The cheechako turned about and
replied: ‘You needn’t wrap it up, stranger; just pour it down the back
of my neck.’”
Speaking of the old-time prices, I hear stories everywhere as to the
enormous cost of things in the days of the gold rush. All tinned
vegetables were sold at five dollars a can, and a can of meats cost a
third of an ounce of gold dust or nuggets. At one time, the usual price
of all sorts of supplies and provisions was one dollar a pound. One man
tells me he bought an eight-hundred-pound outfit in Dawson for eight
hundred dollars. It consisted of provisions and supplies of all kinds,
shovels and nails costing the same as corn meal and rice. At that time
flour sold for fifty dollars a sack, firewood for forty dollars a cord,
and hay for from five hundred to eight hundred dollars a ton.
[Illustration: Many who live in Dawson in winter spend their summers in
little cabins in the country or on the islands in the river. Some of
them grow flowers and vegetables for the Dawson market in gardens along
the river.]
[Illustration: Though not many degrees south of the Arctic Circle, the
official residence of the Commissioner of Yukon Territory has in summer
green lawns, shade trees, and beds of flowers that thrive in the long
hours of sunlight.]
[Illustration: Dawson is so far north on the globe that some days
in midsummer have only one hour of darkness. This photograph of Mr.
Carpenter and a miner’s pet bear was taken after ten o’clock at night.]
I heard last night of Jack McQuestion, who had a log cabin store
at Forty Mile, a camp on the Yukon. One day a miner came in and
asked for a needle. He was handed one and told that the price was
seventy-five cents. The man took the needle between his thumb and
finger, looked hard at it, and then said to McQuestion:
“Say, pard, ain’t you mistaken? Can’t you make it a bit cheaper? That’s
an awful price for a needle.”
“No,” said the storekeeper, “I’d like to if I could, but great snakes,
man, just think of the freight!”
Another story is told of a miner who wanted to buy some sulphur. The
price asked was five dollars a pound.
“Why man,” said he, “I only paid five cents a pound for it in Seattle
last month.”
“Yes, and you can get it for nothing in hell,” was the reply.
Here in Dawson the days are now so long that I can read out-of-doors at
any time during the twenty-four hours. I can take pictures at midnight
by giving a slight time exposure, and in the latter part of June one
can make snapshots at one in the morning. It is not difficult to get
excellent photographs between nine and eleven P. M. and at any time
after two o’clock in the morning. The sun now sets at about eleven
P. M. and comes up again about two hours later. The twilight is bright
and at midnight the sky is red. Last night I saw a football match that
did not end until after ten o’clock, and moving pictures were taken
near the close of the game.
I find that the light has a strange effect upon me. The sleepiness that
comes about bedtime at home is absent, and I often work or talk until
midnight or later without realizing the hour. The air is invigorating,
the long hours of light seem life-giving, and I do not seem to need as
much sleep as at home.
The weather just now is about as warm as it is in the States. The grass
is green, the trees are in full leaf, there are flowers everywhere, and
the people are going about in light clothing. The women go out in the
evening with bare arms and necks, and the men play football, baseball,
and tennis in their shirt sleeves. There are many bare-footed children,
and all nature is thriving under the hot twenty-two-hour sun of the
Arctic.
Many people here declare that they like the winters better than the
summers, and that they all--men, women, and children--thrive on the
cold. The pilot of the boat on which I came in from White Horse tells
me he would rather spend a winter on the Upper Yukon than at his old
home in Missouri. He says that one needs heavy woollen clothing and
felt shoes or moccasins. When the thermometer falls to fifty or sixty
degrees below zero he has to be careful of his face, and especially his
nose. If it is not covered it will freeze in a few minutes. At twenty
degrees below zero the climate is delightful. The air is still and dry,
and the people take short walks without overcoats. At this temperature
one needs a fur coat only when riding. Cows and horses are kept in
warmed stables and get along very well. Horses are seldom used when the
thermometer is fifty degrees below zero. At that temperature the cold
seems to burn out their lungs. Still, it is said that there are horses
that are wintered in the open near Dawson. They have been turned out in
the fall to shift for themselves and have come back in the spring “hog
fat.”
The old timers here tell me that the dreariness of the long nights of
the winter has been greatly exaggerated. During that season most of the
earth is snow-clad, and the light of the sky, the stars, and the moon
reflected from the snow makes it so that one can work outside almost
all the time. True, it is necessary to have lights in the schools, and
in the newspaper offices the electricity is turned off only between
11:15 in the morning and 2:15 in the afternoon. The morning newspaper
men who sleep in the day do not see the sun except upon Sunday.
In the coldest part of the winter the snow makes travelling difficult.
It is then so dry that the dogs pulling the sleds have to work as hard
as though they were going through sand. In March and April the snow is
not so powdery and sleighing is easier. The ideal winter weather is
when the thermometer registers fifteen or twenty-five degrees below
zero, with a few hours of sunlight. The most depressing time is from
the middle of December until the end of the first week in January. Then
comes the most severe cold, and the sun may not be seen at all.
It is this midwinter period that is described in many of the gruesome
poems of the Yukon, especially in Service’s “Cremation of Sam McGee.”
You remember how Sam McGee left his home in sunny Tennessee to roam
around the North Pole, where:
He was always cold, but the land of gold seemed to hold him like a
spell;
Though he’d often say in his homely way that he’d sooner live in
hell.
The poet describes how Sam froze to death on the trail above Dawson and
how, before he died, he made his partner promise to “cremate his last
remains.” This was done, between here and White Horse, on the “marge of
Lake Lebarge.” There the frozen corpse was stuffed into the furnace of
the derelict steamer _Alice May_ and a great fire built. Sam McGee’s
partner describes “how the heavens scowled and the huskies howled, and
the winds began to blow,” and how, “though he was sick with dread, he
bravely said: I’ll just take a peep inside.’” He then opens the furnace
door:
And there sat Sam, looking cool and calm, in the heart of the
furnace roar;
And he wore a smile you could see a mile, and he said: “Please
close that door.
It’s fine in here, but I greatly fear you’ll let in the cold and
storm----.
Since I left Plumtree, down in Tennessee, it’s the first time I’ve
been warm.”
[Illustration: Yukon Territory is said to have thirty-eight million
acres of land that can be utilized for crops or grazing. Above the
Arctic Circle red-top grass, which is used as hay, grows almost as high
as a man.]
[Illustration: Land on the upper Yukon will yield six or seven tons of
potatoes an acre. Sometimes prices are so high that one crop from this
seventeen-acre field has brought in ten thousand dollars.]