Gold Fever

Wednesday, June 24, 2009 – Day 55

Parks Canada operates the Gold Dredge #4 as one of its historical sites, and part of the bigger Dawson City Historical Site.  The dredge is a good example of corporate mining at the beginning of the 20th Century. 

After the initial gold claims had been worked in the Bonanza Creek area outside of Dawson City, the large,well financed mining companies came in with their gold dredges and mechanized equipment. This changed the look of the landscape for many years. Most of the parts of the dredge where shipped via the Yukon White Pass Railroad through Skagway, AK.  The largest parts had to be sent via the Yukon River on the west coast of Alaska and barged along the Yukon River to Dawson.  When you look at the distance those parts had to travel to get to Dawson and ultimately the Bonanza Creek area, it must have been a logistical nightmare. The parts were then assembled on site and the dredge was ready to go.  Almost.  First, because it was called a dredge it needed some water.  Well actually enough water in the pond to float this behemoth, which weighed over 200 tons and was almost 250 feet long. Water was diverted from over 60 Km away through a series of ditches and pipes. 

The dredge was enormous; especially the business end. (Envision a huge chainsaw; the actual saw part would be equivalent to the line of buckets and it worked almost the same way.) Each of the buckets (larger than any backhoe bucket) could dig down to 48 feet below the water line and bring up 16 cu. ft of gravel.  There were 72 of these buckets, and 22 buckets could be dumped per minute.  (About 600 tons of gravel per hour.) The amount of material processed was staggering and after it was processed all of the waste rock…probably about 99.99% of what had been dug up was dumped out the back end in an arc shaped pattern.  These tailings cover a huge area of Dawson City, but you can see that trees are starting to re-vegetate these piles of rock and rubble.  (You needn’t bother about going through these tailings in search of any residual gold. These machines could extract gold so fine that an experienced gold panner would not be able to extract it.  It was so effective that it paid for itself in the first season of operation.

There are still small claims being processed slightly higher up the valley walls but most of the major deposits have long been exhausted by the mining companies.  The sheer size of this dredge boggles the mind and just amazed me. I will post additional pictures in the photo space.

We next visited the homes and cabins of some of the authors who made Dawson their home at one point or another.  Pierre Berton was born and raised here and he always had a love for the Yukon. The original Berton home has been restored to its original appearance.   Robert Service had a small cabin on the edge of town, which is the scene of twice daily readings of his poetry during the summer.  Jack London who wrote Call of the Wild and White Fang, only stayed in the Klondike for one year, but those experiences carried over into his later writings.

Dawson City also had an Opera House during it’s heyday, which has been reconstructed to it’s original appearance including “Yukon Stoves”. Parks Canada conducts tours of the Opera House “The Palace Grand Theatre”, to give the visitors an insight into how the stampeders, would try to socialize with the “percentage girls”.  Basically, the hired girls, (these were not “ladies of ill repute” though) would charge the guys $1.00 for a dance and entice them to purchase more liquor.  Depending on the skill of the girls they could earn up to 25% of what they took in.  Many of them did a lot better than most of the stampeders.  We were also allowed to see the rooms where the entertainers would be lodged during their performances in Dawson City.  As with most of the National Parks Service or Parks Canada presentations this was also very well done.

Before returning to the trailer we drove up to Midnight Dome.  A popular spot on solstice for Yukoners to watch the sun “not go down”.  Dramatic views of Dawson City, the Yukon River and fabulous mountain ranges stretching endlessly into the distance.