Thursday, June3, 2010

We left Whitehorse, Yukon which is the capital of the Yukon since 1953 to drive to Dawson City. We drove through some heavy smoke because of the wild fires. Dawson City is the Queen city of the North and the Paris of the North. This was a refined city during the gold rush days with running water, electricity and telegraph in 1897 with lots of new inventions and , but right now it looks like a 1 horse town. I was correct, it is a 1 horse town- we have no cell phones, no TV and no satellite radio.
The famous author, Jack London, spent only 1 long year here but most of his books are based upon what he learned or experienced while living here. He was born on 1/12/1876 to a poor family in Oakland, California. At 14 years of age he had to quit school to help support the family. He worked at Cannery Row for 18 hours every day which is where his hatred of exploitation of young kids stemmed from. Loving reading books and the sea he became a seaman on the Japan-Bering Sea. His book, Sea Wolf, is about those experiences.
In 1897 he was 21 and the world was in an economic chaos. He had tried his hand at writing and the pile of rejection slips reached the ceiling. When he heard about the Yukon gold he wanted to go;o his stepsister mortgaged the family farm to come up with the money needed. His brother-in-law went with him, but when they had to paddle from Juneau to Dyea in huge dug out canoes, he went home.
At the Summit of Chilkoot it took Jack 30 days to go 33 miles actually pulling himself up the rocks. His book, Smoke Blue, is about that experience. On October 9, 1897 he reached Stewart Island; the river was freezing and lots of people were going back home. They advised him to stay away from Dawson City because there was starvation, scurvy and no land left to claim. He stayed at Henderson Creek for a long, long winter. He put down a claim- #54 on November 5, 1897 and spent 1 month in Dawson City in a tent. He went to the saloons only to get warm, he had no money. The Call of the Wild, his most famous book was inspired by a dog ( a mix between a Scottish sheepdog and a Saint Bernard that weighed 140#) that lived with a miner in the tent next to Jack's. To survive Jack traded his building skills for food and shelter. The miners all congregated in 1 cabin at night to socialize by telling stories. Most of these people were in his novels. He got scurvy while in Dawson City, went to a hospital and then on 6/7/1898 left on a boat to the Bering Sea with his job of shoveling coal. He started writing then. He wrote over 50 books in 18 years and made over one million dollars on his books. He died in his 40s in the year 1914 in Glenellen, California of kidney failure. His cabin was originally in Henderson Creek, but was moved because it was in danger of fire, so it was moved to Dawson City. His cabin was restored with the bottom half in Oakland, California and the top half here in Dawson City. Jack never made a fortune with the gold and went back home with only $4.50.
It is 62 degrees outside ; we are in the CRV and it just turned over to 60,000 miles. It's been a really great car for doing this. We are headed to Bonanza Creek Road where the gold was found in 1896 in dredge #4. They cut into the mountain and left very large pebbles behind that resemble huge stone caterpillars called "talings". They layer them and plant shrubs on top so they look like foothills. They mined this site for 60 years and ceased in 1960 when the dredge machine sank into the silt. This was the largest wooden hulled bucket line dredge in North America. The gold was found in the white gravel below the permafrost.