Dawson City to Inuvik - Alaska and Points North: Tips and Tales from the Road - page 188

Interesting Info:
Dawson City
Tucked into a bend on the mighty Yukon River, the sizzling city lights of Dawson must have
been a welcome sight to the hardscrabble miners crawling in to blow away their gold dust.
After months living under canvas, digging through tons of mud, enduring unimaginable cold
and wet and bugs and their own lousy cooking they came into town for a hot bath, a good
meal and some laughs with the ladies.
Photos of the town in its boom time show streets awash with high rollers and those out
to fleece them. The year after the Bonanza Creek strike, the population exploded to some
40,000. Walking those streets myself now, I cannot conceive of how the town site managed
to accommodate and service those numbers. But it did, creating a boom not just for miners
but for the savvy entrepreneurs who quickly figured out where the real money was to be
made.
Unlimited affluence created a societal structure that strove to duplicate the cultural niceties
of life in Toronto or New York or even Paris. So much so, “Paris of the North” quickly be-
came Dawson's modifier. In the finest homes everything from fashions to furnishings to the
imported sweets and savories customary at receptions were imported, cost be damned.
Unfortunately, for most of those 40,000 men, the months it had taken them to get up to the
Klondike was all the time needed by local miners to secure all the good claims on the gold
bearing creeks. Within a year the stampeders had left and the population of Dawson shrank
to 8,000.
In her memoir, I Married the Klondike , Laura Berton recalls that when she arrived in
Dawson City in the early 1900s she was told over and over again that Dawson was dying,
“everyone” is leaving. But not everyone left and the town has survived. Today, nearly 90%
of the gold mined in Canada comes from the Dawson area and there are some 100 active
mines.