Life and Death in Dawson City

 Dear Blog readers,

Well Birgit and I just spent a couple days in Dawson City Yukon.  If you look at the map you will see that Dawson is about level with Fairbanks. Dawson  is 533 kilometers from Whitehorse- so a bit of a drive, but back in the gold rush days it took 7 days to go up the Yukon River from Whitehorse and that was after hiking the Chilkoot Trail with 500 pounds of stuff. (Have to wait for Skagway for the rest of that story.)  Whitehorse was just a camp ground in those days and Dawson City was called The Paris of the North" (replacing Sitka as the Paris of the West or Paris of the Pacific).  Dawson was the the largest city north of Seattle and west of Winnipeg in 1898.  It had a town population of 16,000 to 17,000 and an estimated 30,000 miners in the surrounding gold fields.  When the gold rush moved to Nome in 1899 the population dropped quickly.  Today there are about 2400 people in Dawson city.

I thought I would touch on a few aspects of life in Dawson as it struck me.  In no particular order. 

1. Garbage. While walking around the city I noticed most houses have an interesting method of keeping bears out of their garbage.  Here are a few photos:

2.   Then I wondered about how they deal with food and supplies. Now days there is a steady stream of trucks hauling freight and fuel up the Klondike Highway- we must have seen over a dozen fuel tankers on our drive, but back in the day they had 4 huge warehouses in Dawson and the Yukon river was ice free for 4 months out of the year. They had 4 months to cram as much stuff into those warehouses to last the winter.

There is one story of a woman named Belinda Mulroony who arrived in Dawson in 1897 who became the first woman millionaire in the Klondike when she arrived with $5000 worth of hot water bottles and fabric. In a few days she made enough money to reinvest in a cafe and a cabin construction company.   Then she built the Grand Forks Hotel. Here is a photo of her second hotel - the Fair View hotel which was considered very elegant featuring steam heated rooms, electric lights, and  restaurant that served steak and oysters.  Can't imagine what they tasted like if it took 7 days to get them there from Whitehorse....

3.  Finally - what on earth did they do with dead people?  The entire town of Dawson sits on permafrost!   Well. As it turns out, they dug graves in the fall in anticipation of people dying and when they ran out of holes they just stacked them up in the funeral parlor and waited until spring