CANADA - YUKON - DAWSON CITY : THE GOLD RUSH REVISITED
by Ursula & Eldrid Retief



The wizened toe stares up at you from the bottom of your cocktail glass. This is the infamous Captain Dick’s Sourtoe Cocktail – a genuine, bodiless, alcohol-preserved Yukon toe afloat in the drink of your choice.

Touch it with your lips and you qualify for a certificate. Swallowers, you are warned, are severely chastised.

The original toe was supposedly off the frost-bitten foot of a gold stampeder who traversed the Chilkoot Trail. It was found in a jar on a shelf in an old cabin by the legendary Captain Dick Stevenson. In every bar he frequented, he put the toe in liquor and vowed that if you drank it and touched your lips to the toe you’d prove you were a genuine "sourdough" Yukoner ..... as opposed to a greenhorn "cheechako".

Then someone stole the toe. Undaunted, Captain Dick placed an advertisement in a Vancouver newspaper for an amputated toe. He got it. So far, there have been seven toes. Each one was lost or stolen, except for the second one – that was swallowed.

This is Dawson City where anything goes.

Much as it did nearly a hundred years ago when an American, George Washington Carmack, and his two Indian partners, Skookum Jim and Tagish Charlie, panning for gold, found a small nugget in an exposed bedrock. They uncovered more gold between the flaky shale, "like cheese sandwiches," remarked Carmack later. The year was 1896.

It was the birth of the Klondike Gold Rush, the last great gold rush in world history, and it transformed the Yukon Territory. Almost overnight it awoke from the lonely, unchartered sleep of the wilderness.

At first word of the gold strike spread only in the Yukon. In 1897, when a steamer put into port at Seattle with nearly three tons of gold dust and nuggets from the Klondike creeks, an invisible telegraph whispered it worldwide.

By 1898 the goldrush had begun in earnest. It seemed that everyone and his dog was heading for the Klondike gold in "them thar hills". Stricken with wanderlust and lured by tales of riches, gold seekers came from every part of the world, followed closely by dance-hall girls, swindlers and cardsharks .....

But back then the challenge wasn’t just in locating the gold. Half the battle was getting there, conquering the treacherous terrain and freezing temperatures.

Over the legendary Chilkoot Pass they struggled, having made their way up the coast to this entrance way to the Yukon. It wasn’t a welcoming one.

It required steely determination to climb the ice-steps that were cut into the near-vertical cliff on the Alaskan coastline. The Canadian Mounties had decreed gold diggers must take a year of supplies – 800 kilograms worth – with them over the pass to ensure their survival.

It took weeks to go up and down, carrying the supplies to a base-camp at the top.

By 1900 a narrow gauge railway had been driven through the coastal mountain connecting Skagway, Alaska, with Whitehorse in the Yukon. Today, running only part of the way, climbing between towering peaks and spanning deep gorges, thundering across spider-web trestles, it remains one of the most memorable scenic railway journeys in the world.

Abandoned after the gold rush, except by occasional hunting parties, the Pass re-opened as a recreational trail in 1961. Well marked, it takes the average hiker from three to five days to complete the trail which is patrolled regularly by US Rangers and Canadian Park Wardens.

In stark evidence on the trail are many remains of the hardships suffered by the gold seekers in their frenzied rush to the Klondike. Collapsible canoes, wagon wheels, broken bottles and wornout boots are testimony to their struggle.

After climbing Chilkoot the stampeders had to cut down trees at Bennett Lake to build boats so they could reach the Yukon River – the "highway" to the Klondike. By May 29, 1898, a total of 7,124 craft of every shape, size and description had started the journey. Hundreds were wrecked on the rocks of treacherous Miles Canyon and the rapids ahead.

In the latter years of the gold rush, the challenge of the rapids was met by the elegant sternwheelers which plied the river to Dawson City.

In those days Dawson City was the good-time capital of Canada, a trendy, lively boom-town of some 30,000 with a bar on every corner and dance-hall girls providing the entertainment. Men cashed in their gold. The whiskey flowed faster than the Yukon River.

Diamond Tooth Gertie’s is now the name of the gambling hall in Dawson City where you can tap your foot to the honkytonk piano. But Diamond Tooth Gertie (aka Gertie Lovejoy) was a bona fide Yukon Dance-hall Queen, well-named for the sparkling diamond she had wedged between her two front teeth.

Gertie made a fortune unloading gold nuggets from the miners. She once said: "The poor ginks have just gotta spend it, they’re that scared they’ll die before they have it all out of the ground."

Today Dawson City is a National Historic Site, a timewarp that takes you back a hundred years. There are no paved streets, boardwalks skirt the edges of the dirt roads. Remnants from the gold mines, picks, shovels and weather-worn dredges lie as they were left in the creeks.

Museums contain gold rush relics, artifacts and diaries revealing the stories of romance and adventure.

And amid the aging relics you can still drink, dine, dance and gamble in the frontier style of ‘98 especially as the nights are almost non-existent at the height of summer. At Diamond Tooth Gertie’s the modern Gertie and her CanCan Dancers perform while gamblers enjoy real slot-machines, blackjack, roulette and Texas Hold’em Poker. Or you can spend an evening at the musical comedy review Gaslight Follies in the authentic atmosphere of the Palace Grand Theatre, built in 1899 out of lumber salvaged from an old riverboat by wild west showman Arizona Charlie Meadows.

Like the theatre, many historic houses have been authentically restored and interpretive programs tell the story of the past.

Guides in period costumes conduct walking tours of these buildings, among them the Eldorado, modelled after the hotel in Jack London’s Call of the Wild.

Jack London lived briefly in Dawson in ‘98 and his cabin in the grounds of the Jack London Interpretive Centre, where there are daily readings of his works, is only a few minutes away from downtown and only a stone’s throw from the old abode of the Yukon’s well-known bard, Robert Service who penned such Canadian classics as The Cremation of Sam McGee and The Shooting of Dan McGraw.

An actor, seated in a high-backed wicker chair in the cabin’s tangled garden, gives daily readings of his poems. He recites from Sam McGee

There are strange things done in the Midnight Sun
By the men who toil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold....

There are certainly some strange things done. Who could ever have dreamed up the most bizarre race in the world: The Great Klondike International Outhouse Race every September when decorated or originally designed outhouses carried by a team of four race for massive prizes. The fifth member of the team must be seated on the "throne" at all times. The event now attracts international entries.

The territory still lives in the golden sheen of its past ..... gold and tourism is its lifeblood. You can pan for gold yourself or tour the creeks – still bearing names like Bonanza, Hunker, Last Chance – where it all began and where miners still change the course of roads and rivers in their relentless search for gold. The dredges sit in the creeks – enormous monuments to the intensity of the quest for gold.

Mining companies still return in search of what some argue is a myth: The Klondike Motherlode. As the story goes, all the gold claimed during the gold rush in the Klondike creeks – by 1903 some $96-million in gold had been mined – had a source somewhere.

Maybe there IS still some gold in them thar hills, maybe there ain’t ..... but one thing’s for sure, the Sourtoe Cocktail is waiting for you.


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Photo courtesy YG Photo © Government of Yukon.
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