Heart of the Klondike!

Heart of the Klondike! - that would be Dawson City, currently home to 2,000, but in 1898, 30,000 made it the largest city north of Seattle and west of Winnipeg. There are 8 National Historic Sites of Canada located in Dawson, including the "Dawson Historical Complex", a National Historic Site of Canada encompassing the entire historic core of the town. Today we visited National Historic Sites in the "Goldfields", just outside the core city.

We toured this huge structure, the grand old Dredge No. 4 National Historic Site, built in 1912 for the Canadian Klondike Mining Co.'s claim on Bonanza Creek. It is the largest wooden hulled bucket line gold dredge in the world - those are white benches at the center of the picture and the place where the tour began.

I knew nothing of "industrial" mining before today's tour, but this huge dredge mechanized "placer" mining. Placer mining means that the gold, in this case, is just loose in the gravel, as opposed to "hard rock" mining where gold is extracted from veins in granite underground. Hard rock mining is what we saw in northern Idaho.

This is Nathaniel, our tour guide.

Most of the machinery used in this dredge was manufactured in Ohio and came by ship to Skagway, by train up the White Pass Rail Road (our trip a few days ago) to Whitehorse, and then traveled by ship up the Yukon River to the Klondike River and then to Bonanza Creek, a feeder creek for the Klondike. All, that is, except this humongous, 14 foot diameter gear. Since there is a 12 foot diameter tunnel along the White Pass RR, this gear had to be shipped up to the Bering Sea and then down the Yukon to Dawson, a long way.

Frederick impressed by the huge machinery. During a flood in 1960, Dredge #4 foundered and remained stuck in the mud for 32 years until the National Government realized its historical significance to the area and began restoring it after it was again "floated." It is now a National Historical Site.

The gear room where all the machinery was controlled.

A mile and a half down the road is another National Historic Site, the Discovery Claim. It was originally staked on August 17, 1896, and is the site of the gold discovery that sparked the Klondike Gold Rush. There is a 0.6 mile walking trail with interpretive panels describing the story of the discovery and the evolution of mining techniques.

We also found two of Parks Canada's red chairs by the shore of Bonanza Creek.

This is a neat map - if you click on it to enlarge it you can see the dates and locations of the major gold strikes.

Along the 8-mile road from town to the goldfields where these colorful birdhouses...

on stilts. I don't know why, but I'll try to find out tomorrow.