Dawson City

Heart of the Klondike
The Klondike Gold Rush grabbed the world's attention during the last years of the 19th century. Thousands of people risked their lives, trekking into the mysterious far north to stake their claims, hoping to get rich quick with a gold strike.

Their destination was Dawson City, located at the fork of the Yukon and Klondike rivers just a few hundred kilometres below the Arctic Circle. Some met with success; most failed.

Within a few years after George Carmack spread the news of his rich claim on Rabbit Creek to prospectors and adventurers already eking out a living in the region in 1896, the previously unpopulated site became home to over 30,000 people. Most lived a rough and weary life, coping with inadequate shelter, sub-freezing winters, and the arduous tasks of mining for gold.


Others lived like kings and queens, either from working their successful claims or by providing the necessities and the luxuries of life at highly-inflated prices.
With Dawson City’s population under 5,000 by 1902, the Klondike Gold Rush was short-lived, but it remains a legend of immense proportions. Millions of dollars worth of gold had been extracted from the hills and river-beds in those few years. Fortunes were made, and often lost.

Hundreds of people perished just attempting to reach the town, unable to withstand the harsh conditions of the route up and over Chilkoot Pass, across the wild and forbidding country-side and along the often dangerous rivers. To capture the essence of the Klondike Gold Rush and Dawson City, people can turn to many literary sources of information and adventure tales, including works by Jack London, Robert Service and Pierre Berton, the Canadian history writer who was raised there.

Today, Dawson City is a major Yukon tourist attraction. Its population of about 2,000 sees many thousands of visitors in a year. Tourists are thrilled by the wilderness beauty of the north and the living history of the restored gold rush era buildings, protected and preserved as part of Parks Canada’s National Historic Sites of Canada in the Klondike.
There is still gold in those hills, with mining continuing in the region. Tourists can get a sense of the old-time mining with a visit to Parks Canada’s restored Dredge #4, located on Bonanza Creek.

From a northern British Columbia source, the Yukon River flows northwest for 3,185 kilometres, emptying into the Bering Sea. Virtually every gold stampeder journeyed on this river. Most came by ship to Skagway, Alaska, to reach Dyea where they climbed the precipitous Chilkoot Pass, after which they struggled under the weight of their prospectors’ outfits, often assisted by natives hired for their strength and guidance to reach Lake Bennett, in Canada. There they built or bought boats to continue to Whitehorse and down the Yukon to Dawson. As the need for transportation grew, many sternwheelers began navigating the Yukon, bringing people, supplies, mining technology and building materials to Dawson City. This type of transportation was used until the mid-1950s; in the latter years, they served primarily as tourist boats in the Whitehorse area.