When I was a school kid growing up on Strickland Street, colourful characters were the norm. It was not unusual to find my Dad and Wigwam Harry sharing a story or two at our kitchen table.
Andy Hooper could be…
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No one is quite sure when he arrived in the Yukon, or how he got here for that matter. Some say he came over the Chilkoot Pass at the beginning of the Klondike rush. What is certain is that he…
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An exceptionally beautiful part of the Yukon River system is found at the mouth of the Pelly River. Here, in 1848, Robert Campbell built the first Fort Selkirk. It didn’t take long for this Hudson Bay trading post…
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When I first read her stuff in the Whitehorse Star, I though it was kinda cute. Not very deep or insightful...just...well...just cute. But more than 30 years later, Edith Josie's columns have become an important record of lives of…
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The man who wrote the ballads that define the Yukon’s colourful history and lifestyle may well have done the same thing in Saskatchewan or Alberta, except for a fateful day in June, 1957.
Al Oster had been touring the Peace…
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Robert Crawford was born in a little cabin in Dawson City, in July of 1899. His father had been the bailiff for the city of Seatlle before joining the hordes of gold-seekers heading for the Klondike in 1897. The Crawfords…
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Ian Tyson is one of my favourite singing story tellers. Always has been. He wrote a wonderful song called "50 Years Ago".
If I could roll back the years,
Back when I was young and limber,
Loose as…
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2008 marks the 50th anniversary of the death of Robert W. Service, who passed away on September 11th , 1958. He spent just eight of his 84 years in the Yukon Territory, yet the stories he told made him one…
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He was as colourful as the characters he wrote about.
Harry J. Boyle was the editor and owner of the Whitehorse Star from 1954 to 1963. The office was in a shack on Main Street, but the editorial office…
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It's not often you get to meet a legendary character who was cremated and lived to tell the tale, but one day, years ago in Whitehorse, I did.
When Sam McGee came to the Yukon around 1898, he had no…
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I didn't really know the elderly gentleman who spent his days in the back room of the little Yukon Electrical clapboard office on Main Street, except that my school chum, Willard, enjoyed stopping there to say hello. To me, he…
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Robert Service always said all of the characters in his poems were fictional. Well, we know now that this is not quite true when it comes to Sam McGee. There was a Sam McGee in the Yukon…
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