August 16th, 1896 was a sunny Sunday. Too hot in fact for the three men who trudged through the bush down the valley of a small stream that flowed into the Klondike River.
A white man, George Carmack, his…
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At the height of the Klondike gold rush in 1898, Dawson City was rightly called the Paris of the North. The boom towns had just about everything you could imagine. And it had characters...some of whom were already rich and…
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In his days, he was the toughest man in the British Empire. He'd beaten everyone he'd met in the ring. But he never had the chance to fight the best in North America. So when he came to the Klondike,…
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He was a big, bold and brash farmboy from eastern Ontario. When he joined the Klondike stampede in 1897, his youthful vigor and incredible strength got him into and out of a lot of trouble. In later years, so did…
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There must be something in the name Bill Gates which attracts money. The only difference between the Bill Gates of 1998 and the guy with the same name in 1898, is that one saves all his money. The other spent…
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In those heady days of 1898-99, the Klondike kings had money - or gold - to burn. They were also starved for entertainment and they wanted the best. Saloon owners were prepared to oblige.
There were many Klondike entertainers, most…
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He was known by everyone as the saint of Dawson. When he died in 1899, after only two years in the bustling gold-rush town, his impact on the people of that gold-mad town was so great that everything came to…
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The Klondike gold rush attracted a strange mix of personalities. Dawson City was the land for adventure seekers as much as it was for gold diggers. The Klondike had it all - from major prize fights to big-league gambling nights.…
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Among the thousands of stampeders who tried to cash in on the Klondike Gold Rush was a professional gunfighter named Wyatt Earp. Yep! The same guy who carved his name in the American history books for his celebrated role in…
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There's a beautiful pass which connects the Keele River in the Northwest Territories to the Ross River in the Yukon. It was named by dominion surveyor Joseph Keele in 1907 for a brave Yukon bushman who had more than one…
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Yukon history owes a lot to Harry C. Barley, a man most people have probably never heard of. Like other photographers who made their living when the Yukon was young, Barley toiled in the shadows of greatness. In this case,…
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Isaac Stringer was born in Ontario in April, 1866. In 1888, he enrolled at Wycliffe College to study theology. In 1892, Stringer heard a speech about the need for missionaries in the Arctic. The idea appealed to young Stringer.
In…
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The tentacles of the Klondike gold rush reached across the world like some gigantic primaeval octopus leaving in their wake both success and failure for those involved. A Greek immigrant experienced both during his colourful life and one of his…
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Many Yukoners have fond memories of Alex Van Bibber. Mine is watching him take Babe Southwick’s dog team around the 14-mile course on the final two days of the 1965 Sourdough Rendezvous dog-sled race.
Babe was Alex’s sister-in-law.…
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Skookum Jim was born, in the 1850's, into the Dakl'aweidi clan of Tagish, son of the Tagish Deisheetaan Chief Kaachgaawaa and Gus'duteen, his mother, who was from the Telegraph Creek area. His birth name was Keish, which means wolf. He…
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