A few men made millions in the early days of the Klondike gold rush. Thousands, it is said, left the Klondike with nothing but memories.
This story is about a poor immigrant named John, who was born in Sweden in…
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It's the jewel in the crown of the fabled St Elias mountains of the Yukon and Alaska. Towering slightly more than 19 thousand five hundred feet above sea level, the mountain is the second highest in North America.
Mt. Logan…
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It has always been an honour to become a member of the Yukon Order of Pioneers, an organization with quite a Yukon history. It was created on December 1st, 1894 at Forty Mile when a group of men got…
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It was a fine salmon river, that’s why the local native people hammered stakes into the riverbed to make fish traps. Because of this practice, they called the river Trondek, a word roughly meaning hammer-water. The first written reports about…
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When I knew him back in the 1960s, he was a soft-spoken elderly gentleman who usually occupied a special place at Cal Miller's Capitol Hotel bar. Back then, that's where anyone who was anyone in the mining industry gathered.…
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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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To most of us, the Klondike gold rush is a multi-image photograph of grizzled men climbing the steep snow covered slopes of the Chilkoot Pass, of unshaven men mired in the muck digging for gold, of poorly clad men roaming…
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These days a lot of outdoor enthusiasts head to the nearest sports centre and order a Bayliner or a Chriscraft boat. Then comes the summer of fun on the many Yukon lakes and rivers. But when the first gold seekers…
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Clifford Sifton was a lawyer from Brandon, Manitoba who was first elected to the House of Commons in a by-election in 1896. Prime Minister Wilfred Laurier quickly appointed him Minister of the Interior and Secretary of Indian Affairs. Back then,…
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South of Main Street, some of the streets reveal the presence of the White Pass and Yukon Route.
When the Close Brothers, a London based financial house, dispatched a survey party to study the feasibility of a railroad from Skagway…
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"The All-Canadian Route to the Klondike!" The headlines trumpeted the news. "Edmonton to the Klondike and return in six months." Those headlines struck a chord with Albertans mired in the depression at the turn of the century. Edmonton was not…
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It wasn't fun. Gold rushes never are, but the Klondike stampede was worse than most. There were countless dangers along the trail. An avalanche on the Chilkoot in the spring of 1898 killed sixty-three people.
The previous September, heavy…
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