Bankers were no different from everyone else who trekked to the Klondike goldfields. They too made the tough trip by boat, trail, dog team and sled to reach the most amazing gold strike in North American history.
As prospectors flooded…
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Now an historic attraction, the Commissioner’s Residence in Dawson City is the Yukon’s equivalent of the White House, or twenty-four (24) Sussex Drive in Ottawa. It was originally built to house the most senior government official in the territory, the…
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For years after the gold rush, the Yukon was a busy place both in summer and winter. River boats were the lifeline from Whitehorse to Dawson. But they were of no use in the winter.
So in 1902, the Yukon…
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Sometimes national anthems have a tough time catching on. Take O’Canada. It was written first in French in 1880 and translated into English in 1908. Since then, the English version has been revised many times. Who knows what the words…
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It seems during those tumultuous years of 1898-1899, the Klondike Nugget newspaper didn't miss a story. So it's no surprise that the paper gave considerable coverage to the Princess of the Yukon.
Margie Newman was just nine years old,…
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Imagine a railway running from Dawson City , along the Klondike river and up the Bonanza Creek valley to Grand Forks and beyond. Sounds like a tourist train dream these days. Back in the early 1900s it was a…
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When she was only ten years old, Marjorie Rambeau performed in the mining camps of Nome.
“...With my hair cropped close ...the men would shake gold dust into my cap, “ said Rambeau later in her career, “But nobody suspected…
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In the fall of 1907, a would-be prospector named Ned Elfors met Yukoners David Bergman and Emil Anderson in Seattle. The three men decided to travel together to Whitehorse. When they arrived in the spring of 1908, they bought a…
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It was an ingenious piece of police work. It wasn't the police who came up with the idea, but it worked, and resulted in the arrest of the man who blew up Canadian Gold dredge number one.
When the gold…
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In far off France in that dismal year of 1916, men in the mud braced themselves for yet another shelling. Both the Allied forces of Britain and Canada and the German army had reached a stalemate. The war to end…
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John Zaccarelli was born in 1881 in Pravia, Italy. At a young age, his family moved to Vancouver Island, near Nanaimo. He was just 16 years old when he heard about the arrival of the ship the Excelsior in Seattle…
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Back in the 1920s, tourism was not a big ticket item in the Yukon. The territory was accessible only by the White Pass Railway, which carried some tourists during the summer, but it was mainly used for freight operations --…
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There was a time when the Yukon River was the Yukon’s highway and the river boats were the life blood of the economy. The boats delivered everything from soup to nuts and bolts from the railhead at Whitehorse to…
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He was a salesman, from the American Midwest, who moved to Seattle to sell goods for a local printing company. In 1897, when he saw miners coming off a ship on the Seattle waterfront carrying their life's possessions and wealth…
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