Although we didn’t stay long, our visit to Dawson City was an educational and fun time. When we originally planned our trip, we were planning to use Dawson City as a basecamp for our big push to the Arctic Ocean. We had only planned to stay as many nights as necessary to stock up for the drive North. We had even negotiated having our trailer stored at the campground while we ventured the Dempster highway to Tuktoyaktuk and back without hauling the load. We knew there was much history in the town that was centered around the GoldRush but didn’t really see it as something interesting for the kids. When COVID changed our plans and we were no longer able to go up to Tuk, we started looking at things to do in Dawson. What a place! We took three tours: an active gold mine, Dredge #4, and the sternwheeler boat S.S. Keno.
Until this trip, we always thought that gold was found in rivers. That was where people “panned for gold” so I assumed it was because rivers held the precious mineral that the panners sought. Nope. We’ve since learned that gold is heavy – 19 times heavier than water. It is so heavy that over thousands of years it makes its way down to bedrock. This is where placer miners look for gold; at bedrock. In the late 1800s when the gold rush took place, miners had to overcome so many obstacles for the opportunity to find gold:
1. They had to get there. At the time, the only way to arrive was over frozen land or by river. If coming by river, you had 5 months within which to attempt the trip before the rivers froze. If coming by land, sled dogs were your best bet but meant you could only bring a few of your belongings as you needed survival items for both you and your whole dog team (read Call of the Wild by Jack London for some perspective on this method of transportation).
2. They had to clear the land. Assuming you’d established some shelter (at the peak of the gold rush, 30,000 people came to Dawson, so good luck finding a place to pitch your tent) and were ready to start mining, you staked your claim (physically placed stakes at the start and end of their claim area) and then needed to dig to bedrock. But before doing so, you had to remove the trees and shrubs and roots on the ground. By hand, of course.
3. They had to thaw the ground. Being in the Yukon means that you will dig only a few feet before you hit frozen ground (permafrost). This isn’t bedrock so you need to get through that permafrost. You would have to find a way to thaw the area you are digging - typically building a series of fires.
4. They had to find the gold. Now that you have the dirt from your thawed area, you need to search it for gold. This is where the water comes into the equation. To get gold separated from all other material, you need water and agitation. This is how panning works. You use water to help remove everything that isn’t heavy like gold so that the gold will be what is left.
Placer mining - the term for open-pit mining for loose minerals (i.e. not ore) - can only be done if water is available, thus the importance of proximity to a river. This also means that mining in the Yukon has short mining seasons, as rivers are frozen much of the year. On our very informative tour of the active mine, Goldbottom Tours showed us some of the strategies used by miners in the late 1890s and 1900s. The use of shafts, digging to bedrock in a 3’ by 3’ square and then building a wooden shaft all the way down, allowed miners to go to the bottom and then dig sideways thus only removing the dirt closest to bedrock and most likely to contain the gold. They used pickaxes, shovels, knives, fire, and water. If lucky and skilled miners could be successful. Gold nuggets were the sought-after prize and many were recovered in this time. As fewer and fewer nuggets were being found, and as all claims along nearly all rivers were spoken for, many prospectors moved onto the next promising place. What gold was left is called flour gold – small, pure flecks of this precious mineral. Enter the dredging era of placer mining.
If you find yourself in Dawson City, you must take the Parks Canada tour of Dredge #4. We almost skipped it but decided to try when our campground owner mentioned that it was a hidden gem of the town. We weren’t sure if the kids would find it interesting but it was only an hour and was a very reasonable price. Plus, they were allowing only 6 people per tour so we had a guide to ourselves!
A dredge is a floating structure that scoops up dirt and rocks, sifts and filters the scoop, and discards anything that isn’t the concentrated remains of heavy minerals. As the kids were quick to point out, the dredge eats pay dirt (the gold-rich dirt above bedrock), digests it, and poops out the stuff it doesn’t want. Dredge #4 is the largest dredge that was built on a wooden structure. It is huge - three stories high. One of the metal gears inside is two stories tall. It’s trommel (the intestines) is big enough to fit a whale. It shovels dirt and rock at a pace of 11 scoops per minute. It could dig and sift through the same amount of dirt in one minute that it took three miners to do in a full day. This technology changed the world of placer mining. But it had to be built and many of the metal gear needed to be custom made in the US and shipped up to Dawson. The lumber needed for the structure were beams much too large to be provided by any tree in the Yukon. In its prime, there were 9 dredges simultaneously operating in the Dawson area and owned primarily by two companies.
By the 60’s, it became unprofitable to mine by dredge; the price of gold was lower, the cost of fuel was higher, and operating / maintenance costs were consistently exceeding the value of the volume of gold found. Dredge #4 stopped operating in 1966.
Dawson City continued to thrive and find profitable mining. We met Dave who was the claim owner and who was mining the area of Bonanza River, that had been mined during the gold rush, and later dredged in the 50’s by his father. Yet Dave is still finding gold on this claim mostly because a dredge was great for scooping lots of dirt quickly but was not an easy machine to operate and thus the precision of digging was low. Today’s mining operations are supported with heavy equipment like excavators and dozers and can move at a slower pace or can scale to suit the location. The equipment is used to move and dig the pay dirt and drop it into a sluice – a smaller yet similar version of the dredge’s intestines – for it to be sifted and separated into the heavy mineral concentrate. That concentrate is further sorted and separated using good ol’ fashioned sieves. Then a magnet is used to pull out iron which is heavy like gold but magnetic, unlike gold. The final concentrate goes through a clever separating process that uses water (always water) and an angled spinning wheel that looks like a gold pan but has ridges on which the heavy gold stays put while the lighter particulates get washed away. The final result is a small cup of gold flakes.
Today’s miners have other challenges to contend with that their predecessors did not. There are more governmental regulations and oversight in the industry than there ever has been and a miner must do more than just mine. Anyone working in government understands what I mean. Also, there are environmental regulations that miners must return the land to its original state once their mining is complete. Since it can take many “seasons” to mine a claim, it can be very difficult to return the land to as suitable “original” state. All of this work must come out of the miners’ profits. This wasn’t the case in the 60’s. In fact, as you drive into Dawson on the Klondike Highway, you’ll pass 3 kms of dredge tailings (poop) left over from when the area was mined 60 years ago. There are trees now growing out the top of some of these piles but mostly it is a vast expanse of berms of rocks. If you look at the area from space, you’ll see the tailings strewn around the town.
I wasn’t sure how much the kids would appreciate or enjoy these mining tours. Surprisingly, they enjoyed it very much. We were given a shovel full of pay dirt from the claim site, were taught how to pan properly, and got to keep the gold flakes that we found in our pans. Simon had a bit of help from our guide and was super excited to see 9 flakes in his pan! All of us walked away with some gold we panned ourselves. This hands-on experience really solidified the whole lesson (I mean tour) of the mine and the mining methods used. Having panned for gold, the kids were able to follow along with the dredge tour a few days later and were even able to explain some of the steps when asked. They marvelled, as did I, at the size of the machine and could appreciate how loud it must have been. Our guide assigned us the names of one of the positions that would have existed. A single dredge can be operated with as few as 4 people. She assigned us jobs based on seniority so Simon had the toughest job while Erik was the captain. The kids had fun imagining doing those jobs. Again, it helped them to appreciate what they were learning and remember these fun facts. We were grateful for such informative and personal tours.
The next morning, the kids kicked off a game which normally would have a mafia member, a police officer, and a citizen. Instead, the game was changed to have a mad trapper, an RCMP officer, and a gold prospector. I guess the Yukon is rubbing off on them.