Till the moon set the pearly peaks gleaming,
And the stars tumbled out, neck and crop;
And I’ve thought that I surely was dreaming,
With the peace o’ the world piled on top.
CHAPTER XXXIII
THE CAPITAL OF THE YUKON
I write of Dawson, the capital of Yukon Territory, the metropolis of the Klondike, and for years the richest mining camp of the world. In the height of its glory it had more than thirty thousand inhabitants, and in the region about there have been more than sixty thousand people. To-day the population of the town is less than one thousand. With the gradual exhaustion of the gold the population is decreasing, and it may be only a question of years when the precious metal will all have been taken from the ground and the chief reason for a city here will have disappeared. One of the great hopes of the people is in the discovery of rich quartz mines or the mother lode from which all the loose gold came. The hills have been prospected in every direction, but so far no such find has been made.
Dawson lies just where it was located when gold was discovered. The houses still stand on the banks of the Klondike and Yukon rivers where the two streams meet. The town is laid out like a checkerboard, with its streets crossing one another at right angles. They climb the sides of the hills and extend far up the Klondike to the beginning of the mountains of gravel built up by the dredgers. The public roads are smooth, and the traffic includes automobiles and heavy draft wagons. There are more than fifty automobiles in use, and two hundred and fifty-five miles of good country highways have been made by the government in the valleys near by.
Dawson has been burned down several times since the great gold rush, and vacant lots covered with the charred remains of buildings are still to be seen. Most of the stores are of one story, and log cabins of all sizes are interspersed with frame houses as comfortable as those in the larger towns of the States. Scores of the homes have little gardens about them, and not a few have hothouses in which vegetables and flowers are raised under glass. Empty houses and boarded-up stores here and there show the decline in population.
This is the seat of government of Yukon Territory and the district headquarters of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Here the judges hold court, and here the commissioner has his residence. The government house is a large yellow frame building with a wide porch. In front of it is a beautiful lawn, and beds of pansies border the walk that leads to the entrance. At the rear are gardens filled in summer with the most delicious vegetables grown in the Yukon, and near by are the hothouses that supply the tomatoes and cucumbers for the commissioner’s table.
Yukon Territory is next door to Alaska, and its resources and other characteristics are so similar that it might be called Canadian Alaska. Its southern boundary is within thirty miles of the Pacific Ocean, and the territory extends to the Arctic. It is a thousand miles long and in places three hundred miles wide, and it comprises almost as much land as France. It is one third the size of Alaska from which it is separated by the international boundary, which crosses the Yukon River about one hundred miles from here.