Canada and Newfoundland

by Frank G. Carpenter

The Dawson of to-day has none of the earmarks of the Dawson of the past. It has now several churches, a city library, radio concerts, women’s clubs, sewing societies, and afternoon teas. The palatial bars where beer cost three dollars a bottle and champagne twenty dollars a pint have long since disappeared. The hymns of the Salvation Army have taken the place of the songs of the dance halls, and in the hotel where I am staying is a Christian Science lecturer who is drawing large crowds.

The order on the streets is as good as that of any town in New England, and educationally and socially the place is the equal of any of its size in the States. There is still a large proportion of miners, but most of them are connected with the great dredging and hydraulic operations, and the independent prospectors are few. There are many business men and officials, as well as lawyers and doctors. Now and then Indians come in to sell their furs to the traders. The stores have large stocks of goods and handle most of the trade of the Yukon and some of that of eastern Alaska.

For the first few years after gold was discovered in the Klondike everything was paid for in gold dust or nuggets, and the store-keepers had their gold scales, upon which they weighed out the price of their goods. Every miner then carried a gold poke, and paid for a cigar or a drink with a pinch of dust. To-day the only place where one can use any coin less than a quarter is at the post-office, and there the change is in stamps.

Visiting a grocery store, I saw cantaloupes selling at seventy-five cents apiece, chickens at three dollars, and eggs at a dollar a dozen. These are the summer prices. In the heart of midwinter, when the hens go on a strike, eggs soar to five dollars a dozen. In early days they sometimes sold for eighteen dollars, and were cheap at one dollar apiece. In a butcher shop hard by I saw salmon that had been brought seventeen hundred miles up the Yukon, and the finest of porterhouse steaks. As I have said, the beef has to be brought in from southern Canada or the States, and the freight rates are so high that the butchers cannot afford to import skinny animals. Indeed, I am told that the transportation charges are quite as much as the first cost of the meat.

“All game here is cheap,” said a butcher I talked with. “We sell moose and caribou steaks and roasts at twenty or twenty-five cents a pound. As to bear, the people won’t eat it; it is too tough. In the winter we have plenty of caribou. The Indians kill deer in great numbers and bring in the hind quarters, peddling them about from house to house. The fore parts of the animals they feed to their dogs. This country is also full of grouse and ptarmigan, and any one can get game in the winter if he will go out and hunt for it.”

The commissioner of the territory tells me that the Yukon is one of the best big game regions of the North American continent. All shooting is restricted and licensed, and, so far, there is no indication of the animals dying out. There is an abundance of moose, mountain sheep, and mountain goats, and ten thousand caribou may sometimes be seen moving together over the country. Such a drove will not turn aside for anything. One can go moose hunting in an automobile within twenty-five miles of Dawson. The moose are among the largest of the world. Their horns have often a spread of five or six feet, and it is not uncommon to kill caribou with antlers having more than thirty points.

At a drug store I paid a quarter for a bottle of pop. The proprietor, a pioneer gold miner, had a store in Pittsburgh before he came to hunt for gold in the Klondike. He did fairly well mining, but decided there was more money in drugs.

“My prices are small, compared with what I got when I first started business,” he said. “I used to charge a dollar for a mustard plaster, a dollar for a two-grain quinine pill, and fifty cents an ounce for castor oil. I sold my Seidlitz powders at a dollar apiece, and flaxseed for thirty-two dollars a pound. The latter was used largely to make a tea for coughs and colds. I remember a cheechako, or tenderfoot, who came in during those days. He asked me for ten cents’ worth of insect powder. I looked him over and said: ‘Ten cents! Why man, I wouldn’t wrap the stuff up for ten cents.’ The cheechako turned about and replied: ‘You needn’t wrap it up, stranger; just pour it down the back of my neck.’”

Speaking of the old-time prices, I hear stories everywhere as to the enormous cost of things in the days of the gold rush. All tinned vegetables were sold at five dollars a can, and a can of meats cost a third of an ounce of gold dust or nuggets. At one time, the usual price of all sorts of supplies and provisions was one dollar a pound. One man tells me he bought an eight-hundred-pound outfit in Dawson for eight hundred dollars. It consisted of provisions and supplies of all kinds, shovels and nails costing the same as corn meal and rice. At that time flour sold for fifty dollars a sack, firewood for forty dollars a cord, and hay for from five hundred to eight hundred dollars a ton.