The town has telephones and electric lights, which latter must pay finely when you realize that for nearly seven months darkness prevails over day. There are two morning daily, and one evening daily newspapers, with all Associated Press telegraphic news. I send you a copy of one of them. Two banks handle the gold, buying the miners’ “dust” and doing a thriving business.
There are half a dozen quite handsome churches, two hospitals, government buildings, the “Governor’s Palace,” and a number of residences that would do credit to any town. There are two large sawmills near the mouth of the Klondike River, which is crossed by two fine bridges, one iron and one wood. Of foundries and machine shops there are many. The stores and shops are many of them pretentious and filled with the most expensive high-class goods and wares—for, in the first place, the gold miner is lavish, extravagant, and will only have the very best, while it costs as much freight to bring in a cheap commodity as an expensive one. You can buy as handsome things here as in San Francisco or New York, if you don’t mind the price. The daily newspapers are sold by newsboys on the streets at 25 cents a copy. Fine steaks and roasts, mutton and veal, are thirty-five to sixty-five cents per pound. Chickens, $2.00 to $3.00 each. A glass of beer, twenty-five cents.
Some elegant drags and victorias, with fine horses, as well as many superb draft horses, are seen on the streets. It only pays to have the best horses; a scrub costs as much to bring in and to keep as a good one, and hay is $60.00 to $150.00 per ton, and oats are sold by the pound, sometimes $1.00 per pound. Cows’ milk is an expensive luxury at the restaurants, and various canned goods form the staple of life.
Many large steamboats ply on the Yukon, and those running down to St. Michael, 1,800 miles below, are of the finest Mississippi type, and are run by Mississippi captains and pilots. We shall go down on one of these, the “Sarah,” belonging to the “Northern Commercial Company,” one of the two great American trading companies. Also large towboats push huge freight barges up and down the river.
Several six-horse stage lines run many times a day to the various mining camps up and adjacent to the Klondike Valley, which is itself now settled and worked for one hundred and fifty miles from Dawson. Probably thirty to thirty-five thousand people are at work in these various diggings, and trade and spend in Dawson. Hence Dawson takes on metropolitan airs, and considers herself the new metropolis of the far north and Yukon Valley.
Two things strike the eye on first walking about the town. The multitude of big, long-haired, wolflike-looking dogs, loafing about, and the smallness of the neat dwelling-houses. The dogs play in the summer and work untiringly through the long seven months of winter—a “dog’s life” then means a volume. Small houses are easier to warm than big ones, when fuel is scarce and wood $16, $20 and $50 per cord, and soft spruce wood at that!
DAWSON CITY, THE YUKON—LOOKING DOWN.