COMMENTS: Dawson City should not be confused with Dawson Creek. Dawson City was the goal of the Klondike Gold Rush. It is the second largest city in the Yukon with 2k+ residents in the summer. There are still arpprox. 250 active claims being worked in the area. It is one of the few places in Canada with casino gambling.

Check out Dawson City here: Klondike Visitors AssociationP.O. Box 389W,Dawson City, Yukon,Canada Y0B 1G0Tel: (867) 993-5575Fax: (867) 993-6415email: KVA@Dawson.net
REMAINS: Lots of well photographed buildings

See "comments". Tourism in the summer is high profit. Sam Steele of the RCMP kept order in the mining town during the gold rush. Pierre Berton has written several book on the gold rush. Berton was botn in Dawson City. Jack London worked a mine there for a time and Robert Service was a bank clerk there. I can sewnd photographs on request. Submitted by: Stephen Wylie

Anyone who has recently spent the dead of winter in Dawson cannot help but have some appreciation of what the middle of winter was like in the early days. No running water, no electricity, often very little food, almost no nothing except an average winter temperature of -16 degrees. The actual range is from an extreme low of -81 to a high of near zero. The stampeders arrived at Dawson City in the fall of 1897 although in 1886 a rich strike was made just downstream from Dawson just a few miles inside the Canadian-Alaska border called Forty Mile Creek. A boom followed but in time began to fade when the Klondike hysteria broke out. The population moved upstream and Dawson City had its first residents. One can only imagine the hardships endured by miners attempting to mine for gold in the frozen ground. The long period of winter freezing causes the ground to become so hard that even in mid-summer it thaws only a foot, creating the condition called "perma-frost." For a few years Dawson enjoyed a boom never before seen. At its height, the town boasted of 30,000 people. But the lone prospector with his pan and pick and shovel soon faded into oblivion, replaced by "Big business" with larger and more mechanized equipment. In 1906, the railroad come to Dawson but lasted only eight years when gold production began to drop. The end of the railroad was an indication of what was in store for Dawson. Dawson City today is well worth a visit, but not during the winter. - Ghosttowns.com