Original subtitles

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- [Pierre Berton]: This was my home town

and my father's town before me.

It's a quiet place.

A few stores, a restaurant,

300, maybe 400 people.

Hard workers, most of them.

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On the main street, the old men

sit on the porch of the hotel in the sunshine

and they talk about the old days,

the good old days.

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The park is always full of kids.

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After a rain, there are always plenty of puddles

to sail boats in.

But I must tell you that this town where I spent my childhood

isn't really like any other town in the world.

This is Dawson City,

the center of the Klondike Gold Rush.

History will never see its like again.

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Every summer when the seeds of fireweed drifted

across the Valley of the Yukon River,

we kids used to roam through these decaying buildings.

Some of them had been locked

and barred for almost half a century.

You could buy anything in Dawson City in its heyday,

I remember my father telling me.

Anything from oysters to opera glasses.

You could buy a dance hall queen for her weight in gold,

and one man did.

His name was Chris Johanson

and he lived on Whiskey Hill.

For a child, Dawson was a bit like a giant play-yard

full of enormous dollhouses, each one crammed

with the trinkets of the stampede.

Hundreds of picks and shovels, old magazines,

bedsteads, pictures, furniture, bric-a-brac.

We used to play locomotive engineer

on the old Bonanza Creek Railway,

almost on every spot where George Washington Carmack

picked up the nugget that started it all.

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We played steamboat captain too.

These deserted sternwheelers were part of a fleet of,

oh, there'd be 250

that steamed up the Yukon in the stampede days.

Floating palaces, brightly painted,

loaded with champagne, and dancing girls, and gold.

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Today, there isn't a single one left on the River.

Most of the men are gone with the steamboats.

Of the tens of thousands who came here,

only a handful found the gold they were seeking.

And yet very few, I think,

regretted the journey to Dawson City.

For the great stampede was the high point of their life.

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The winter of 1897,

beyond mountains,

2000 miles north from civilization,

the cry was "« Gold "».

All over the world, a million people laid plans to go.

A hundred thousand actually set out.

But the going was so hard,

the way so weary

that more than half turned back.

My father was one of those who struggled on.

Scarcely any of these men were miners;

most were white-collar workers.

My father had just graduated from university,

in Civil Engineering.

All them had one idea:

they were on their way to the Klondike to shovel up gold,

and they were going to be rich beyond the dreams of avarice.

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The Chilkoot Pass.

This scene above all others

remained in my father's mind to his dying day.

Even when his memory began to fail,

this spectacle remained.

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You had to pack a ton of goods

up this terrible 45-degree slope of sheer ice,

a hundred pounds at a time,

over and over again, a year's outfit.

Without that, the Mounties wouldn't let you

enter the Yukon.

You couldn't stop to rest,

or it might be hours

before they'd let you back

into that endless human chain.

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At the top, a city of provisions.

70 feet of snow fell that winter,

and by spring, there were seven such cities,

layer upon layer, buried beneath it.

But the persistent ones dug out their supplies

and sledded off down the mountain slopes

on the next lap of the great adventure.

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Here on Lake Bennett at the head of the Yukon River,

20,000 men

built 7000 homemade boats.

Few of them had ever handled a saw or a hammer before.

They cut the planks by hand

and then they used Oakum to caulk the seams,

or pitch boiled from spruce gum.

Sometimes, they even used their own underwear.

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And then the word,

the river's clear of ice,

and on June 3rd, 1898,

the fantastic armada was launched.

The mountains behind, Dawson ahead,

500 miles to the north.

Clear sailing all the way downriver

to the gold fields.

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Most of them were too late.

They found almost everything staked:

valleys, hills, even moose pastures.

Here was Eldorado Creek, the richest of all.

31 claims,

each worth more than a million.

But all owned by men

who'd been on hand 18 months before.

All the land was being torn up

by these early birds, as they worked feverishly

with sluice box and rocker.

For the newcomers, nothing.

Only a few got claims

and these soon came to realize

that you just couldn't scoop up the gold

by the shovelful.

You had to burn your way down through the permafrost,

30, 40, perhaps 100 feet.

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As you went, you kept testing for that elusive,

glittering ribbon of soil,

known as the pay streak.

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It might take ten months of backbreaking toil

before you knew how rich you were.

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But the gold was there.

And Dawson City grew on it.

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Here on a wedge of frozen swamp,

not far from the Arctic Circle,

a weird and exotic city sprang out,

a city big enough to hold 30,000 souls.

For one demented summer,

it was mecca.

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And here too,

ground of another kind

was being staked out by the early birds,

who would never need to swing a pick handle

to fill their pockets.

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40,000 customers poured into the waiting town

from all over the world:

Australia, Greece,

every province in Canada,

every state in the Union.

They had names like Calamity Jane,

Diamond Tooth Gertie,

Swiftwater Bill

and the Evaporated Kid.

And if a man was shrewd enough

or cold-blooded enough,

a fortune could be made in a week.

There were no price ceilings:

a fresh egg cost 2$, a glass of milk, 5$,

a pint of champagne, 30$.

For Dawson was feeding on gold.

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Gold poured in from the creeks on mules' backs

while the whole town watched.

Watched and waited.

My father used to talk about Big Alec Macdonald

who had 29 mules,

each loaded with a hundred pounds of gold.

He'd been broke two years before

until he bought a million-dollar claim

for a sack of flour and a side of bacon.

He lived to eat off gold plate

and ride a carriage down the Champs EÉlysée.

But when he died, back here in the Klondike,

he was broke again.

That was the way it went, down the hatch.

You could buy wine enough fill a bathtub.

And if you were so inclined, and some were,

you could pay a girl to take a bath in it.

You could do anything, if you had enough gold.

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Paradise Alley

ran right behind the main street.

Every residence had a name on the door.

Names like Montreal Marie,

Spanish Jeanette,

Golden Gut Flossie.

For these ladies, Dawson imported

fashions from Paris.

Nothing but the best.

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With all its gaudy glitter,

Dawson was never a lawless town.

The Mounties saw to that.

They might overlook the sins of the flesh,

but they didn't sanction anything else.

Nobody could pack a gun

and all the saloons had to close on Sunday.

The Sabbath was so holy

that one man was actually fined

for chopping his own wood on the Lord's Day.

You know it's almost inconceivable

that the law should have been maintained so firmly

in a city nourished by that metal

which is said to be at the root of all evil.

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And yet in that crazy summer,

no major theft,

not a single murder.

All the more remarkable

because there were other passions to keep in check,

national passions.

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Dawson was an American town

on Canadian soil,

subject to the Queen's laws,

but populated almost entirely

by strangers from the United States.

And so the great festive day

was a combination of Dominion Day

and the Fourth of July.

It was a perfect moment for a celebration.

The last stragglers had attained their mecca.

The miners on the creek had finished their winter's work.

The carnival had reached its climax.

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The daylight hours were endless.

There was plenty of dynamite to explode

and release pent-up emotions.

The reverberations were so great

that the very dogs fled the town.

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What were they celebrating, really?

More than Independence Day, I think.

More than Dominion Day.

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Each man had a great deal to think about.

All were at least 2000 miles from home,

some were 10,000.

On the face of it, they had very little to celebrate.

Only a few had got any gold

and very few of these were able to hang onto it.

And yet, after the long months on the passes

and the lakes and the rivers,

they found themselves seized

by a curious mixture of feelings,

not the least of which was a strange elation.

It's hard to believe, but after coming all this way,

many of them never bothered to look for gold at all.

It was as if somehow,

they'd already found what they were seeking.

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You know, when we were playing house in Dawson,

it never occurred to us that any of this meant anything.

That one of these chairs for instance,

might be the very one

in which Silent Sam Bonnifield was sitting

the night he lost the M & E Hotel in a poker game.

It never occurred to us

that each Victorian picture told its own story,

that these two paintings

had once been worth more than gold itself

to a man who traded half his claim for them.

[dog barking]

No ghosts of the past returned to haunt us,

here in these silent rooms.

[children playing]

- Get out of there.

- Let's go. Come on!

- [Pierre Berton]: I don't suppose the next generation

gives the old days much of a thought either.

For the Klondike is only a beginning to them

and not an end,

as it was to the men of 1898.

I think my father understood that.

He found no gold, but he lived here 40 years

and I know he would have been content to die here,

like some of his cronies.

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But that was not to be.

He knew that each of us had his own Chilkoot to conquer,

of another kind.

And so he left Dawson City behind

and I don't imagine that I shall ever see it again.

I don't suppose things have changed greatly.

I know that all the men

still sit in the sunlight on the main street

and talk of the good old days.

And the good times, the times that are remembered,

usually turn up to be the hardest times.

No the moment when the nugget was found in the pan,

but those bitter hours on the passes

and the long days of the trail.

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The Gold Rush was something like a war.

It caused many casualties.

But those who survived it and learned from it

were strangely ennobled.

These men found their Eldorado.

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Well, that's my home town,

Dawson City.

Subtitles: www.sovo-tech.com

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