Dawson City Yukon

Dawson City was the home of the Klondike Gold Rush between 1896 and 1899. During this time its population was 40,000 people, the largest city west of Winnipeg and north of San Francisco. Vancouver almost doubled in population during this mass movement of humanity to the gold fields. Edmonton when from a hamlet of 1,200 to a town of 4,000.

The greatest effect was felt in Seattle; in 1899 alone, 1,200 new houses mushroomed up in the city, and merchants, who before the rush had sold goods worth an annual $300,000, now found that their direct interest in outfitting amounted to ten million.*

Today Dawson's population is just over 2,000. (500 when Pierre Berton completed his book in 1957).

Dawson existed as a metropolis exactly twelve months: from July 1898 to July 1899. Before this period it had been nothing more than an overgrown frontier community of shacks and tents.

Although it lay in the shadow of the Arctic Circle, more than four thousand miles from civilization, and although it was the only settlement of any size in a wilderness area that occupied hundreds of thousands of square miles, Dawson was livelier, richer, and better equipped than many larger Canadian and American communities. It had a telephone service, running water, steam heat, and electricity. It had dozens of hotels, many of them better appointed than those on the Pacific coast. It had motion-picture theatres operating at a time when the projected motion-picture was just three years old.*

*Klondike
The Last Great Gold Rush
1896-1899
by Pierre Berton