Canadian Historic Sites: Occasional Papers in Archaeology and History No. 21

The Dawson Daily News:
Journalism in the Klondike

by Edward F. Bush

Introduction

On the morning of 17 August 1896, Skookum Jim, Tagish Charlie and George Carmac staked claims on Rabbit Creek, a tributary of the Klondike. The full import of the rich gold strike reached the outside world with the docking of the steamer Excelsior at San Francisco on 15 July 1897 and of the Portland at Seattle three days later as the first successful stampeders staggered down the gangplanks lugging suitcases heavy with gold. Appropriately renamed "Eldorado," the Rabbit Creek discovery within two years transformed Dawson, a hamlet at the confluence of the Klondike and Yukon rivers, into a sprawling mining camp with an itinerant population estimated between twenty and thirty thousand. The news of the strike drew adventurers, miners, gamblers, hustlers and camp followers from every quarter of the continent and indeed from all over the world. In the summers of 1898 and 1899 Dawson boasted the largest and certainly the most colourful population of any Canadian community west of Winnipeg. Restaurants, cafes, dance halls, hotels, bathhouses, theatres and brothels sprouted like dandelions to serve the motley host gathered there.

Among the sundry enterprises evoked by the stampede in June 1898 were two newspapers, the aptly named Yukon Midnight Sun and Klondike Nugget. Printed on light hand presses, they broke forth in self-confident print primarily to serve the mining camp, but also, they hoped, to provide a little news from "the outside," as Klondikers referred to the rest of the world. A little over a year later, in July 1899, the Sun and the Nugget were joined by a competitor that would outstrip them both, a paper which in news coverage, format, features and editorial style bore fair comparison with many of the large metropolitan dailies in the early years of the century. This, then, is the story of the Dawson Daily News, born at the height of the world's last great gold rush, a vigorous daily which later boasted that it had never really had any substantial competition, but fated to end its career as a village weekly 55 years later.