Yukon Gold Rush Steamboat Survey, Canada
Project Number: INA-124
Project Director: John Pollack MSc FRGS
Project Archaeologist: Robyn Woodward, PhD
Team Members: Over the past six years more than thirty professionals, volunteers and graduate students have worked on 11 field trips in the North. Our supporters include PROMARE, the Government of Yukon, EPICSCAN, Blueview Technologies, Oceangate, Speigel-TV, the Yukon Transportation Museum, National Geographic/Waitt Foundation, the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, the Vancouver Maritime Museum, and the Nautical Archaeology Program of Texas A&M University
Location: Yukon Territory, Canada
Sites: The Yukon River and its tributaries between Carcross and Dawson City
Project Initiation: 2005
Period: ca. 1898-1910
Synopsis
When the discovery of gold in the Yukon became known to the world in the summer of 1897, an estimated 100,000 "stampeders" attempted to reach Dawson City. Only 30,000 made it to Dawson City. There were two common routes to Dawson, both of which were long and arduous. One route was entirely by water, first by ocean steamer to St. Michael, Alaska at the mouth of the Yukon River and then upstream to Dawson. The shorter but more difficult route was by steamer to Skagway, over the mountain passes to Lake Bennett, and finally downstream to Dawson. Both routes involve involved vast distances on a swift and shallow wilderness river. Hence stern-wheel steamboats were an obvious craft for the Yukon River.
When the Gold Rush exploded, forty-three West Coast shipyards responded to the demand, and in 1898, 131 stern wheelers were constructed in yards as far south as San Francisco, and as far north as Dutch Harbour in the Aleutian Islands. In total, 266 stern and side-wheeled steamboats operated on the Yukon River in Alaska and Canada.
When the boom dissipated in 1900, many steamship companies either went bankrupt or were bought out by competitors, and surplus tonnage was abandoned. Often vessels were left derelict on shore along the banks of the river, where they had been winched out of the water in the fall to protect them from ice damage. As a result, the Yukon now contains one of the greatest intact collections of stern-wheel vessels known to exist, and many are in excellent condition.
The Yukon River Survey was initiated in 2005 by John Pollack and Robyn Woodward, and became an INA project in the fall of 2007. Given the many potential sites in this unstudied area, we are focusing our efforts on a specific subset of projects. The over-arching priority is to document the range of construction techniques used on these late 19th-century vessels.
Research Foci
Twenty-two wrecks and hulks have been catalogued to date. In the course of this work the team has undertaken complete assessments of six sites, and collected detailed information at other locations related to hull construction, chines, boiler, and tiller-and-rudder configuration.
Considerable variation is noted among the Yukon River vessels, and to date we have documented three of four general classes of hull design. These benchmark ship descriptions include Evelyn on Shipyard Island, Seattle No. 3 and Julia B. at West Dawson, and Moyie at Kaslo, BC. A.J. Goddard will be described in detail by MA-candidate Lindsey Thomas, noting it is a unique, one-off design not seen elsewhere on the river.
Our 2011 priorities will include an assessment of the hull and artifacts of the famous and newly discovered stern wheel steamboat, Columbian. This ship blew up and burned in 1906. We will attempt to locate the wrecks of Casca and Dawson in Rink Rapids, and we shall vet - in the field - the conclusions of a major journal paper to be published in 2012.
Click on the buttons (left and above) to view a brief history of the Klondike Gold Rush, a summary of chronology of the past six years of field work, a review of our initial findings, photo galleries, and a list of references for further information.
Klondike from the Western Bluff in 2005. photo: John Pollack.