Conrad Boyce is the editor and publisher of the Cosmos. He has a BA in English from the University of Alberta and a diploma in journalism from Grant Macewan Community College in Edmonton. He lived and worked in the Yukon and Vancouver Island before arriving in Ontario in 1995. Beyond these pages, he is the Artistic Director of OnStage Uxbridge, and the technical manager of the Uxbridge Music Hall.
A morning on Rabbit Creek
Having asked a dozen of my contributing writers to hop into a Canada Day time machine and visit some of the most fascinating moments in Canadian history, I figured I should do the same. But where in space and time to go?
My writers, being delightfully creative individuals, took some unexpected journeys. The farthest anyone went back was 300 years, but in that case the writer only visited her own back yard. One writer only went back a couple of weeks in time. The locales ranged from a New York recording studio to a dusty street in Calgary, from a battlefield in France to the railway station in Zephyr.
My time machine is going mid-range, both in space and time. The date is Aug. 16, 1896, and the place about 5,000 kilometres from here, on a small creek in what was then the vast Northwest Territory. The watercourse is called Rabbit Creek, but after today’s dramatic events, it will be quickly re-christened.
The best guess is that this part of the world was inhabited by nomadic natives for about 12,000 years before Europeans came, first to explore, then to trade for furs, finally to prospect for minerals. Rabbit Creek feeds into the Trondhek River only a couple of miles before the Trondhek in turn empties into the mighty Yukon, which still has 2,000 miles to flow north and west before meeting the Bering Sea.
The biggest European settlement in these parts right now is the trading post at Forty Mile, about a day’s paddle from the Trondhek. About half of its citizens are traders, the other half are prospectors. But George Carmack, he’s a little bit of both. A couple of years ago, he married a Tagish girl named Kate, from down south near the Yukon’s headwaters, and now he’s as much native as he is Scots/Cailfornian. Today, he’s come up to the mouth of the Trondhek to set up his salmon traps, along with Kate, her brother Jim Mason (known as “Skookum Jim”) and her cousin, Tagish Charlie. The salmon have come this far up now, and are heading into the sidestreams to spawn, so the fishing’s good.
But whenever he comes up here, George brings his prospecting kit, too, sometimes just his gold pan, because you never know where you might find some “colours”. Jim and Charlie have learned to keep their eyes out, too, even Kate. More and more people are coming into the country, looking for a quick way to get rich. There must be something to it.
This time of year, it’s pretty cool at night - it snowed for the first time last Friday. Yesterday Charlie went up the Trondhek to see where the salmon were going, and he ran into that canny Nova Scotia miner, Bob Henderson, and stayed the night with him at his cabin on Humker Creek. Swapping stories around the fire, Bob said he’d found a bit of colour on Rabbit Creek, but hadn’t got back there yet, he’d do it as soon as the wood was cut for the winter. So as soon as Charlie could get out of there on the morning of the 16th, he came beetling down to the camp to tell the rest of them the news.
“That Henderson,” scoffed George, “probably trying to send us on a goose chase, while he goes after the real stuff. But the fish aren’t really running yet, I guess it couldn’t hurt to wander up there.”
So they packed light, not expecting to be more than a couple of days, and the four of them headed south up Rabbit Creek, panning as they went. It was early afternoon when Skookum Jim let out an almighty yell, and the rest came running. The bottom of Jim’s pan was almost covered with the most beautiful flakes George had ever seen - gold!
Because he was the head of the family (not to mention being a white man), George got to stake the discovery claim, which was twice as big as the others. Jim staked One Above and Charlie One Below, and Kate, being a woman (not to mention being native), didn’t get to stake a thing. Then they went down to Forty Mile to file the claims, and they all called George a liar till he poured the flakes out on the bar. And Forty Mile emptied overnight, and they built a new town at the mouth of the Trondhek, called Dawson City. And they renamed the Rabbit Bonanza Creek, because it was - almost everyone who staked on it became a millionaire. And because Trondhek was a bit hard to get your mouth around, they started calling it the Klondike, and what the Carmack family started became the biggest gold rush the world had ever known.
George and Jim and Charlie all got rich, and of course George left Kate and went back to the States. But the other three are buried side by side in a little cemetery in the southern Yukon, not far from where they were born. And Bonanza Creek still flows down to the Klondike, and it still has gold in it. And, you know, they’ve still never found the mother lode...
