useful in plotting the day-to-day activities. These units were the Yukon Motor Machine Gun Battery and the 2nd Canadian Motor Machine Gun Brigade.
Accounts of Canada’s involvement in the Great War by military historians provided me with the greater context of the war. Of these, the writings of Canadian authors/historians Tim Cook and G.W.L. Nicholson, among others, were very helpful. Specialized references about machine guns and snipers filled in details important to the story.
Some Yukon participants in the war stood out from the rest, either by what they wrote or by what others wrote about them. George and Martha Black and Howard Grestock fit into the former category. Joe Boyle and James Murdoch Christie fit into the latter. Although many displayed individual acts of bravery, these latter two men stand out for their heroic accomplishments. The efforts of the women who remained at home in the Yukon to raise funds for patriotic purposes also demanded attention.
I have woven together these disparate accounts into what I hope is a compelling and informative overview of what happened to people of the Yukon during World War I. I hope that it opens doors to the past that others will choose to enter. I do not consider myself an expert in the history of war, but I think that I share that with the hundreds of brave souls who volunteered for what they saw as a noble purpose.
Introduction
It was impossible for the men and women of the Yukon to imagine what lay before them when they answered the call to war between 1914 and 1918. The Yukon was not the most distant region of the British Empire, but it was certainly the most isolated. Spawned by the Klondike gold rush that started in 1896, the Yukon came into existence on June 13, 1898. Dawson City, its capital, rose almost fully formed from the swampy land at the confluence of the Yukon and Klondike Rivers, only a short distance from the Arctic Circle, in the span of two years. At the peak of the gold rush, it was said to be the largest city west of Winnipeg, and it had all the conveniences of any modern city of that time period. In fact, it came to be known as the “Paris of the North.”
Dawson City wasn’t easy to get to. During the gold rush, it would take months for a man to haul his year’s supplies over the rocky trails of the mountainous Pacific coast and down the system of rivers and lakes, more than 900 kilometres into the heart of a wilderness. This journey was shared by tens of thousands of northern Argonauts. Even after the community had settled into Victorian respectability, it was subject to the tenuous chain of transportation links that started with ocean liners travelling from Vancouver, Victoria or Seattle to Skagway, Alaska, followed by a train ride on the White Pass and Yukon Route railway through the mountains to Whitehorse, and concluded with a two-day journey downriver by sternwheel riverboat. The winters were worse. Once the Yukon froze up in the subarctic autumn, all transportation ceased until the ice on the rivers was safe to cross and the snow was deep enough to allow sleighs to be drawn by horses through the arctic half-light at temperatures reaching fifty degrees below zero. It was a place where you could get away from it all, as many did.
The Yukon, long inhabited by First Nations people, had remained undisturbed by European intrusion until the mid-nineteenth century. Then gold was discovered. The earliest prospectors first came into the Yukon River valley in 1873, but it was another decade before they started to trickle into the region in any significant numbers. Buoyed up by optimism that the great find would someday be discovered, these hardy individualists moved from one promising prospect to another, looking for the pay streak.1
Gold was discovered on the Fortymile River in 1886, and the following year, the small town of Forty Mile grew up and served as the centre of mining in the region for the next decade. More gold was discovered on the nearby creeks of the Sixtymile River, and then at Birch Creek in Alaska. By 1896, sixteen hundred prospectors and miners had come into the Yukon River valley to search for the yellow metal.
All of this changed dramatically when Keish (a First Nation man from Tagish, also known as Skookum Jim), the brother-in-law of an American prospector named George Washington Carmack, discovered gold on Rabbit Creek, a tributary of the Klondike River, in August 1896. Rabbit Creek was quickly renamed Bonanza Creek. This was the gold discovery that everyone had been waiting for, and thousands more hopeful prospectors flocked to the Yukon with dreams of becoming rich.
Gold was found in incredible quantities on Bonanza Creek; Eldorado Creek, its main tributary, was even richer. The first two dozen claims on Eldorado Creek made their owners millionaires. Gold was found on Hunker Creek, and many other streams radiating out from a central peak, that was named King Solomon’s Dome, like the spokes on a giant wheel. Gold was even found in the gravels on the hillsides above Bonanza, Eldorado and Hunker Creeks. Everywhere they turned, the prospectors seemed to find more of it. Production of the precious yellow metal peaked four years later, when more than a million troy ounces of gold were washed out of the frozen gravels of the Klondike.
At the peak of the gold rush, the Yukon had a population of thirty thousand, centred on the metropolis of Dawson City, and the satellite communities and mining operations of the surrounding goldfields. A few hundred lived in the tiny village of Whitehorse, which was, at that time, a place to pass through, rather than a destination. An even smaller number inhabited the millions of hectares of wilderness that surrounded these places. The original occupants of the land, the First Nations of the Yukon, numbering perhaps fifteen hundred individuals, were completely overwhelmed by this flood of humanity. Dawson became a vibrant city of dirt streets and boardwalks, electric lights and running water. Yet only a short distance away, grayling abounded in the streams and moose, bears and caribou were abundant in the hills and valleys. The region had yet to be explored and mapped by the new arrivals.
Within a few years, the countless claims at first mined by hand labour and sweat of brow were being operated by steam hoists, pumps and mills; these in turn were displaced by massive floating gold-digging machines called dredges, run by mining companies based thousands of kilometres away. The result was depopulation, and a stabilization of the community, which became dominated by the corporate giants operating there. In addition, thousands of miners were drawn away to mining camps in Alaska. The population of the Yukon was only about five thousand by 1914.
Throughout this period, however, Dawson City remained an active and dynamic Victorian town, and its inhabitants never lost the optimism that the next big find was just around the corner. Through the Yukon Order of Pioneers, the first fraternal organization in the Yukon, the old-time miners of the gold rush began to celebrate Discovery Day, turning it into one of the biggest events of the summer. It was symbolized by the individual prospector and miner who had mucked for gold for a quarter of a century before the big strike was made. The prospector crouched over his pan looking for gold became the iconic image that characterized the mining industry of the time, as it still does today. And it was with that in mind, that the community of Dawson was starting to think of the August 17 celebration in the summer of 1914.
Dawson City, which had exploded in population in 1898, was in slow decline by the time of the Great War, but still displayed some of the grandeur of the Klondike gold rush. Yukon Archives Claude and Mary Tidd fonds 008360
Now imagine a landscape that is as barren as the moon. The trees are gone, or if they still survive, they are mere skeletal stumps, devoid of branches and leaves. They provide no shade, nor do they harbour songbirds. The ground is littered with long rows of barbed wire ready to entangle anything or anyone who attempts to pass. They call it No Man’s Land, and never was there a better description.
On either side of No Man’s Land are opposing sets of trenches zigzagging across northern France. Along this line are thousands of machine gun nests, ready to spray a deadly rain of lead across the enemy lines. To attempt to approach is a death sentence for anyone who dares.
Behind each line of trenches are rows of howitzers and mortars that lay down a constant barrage
