Letter from Yukon: In Canada’s north, the gold rush lives on as a family business
| Dawson City, Yukon
Yukoners call them the “family farms” of the Canadian North. But the barren, gutted landscapes where miners sift gold from riverbeds look nothing like farms.
The reference, instead, is to the long history of alluvial gold mining here in the Klondike Valley, and how the tradition is still passed from generation to generation.
Lisa Favron’s family originally arrived here from Finland. Like thousands of other prospectors, her great-grandfather was tempted by the riches of the creeks and tributaries around Dawson City. “He hiked the Chilkoot Pass, and settled in Grand Forks, which is the confluence of the Bonanza and Eldorado rivers,” she says, on a hilltop above Hunker Creek, where small miners staked thousands of claims in 1898. Ms. Favron herself grew up away from gold mining, but she married back into it, and now considers herself a proud fourth-generation placer miner.
Why We Wrote This
The gold rush may be long over, but the work of extracting valuable minerals from stream deposits – modern “panning for gold” – still goes on in Canada’s Yukon. Today, it’s a family business, passed down from generation to generation.
The Klondike gold rush attracted thousands from around the world, who founded Dawson City. The former frontier boom town, once dubbed the “Paris of the North,” today draws flocks of tourists who experience the past by walking around the town’s restored wooden facades, seeing (incredibly talented) cancan dancers at a local theater, or partaking in gold mining the historic way.
During one afternoon with Goldbottom Mine Tours, young kids and adults roll up their pants and scoop up the surface of Hunker Creek, shaking their old-fashioned pans in search of flakes of gold. They whoop when they find it glittering in the sunlight.
Though placer mining still is focused on extracting mineral wealth from stream beds, the modern effort has moved on from pans and sifting trays. While the basic goal is still the same – filter away sand and rock, leaving behind valuable material – the technology today is industrial-scale, thanks to truck-sized machines such as the trommel, which spins with water to separate out the precious metal.
Placer miners can sometimes quite literally unearth the past. They often find zippers or buttons that hail from the 1800s. On one claim, a miner discovered a 56,000-year-old mummified wolf pup, which was given the name Zhur when it went on public display.
“But people think we’re just from the past,” says Lorraine Millar, whose family runs Goldbottom Mine Tours. She drives up about a half mile along the creek, away from the tourists to the spot where her husband is running a trommel. “We’re still mining.”
The landscape is admittedly not pretty. Placer miners have faced controversy for environmental degradation, disturbing the creeks and natural greenery of the valley to create quarry-like pits in the ground. Miners counter that they are required to “reclaim” nature once they’re done mining an area, and that it grows back quickly and often on its own. They also argue that it causes much less damage than hard-rock gold mining.
They’ve also faced criticism from some residents, including Indigenous leaders, over the royalties system set up more than a century ago. It requires they pay the Yukon government 37 cents per ounce of gold mined, which is 2.5% of a fixed gold value of $15 per ounce. The current value of gold is at record highs, above $4,600 Canadian ($3,330 U.S.) per ounce, but the 37 cents per ounce owed to the government hasn’t evolved with the times.
Aside from metal prices and some automation, placer mining has changed little over the past 125 years.
Ms. Favron enters a room in her basement that she calls the “gold recovery room.” It is decidedly low-tech. Her role in the business is to screen and wash the earth at multiple stages, concentrating the find at each step until she’s left with nothing but the metal. The largest she found was the size of her thumb. She gave it to her daughter for her graduation from university.
When she has just over 100 ounces, the family goes outside to the furnace, hooks up the propane, melts the gold, and pours it into a mold. She then takes that bar to one of three assayers in Dawson City. “When I need money to pay a bill, I call the gold holding company and say, ‘I’d like to sell 50 ounces from my pool account,’ and they put cash in your bag.”
That doesn’t mean they’re “rich” – at least in the bank, says Ms. Favron. In any given year, they might find anywhere from a few hundred ounces of gold to a few thousand. Most of it goes right back into the business. It’s not a lifestyle that one necessarily chooses to enter. Rather, most are born into it, she says: another similarity with the “family farm.”
She says that all five of her kids worked in the business – cleaning the gold, cooking for the team – as they grew up. “Then they went away and said, ‘We’re not doing this.’ We’ve got one in the game. One out of five. It’s not bad.”
After all, that means they’re raising a proud fifth-generation placer miner.
