There have been many interesting stories about gold dredges of the Klondike and 60 Mile country.
Just the dredge stories about Joe Boyle, one of the Klondike kings, have filled many exciting books. Even William Ogilvie was involved with dredging, I think on the Stewart River. David Neufeld (with Parks Canada) and Patrick
Habiluk wrote Make It Pay! about gold dredge #4 on Bonanza Creek; their book was a very successful effort. The late old-time writer Archie Gillespie wrote a great dredge story for me in my Colourful Five Per Cent Illustrated No. 1.
In the story, in 1945 “An old dredge dug into the white channel of the tailings. It struck a regular Pandora’s Box of gold. On one cleanup at the foot of the tailings, the gold caught in the riffles looked like a field of wheat. It was
probably one of the richest cleanups ever made by the Yukon Consolidated Gold Corporation.”
“Around 1945, old No. 3 was tearing up gravels at the foot of Jackson Gulch tailings piles” is when this rich strike was made.
Anyone with information about this subject, please write Jim Robb: The Colourful Five Per Cent Scrapbook — Can You Identify? c/o the Yukon News, 211 Wood Street, Whitehorse, Yukon, Y1A 2E4, or e-mail through the News
website, www.yukon-news.com.