When gold was discovered in the Klondike, the quantities that were taken from the creeks surrounding Dawson City were enormous. In 1900, Klondike gold production peaked at a million ounces, which was an astounding 7,000 per cent increase compared with four years earlier.
With the growth of Dawson, real estate values escalated dramatically. The lot on which the Opera House stood on Front Street, for example, was one of the most valuable pieces of property in the bustling infant town. It had sold for five dollars in 1896; by Christmas of the following year, the lot was worth $30,000.
By 1898, Front Street between King and Princess was the dynamic heart of the gold rush city. Large frame and log structures faced the river, shoulder to shoulder. Five of the eight theatres in Dawson that year were clustered along this stretch of waterfront. One was the Oatley Sisters’ Concert and Dance Hall in the Horseshoe Saloon. Beside that towered the Monte Carlo, and two doors farther south, the Opera House. A few doors along was the Combination, and on the next block, opposite the post office, was the Mascot.
With all that gold, and a captive audience (once the Yukon River froze), the saloons, dance halls and theatres along Front Street were the social hub of the bustling boom town. As the long cold dark winter descended, these businesses held an irresistible allure in a town where men outnumbered women by at least fifteen to one. When electricity was installed in the establishments along a two-block stretch of Front Street late in the year, they became a tantalizing island of light in a city enveloped by Arctic darkness.
| Unlike the Hollywood portrayal of a gold rush dance hall, Kate Rockwell insisted that "Dance hall girls in those days wore high-necked shirtwaists, high button shoes and skirts down to the ground as well as wrist-length sleeves." (Courtesy/J.B. Tyrrell Collection) |
Rich or poor, everybody was welcome. Those who were starving and cold were drawn to these places to keep warm, or even sleep. They might also be treated to a round of drinks by the wealthy Klondike kings, who spent their earnings lavishly in these pleasure palaces.
There was plenty to spend gold on. The theatres had a bar near the front, opposite the gaming tables, while in the back was a theatre where singers, dancers, magicians, acrobats, comedians and actors entertained. When the show was over, the chairs were pulled aside, and a small orchestra would strike a waltz, square dance or two-step, and dancing began. The girls took a percentage of what the men paid, for each turn around the dance floor. Behind Front Street, were the prostitutes of Paradise Alley. All of these activities were designed to separate the miners from their money.
A good example: two dance hall girls known fondly by the nicknames Glycerine and Vaseline once worked Irishman Roddy Connor out of the $50,000 he made from the sale of his mine. Connor loved to dance, and with his remarkable stamina, there was no girl who could keep up with him on the dance floor, so Glycerine and Vaseline took turns dancing with him. He spent from five hundred to two thousand dollars a night on them until it was all gone.
Despite being a wide-open frontier town, strict oversight by the North West Mounted Police kept things in Dawson from getting out of hand. There were not the gun fights often portrayed in movie Westerns, and there was a strict policy of closure from midnight on Saturday evening, until seven o’clock on Monday morning.
The Mounted Police kept a close eye on the entertainment to ensure that it was of an acceptable moral standard. Freda Maloof, the “Turkish Whirlwind,” thrilled her male audience with her belly dancing. But violators like her found themselves in court, paying substantial fines, incarcerated at the government woodpile, or even banished from town. And nothing as risqué as can-can dancing was allowed.
| Front Street was the tantalizing social hub of Dawson City in 1898. Four of at least eight Dawson theatres stood between King and Queen Streets. There was the Horseshoe Saloon with the Oatley Sisters' Concert and Dance Hall. Beside it was the Monte Carlo. Two doors away was the Opera House, and the Combination was a few doors farther along. In addition to theatre, they offered dancing, drinking and gambling. (Courtesy/Gates collection) |
As the city stabilized, and more families arrived, social pressures on the administration forced the territorial council to impose ever stricter regulations that eventually took most of the fun out of high living. The prostitutes were moved to a swamp on Fourth Avenue, then eventually moved across the river to Klondike City. Gambling was shut down in 1901, and strict regulations prevented liquor from being dispensed in dance halls, and when the crafty proprietors looked for loopholes, the council plugged them too.
Declining gold production and dwindling population also hastened the demise of Dawson City’s Broadway. By 1904, the professional theatrical scene was gone. Gambling had gone underground and the dance halls shut down. The last saloon closed in 1916, but the glory days lingered in the memories of all who were part of it. Everyone shared the high points and the colourful stories. Legends were created. Hollywood gave the Klondike a makeover and turned the story of the gold rush into another Western transplanted to the north.
When Kate Rockwell, who spent three years entertaining in the Klondike, was invited to the film set of the Columbia Pictures production of “Klondike Kate,” she commented on the Hollywood transformation. The Hollywood dance hall girls weren’t anything like the real version, she said in an interview. “We danced like ladies—square dances and waltzes and things like that, and our costumes were not the low-cut sort you see now. On stage we wore tights. Dance hall girls in those days wore high-necked shirtwaists, high button shoes and skirts down to the ground as well as wrist-length sleeves.”
Rockwell took pains to clarify that the Klondike wasn’t like the wild west. “People get funny ideas,” she said. “They think those days were wild and woolly for a fact. It was wild country all right, but the Mounties didn’t let much go wrong. As for the girls, I never heard a girl in a dance hall tell a vulgar story, swear, or curse … The scenes you saw in Dawson’s dance halls weren’t any wilder than what you see in some of the taxi-dance places today” (taxi dancers were paid to dance with their customers on a dance-by-dance basis).
Hollywood and reality seldom overlap. The story that Columbia finally settled on was entirely fictional. “I don’t recognize anything in it that happened to me,” she said in October of 1943 during the filming of the picture.
All of this raises the question: do we want to remember the gold rush the way it really was, or as a vision fabricated by Hollywood? I think the story of the gold rush, without embellishment by Tinseltown, is interesting enough to stand on its own merits.
In 1940, when the Orpheum Theatre in Dawson burned down, Kate Rockwell was in town. When Rockwell (then married to local miner Johnny Matson) was given a sample of dirt gathered from beneath the stage where she once performed, she panned out more than an ounce of gold dust in just a few minutes. Even forty years after the rush, the streets were still paved with gold.
Michael Gates is Yukon’s first Story Laureate. He is the author of six books of Yukon history. His latest, “Dublin Gulch: A History of the Eagle Gold Mine,” received the Axiom Business Book Award silver medal for corporate history. You can contact him at msgates@northwestel.net.