Three famous authors

There are three famous authors who spent time in Dawson City.

One of them was Jack London.  He was there at the beginning of the Gold Rush in 1897, and came over Chilkoot Pass.  He only spent that winter in Alaska, outside of Dawson City in a log cabin.  He suffered from scurvy and in the spring of 1898, went back to San Francisco.  (He had started school at Berkeley, but quickly left.) He added to the allure of Alaska by writing The Call of the Wild, The Son of the Wolf, White Fang, and Burning Daylight.    When his cabin was discovered, it was divided in half -- half went to Oakland to Jack London Square; the other half stayed in Dawson City.  They reconstructed the other half in each place.  Part of his centre talks about the characters in his books and the real people on whom they were based.

Robert Service is known for his poems about Alaska,

namely the Cremation of Sam McGee, and the Shooting of Dan McGraw. Look them up, you’ll find them very entertaining!

  He was an Englishman, and a banker by trade.  He didn’t come to Dawson City until  10 years after the Gold Rush, but stayed from 1909-1912.  He was pretty well off and had housekeepers, cooks, etc.  But he loved the Yukon. His poems are easy to read and memorize, and became very popular.

  He went on to other things but in Alaska, he is known as “the Bard of the Yukon.” A young man gave a lecture and read some of his poems.  He was very good.

Pierre Breton is a contemporary author, but he has written 50 historical books on Canada, and several on the Yukon.  His book entitled “Klondike”  is the most popular here.  He was a television personality, and had other careers, and still wrote 50 well respected non-fiction books.  The house where he was born is now an author’s retreat, where authors are invited to come and live  and write for a given period of time.