Thinking Citizen Blog — Rivers of the US (XI): the Yukon — from British Columbia to the Bering Sea
Thinking Citizen Blog — Wednesday is Climate Change, the Environment, and Sustainability Day
Today’s Topic — Rivers of the US (XI): the Yukon — from British Columbia to the Bering Sea
The closest most people get to the Yukon is the character of Yukon Cornelius in the “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer” TV Christmas Special from 1964. Perhaps a few know something about the Klondike Gold Rush of 1896–1903. Doing research for this post, I learned about Robert W. Service (1874–1958), the “Bard of the Yukon.” The first third of today’s post will be on the river itself. The second third will be on the Gold Rush and the final third on “Canada’s Kipling.” Has anyone taken a canoe trip down the Yukon? Tales to tell? Experts — please chime in. Correct, elaborate, elucidate.
FROM BRITISH COLUMBIA TO THE BERING SEA
1. Source: the Llewellyn Glacier at the southern end of Atlin Lake in British Columbia.
2. Course: flows northwest through Canada’s Yukon Territory into Alaska then a little further northward and then southwest to the Bering Sea. There are only four vehicle-carrying bridges cross the river. The Klondike River, after which the Gold Rush and the Ice Cream Bar is named, is a tributary of the Yukon.
3. Pollution: relatively low — not classified as “impaired” by the EPA. “The Yukon River Tribal Watershed Council. a cooperative effort of 70 First Nations and Tribes in Alaska and Canada, has the goal of making the river and its tributaries safe to drink from again by supplementing and scrutinizing government data.”
NB: Wikipedia classifies the Yukon as the third longest river in the US after the Mississippi and the Missouri. But if you consider the Missouri part of the Mississippi system, the Yukon would be the second longest — but that ignores the fact that a good part of its length is in Canada. From a North American perspective, the Yukon (3185 km) is the third longest river system: after the Mississippi-Missouri (6275 km) and the MacKenzie-Slave-Peace (4241 km).
THE KLONDIKE GOLD STRIKE (1896–1903)
1. “At Lakes Bennett and Lindeman, the prospectors camped to build rafts or boats that would take them the final 500 miles (800 km) down the Yukon to Dawson City in the spring.”
2. “7,124 boats of varying size and quality left in May 1898; by that time, the forests around the lakes had been largely cut down for timber.”
3. “The river posed a new problem. Above Whitehorse it was dangerous, with several rapids along the Miles Canyon through to the White Horse Rapids. After many boats were wrecked and several hundred people died, the Northwest Mounted Police (NWMP) introduced safety rules, vetting the boats carefully and forbidding women and children to travel through the rapids.”
NB: 100,000 prospectors invaded the region around Dawson City which grew from a population of 500 in 1896 to 30,000 in 1898. To prevent starvation, each prospector was required by Canadian authorities to bring a year’s supply of food. This would weigh about a ton which prospectors brought themselves in stages. The Native “Han” people were displaced and put on a reservation where many died.
ROBERT SERVICE (1874–1958) — “bard of the Yukon,” “the Canadian Kipling”
1.) “There’s a race of men that don’t fit in, A race that can’t stay still;
So they break the hearts of kith and kin, And they roam the world at will.
They range the field and they rove the flood, And they climb the mountain’s crest; Theirs is the curse of the gypsy blood, And they don’t know how to rest.”
2.) “Some praise the Lord for Light, The living spark; I thank God for the Night The healing dark.”
3.) “There are strange things done in the midnight sun By the men who moil for gold; The Arctic trails have their secret tales That would make your blood run cold; The Northern Lights have seen queer sights, But the queerest they ever did see Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge I cremated Sam McGee.”
NB: Robert W. Service, like Rudyard Kipling, was denigrated by the critics and loved by the general reader. In his own words: “Verse, not poetry, is what I was after… something the man in the street would take notice of and the sweet old lady would paste in her album; something the schoolboy would spout and the fellow in the pub would quote. Yet I never wrote to please anyone but myself; it just happened. I belonged to the simple folks whom I liked to please.”
Yukon River Inter-Tribal Watershed Council
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_longest_rivers_of_the_United_States_(by_main_stem)
The Longest Rivers in North America
https://hero.fandom.com/wiki/Yukon_Cornelius
Robert W. Service Quotes (Author of The Cremation of Sam McGee)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolph_the_Red-Nosed_Reindeer_(TV_special)
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YOUR TURN
Please share the coolest thing you learned in the last week related to climate change or the environment. Or the coolest, most important thing you learned in your life related to climate change that the rest of us may have missed. Your favorite chart or table perhaps…
This is your chance to make some one’s day. Or to cement in your own mind something that you might otherwise forget. Or to think more deeply than otherwise about something dear to your heart.
