Safe found in gold rush capital, but is there treasure?
Dawsonites will find out on Saturday
A crew in Dawson City, Yukon, was digging what is delicately termed a “lifting station” — essentially, a pumping facility designed to move the community’s human waste from one place to another.
Until, an excavator struck something with a clang.
“Two metres deep, they hit something hard and metallic," said Mark Dauphinee, the town’s public works superintendent.
Digging up strange things is relatively common for Dawson City work crews. The community owes its existence to buried gold, of course, but the region is also home to a rich trove of Ice Age fossils. A uniquely pungent aroma wafting over a work site is often all that’s needed for crews to realize that they stumbled upon the long-buried carcass of a prehistoric horse.
Plus, as one of the world’s most famous boom towns, Dawson City is utterly littered in 20th century artifacts, from Gilded Age belt buckles to abandoned dredges.
“There’s certainly lots of junk that we dig up,” Dauphinee said.
After an investigation, the artifact turned out to be a safe. It was badly rusted, having spent at least a few decades under the water table.
Although the safe is still locked, a large section of the door broke off as it was raised to the surface, exposing several small holes through which the inside can be viewed.
As a result, crews can confirm the safe is not empty. “You can kind of see some boxes in there,” Dauphinee said.
Dawsonites will find out once and for all what lies within the safe this Saturday, when it is pried open as part of Discovery Days, the town’s annual celebration of the 1897 discovery of gold.
According to Dauphinee, cracking the safe should take no more than a pry bar and maybe a few blows with a sledgehammer.
The safe was discovered on what was once the site of a complex of buildings owned by the Northern Commercial Company. A Dawson City fixture since the settlement’s beginning, the company was a general store selling everything from furniture to wall tents to cutlery.
As with all early Klondike businesses, for a time it would have accepted payment in gold dust.
The Northern Commercial Company’s store and warehouses all burned down in 1951, and it is believed the recently discovered safe was caught in the blaze.
It’s not impossible that something of intrigue remains locked in the safe, although Alex Somerville, executive director of the Dawson City Museum, was quick to pour cold water on any dreams of buried treasure.
The safe was discovered below what was once a Northern Commercial Company warehouse, rather than the company’s store, where they would have presumably kept their cash, gold or other valuables.
“It’s an abandoned safe found on the site of a warehouse of a company that sold everything,” Somerville said. "It’s an unsold safe.”
Still, even if it doesn’t contain precious metals, one of the most valuable items to come out of the Dawson City ground in recent years actually had nothing to do with gold at all.
In 1978, the excavation of an old Dawson City ice rink revealed more than 500 early 20th-century film reels once thought lost to history.
Shipping costs into Dawson City were so expensive in the 1920s that the local cinema simply kept films rather than sending them back to the distributor. Safety concerns over the incredibly flammable reels then prompted the community to bury their everexpanding movie collection in 1929.
Now held in Ottawa, the Dawson Film Find continues to regularly yield new discoveries including, most recently, some of the only footage of the infamous 1919 World Series in which Chicago White Sox players conspired with gamblers to intentionally lose to the Cincinnati Reds.