Industry
Today, Dawson City's main industries are tourism and gold mining. Gold mining started in 1896 with the Bonanza (Rabbit) Creek discovery by George Carmack, Dawson Charlie and Skookum Jim Mason (Keish). The area's creeks were quickly staked and most of the thousands who arrived in the spring of 1898 for the Klondike Gold Rush found that there was very little opportunity to benefit directly from gold mining. Many instead became entrepreneurs to provide services to miners.
Starting approximately 10 years later, large gold dredges began an industrial mining operation, scooping huge amounts of gold out of the creeks, and completely reworking the landscape, altering the locations of rivers and creeks and leaving tailing piles in their wake. A network of canals and dams were built to the north to produce hydroelectric power for the dredges. The dredges shut down for the winter, but one built for "Klondike Joe Boyle" was designed to operate year-round, and Boyle had it operate all through one winter. That dredge (Dredge No. 4) is open as a National Historic Site of Canada on Bonanza Creek.
The last dredge shut down in 1966, and the hydroelectric facility, at North Fork, was closed when the City of Dawson declined an offer to purchase it. Since then, placer miners have returned to the status of being the primary mining operators in the region.
Besides Tr'ochëk, Dawson is home to several national historic sites many of which are included in the Dawson Historical Complex.
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Famous quotes containing the word industry:
“No delusion is greater than the notion that method and industry can make up for lack of mother-wit, either in science or in practical life.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgement; and he betrays instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion.”
—Edmund Burke (1729–1797)
“Change of fashion is the tax levied by the industry of the poor on the vanity of the rich.”
—Sébastien-Roch Nicolas De Chamfort (1741–1794)