Mr Smith UK

Mr Smith UK

Mr Smith is not actually called Mr Smith but did not want his name used in any publication of the interview. Smith doesn't live in Dawson so interview conducted over the phone.

Smith was born in 1929 in Lincoln England and came to Canada in 1952 with a friend from the UK.

'We both came from the old country but we split in Vancouver because he wanted to go into fishing and I didn't want to do that.'

Smith came to Dawson in the summer of '53 and worked at the power plant that provided electricity for the dredges on the gold fields. On asking him why he came to Canada and the Yukon he says that it was just 'something you did when you were young.'

'We thought it would be a good idea to come to Canada and that's what we did. It was a lot harder then though to keep in touch with people back home. We couldn't get in touch with our families as easily because there were not as many people had phones and we certainly didn't have email, but we made good friends pretty quickly here.'

Smith, as a local entrepreneaur, succeeded in developing a number of different business's and having different jobs whilst in Dawson, including starting a boat freighting company carrying supplies up to Old Crow, a wood cutting business, general store, gold mine, movie house, and working as a bar tender. 'I used to know what every guy and woman in town drank.'
I asked him if he thought that Dawson provided more opportunity than the UK for people like him.

'Wherever you are at you can make it work if you're willing to get out there. I would do anything to make a dollar and I can make money anywhere - you just have to go out and do it. Some people mope around and waste their time and wonder why they go bankrupt instead of starting a fresh and trying something new.'

How did you cope with the extremes of dark/light and the extremes of temperatures that Dawson experiences?

'Didn't bother me one bit. I just got on with what needed to be done. The dark is not hard as it slowly comes on so you work around it. The dark comes on gradually so it's not as if it's just all of a sudden dark and you don't expect it. When we were cutting wood we would go out at seven in the morning in the dark and drive 100 miles from Dawson. By the time we got there it would be getting light. If it wasn't we had hard hats and torches on them like the miners had so we had light that way. When it is light all the time I like to hear the birds singing at two in the morning. I llike to see the sun still moving at two in the morning and the road looks better if your'e drunk because you have been up all night drinking ha ha. Now when I am in the south I miss the 24 hour sunshine and the darkness that you get in the winter. I find that more strange. When me and my partner were freighting up to Old Crow we would set off at three in the morning and go all day.'

'When the weather started to get warmer we would be working the gold mines 24 hours a day, stripping the land of the muck with bulldozers and exposing the permafrost to melt in the sun. Whilst the frost was melting we would be repeating the process somewhere else until we could come back and remove the layers of gravel that were freed up from the frost and get to the paydirt. We would live out on the claim camp all summer.'

Read interviews with
David McBurney New Zealand Ann Ledwidge Canada