Memories of the Dempster Cat Trains

by John Gould

John Gould can still recall the day he went snow-blind. It was in the early 1960s and he was with a cat train in the area that would eventually become the Dempster Highway. As a cook he worked nights on that trip and would often get up during the daytime to take pictures of the incredible terrain through which they were travelling.

The sun was bright on the snow that day, but the real damage was done by the falling snow, flashing like millions of tiny sparks as it fell.

John Gould presented a slide show about his days on the Dempster cat trains at the Oddfellows Hall. Photo by Dan Davidson

When he woke up later after getting his daytime rest, he couldn’t see and his eyes were burning. The effect was as if he had stared at a welder’s arc without protective goggles.

“I was lucky it was night time,” he said, “and I didn’t have to face daylight.”

This was just one of a number of anecdotes that seasoned Gould’s slideshow presentation at the Oddfellows’ Hall on September 29, a repeat of a performance that packed the Museum lecture room about a month before, but which had a disappointing turnout this time.

Those who weren’t there missed a lot.

Gould has always had an eye for an interesting photograph, this pick of the crop, taken between 1955 and 1963 contained a great many startlingly beautiful and eerie images.

The cat trains which serviced the oil exploration boom of 40 years ago operated from late January until the end of March, when there was often lots of light to move by, even though the quality of the light often made it look as if the crews were on another planet. Gould’s photos from the period have a lot of unearthly reds and blues in them.

John Gould was present when Prime Minister John Diefenbaker came to Dawson in 1962 to announce his Road to Resources plan, but Gould had been travelling much of the Dempster Route for a number of years before that. The oil exploration boom of the late 1950s brought winter employment to the region, and Gould signed on in 1955 as a cook, and later became familiar enough with the route to also be a guide.

The men travelled in a combination 20 by 8 foot cookhouse/bunkhouse which had enough bunks for the men to sleep in shifts. Even though the cook was using the stove all day, it could still get pretty cold in there.

“One time at 60 below (Fahrenheit) the caboose gave a jerk. The cook was mixing hot cakes at the time. The bowl fell out of his hands and hit the floor, spilling the batter, which froze almost immediately.”

There were four sleighs behind each of the tractors powering the train, and each one carried about 15 tons of supplies. In some places it would take three cats to pull the

load. In heavy snow the cat would go ahead to clear the way and then pull the sledges along to it by means of a winch and cable, moving forward like a fifty foot inch worm.

There were surprises along the way. On one trip a brand new D-8 cat suddenly dropped through the ice into a small lake.

“There was this lake. We had been crossing it for two or three years and never knew it was there until this cat went through. After hauling all the

A Dempster Cat Train on the trail. Photo by John Gould

strings of sleighs over, this cat came along behind and just got on the edge of this big round pond and went through.”

No one was injured, but it was a near thing, and they had a hard time getting it out of the 20 feet of water and several feet of silt.

“We were on pins and needles when it went through.”

On another occasion Dick Gillespie was the lead cat skinner when he met a big grizzly bear walking down the road.

“Dick slowed down but the bear kept coming, so he finally stopped the cat and sat there on the seat watching him. The bear kept coming, Dick stepped out onto the track and the bear went ‘Wuuf’!

“Dick jumped off the track, up on the top of the load here, and then down the load and came into the cookhouse,”

When the men in the cookhouse realized what was up one of them joined Dick. They unhooked the cat and went chasing after the bear.

“They went all through the trees here, back and forth, up and down, but off course they never caught the bear.”

The trip into a drill sites could take 2 and a half to three weeks, and then about a week to get out again. The average speed was only about a mile an hour going in. The crews would have a day to two off and then hit the trail again. They might make six round trips in a season.

It wasn’t easy work, but the money was good and John Gould remembers the era fondly.

Uffish Thoughts: Community Divided on Bridge Question

by Dan Davidson

In one way, you could say that the current government’s thinking on building a bridge across the Yukon River at Dawson is a triumph of long-term lobbying. I could easily have written the Premier’s and Deputy Premier’s speeches on the subject last spring out of notes of several stories I’ve written in the past related to the position of the local Chamber of Commerce and the special Mayor’s Bridge Committee of a few years ago.

The document produced by the latter committee on behalf of the 2000-2003 Dawson council probably reads pretty close in content to the Yukon Party’s platform document.

I’m not saying that this is a bad thing, just pointing out that the current situation is a sudden brainstorm, but the coming to fruition of a long struggle by a certain group of Dawsonites to have this project labeled something other than Dawson’s Bridge, to make it a clear territorial issue, and to push it past the vanished promises of the first Yukon Party government of the 1990s.

Personally, I see a bridge as a natural development, but not for the reasons put forth by the tourism community. It’s needed for the continued growth of Dawson, which, after the construction of the Dredge Pond Subdivision, has gone about as far as it can in residential growth down the Klondike Valley.

If the town is to grow across the river, as the Ostashek government tried to force it to do by expanding its municipal boundaries over there, then there has to be a way to provide services to the area, such things as fire protection, ambulance service and regular municipal utilities. Small wonder that several councils after that put their efforts into giving back the unserviceable land, just as the town returned the damaged road above the Dome residential subdivisions because it could not possibly afford to maintain it.

Still, whatever I may think about all this, I was brought up short by the fact that no one to my knowledge, had ever really polled the community to get a sense of the real mood. As I noted a few weeks back, people who have never ventured a political opinion have made a point of telling me they don’t want a bridge. The anti-bridge forces were, of course, front and center in any discussion, even to holding their own meetings.

I sort of guessed that the opinion in the town would probably be closer to an even split than anyone else was saying. So I talked it over with the board of directors at the Sun (we do a lot by email) and we decided to see what we could find out. One of our board members made up a short questionnaire and we placed in the last edition, asking folks to clip it and either drop it at our Front Street office or at a drop-box in the post office.

I made up a handful of separate forms and fastened them to the box I had decorated for the purpose. At the end of one day all 18 were filled out, along with two newspaper clippings and one hand-made form. Seeing that we had something going on, I dropped another 40 forms at opening time last Thursday. By the end of day they were all filled in and several more clippings had been added. I ran off another 100 after school that day and waited to see what would happen.

At that point there were there are 29 votes in favour of a bridge and 22 against. The lead see-sawed back and forth all week, and when I posted the results daily on the new Dawson Forum website some people started drawing conclusions, though I warned against it.

Just so you’ll know: most people used the Xeroxed forms, so our nefarious plot to sell more papers didn’t work. We had four hand-mades and one written on the back of what looked like a YTG payroll notice envelope. Most were left at the Post Office, but about 10 people actually wandered down to the Sun office to leave them. We also had some unsigned letters defending one position or the other. We can’t use those, of course. We were nearly sued the last time we published a letter without a name on it. The subject at the time was bad debts, so the lawsuit would have been frivolous, but it was unnerving.

When I pulled the box and the last two slips of paper (one clipped and one hand made) this afternoon (October 15) we had 90 votes in favour and 94 against. I wouldn’t try to build any kind of strong pro or con argument on results like that.

What I can say is that we’ve already exceeded the return on any other survey we’ve tried in the last 16 years. As one respondent noted on the form, it’s a totally invalid survey because we had no means of controlling how many forms a person filled out.

And, of course it means nothing at all in terms of the project.

But it is interesting, all the same.