"Bob Smart's Dream" is a poem written by Robert W. Service while he lived in Whitehorse, Yukon, Canada. He presented it on March 19, 1906, at a banquet held to honour J.P. Rogers, the superintendent of the White Pass and Yukon Route. The real-life Bob Smart had been the government assayer at Whitehorse since 1903.
Imagining that "fifty years had sped," as Service wrote, Smart discovered a vastly different Whitehorse from the frontier town he knew that merely supplied transportation to and from the Klondike. It reflects a how technology and society might advance in 50 years from the point of view of someone living at the turn of the 20th century.
Smart dreamt that in 1956 there were industrial manufacturing plants ("stamp mills") and a smelter up on the ridge where the city's airport actually is located today. The Whitehorse Rapids had been dammed to power other factories, but instead, a hydroelectric project has actually been built. No smelter was ever built in the Yukon.
Smart hears the roar of a trolley and steps out of its way; in actuality, there was no public transit in Whitehorse except during World War II (for military personnel only) and then since 1976, in the form of buses.
Smart crosses the Yukon on a big steel bridge. While the Robert Campbell Bridge was originally steel, it was damaged in 1973 and replaced with a concrete structure in 1975.
Smart visits Ear Lake Park, a garden spot to relax. Ear Lake was the location of a park, and actually, there have been occasional suggestions to make it into a suitable park and to run the waterfront trolley out that far. The waterfront trolley (actually a tram that pulls its own electric generator) is all that Whitehorse actually has for trolleys.
Smart stumbled along a cement sidewalk that had replaced wood, and looked up at a skyscraper where a tent had been before. An 18-storey steel building had replaced the White Pass Hotel. In fact, cement sidewalks replaced wooden ones in the early 1960s, and the "skyscrapers" of Whitehorse are no taller than four floors; one three-storey log cabin was built in the 1940s.
Smart saw beautiful suburbs with flower gardens.
Smart saw "Taylor and Drury's colossal department store." Alas, the Taylor and Drury mercantile chain has disappeared, and the largest department store, in the traditional sense, is now a Wal-Mart store located some distance from the downtown core that Smart trod in his dream.
Smart saw "the flyer just starting for Dawson, the bullion express coming in," a reference to a fast passenger train departing for the heart of the Klondike, and a freight train bringing more gold brought up from the creeks. In fact, no railroad ever was extended past Whitehorse, and there has been no scheduled train service even as far as Whitehorse since 1982.
Much of the poem's text is now part of a mural outside the council chamber in the city hall in Whitehorse.
Whitehorse is the capital of the Yukon, and the largest city in Northern Canada. It was incorporated in 1950 and is located at kilometre 1426 on the Alaska Highway in southern Yukon. Whitehorse's downtown and Riverdale areas occupy both shores of the Yukon River, which rises in British Columbia and meets the Bering Sea in Alaska. The city was named after the White Horse Rapids for their resemblance to the mane of a white horse, near Miles Canyon, before the river was dammed.
The Municipality and Borough of Skagway is a first-class borough in Alaska on the Alaska Panhandle. As of the 2020 census, the population was 1,240, up from 968 in 2010. The population doubles in the summer tourist season in order to deal with more than 1,000,000 visitors each year. Incorporated as a borough on June 25, 2007, it was previously a city in the Skagway-Yakutat-Angoon Census Area. The most populated community is the census-designated place of Skagway.
The Alaska–Yukon–Pacific Exposition, acronym AYP or AYPE, was a world's fair held in Seattle in 1909 publicizing the development of the Pacific Northwest. It was originally planned for 1907 to mark the 10th anniversary of the Klondike Gold Rush, but the organizers learned of the Jamestown Exposition being held that same year and rescheduled.
The White Pass and Yukon Route is a Canadian and U.S. Class III 3 ft narrow-gauge railroad linking the port of Skagway, Alaska, with Whitehorse, the capital of Yukon. An isolated system, it has no direct connection to any other railroad. Equipment, freight and passengers are ferried by ship through the Port of Skagway, and via road through a few of the stops along its route.
Dawson City, officially the City of Dawson, is a city in the Canadian territory of Yukon. It is inseparably linked to the Klondike Gold Rush (1896–1899). Its population was 1,577 as of the 2021 census, making it the second-largest city in Yukon.
"The Cremation of Sam McGee" is among the most famous of Robert W. Service's (1874–1958) poems. It was published in 1907 in Songs of a Sourdough. It concerns the cremation of a prospector who freezes to death near Lake Laberge, Yukon, Canada, as told by the man who cremates him.
The Klondike Highway is a highway that runs from the Alaska Panhandle through the province of British Columbia and the territory of Yukon in Canada, linking the coastal town of Skagway, Alaska, to Dawson City, Yukon. Its route somewhat parallels the route used by prospectors in the 1898 Klondike Gold Rush.
Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park is a national historical park operated by the National Park Service that seeks to commemorate the Klondike Gold Rush of the late 1890s. Though the gold fields that were the ultimate goal of the stampeders lay in the Yukon Territory, the park comprises staging areas for the trek there and the routes leading in its direction. There are four units, including three in Municipality of Skagway Borough, Alaska and a fourth in the Pioneer Square National Historic District in Seattle, Washington.
Keish, also known as James Mason and by the nickname Skookum Jim Mason, was a member of the Tagish First Nation in what became the Yukon Territory of Canada. He was born near Bennett Lake, on what is now the Yukon–British Columbia border. He lived in Caribou Crossing, now Carcross, Yukon.
Atlin is a community in northwestern British Columbia, Canada, located on the eastern shore of Atlin Lake. In addition to continued gold-mining activity, Atlin is a tourist destination for fishing, hiking and heliskiing. As of 2016, there are 477 permanent residents.
The Jack London District, also called the Loft District, is a neighborhood of Oakland, California, USA, that occupies the region south of the Nimitz Freeway along The Embarcadero, between Adeline and Lake Merritt Channel. It includes and surrounds the Jack London Square shopping and tourist area, as well as the Warehouse District north of the Oakland Amtrak Station. The area has a long history of industrial and warehouse land use. Since the late 1990s, the area has seen residential redevelopment.
The history of the Yukon covers the period from the arrival of Paleo-Indians through the Beringia land bridge approximately 20,000 years ago. In the 18th century, Russian explorers began to trade with the First Nations people along the Alaskan coast, and later established trade networks extending into Yukon. By the 19th century, traders from the Hudson's Bay Company were also active in the region. The region was administered as a part of the North-Western Territory until 1870, when the United Kingdom transferred the territory to Canada and it became the North-West Territories.
The Overland Trail was a Klondike Gold Rush-era transportation route between Whitehorse, Yukon and Dawson City in Yukon, Canada. It was built in 1902 at a cost of CDN$129,000 after the White Pass and Yukon Route railroad won a contract to deliver mail to the Dawson City gold fields from the Canadian government. The trail consisted of a 330 miles (531 km)-long, 12 feet (4 m) wide graded surface with culverts in some locations. Before its construction, transportation to Dawson City required a steamboat trip on the Yukon River during the brief subarctic summer, or dog sleds after the rivers had frozen.
Robert William Service was a British-Canadian poet and writer, often called "the Bard of the Yukon". Born in Lancashire of Scottish descent, he was a bank clerk by trade, but spent long periods travelling in the west in the United States and Canada, often in poverty. When his bank sent him to the Yukon, he was inspired by tales of the Klondike Gold Rush, and wrote two poems, "The Shooting of Dan McGrew" and "The Cremation of Sam McGee", which showed remarkable authenticity from an author with no experience of the gold rush or mining, and enjoyed immediate popularity. Encouraged by this, he quickly wrote more poems on the same theme, which were published as Songs of a Sourdough, and achieved a massive sale. When his next collection, Ballads of a Cheechako, proved equally successful, Service could afford to travel widely and live a leisurely life, basing himself in Paris and the French Riviera.
The Whitehorse Waterfront Trolley was a heritage streetcar service in Whitehorse, Yukon, Canada.
The MacBride Copperbelt Mining Museum formally the Copperbelt Railway & Mining Museum (CR&MM) is run by the Miles Canyon Historic Railway Society (MCHRS), which consists of a board of six members. The objectives of the society are to: a) To preserve, promote and to protect the railway heritage of the Yukon; b) To develop and operate the Waterfront Trolley; c) To develop and operate the Copperbelt Railway & Mining Museum; and d) To promote and enhance tourism development in the city of Whitehorse and the Yukon.
Downtown Whitehorse is a neighbourhood in Whitehorse, Yukon. The downtown area serves as Whitehorse's city centre and central business district.
The SS Keno is a preserved historic sternwheel paddle steamer, a National Historic Site of Canada, and a unit of the Canadian national park system. The SS Keno is berthed in a dry dock on the waterfront of the Yukon River in Dawson City, Yukon, Canada.
The Yukon Hotel is a National Historic Site of Canada and part of the Dawson Historical Complex. It is a log building with a three-storey false facade on First Avenue at the corner of Church Street in Dawson City, Yukon.
The Etheridge railway line is a heritage-listed railway line between Mount Surprise and Forsayth, both in the Shire of Etheridge, Queensland, Australia. It includes Mount Surprise railway station, Einasleigh railway station, Wirra Wirra railway station and Forsayth railway station. Etheridge railway line was added to the Queensland Heritage Register on 16 February 2009.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
