The Midnight Dome

About 150 people, many of them women, attended the first formal gathering to see the midnight sun on June 21, 1899, where they were welcomed with nuts, candies, and soft drinks at elevated prices, British and American flags were raised, a bugle call opened the ceremony, and Captain Jack Crawford gave the evening’s featured speech. The sun disappointed the crowd by setting one-half hour before midnight and rising two hours later, and after that no one expected to see a true midnight sun there on the solstice, though the Dome remained a popular place for sightseeing and celebrating the long summer nights. As Dawson’s population declined, ministers began holding midnight church services there, including a 1905 sermon by Rev. W.H. Barraclough from Revelation 22-5 and a 1925 Union Service led by Miss Harold of the Christian Science Society, Professor Trumpour, Archdeacon Shirley, and Rev. Findlay, who preached for half an hour around a small campfire to a very small audience. The Midnight Dome is a knob of metamorphic rock south of the Tintina Trench fault line, and the geology on the two sides of the Trench differs greatly because of a slippage of 450 km. within the last 65 million years; placer gravels rich in gold generally lie south of the Trench, while hardrock deposits of lead, zinc, and coal lie to the north. In the Dawson City area, the Tintina Trench marks the edge of glaciers as they existed 3 million years ago, and this glaciation may have changed the Yukon River from flowing south to flowing north when the river cut through bedrock instead of following the lower but ice-filled Trench; later glaciations may have altered the river’s direction again, but today it flows north. In September 1925 a road was built from the graveyards to the Dome for steamboat passengers on one-day sightseeing tours, with $500 donated by White Pass & Yukon Route and the labor supplied by members of the Yukon Order of Pioneers using a borrowed Caterpillar tractor and plough. Islands in the Yukon River near Dawson have been used since the gold rush to grow produce and animal fodder, and Sister Island, 3 km downriver from Dawson, was donated to the Sisters of St. Ann around 1900 for hospital cattle grazing and picnics.

Yukon · Canada