38 SMITHSONIAN.COM | November 2019
The Alaskan hus-
ky is descended
from dogs raised
by Inuit people
of the coastal
areas as well as
dogs from inland
cultures like the
Athabascan.Mixed-breed
huskies are a
familiar sight in
Dawson City, the
halfway point on
the 1,000-mile
Yukon Quest
dog sled race
from Fairbanks,
Alaska, to White-
horse, Yukon.The big worry was the ice accumu-
lating in the river.
The Yukon—the third-biggest
river in North America, after the
Mississippi and the Mackenzie—
usually froze solid by mid-Octo-
ber. On October 9, about 80 miles
from Dawson City, they decided to
stop and winter at the mouth of the
Stewart River, where they found
some old serviceable cabins and
Big Jim saw promising color in his
gold pan. Jack staked out 500 feet
on the left fork of Henderson Creek
and boated downriver to fi le his
mining claim in Dawson City.
Founded the previous year,
Dawson now had more than a doz-
en saloons with dance halls and
gambling, a street of prostitutes
called Paradise Alley and some
5,000 inhabitants living in cabins,
tents and shanties. There was a
food shortage, no sanitation, and
the fi lthy streets were full of un-
employed men and sled dogs.
Jack befriended two brothers,
Louis and Marshall Bond, who let
him camp next to their cabin in
Dawson. Their father was a wealthy
judge with a ranch in Santa Clara,
California; he would later appear,
lightly fi ctionalized, as Judge
Miller in The Call of the Wild. Jack
also befriended the Bond brothers’
dog, a magnifi cent, 140-pound
Saint Bernard-Scotch collie mix.
The dog’s name was Jack, and he
was the model for Buck, the canine
hero of The Call of the Wild.
Marshall Bond was struck by Jack London’s un-
usual rapport with dogs. Rather than talk aff ection-
ately to them, and pet them, “He always spoke and
acted toward the dog as if he recognized his noble
qualities, but took them as a matter of course,” Bond
wrote in his memoir. “He had an appreciative and in-
stant eye for fi ne traits and honored them in a dog as
he would in a man.” That is a statement of the obvi-
ous to anyone who has read The Call of the Wild and
London’s other great dog book, White Fang.
Jack stayed in Dawson for more than six weeks.
Partly to keep warm, he spent a lot of time in bars,
and was often seen in conversation with the “sour-
doughs,” or seasoned miners. These characters
thought 40 below zero was good weather for hunting
and dog-sledding, and they scorned the newcomers
as cheechakos, or “tenderfeet,” who were liable to
start whining after three days with no food. There
was so much material for a budding novelist in those
gaudy saloons, where men told tales of death out-
witted and bonanza gold strikes, silk-clad women
charged a dollar for a dance, $25,000 was sometimes
wagered on a hand of poker, and everyone paid with
gold dust or nuggets.DAWSON CITY TODAY is a hardy, free-spirited, ex-
tremely remote community of 1,400 people, still
trading on its history as the capital of the Klondike
gold rush. It’s a place where oddballs, artists, the
First Nation Trondek Hwechin and others can live
at their own pace and with a minimum of judgment.
Even in an era when industrial-scale mining has
been introduced in the region, independent gold
miners are still digging and sluicing in the nearby