#6: 2 of 6--Conrad City, Yukon. A Ghost Town

Whose house is this? One of my sources tells me only one house still exists in the ghost town of Conrad City in the Canadian Yukon; a rather tippy affair and reminder of post gold rush days up here. 

However, we--we being Wayne, Stanley, Bethany, and me--found two! Whose is this?

The two homes sit in Conrad City, a once-upon-a-time mining town that came about through the efforts of one John Howard Conrad just after the turn of the last century. Jane Gaffin of the Yukon News writes that he "crashes boldly and brashly" into history "as somewhat of a jewel and jerk." She goes on to say that he was an "ambitious and optimistic capitalist" who had a "cathedral-sized ego and liked publicity ladled out in big scoops." He was, she said, "a high-rolling scoundrel who lived fast, made decisions faster, imbibed generously in booze, and could be mean-spirited. It probably was not wise to get in his way."

An American financier at the turn of the last century, Conrad left the Lower 48 to consolidate a string of gold, silver, and lead claims on steep rock face of Montana Mountain, about 50 miles north of Skagway, AK. This mineral rich mountain, formed 60 million years ago in the ongoing collision of tectonic plates, sits just a few miles south of Carcross, where lived, just so you know, the discoverer of the Yukon gold. A Tagish and Tlingit man, a man by the name of Skookum Jim. Back to John Howard Conrad.

An imposing, gregarious Southerner, born on a Virginia plantation five years before civil war, Conrad was eventually dubbed Colonel  His namesake city sprang up fifty years later, in 1905,  on the banks of Windy Arm, an extension of the Yukon's Tagish Lake. "With great hoopla," writes great-great grandson Murray Lundberg in Fractured Veins and Broken Dreams: Montana Mountain and the Windy Arm Stampede, "he predicted that what is now a ghost town would grow and replace Dawson City as the Yukon's capital."

Ha ha, yea right, good one, I think, sitting on the threshold of a tumbling-down log cabin all but buried in second growth forest, holding a wild flower in my hand.

Crank back the clock, though, this was a busy  place, a happy place, productive. Families roused themselves in the morning just as we do today, going off to work, children playing, going to school.  

Colonel Conrad was lauded by some for saving the territory from economic collapse after the gold rush, a credit he fully embraced and others went along for the ride. By January, 1905, he'd created two companies--Conrad Consolidated Mines and J.H. Conrad Bonanza Mines--consolidating"an intricate web," great-great grandson writes, "of nearly a dozen companies and more than 100 claims." He employed more than 200 miners and his  little city  included stores, churches, hotels, restaurants, baths, laundry, post office,  hospital, recorder's office, a regular steamboat service to Carcross.

Conrad City looking south. Montana Mtn rises straight up on the right.

Conrad's most ambitious and costly endeavor, however, was the tram line, the longest in the world at the time, rising up 3,700 feet and extending for more than four and a half miles to the tune of $75,000 at a time when a miner's wages ran just around $3.50 a day.

 

The work was hard, everything done the old-fashioned way, digging out the mountainside with candle for light, pickaxes to break the rock.

Still, it was work, and profitable at that.

Though it didn't  last... Boom went to bust in short order, as it often does. The world price for silver plummeted in 1914. Colonel John Howard Conrad filed bankruptcy. The mine was closed, the town abandoned. Not even ten years and it was over. Conrad City's buildings were hauled up to Carcross or left to rot or be washed away by the lake. Or found a century later by my friends and me.

The second home we found was nestled in the whispering cottonwood. No Sleeping Beauty here, lying serenely in peace, awaiting the kiss of resurrection a hundred years beyond forgotten tragedy. No one here but the ravens, a squirrel or two, maybe a bear waiting for us to go all away. I found it oddly harmonic, this cycle of life with its ups and down, risk and adventure, and sometimes devastation. Everything coming to an end. Time running along with disregard, obscuring our lives. I briefly asked, Is life for naught? even as eternity stepped in and introduced itself, as real and palpable as the breeze against my cheek. I could each out. I could touch it, this breath of God. Breathe it in as my own.

When did I spot the shelf?

Who once used this? I wondered. And what hung from the nails? Wooden spoons? A mug?  Perhaps a child's sweater? No...I thought not. I found myself wanting to sit  and visit with the woman who'd lived here. Perhaps she'd hung from these old and rusty nails a set of highly prized china cups. Yes, I decided, china teacups. The china too new for patina. Bright, polished, the porcelain smooth, cool to the touch. With a lovely teapot, yes indeed, to match. Up on the impossibly high shelf.

Matthew Watson's General Store is the only business to survive Conrad City, and is now the oldest operating store in the Yukon. It sits in Carcross, across the tracks. Tourists stop in to buy ice cream cones before boarding the old gold rush train.

Cycling, recycling, a new generation, and another. Still...who was the woman in Conrad City? I don't know. She, and those who pined her absence, have stepped into eternity. As I too, and you, will someday do.

Still, whose house is this?