Dawson City - The Old Hillside Cemetery

Day 09 - July 22nd, 2024

Weather - Overcast, 27 degrees C

The marker of Joseph Bologh. When I first took the photo of his marker, the left half was missing. Then I saw it laying face down covered in foliage to the side, so propped it against the supporting board. Joseph is, sadly, not part of my research, but I have learned that a photo of his marker did not exist prior to this.

Since today was Monday and the library was finally open, Earl headed there for a charging day. We have so many things up here that need a charge, and taking photos drains batteries so fast. While Earl took care of that, I was at the old Hillside Cemetery. From my initial survey, I saw that it was sprawling and overgrown and that there might be some graves over the edge of the steep hill, so I wanted to take my time there.

Things were horrible. In the Catholic Cemetery, the cemetery itself was overgrown, but the markers were generally still in good condition and legible. I've probably said this before, but in the Hillside Cemetery, there were markers everywhere that were worn down to little more than pieces of wood, and so SO many graves that were no longer marked at all. It was disheartening. Initially, I took photos of all the graves because I knew many would no longer have a marker within the next few years. Not that it would not make a difference since you could no longer read who they belonged to. Still, if I have time months from now, I can compare my photos to pre-existing ones on Find a Grave. Knowing what the markers look like now and what they used to say would allow a new marker to be made and placed.

Sadly, it was taking me far too long, and I needed to start working on the pre-1900 burials, so around noon, I shifted focus to locating and surveying those. I resolved to come back and record the rest of Hillside on another day if I had the time, as I had resolved to do with St.Mary's.

By the end of the day, I am pretty sure I captured all of the pre-1900 burials that are still marked, but it's hard to say, given their condition and that of the cemetery. If I have time, I would like to come back to Hillside again to explore the hill and cemetery boundaries more fully. For now, I suppose I will just have to go through my photos and existing database to see who has been lost and who still remains. Sometimes, it's hard feeling like you have to/want to do everything, but knowing that you can't.  

After I finished my work at the cemetery for the day, Earl and I went to the museum. When I first began planning for this trip, one of the many things I wanted to do was a community-type gathering in Dawson City, where we could share food and drink, community members could learn about my work, and I could learn from them. I wanted to get the perspective of people who had lived here all their lives about how the Klondike Gold Rush is treated in heritage/tourism and how it has changed over the years. I also wanted to understand how the cemeteries had been treated as part of that larger heritage/tourism picture. Even more so now that I have been to Skagway and witnessed the cemetery tourism culture firsthand.

For the last couple of months, I have been e-mailing back and forth with the director of Dawson City Museum, Angharad Wenz, about such a meeting. I also intended to examine some of the museum's archival material while in Dawson. So, I decided to pop into the museum today to settle things formally. I knew that I would be staying in Dawson City a little longer than anticipated, so I thought it would be better to do a meeting of this type as a way of saying hello rather than as a way of saying goodbye at the end of my trip in August, as originally intended. Angharad was an absolute delight of a human being; by this point, I had worked myself up into a mess about the whole meeting thing and wondered if anyone would even care about my work, typical Nikki, if you know me. Angharad talked me off the ledge; we sorted out all the who's, what's, when's and how's, and I left feeling much more confident about what I was doing.

Earl and I got cleaned up and returned to our campsite for the evening. Back at the campsite, it had started to rain a little, so we had our first campfire of the trip - so lovely. It was an early night again tonight; today was exhausting. I'll see you all tomorrow!

-Nikki