The Signwriters and Sourdoughs: Art in the Gold Rush Era

The photographers who came to the Klondike Gold Rush were not, for the most part, fine art photographers in the contemporary sense. They were commercial operators — men who had invested in the expensive equipment and the technical knowledge required to make photographs, and who expected to recover that investment by selling their images to the flood of people who wanted visual records of what was happening around them. Eric Hegg was the most prolific and the most artistically significant of the rush-era photographers. He had a studio in Skagway in 1897 and moved his operation to Dawson City as the rush intensified, producing thousands of glass plate negatives over the years of the rush that documented everything from the Chilkoot Pass trail to the main streets of Dawson City to the mining operations on the creeks. His images are the visual vocabulary of the Klondike — the photographs that appear in every book about the rush, on every exhibition wall, in every documentary film that covers this period. What distinguishes Hegg's best work from the standard commercial photography of the period is a compositional intelligence that goes beyond documentation. The famous photograph of the Chilkoot Pass trail — the long column of stampeders climbing the Golden Stairs — is not just a record of an event; it is a formally composed image that uses the repeated figure and the diagonal of the slope to create a visual equivalent of the experience's meaning. The anonymity of the individual figures, the suggestion of endless repetition, the overwhelming scale of the mountain against the human column: these are the choices of a photographer thinking about what he was seeing, not just recording it. ## The Painters Hegg and his contemporaries were photographers; the painting tradition in the Klondike was thinner, partly because the practical requirements of painting in a gold rush town were more demanding than those of photography and partly because the market for painting was less obvious. But painters did come to the Klondike, and some of them produced work that is now in museum collections. The most significant Klondike painter is probably Ted Harrison, though he came to the Yukon much later — his most important work was done in the 1970s and 1980s in Carcross, and it depicts the contemporary Yukon rather than the gold rush era. His bright, flat, folk-art-influenced style, with its bold colours and simplified forms, has become one of the most recognizable visual representations of the northern landscape. For the rush era specifically, the watercolours and sketches made by participants in the stampede — men and women who were not professional artists but who recorded what they saw with whatever skill they had — constitute an important visual record. These amateur works are less technically accomplished than the professional photographers' images, but they preserve a kind of subjective truth about the experience of the rush that the photograph cannot capture: the colour, the feeling, the specific way that a particular person saw a particular moment. ## The Signwriters The commercial signage of Dawson City was, at its best, a form of applied art that took its craft seriously. The signwriters who painted the names and advertisements on the buildings of the rush-era commercial district worked in a tradition of hand-painted lettering that valued the quality of the letterforms, the balance of the composition, and the legibility of the message. Some of this signage survives, on buildings that have been preserved or in the photographic record. The elaborate lettering on the old commercial buildings — the gold leaf and the painted enamel, the ornate serifs and the careful spacing — communicates a desire to make even commerce beautiful, to elevate the ordinary transactions of commercial life into something that acknowledged the human capacity for visual pleasure. The tradition of hand-lettered signage that the rush-era signwriters practiced is still visible in Dawson City today, in the buildings and businesses that have chosen to maintain or recreate the visual character of the rush era. The Downtown Hotel's hand-painted sign. The Parks Canada interpretive panels that use lettering styles drawn from the historical period. The Klondike Kate's restaurant facade. These are not just commercial pragmatism; they are a choice to maintain a visual vocabulary that connects the present to the past in a specific and legible way. ## The Klondike Institute of Art and Culture The contemporary arts community in Dawson City — which is larger and more active than its population size would suggest — is anchored by the Klondike Institute of Art and Culture (KIAC). Founded in 1997, KIAC operates out of the Odd Fellows Hall in central Dawson City, running residency programs, workshops, exhibitions, and the Dawson City International Short Film Festival, which is one of the more unusual events in the Canadian film calendar: a short film festival in a remote northern town, with screenings in various heritage venues including the Palace Grand Theatre. KIAC's artist residency program brings artists from across Canada and internationally to Dawson City each summer, and the resulting work — made in response to the landscape, the history, the community, and the specific conditions of the subarctic — forms a growing body of contemporary art that takes the Klondike seriously as a subject and a place. The residency program has produced, over more than twenty-five years of operation, a remarkable range of work: visual art, writing, music, film, theatre, and various forms that resist easy categorization. The best of it shares a quality of genuine engagement with the place — it is not tourist art or heritage kitsch but work made by people who have paid attention to where they are. ## Photography Today The photographic tradition that Hegg and his contemporaries established in the Klondike is still very much alive in Dawson City. The combination of extraordinary landscape, the specific qualities of the northern light, and the visual richness of the heritage townscape attracts photographers of serious ambition to the Klondike every summer. The light at high latitude has qualities that photographers travel great distances for. The summer light — long-angled, warm, continuous for most of the day — allows shooting at hours when most places are dark, and the quality of that late-evening, early-morning light is different from anything available at lower latitudes. The fall light — even more extreme in its warmth and angle — is among the most sought-after in Canada by photographers who care about natural light. The [Dawson City Travel Guide](/guide/dawson-city-travel-guide) includes information about the Klondike Institute of Art and Culture and its programs. The [Klondike Gold Rush: A Complete History](/guide/klondike-gold-rush-history-guide) covers the photographic legacy of the rush in the context of the broader historical narrative. The art that was made in and about the Klondike — from Hegg's glass plate negatives to the contemporary work of KIAC's residents — is part of the way this place has been understood and communicated to the world. It is worth looking at carefully.