Dawson City's Libraries: Books at the Edge of the World

There are more books per capita in Dawson City than in almost any other community of comparable size in Canada. This is not a formal statistical claim — I do not have the data to prove it conclusively — but it is a strong impression formed over several visits to a town where the library is one of the genuine centres of community life, where the used bookstores have the depth and quality of institutions in much larger cities, and where the proportion of residents who describe themselves as serious readers seems remarkably high. This is partly a self-selection effect: the kind of person who chooses to live in Dawson City — remote, cold, geographically isolated — tends to be the kind of person who can entertain themselves with books. The long winter nights are an incentive to read that few southern communities can match. And the community's tradition of intellectual life, which goes back to the gold rush era, creates a social environment in which books and reading are valued in a way that is not universal in small-town Canada. The library tradition in Dawson City is older than most people might expect. The gold rush brought to Dawson City a population that included a significant proportion of educated men and women — the rush was not just the preserve of manual labourers, but included lawyers, doctors, teachers, journalists, and others whose professional formation had required extensive reading. These people wanted access to books, and they were willing to pay for it. ## The Carnegie Grant In 1899, Andrew Carnegie — the Scottish-American industrialist whose philanthropic program of library construction would eventually build more than 2,500 libraries worldwide — approved a grant to Dawson City for the construction of a public library building. The Dawson library was one of the earliest Carnegie libraries in Canada, and its existence in a remote subarctic community at the height of a gold rush is a fact that surprises everyone who encounters it. The Carnegie library building — a modest but properly designed structure with the functional elegance that characterized Carnegie library architecture — provided Dawson City with a dedicated public library space that most communities of its size anywhere in North America did not yet have. The collection it housed was assembled partly through donations from the rush population and partly through purchases by the library board, and it covered a range from practical technical works on mining and engineering to literature and history and the natural sciences. The library was a serious institution, not a gesture toward respectability. It was used. The borrowing records from the early years — preserved in the Dawson City Museum archive — show consistent and wide-ranging use by a population that was reading seriously, not just decoratively. Fiction was borrowed in quantity; so were works on natural history, on political economy, and on the history of the regions from which the various nationalities of the rush had come. ## The Modern Library The Dawson City library today — housed in a modern building rather than the original Carnegie structure — is one of the most important institutions in the community. It serves the functions that public libraries serve everywhere — providing access to books, periodicals, the internet, community meeting space — but in Dawson City it does so for a community that is more isolated and more dependent on its public institutions than a comparable southern community would be. The collection reflects the community's interests and the territory's character: strong on Yukon history, northern literature, Indigenous studies, natural history, and the adventure and travel writing that attracts people to the north in the first place. The librarians know their community and their collection, and they are the kind of librarians — present in small communities and increasingly rare in large ones — who know what their patrons are looking for and can help them find it. The library also serves as a de facto community centre in the way that public institutions in small communities always do. It is warm, it is free, it is open, and it is full of people who are doing things — working, reading, meeting, using the computers, attending the events that the library programs throughout the year. ## The Klondike Institute and the Arts Library The Klondike Institute of Art and Culture, which runs out of the Odd Fellows Hall in Dawson City, maintains a specialized library and archive focused on arts and culture. The KIAC collection includes artist books, exhibition catalogues, critical writing on northern art and culture, and the archives of the institute's own programming — records of residencies, festivals, and events that document more than twenty-five years of arts activity in Dawson City. For researchers working on contemporary Yukon art, Indigenous art and cultural revival, or the history of arts programming in remote communities, the KIAC archive is a primary source of material that exists nowhere else. It is not a large collection in absolute terms, but it is dense with material that is not duplicated elsewhere. ## The Berton House Writers' Retreat One of the more specifically literary institutions in Dawson City is the Berton House Writers' Retreat, the former home of Pierre Berton — the Canadian writer and historian who grew up in Dawson City in the 1920s and whose books on the gold rush are among the standard accounts of the period. The Berton House program brings two Canadian writers per year to Dawson City for residencies of several months, providing them with free accommodation and a small stipend in exchange for participation in community life and a public reading. The program has been running since 1996 and has brought a remarkable range of Canadian writers to Dawson City over the decades. The writers who have done the residency often report that the experience of living in Dawson for an extended period — through the winter, through the long dark, through the specific rhythms of a small northern community — has a significant effect on their writing. Pierre Berton's own relationship to Dawson City was complex: he grew up there, left as a young man, and spent much of his career writing about the gold rush from a distance. His books — "Klondike," "The Klondike Fever," and the various other works on the rush — are the popular accounts that most Canadians encountered the Klondike story through, and they are well-researched, well-written, and illuminating about many aspects of the rush while being limited in the way that books of their era were limited about Indigenous perspectives and social history. The [Dawson City: Heritage and History Guide](/guide/dawson-city-heritage-guide) covers the literary and intellectual history of Dawson City in the context of its broader heritage. The library, the Berton House, the KIAC archive, the used bookstores on the main streets — these are the institutions of a community that has always understood reading as one of the things that makes life in a remote place not just possible but good. Books at the edge of the world: it is one of the most specifically Dawson City things there is.