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Whitehouse Cabins
Est. 1953
Dawson City, Yukon
Canada
Reservations
cabins@northwestel.net
867.993.5576
An Authentic Klondike Heritage Experience Overlooking the Yukon River!
The Gold Rush Cabin
The Story of the Cabin
The exact age of the Gold Rush Cabin isn't known, but historical records place it here by 1900 and suggest it may have been built somewhat earlier. Its earliest documented connections are to the Trading & Exploring Company, one of the businesses operating in Dawson as the frenzy of the Klondike Gold Rush was beginning to subside.
The little cabin went on to outlive the boom that created Dawson. As the population fell from the tens of thousands who had rushed north in search of gold, buildings were abandoned, moved, repurposed or simply disappeared. The cabin survived, passing through a succession of owners and residents and continuing to serve as a home through much quieter decades in Dawson's history. We have even had people stop at Whitehouse over the years, point to the cabin and tell us that they once lived there.
There are still pieces of that early history we're trying to unravel. We have long been told that the cabin was once connected to Dawson's mining recorder — either as his residence or, according to another version of the story, as an early mining recorder's office. We haven't found documentation that settles the question, but the story has followed the cabin for many years.
By the 1950s, Dawson was beginning another transformation. Visitors were coming north not in search of gold, but to experience the remarkable place the Gold Rush had left behind. Ed and Irene Whitehouse were among the early Dawson residents to recognize that change. In 1953 they opened Whitehouse Motel, described by the Dawson Daily News as Dawson's first “tourist court,” and the old log cabin became part of the Whitehouse property.
Whitehouse changed hands over the decades that followed, but the cabin remained. By the time we became the next owners in the early 2000s, however, it had seen better days. Much better days. Its log walls had deteriorated and the building leaned so dramatically that a guy wire was helping to hold it upright.
If the cabin was going to survive another chapter of Dawson's history, it needed considerably more than a renovation.
In 2005, we took it apart.
Each log was removed and numbered so that it could eventually be returned to its original position. Rotten sections were carefully removed and replacement pieces joined to the surviving logs using traditional splicing techniques. The intention wasn't to build a new version of an old cabin, but to save as much of the original one as we could.
Taking it apart revealed traces of the people who had lived there before us. Beneath the tin roofing were remnants of an earlier sod roof. Some logs carried evidence of an old chimney fire. Newspapers and pieces of denim had been tucked beneath the floorboards to keep out the cold. Among the papers were a couple of pages from a poem called Despondency. Who left them there, or why, is another part of the cabin's history that has been lost. A section of hand-painted wallpaper above the rear doorway was also preserved.
Some of these small remnants of the cabin's earlier lives remain on display inside it today.
Once the repairs were complete, the numbered logs went back into place. The little cabin that had survived Dawson's rise, decline and reinvention was standing on its own again — this time as a place where visitors could experience some of that history for themselves.
And people continue to notice it.
The cabin has been painted by former Dawson school principal Mary Gartside, recreated in fabric by Yukon textile artist Shirley Pennell, drawn in pen and ink, and photographed for a postcard once sold in shops around Dawson and elsewhere in the Yukon. In 2010, it opened its doors to the public as part of Doors Open Dawson, and today it is included in the Dawson North Historic Sites Walking Tour guide book.
More informally, throughout the summer we watch drivers slow as they pass along Front Street for a better look, while people walking by regularly stop to photograph it.
More than a century after it first became part of Dawson, the Gold Rush Cabin is still doing what it has done for generations.
Welcoming people through its door.
The restoration of the Gold Rush Cabin was completed with financial assistance from the Government of Yukon’s Historic Properties Assistance Program (HPAC).