By Andrew Cremata

Two young men pulled a small handcart full of firewood along an old dirt road. Blocked at either end, the half-mile passage connects the Conrad Campground to the Montana Creek pullout in the Yukon Territory. 

One-hundred-twenty years ago, the dirt road was the main thoroughfare running through a mining town named Conrad City. The street featured a hardware store, living quarters, storage buildings, and a five-star two-story hotel. 

For millennia, this relatively small lakeside area, largely protected from frequent high winds, was used by Indigenous Carcross/Tagish people for traditional purposes like hunting and fishing. Protection from the wind, and an accessible sandy shoreline adjacent to a near-shore deep-water ledge, provided a suitable site for a large dock. A tramway connected the dock to silver mines miles away in the alpine.

In 1905, Conrad City was born. Optimism and wishful thinking led to it being heralded as the next “Big Thing,” which soon became one of the mine’s names. Many claimed it would become the capital of the Yukon Territory.

Like most boomtowns, Conrad City didn’t last long. Not a decade passed before most of its buildings were dismantled. Many were moved to Carcross. A few structures remained, including the dock, tramway structures, and two log cabins built from quivering aspen trees that abundantly grow all over the region. 

One hundred years later, Conrad’s few remnants were desiccated by wind and weather. Tree branches grew through broken windows. Cedar shingles lay scattered on the ground. Even the sturdy dock withered away to the point of being unrecognizable. 

Throughout Conrad’s decades of decay, a few primitive campsites scattered around the site were frequented by Skagway and Yukon residents who eagerly explored the city’s ruins. Imaginations ran wilder than the forest that quickly reclaimed the spaces abandoned by humans.

Hidden among the few remaining structures were hints of daily life. A shelf next to a doorway that once contained someone’s belongings. A fragment of fine china painted with ornate blue patterns peeking from soft bronze sand near the water’s edge. A bottle midden where long forgotten libations lay in mixed fragments under inches of soil like some rejected offering to the spirits of wealth and fortune. 

It was Friday afternoon. As I watched the two young men pulling their firewood cart along the roadway, one of its wheels fell off. The cart tilted sideways and firewood rolled out onto the ground. After reloading the firewood and briefly considering their predicament, they continued to pull the cart toward their campsite. The broken leg that previously housed the wheel carved a deep groove into the roadway, marking the young men’s uneven path as they struggled to pull the cart to its destination.

Strong wind and rolling waves thwarted my fishing plans for the following day. I spent the morning sipping coffee, watching shadows slowly disappear as the sun tracked a steep angle from horizon to zenith. High on the mountain across the lake, four mountain goats foraged in a clearing while one large male sat stoically on a rocky cliff’s edge as though surveying its vast domain.  

By noon, the sun’s heat motivated me to seek shade. While wandering the woods, I stumbled upon an assortment of rusty nails, all different shapes and sizes, each dramatically bent and twisted in some unique way. Presumably, someone long ago collected their assortment of bent nails into a container made from something less resilient than iron. 

A little further along an old rusty can hidden under some brush hinted at a long-forgotten meal. Upon returning to the main dirt road, I noticed the deep groove left behind by the three-wheeled cart had largely disappeared, much like Conrad City.

In 2022, the Carcross/Tagish First Nation and the Yukon Government enacted a comprehensive Conrad Management Plan to preserve the area’s cultural heritage. Before the document was signed, work was underway to restore one of the old cabins. The walls were reinforced with braces. New logs hewed from local timber were cut and prepared to eventually replace the compromised originals.

Without the effort, memories of Conrad City would soon be little more than a long-forgotten groove in the well-traveled roadway of time. Still, I can’t help but wonder at what point restoration becomes simulation – when the effort to preserve the past creates something that never existed.

Skagway’s current version of the Klondike Gold Rush preserves an aesthetic but it’s difficult to conjure authentic visions of the era on a four-ship Wednesday. Many memories of the Gold Rush are suspect, especially those crafted by colonialists who romanticized the wild beauty of the region while excluding or exploiting the people who already lived there. 

Had it not been for the stampeder’s propensity to litter, there would be no Gold Rush artifacts to display in museums. When boomtowns are done booming, nothing but garbage is left behind. After a hundred years pass, garbage becomes artifacts and history comes to life, at least for those who write it. 

In this way, the simulation of preservation devolves into a farce where subsequent generations interpret history under the lens of modern sympathies, something I effectively accomplished over the last three paragraphs.  

And yet I get excited when I find that old piece of china with the ornate blue markings and a strewn collection of rusty nails that once served a distinct purpose. Sparks of imagination fly when I think about a collection of personal treasures that may have rested on a wooden shelf by the doorway. 

By evening I was back in my chair watching the mountain goats. The large male must have gotten hungry because he’d forsaken his high perch for a grassy slope where he grazed with his white-haired family.  

In another hundred years, I wondered what the goat’s descendants will see as they gaze out over Tagish lake toward Sinwaa Éex’i Yé (Grey Ridge Yelling Place), this beautiful patch of land briefly known as Conrad City.

I suppose it depends on who’s preserving the history and the history being preserved. Compared to the scale of time that First Nations people caught fish along its shores, Conrad City’s existence is nothing more than the blink of an eye. Compared to the scale of time in which the region’s landscape was forged, all human history is a twinkling of an eye. 

It was slightly less windy on Sunday. A brief attempt at fishing yielded one 24-inch lake trout. Then I broke camp and headed south along the Klondike Highway.

After returning home, I carefully placed an old bent, rusted nail on my bookshelf.