The steam-powered sternwheeler A.J.

Goddard, loaded with men, supplies and

firewood, heads toward the Klondike gold
fields along the Yukon River in 1898.
Photograph by: Handout, Alaska State Library
A team of Canadian and U.S. marine archeologists has discovered a long-lost shipwreck in the depths of Yukon's
legendary Lake Laberge that is being hailed as a "national treasure" and a "time capsule" from the Klondike.
The "perfectly preserved" 19th-century sternwheeler A.J. Goddard — named for an intrepid U.S. shipping merchant
who pioneered Yukon River transport during the wild race for Canadian gold in the 1890s — went down in a storm
more than a century ago in the setting made famous by the Robert Service poem "The Cremation of Sam McGee."

In the ghoulish rhyme, a Tennessee gold-seeker's frozen corpse finds blissful relief from the fatal Yukon cold in the
fiery boiler of a sternwheeler stranded in ice on Lake Laberge.

The lake, a widening of the Yukon River north of Whitehorse, was a key leg in the treacherous, five-day journey by
steamboat for tens of thousands of "stampeders" who came from across the U.S., Canada and elsewhere to search for
gold in the Yukon's Klondike region in the late 1890s and early 1900s.

Many of the miners trudged from Skagway, Alaska — which could be reached by Pacific steamers — across
dangerous mountain passes to the Yukon River headwaters in northern British Columbia.

Goddard took the same arduous route with the materials used to build his sternwheeler, which was assembled on the
shores of B.C.'s Lake Bennett and became the first steamboat to reach Dawson — then only a tent city filled with
fortune hunters — in June 1898.

Goddard's historic arrival at Dawson in his self-named boat — to the thunderous cheers of miners — has become
part of Klondike lore, recounted in the works of author Pierre Berton and other Gold Rush chroniclers.

The ship sank in October 1901, and three of the five crewmen on board at the time drowned.

Doug Davidge, president of the Yukon Transportation Museum, and B.C. archeologist John Pollack, a research
associate with the Texas-based, international Institute of Nautical Archaeology, had led several searches for
Klondike-era wrecks before discovering the sternwheeler in 2008 and positively identifying the 15-metre wreck
earlier this year.

"She is, indeed, a Gold Rush time capsule," INA president James Delgado, former director of the Vancouver
Maritime Museum, told Canwest News Service.

"The boiler door is hanging open with the firewood they'd thrown in," he said. "There are bags of tools and
somebody's coat lying there on the deck, and the boots that the engineer probably kicked off as he was drowning lie
close to his station."

In a statement announcing the find, the researchers also describe how a trapper camping on the shore of Lake
Laberge in 1901 "saw Goddard's tiny pilothouse, torn off the sinking steamboat, with two survivors, half frozen,
clinging to it. He saved them . . . Diving on A.J. Goddard, it is as if these events happened yesterday."

They also said "an axe used to chop the tow line for a small barge loaded with supplies still rests on the deck where
a crew member dropped it."

The discovery, backed by funding from INA, National Geographic, the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, the
Yukon government and others, is to be followed next summer with further dives documenting the wreck site and its
debris field.

"As this discovery now shows," the team notes, the steamboat also operated as a small floating repair shop, forge
and kitchen — a self-sufficient depot on the Gold Rush frontier."

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