Searching for Yukon Treasure
September 22, 2009
Whitehorse, Yukon
Before I left Edmonton, a friend of mine gave me a small green notebook for my northern scribbling. On the front cover a dragonfly floats above the words: “There are still a few remnants of magic left in the world.” A few? In the Yukon, magic is not measured in fragments; it’s everywhere.
Every day I carry my laptop and green notebook into the Yukon Archives, the Whitehorse Public Library or a local museum or interpretive centre. I’m compiling long lists of the people I want to interview in the year ahead, and the historic photographs and documents I want to order for research files.
I am also reading long oral histories from First Nations elders, carefully translated and transcribed, to learn more about the history of the communities I’ll be visiting.
My search for contemporary stories of childhood in the Yukon has begun, too. Today I learned a little bit about a boy – now a man –who discovered the remains of the 26,000-year-old Yukon Horse.
In 1993 Sam Olynyk was helping his father Lee Olynyk and another miner named Rob Toewes at a placer gold mine at Last Chance Creek. While working, Sam spotted something strange in the frozen dirt. He looked again. His unusual find turned out to be the most complete and best-preserved specimen of an extinct large mammal ever discovered in Canada.
This wasn’t like finding a fossilized footprint or a skeleton of bones from the historic era after the Ice Age. The dead Yukon horse was much, much older, and its body had been freeze-dried in the permafrost. Sam found a large piece of hide, with skin and hair, extending from the tail to the ear, a right foreleg, a small portion of the hooves, some intestine—even some ancient horse dung.
Paleontologist Dr. Richard Harrington took the horse’s remains to the Canadian Conservation Institute in Ottawa. There, a conservator named Tara Grant carefully cleaned and unfolded the specimen over a three-month period, and then dried the hide for the next seven months. Team members learned what the ancient horse had eaten for its last meal. They found grasses, poppies, mustards, buttercups and rose remnants in the horse’s intestines.
The Yukon horse was blond and about as big as a pony. It fed on the open grasslands of the North along with ancient caribou and woolly mammoths.
The world’s first horses appeared around 55 million years ago, and were the size of small dogs. The bigger Yukon horses wandered across the Bering Bridge to populate Asia, but became extinct on our continent about 12,000 years ago. Horses didn’t return to North America until the Europeans brought them in the 1500s.
How did this Yukon Horse die? Scientists found teeth marks on the neck and leg matching the teeth of a wolf.
After full scientific analysis, the remains of the Yukon Horse returned to the territory in 2009, and you can now see it yourself at the “Yukon Beringia Interpretive Centre”: www.beringia.com in Whitehorse.
I’ll try to find Sam and his family when I get to Dawson. If you know them, please ask them to contact me.
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