Dan Davidson
Dan Davidson and his wife Betty arrived in Beaver Creek from Nova Scotia in August 1976, about three days before school started. They had been having difficulty finding teaching positions for both of them in the same town. Betty had been teaching for two years and Dan had just finished getting his degrees. Beaver Creek had a two-room school of twenty-six students, and the pavement ran out on the Alaska Highway at Mile 101. The Davidsons stayed for three years, and the school population varied from twenty-two to twenty-six. A number of people lost bets on how long the couple would stay. The smart money gave them six months. Dan started his regular Whitehorse Star columns while they were in Beaver Creek and he wrote a number of opinion pieces as well.1)
The Davidsons moved from Beaver Creek to Faro and then to Dawson. The Klondike Sun newspaper was launched in Dawson in May 1989. The founding group included Dan Davidson (who had worked on the Faro Raven and had been writing for the Whitehorse Star since 1977), Kathy Jones-Gates (who had written for the Star and published a summer insert called the Dawson Packet), Sourdough Sue Ward ( who had worked for the legendary British Columbia publisher Ma Murray), Dawne Mitchell (writing for the Yukon News), Chere Mitchell (once a type setter), John and Madaleine Gould, Richard Blais, and Palma Berger. Louise Ranger typed a lot of stories into the Mac computer. Murray Matchett and Paula Paulovich dropped by to assist in gluing the strips of columns to the layout sheets. Mike and Kathy Gates developed the photographs that Sue Ward provided. Others turned up to help as well. The group had to choose a unique name, and the Literary Society of the Klondike was born. Kathy and Dan were co-editors in the first years and in 2009, Dan was the only original board member remaining.2) The Klondike Sun went digital in 1999, and in 2016 the society donated nearly 100,000 photographs to the Dawson City Museum.3)
Dan Davidson was a full-time teacher in the Yukon from 1976 to 2008. He started writing columns for What’s Up Yukon in 2010.4)