Coffins found at Dawson City sewage plant site

Archeologists are in Dawson City, Yukon, to study human remains — possibly dating back to the Klondike Gold Rush — that were found Thursday at the site of a new sewage treatment plant.

Yukon government officials have confirmed that construction workers discovered two wooden coffins containing human remains while they were excavating at the site of the sewage plant.

Work on the site was stopped immediately, and Yukon government archeologist Greg Hare arrived Friday to investigate the find.

Hare told CBC News that his crew hopes to recover the human remains from the two coffins over the weekend.

Residents said the remains appear to be very old, likely dating back to the Klondike Gold Rush at the turn of the 20th century.

The coffins were found near the location of the historic North West Mounted Police detachment in Dawson City.

This has led historians to speculate the human remains are those of convicted criminals who were hanged in Dawson City at the height of the Gold Rush.

Buried in secret

"There [were] 10 hangings that took place and there were six bodies put into a lime pit, and it looks like they just found the lime pit there," Walker Graham, an amateur historian in Dawson City, told CBC News on Friday.

"I know that there's at least two bodies, maybe more, and I know the people that were actually buried there. There's actually six of them, if it's the right place."

Graham said it's believed the North West Mounted Police — the precursor to today's RCMP — secretly buried the convicts in unmarked graves at night.

"They didn't want [anyone] to know where they were. So that way, nobody would go and take some gruesome, you know, like, souvenirs or anything," he said.

"So it's been pretty difficult to find out exactly where they are. But now that they've found them, it's really quite interesting."

Graham, who has spent years searching for the graves, said that 100 years ago, the site where the coffins were found was a swamp directly behind the North West Mounted Police detachment.

Stories about the secretly buried convicts prompted archeologists to conduct studies in the Dawson City area in the 1980s, but nothing was found at that time.

Hare said the other graves that are believed to be in the area are probably outside the work site, closer to the RCMP station.