"as if it happened yesterday"

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."

Above, 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