Perpetual motion obsessed Jan Welzl. Most people came to Dawson City to look for gold. Jan came to build a perpetual motion machine. He filled his three cabins with pipe and fittings, axles, counterweights, and even beer bottles. Whirling drive belts ran from the window of one cabin to the door of the next.
His neighbors thought the rotund, perpetually smiling man with a heavy Czech accent a harmless eccentric, especially since his perpetual appetite for junk tended to keep the town clean.
Link to another story “Yukon People”
Jan Welzl had lived an amazingly adventurous life, and a few of his adventures may have actually happened. In Europe in the mid-twenties, Jan eked out a living giving lectures about his travels in and around the Arctic. Kangaroos he asserted would make better sled animals than dogs. He told of a race of pygmy Eskimos who had ridden a meteor from Mars.
You get the idea.
In addition to lecturing he wrote articles for local publications, but in sad truth Jan couldn’t write a readable sentence, let alone an entire article.
A pair of local writers found his stories fascinating. They interviewed him, took notes, plied him with rum (his stories got better after dose of rum). They paid him the equivalent of $100 for his rights in the book and he went on with his life.
The book, Thirty Years in the Golden North, didn’t sell very well until an American Publisher released it and it became a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. Sales took off, but by that time Jan had made his way to Dawson City and perpetual motion.
In 1933 Welzl heard about his best seller, read his own stories but also found several stories he’d never heard, let alone told. He couldn’t decide whether to disown the book altogether or fight for a share of the royalties. Since he’d signed a contract with the authors when he accepted their $100, he didn’t really have a choice.
Jan died in 1948. But a few years later in Communist Czechoslovakia “Eskimo Welzl” emerged as a symbol of the individualism suppressed by the regime. Czech’s made pilgrimages to Dawson City to decorate his tombstone, or at least the stone with his name on it.
Nobody actually knows the location of his grave.
Thx, enjoyed it
im curious… was his search for perpetual motion in dawson city or dawson creek? there are clear references to it being in both/either in this article…
This happened in Dawson City. The reference to a Dawson Creek was an error on my part.