You enter the Sourdough Saloon, John Wayne style, through double swing doors. The plush flock wallpaper and long velvet benches hark back to the 1890s, when prospectors stampeded to the creeks of the Klondike river and Dawson City briefly boomed.

At the height of the gold rush in 1898 the population hit 40,000. But by the following year the easy pickings were over, and the city has gradually dwindled to a little more than 2,000 residents, although some gold mining still continues.

From red-upholstered bar stools, grizzled old timers and mining engineers of the modern age blow their month’s earnings on endless jugs of Kokanee beer. They tell the same stories, ring the bell to buy a round for the house, and occasionally tip in gold.

But the Sourdough Saloon is most famous for a drink far more lurid than beer: its “sourtoe cocktails” are the drink of choice, garnished with a genuine severed human toe.

The Sourtoe Cocktail Club began in 1973. A group of friends was debating how to become an honorary “sourdough” – the name given by the early gold miners to those who survived a subArctic winter – without having to endure the bitter months from the freezing of the rivers in September to their break-up in May.

One of them, Dick Stevenson, had bought a cabin just outside Dawson. Its previous occupants were brothers who had hauled bootleg booze over the border into Alaska during the years of prohibition. They’d travelled by dogsled and, on one journey, one of them had developed a gangrenous big toe. With no doctors available, his brother had amputated it. They’d preserved the toe in alcohol and Stevenson inherited it with the cabin.

Perhaps, Stevenson suggested, one could become a “sourtoe” rather than a sourdough. To qualify, visitors would have to consume a drink garnished with the preserved digit – and the toe had to touch the drinker’s lips.

Thanks to Dawson’s summer tourist trade, there are now 24,000 certificate-holding members of the club. The first toe has long since gone (rumour has it that an overenthusiastic drinker swallowed it).

Fortunately generous souls forced to undergo amputations for medical reasons have donated replacements. Matt Van Nostrand, co-owner of the Downtown Hotel of which the Sourdough Saloon is part, has 12 in his collection – two big toes and 10 little ones. One came all the way from Virginia. “I think that was a lawnmower accident,” he says.

Name The Sourdough Saloon

Address Downtown Hotel, corner of Second Avenue and Queen Street, Dawson City, Yukon Territory, Canada

Phone 001 867 993 5346

Website www.downtownhotel.ca

The time 11.30am-1.30am daily. Sourtoe hour is 9pm-11pm

The owners The Van Nostrand family

The clientele Goldminers, trappers and tourists

The look Work clothes for the locals; Gore-Tex and thermals for everyone else

The drink Kokanee beer or the drink of your choice garnished with a severed human digit

The opening line “Ran over my toe with the lawnmower; do I get severance pay?”

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