Dance history research, at least if done well, is often not so much a matter of coming up with definitive solutions as a continual cycling back through old material in the light of new sources or new understanding and correcting and refining one's work. I'm still in the middle of that process for the Klondike Two-Step, but as my region is currently undergoing an Arctic blast of cold air with a temperature similar to the average in the Klondike in January, it seems like a suitable moment to revisit the dance and check in on new developments. When I first discussed it here thirteen-plus years ago, I was mainly concerned with the basic reconstruction of the dance, and since the single description I had for it was a bit of a mess, I had plenty to say about that and neither the desire nor the resources to delve more deeply.
It would probably be helpful to go read my earlier post before going on.
So, what have I learned since I wrote it?
Well, let's start with the problem right in the very first sentence:
...this little French sequence dance...
With more perspective, that description is...wrong, but maybe not as wrong as it ought to be. I noted further down in my post that Lopp, in Le Danse (1903), attributed the Klondike to "H.-N. Grant" of Buffalo, New York. That is, of course, in America, which means the dance is American, not French. Even Lopp was not actually French, though he lived and taught in Paris for a time and was obviously fluent. So calling it a French sequence dance, as opposed to a dance published in France, is incorrect.
On the other hand, while I was aware back then that Lopp had made either mistakes or changes in some of the dances he copied over from M. B. Gilbert's Round Dancing (1890), I hadn't reconstructed nearly as many of them at the time and, more importantly, hadn't seen the original descriptions, not Gilbert's versions, of as many of them, and therefore hadn't realized the scope of the problem. Given Lopp's track record, and the issues with counting measures and beats in the description, it's far from certain that what Lopp described is precisely (allowing for the French translation) what Grant published. So maybe "Le Klondike Two Step" as much French as American. But it was still remarkably poor and misleading phrasing on my part.
I was right about one thing, however:
...I think it most likely that this dance dates to 1897 or 1898, the height of the Klondike Gold Rush...
Spot on. One of the many useful things that's become available online in the last thirteen years is much more extensive copyright records. Consulting the United States Catalogs of Copyright Entries for July-December, 1897, one can date the dance very precisely:
That means I made, or was led into, another mistake:
Since the instructions for music for the dance are simply for either 6/8 or 2/4 time, it may be presumed that there was no specific tune in mind...
Well, actually, it looks like there was. The "[Piano]" in the listing, and the fact that it was found under musical compositions, means that it was published as sheet music written to go with the dance (or vice-versa). As I now understand, most of the oddly-named couple dance variations in Gilbert and Lopp were less variations than sequences associated with particular tunes. That doesn't mean you can't dance the Klondike Two-Step sequence to other two-step music, but that's not how it was originally conceived. And that also means that Lopp either didn't have the original music (or he would have known the time signature) or deliberately chose to ignore the fact that there was specific music and listed the time signature in a way that implies that you can dance it to other pieces. This is not the only example of this time signature issue in Lopp, and it makes me wonder whether there were other places these later dances (post-1890 and Round Dancing) appeared which Lopp might have used as a source.
Unfortunately, I still haven't located the sheet music for The Klondike Two-Step. I've found a few other publications from The Two-Step Publishing Company, which seems to have been Grant's personal imprint, but not this particular piece.
What has turned up, however, in the pages of Grant's dance journal, The Two-Step, is the advertisement shown at the top of the post (click to enlarge), which appeared in identical form in at least the issues for March, April, May, June, August, September, October, November, and December of 1898. I would assume it appeared in earlier issues and in the July issue, but I don't happen to own those to check. The ad is particularly intriguing since it suggests, with that casual described by illustration, that the music was published with either diagrams or line drawings of the dancers, which of course would make a precise reconstruction much easier.
I haven't given up hope of finding the music and its illustrations, but looking for a particular piece of sheet music in the thousands of surviving but uncatalogued pieces of it can be less like searching for a needle in a haystack and more like wandering around a field of haystacks hoping a needle sticks you in the foot. And even then, it probably won't be the right needle! I may find it this year, or I may never find it. If I do, I'll write Klondike, Take Three, hopefully resolving all the weirdness with Lopp's beat and measure counts. Until then, regard the reconstruction with caution.
I'll end with the clip below from the June, 1898, issue of The Two-Step (click to enlarge) about the state of dancing in the actual Klondike by that summer, as the initial boom of the Klondike Gold Rush began to ease. Apparently at least one boom town was developed enough to have not merely a dance hall but a floor manager with a repertoire of quadrilles and the ability to lead a cotillion!
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