Jim Robb has spent a lifetime drawing Yukon history in colourful characters and places

Amid the drinking, smoking and animated conversations going on at the café in the White Pass Hotel on Whitehorse's Main Street during an afternoon in 1957, something unusual happened.

"Someone put a coin in the jukebox … and then, from the back of the café, a guy came up and started dancing around the jukebox!"

It was enough to ignite the imagination of Jim Robb, seated a few tables away. The 24-year-old was seeing what would become his life's work. 

"I thought nobody was doing much about our colorful Yukon characters, and that made my life interesting," he said.

In his early days, Robb lugged his canvases and his sketching and painting paraphernalia across the Yukon, without anyone really knowing what he was doing. He sketched the characters and the faces that only the Yukon of the past could forge, the old buildings that leaned to the extreme and the rust that gnawed at them before time did its work and carried them away. 

Robb, 88, still spends some of his nights drawing again and again, to keep this now-lost world alive.

Robb has always drawn, "but never anything really serious," he says. 

"[He] didn't like school or authority," his younger brother David says about him, adding that he quickly swapped his school bag for an easel at the École des Beaux-arts de Montréal. And then one day, he left.

Robb, who was always interested in history and the people who make it, embarked on a road trip, eventually making his way to the Yukon in 1955.

Far from his native Quebec, Robb did odd jobs at first until that fateful afternoon at the White Pass Hotel. From that day on, he sought out faces that tell a story, sketched them, photographed them, even filmed them sometimes, and told their stories. He called them the "colorful five per cent."

He also developed his own style, which he dubs "the exaggerated truth."

"If a chimney leans, well, I make it lean even more."

In the 1970s, Robb spotted a man waiting for the bus. Big Salmon George was a First Nations man who cut wood for steamboats. Robb asked him if he could take his picture and Salmon George said yes, but the bus was arriving.

"He was going to miss his bus while I was doing his portrait, so I gave him a five dollar bill to take a taxi," says Robb with a smile. It was his last five dollars, he says, but he believed in his mission.