Gold Diggers_Striking It Rich in the Klondike

by Charlotte Gray

  All that Bill Haskell knew was that word of George’s fistful of gold had spread through the crowded little settlement like a forest fire a few days after the strike. Gold fever took off. Men piled into the motley flotilla of boats tied up at the riverbank and started furiously poling, paddling, or rowing upstream. “Men who had been drunk for weeks and weeks,” Bill heard, “were tumbled into the boats and taken up without any knowledge that they were travelers. One man, it was related, was so drunk that he did not realize that he had left Forty Mile until he was two-thirds of the way [to the creek]. Yet this same man is settled on one of the best claims.” Vessels that were falling apart were patched with the lumber wrenched from cabins. Three days later, there wasn’t a boat left in Forty Mile.

  Bill Haskell listened to the story and scratched his beard. His first instinct was to resist the siren call of a stampede. He knew that it didn’t take much to send a bunch of prospectors chasing off into the unknown, particularly when winter loomed and they were feeling the “bluest of the blue” because they had toiled for months without making a single strike. Besides, Joe was sweating away on their claim near Circle City, and Bill was starting to feel guilty about abandoning his partner. But a couple of days after he had arrived in Forty Mile, one of the guys who had rushed upstream in the first wave of miners returned. “It’s a big thing,” he announced gleefully, as he swigged a double. “Everybody is finding big pans.” Another prospector reappeared, equally optimistic. The surface yields were so good, he said, that “if it went down it would be the biggest thing on earth.” The miners had already renamed the Tr’ondëk River “the Klondike” because they couldn’t pronounce its Hān name properly, and Rabbit Creek “Bonanza” because they were convinced it would make their fortunes.

  The enthusiasm was not universal: a couple of Yukon veterans came back in disgust, convinced it was a hullabaloo about nothing. “The valley was too wide, the willows did not lean the right way, [or] the waters did not taste right.” But skeptics were soon drowned out as yet more miners poured into Forty Mile to pick up supplies for the winter before hot-footing it back to this glittering tributary of the Tr’ondëk. The hairs on the back of Bill’s neck prickled. Maybe this was more than the usual pack hysteria. He felt himself being pulled into the frenzy. Could he afford to miss the big pan-out? “I determined that I would put out and see for myself.” His decision meant that he was among the first to join the Yukon Gold Rush—the last great gold rush in history.

  Chapter 4

  “Five dollars to the pan!” October 1896-April 1897

  ONCE HE HAD MADE UP HIS MIND, Bill acted fast. With the money he had earned as a deckhand, he bought a small boat and some provisions, recruited three destitute miners eager to reach the new gold strike, and set off upstream toward the Klondike. But getting there took all their strength. Bill’s boat was loaded to the gunwales, and the Yukon’s current was too swift to permit paddling except for brief stretches. Most of the time, two men tramped through mud and thick bushes along the bank, hauling the boat against the current while the other two kept the vessel in midstream. Even bright-eyed Bill found the laborious voyage upstream in a constant drizzling autumn rain demoralizing: “We ate hurriedly, slept little, and hour after hour dragged the tow line over rough places on the shore, the boat all the time pulling a dead weight against us.” Their feet and hands grew steadily more blistered as they slipped and sprawled along the rocks on the bank. Bill missed Joe: his new companions lacked Joe’s muscles, stamina, and indefatigable determination. What’s more, he now found himself the expedition leader—a position he had always ceded to Joe before. He had to deal with the constant grumbling of his new partners, even as he wondered if he was crazy to be joining the stampede. But he kept going because coming in the other direction were boats full of miners eager to register claims at Forty Mile. “Hurry up, boys!” they yelled at Bill and his companions. “It’s a great thing! Five dollars to the pan!”

  After three days, the four men rounded a bend in the river and saw the mouth of the Klondike. Bill, who had been clambering over the rocks at the water’s edge with the tow rope over his shoulder, straightened up and stared in amazement. In mid-May, when he and Joe had passed this spot, there had been only the Hān huts in the settlement on the bank of the Klondike where it joined the Yukon. Now it looked as though a circus of about fifty dirty white tents had come to town—except that there was no town, just a scrubby mudflat squeezed between the river and a steep hill. Bill and his crew were too tired and footsore to set off for the creeks that evening, so they pitched a couple of cramped little pup tents and dragged the boat up onto the beach. “We had a bite, a little hot coffee, and then a pipe, then sat and listened to the stories of those who had been in.” They also stashed most of their provisions in a cache, out of reach of dogs, so they would not be too encumbered on the trail.

  By now a cold, damp night had fallen, cloud hid the stars, and Bill was acutely aware of the whisper of the Yukon’s current, the growling of dogs, and the occasional distant howl of wolves. It was a strange and lonely cluster of men around the campfires—the sole source of light in this murky landscape. In theory, they were all competing with each other for the most lucrative claims. In practice, they huddled together, thousands of miles from a half-decent town, dependent on each other in an emergency, wondering if they were all just grasping at fantasy. There were grunts of recognition from those who knew each other from Circle City or Forty Mile. When a stranger appeared, those already close to the fires shuffled aside to make room for the newcomer. The smell of sour breath and sweaty, damp clothing mingled with wood smoke and coffee. Some men never uttered a word. Others couldn’t shut up.

  Bill pulled his thick wool jacket tighter around him, tugged on a pair of knitted mittens, and glowered into the flames. As he listened to men who were returning to Forty Mile to register claims, he began to lose his nerve. There was plenty of talk of big strikes, “but we were shown little gold.” Most of the prospectors had simply staked out claims on the creek with no idea if there was any color in them. Others planned to sell the claims they had staked before winter closed in. Bill could tell from their remarks that they were hustlers after a quick buck and didn’t know a rocker from a sluice box. He began to wish that he had returned to Circle City and rejoined Joe, rather than allowing himself to be swept along in a burst of mass hysteria.

  Suddenly there was a wild whoop, followed by a volley of yells and the sound of rocks tumbling down the hill. The men round the campfire rose, startled. Was this an Indian attack, Bill wondered? An avalanche?

  It was a bunch of men returning from Bonanza. Bill shouted at the guy in front, “How is it?” A ripple of excitement ran through the crowd when the reply came: “Ten dollars to the pan, right in the bank of the creek.” Someone threw more wood on the fire and began frying bacon as the newcomers were peppered with questions about what was happening in the hills behind them. Bill’s spirits rose as he heard that three men had panned out seventy-five dollars’ worth of gold in four hours, including a single nugget worth twelve dollars. A couple of men had even got two lengths of sluice boxes going already, and they had taken out $4,000. It was all still just talk: nobody in the shabby little campsite produced any nuggets or dust. But as Bill observed, “It was enough to set the miners wild!”

  Within a few minutes, men started slipping quietly away from the fire, strapping on their packs, and starting up the path to the creek. They clung to the bushes as they attempted the steep incline in the dark. “They could not wait a moment after hearing the stories of those wonderful pans.” But Bill watched the way that the miners who had come running down the trail now fell on the bacon and hot coffee as though half starved. The hike into gold country was obviously brutal, and Bill had little faith in his companions’ stamina. He decided they should wait until dawn. He crawled inside his tent, wrapped himself in a blanket, and fell asleep. Yet all night, he periodically woke to hear the rattle of gravel as more boats arrived and w
ere hauled onto shore. Their passengers would disembark, cook a quick meal, then scramble up the steep track.

  Essential tent furnishings included a bottle of whiskey, warm fur bedding, and a pair of scales for weighing gold.

  The trail to Bonanza Creek began more easily than Bill expected. Granted, he and his three companions had to wade through a swamp and couldn’t find any decent water to drink, but the low bushes along the path glowed scarlet with cranberries that helped slake their thirsts. Every so often, they would meet miners coming the other way. Some told of rich prospects along the creek; others declared the whole thing a fraud. But Bill was back in the grip of gold fever and eager to dismiss pessimists, who always looked “weary and fagged out . . . I knew they had had no breakfast.”

  The Klondike Gold Creeks

  The four men finally reached the summit of the first hill, and drank deep from a spring of fresh water. Bill looked around. After the previous night’s drizzle, the sky had cleared, and in the crisp autumn air the landscape of low green hills, dark granite, trees tinged scarlet, and high sandy cliffs spread itself below him like a magnificent tapestry. He could trace the silvery thread of water for fifty miles, and he could see the snow-clad peaks of distant mountains. Every ravine in the far distance held a glittering little glacier, which converged on the main glacier like branches on a tree trunk. The whole glorious picture reminded Bill of “an outline drawing in chalk of a leafless tree.”

  Bill could have rested there for hours, admiring a spectacular landscape that few non-natives would ever see. “Never mind the mountains,” barked his companions, so they all trudged on, first along the ridge, then down a perilously steep incline. A steady, soaking rain started to fall, making the trail soft, slippery, and easy to lose. It wasn’t even a well-trodden path, thought Bill grimly: the hills around Circle City had been easier to hike across. The party stumbled and slid onward, past several creeks that nobody had yet panned and into a shallow swamp covered with what the miners called “niggerheads”—grassy clumps that looked like secure footings but were the cause of more twisted ankles and falls than any other feature of the Klondike landscape. By the time the men arrived at the first claim stake on Bonanza Creek, which was numbered 64 Below Discovery, they were tired, damp, and dirty. Bill’s early euphoria had evaporated. As he stared at the creek’s muddy banks and a few quartz pebbles, his spirits sank further.

  There were ten and a half claims in a mile, which meant they were still a long way from Carmack’s original find—“Six more miles on paper,” Bill calculated, “several more times that on foot.” Would they ever get to Discovery Claim? Did Bonanza really offer, in the words of an Irishman they met on the trail, “all the goold in the worruld”? Or was the man just another blowhard caught up in stampede frenzy?

  On and on the four men trudged, clambering over rocks and fallen trees, wondering if they would ever reach clear ground. When they were still two miles short of Carmack’s claim, one stopped in his tracks, let his heavy pack slide to the ground, and declared this was it: he could go no farther. It was almost dark, and Bill’s shoulders ached. He organized a campfire and a pot of tea, then sat gloomily on the ground, wondering what the hell he was doing in this lousy moose pasture. No one said a word. Early next morning, he woke chilled through, with a white frost clinging to his blanket. Hot tea and a mouthful of bread helped a little, but it was a wretched party that struggled up the trail to Carmack’s Discovery Claim.

  Gold can work miracles. The sight of it glinting in Carmack’s sluice boxes gave new energy to each of them. Carmack himself slapped them all on their backs, then proudly pulled three nuggets out of his pocket. With a big grin, Bill shouldered his pack and soldiered on, past the mouth of another creek—a “pup”—that emptied into Bonanza, past eager miners swishing gravel and water in their gold pans, past half-built log cabins being readied for the winter. Finally, eighteen hours after they had left Carmack, Bill and his boys came to the last of the claim stakes above the Discovery Claim. They staked out a 500-foot square each, tacked up notices of claims, then wearily looked around. They had no idea if their claims were any good. Since their mission had been to stake, not pan, they hadn’t brought their pans with them, and they had no energy left to scrabble around on the stream bed. “It’s all chance,” Bill thought to himself, as he squatted by the creek, staring into the water. “Gold might be there and it might not. It certainly looks little like it.” At least, however, they had secured their claims on the creek where there might be “all the goold in the worruld.”

  The return journey back to the mouth of the Klondike was much easier, now that the pressure was off. They met plenty of men coming up as they went down. “How is it?” the newcomers asked anxiously. Forgetting the doubts they had felt only hours earlier, Bill’s gang replied in unison: “It’s a big thing!” Once in sight of the makeshift camp at the river’s mouth, “we, in our turn, yelled like Comanches and jumped and tumbled down the hills with the rattling rocks.” So what if there was no gold on their claims? At least they were in the game: they now each owned the one claim an individual was legally allowed on a creek and its tributaries. Eager newcomers crowded round Bill and his companions, desperate for an update on the creeks because “we were in the delightful position of having staked our claims.”

  The sight of other men collecting nuggets and gold dust in their sluice boxes on Bonanza Creek gave new energy to Bill and his party.

  Once Bill had recovered from his race to stake, he hiked back into the hills to check whether any of Bonanza’s tributaries held out more promise than the claims already secured. “It makes a great difference in carrying a pack on a trail whether a person is in a hurry or not,” reflected Bill, as he strapped on a pack three times heavier than he had carried before. This time, the pace was more leisurely and, as frost crept into the ground, the trail firmer. None of the other pups looked worth trading his Bonanza claim for. Soon the deciduous trees shed their last leaves, there were no more cranberries to pick, and snowflakes started to drift across the path. Bill decided to retrace his footsteps to the mouth of the Klondike.

  As Bill Haskell crested the last peak before the descent to the Yukon, an extraordinary sight met his eyes. On the far shore of the Klondike River, across the water from the cramped area where they had camped a few days earlier, was an even larger spread of dirty tents, and even the beginnings of several log buildings. The dreary mudflat covered in alder and stunted willows, opposite the former Hān fishing camp, had been transformed, in Bill’s words, into “a new metropolis.”

  In later years, Bill enjoyed explaining how “a clever man could see that this flat was about the only place available for a city in that rugged region, and there was a clever man who saw it.” The clever man was Joseph Ladue, the trader upriver who had grubstaked Robert Henderson. News of the rich find on Bonanza had ripped up and down the Yukon River in August, and when it reached Ladue at Sixty Mile, he moved fast. Grasping the need for a trading post near the gold fields, he had rushed downriver to the confluence of the Klondike and the Yukon. There, he carefully assessed the mudflat and recognized that although the gold-bearing creeks all flowed into the river from the south, only the river’s northern bank could accommodate both a decent-sized community and a good steamboat landing. He then quickly continued downriver past Fort Reliance to Forty Mile and filed an application at the Canadian police post there to register plans for a townsite of 160 acres. Rowing and poling his way laboriously upriver for a hundred miles took a couple of weeks. But once back at Sixty Mile, he built a raft out of all his dressed lumber, loaded his sawmill onto it, and floated it downriver to the mouth of the Klondike.

  By the time Bill Haskell returned from his second hike into the gold fields, Joe Ladue had set himself up on the Klondike’s northern bank. He had purchased some gold claims for himself, got his sawmill working day and night, and built a warehouse plus a small cabin that also served as a saloon. He was only just ahead of the crowd. By late October about
600 claims had been staked on Bonanza Creek and its pup, named Eldorado. There were now over a thousand men in the Klondike valley, all clamoring for wood to build shanties and cabins. They had to cross the river to get to Joe Ladue’s townsite and sawmill, but there were plenty of canoes and boats available in which to pole through the shallow waters. And once the river froze over, they could walk.

  Ladue’s townsite buzzed with anticipation. The site was strategically positioned to be the supply center for what the trader insisted would be the richest gold field in the world. The Yukon River was navigable by steamboats; the Klondike River was not. So the settlement at the junction of the two rivers was poised to become a booming business and transportation center. Ladue announced that his townsite was like San Francisco in 1849, before the California Gold Rush, and he started selling building lots for five to twenty dollars each.