Gold Diggers_Striking It Rich in the Klondike

by Charlotte Gray

  When he was only nineteen, he had joined an army of unemployed men who were marching on Washington (and traveling there by riding the rails of the Southern Pacific Railroad). “I went on ‘The Road’ because I couldn’t keep away from it,” he later told a friend, “because of the life that was in me, of the wanderlust in my blood that wouldn’t let me rest . . . because I was so made that I couldn’t work all my life on ‘one same shift.’” His traveling adventures were brutally interrupted in Buffalo, where he spent one month in jail for vagrancy. Jail was an education for Jack. First, it had the impact that today’s promoters of boot camps for delinquent youth like to promote: it scared him straight. But the trip east also exposed this impressionable young man to the appalling poverty and social conditions that existed alongside American affluence. “I had been born in the working class,” he wrote later, in his essay “What Life Means to Me,” “and I was now . . . beneath the point at which I had started. I was down in the cellar of society, down in the subterranean depths of misery about which it is neither nice nor proper to speak. I was in the pit, the abyss, the human cesspool, the shambles and the charnel house of our civilization.” For the rest of his life, however much wealth he accumulated, Jack London vehemently argued against capitalism and in favor of socialist solutions to social problems.

  Tousle-haired and muscular, Jack London was desperate to escape a cramped household and menial jobs.

  Returning to San Francisco, Jack London decided to return to school and complete his education so that he could make a career as a writer. He wanted to escape from the laboring class, but he also wanted to publicize its plight. Soon he had discovered Karl Marx, and joined the Henry Clay debating society, an Oakland group steeped in Fabian socialism. He poured his personal insecurities into political analysis, running as a Socialist-Labor candidate for the Oakland Board of Education (and polling a respectable, but hopeless, 552 votes). Nothing could shut him up. He made headlines when he was taken to court for challenging a city ordinance prohibiting soapbox oratory, and was then acquitted after an impassioned speech of self-defense.

  In the summer of 1897, Jack London had knuckled down to the challenge of writing his way out of poverty. It was a bold ambition for a young man with no money, little learning, and no contacts in the publishing world. But he was obsessed. He holed up in his mother’s Oakland home, toiling for up to fifteen hours a day at his self-imposed task. Fiction, poetry, essays, humorous verse—he hit the keys so hard on an old Blickensderfer typewriter, which wrote entirely in capitals, that his fingertips blistered. It did not go well. His creative efforts were overwritten and unconvincing. Rejection slips piled up as fast as debts. He had pawned every single one of his possessions—his books, his clothes, his future—and he felt trapped. Then, at exactly the moment when he was desperate to escape, the Excelsior docked in San Francisco. Joining the stampede north was an insane gamble, but the opportunity was irresistible. He told a friend that he wanted to “let career go hang, and [take] the adventure-path again in quest of fortune.” In the words of novelist E. L. Doctorow, Jack “leapt on the history of his times like a man to the back of a horse.”

  Jack left only a few random pieces of personal, unpublished writing about his Klondike adventures—a couple of letters, a journal about his homeward voyage. He makes mention of his year in the North in the two versions of his autobiography he published: John Barleycorn and Martin Eden. One photograph of him during his ascent of the Chilkoot Pass has surfaced. It shows a slender, short youth with a diffident expression, almost hidden in a party of men who look older, bigger, and more hardened. But several of the people who knew him in the North never forgot him and were happy to reminisce about him in later years, when that slender youth had turned into a world-famous writer. Best of all, Jack himself used and reused his Klondike experiences in the short stories and novels (particularly his masterpieces The Call of the Wild, published in 1903, and White Fang, published in 1906) with which he made his reputation.

  Like Bill Haskell, Jack was not simply running away when he embarked on a ship that took him up the coast. Raised on the myth of the frontier, the Gold Rush spoke to a deeper need in him, which he caught in the work that gave its title to his second book of short stories, The God of His Fathers : “True, the new territory was mostly barren; but its several hundred thousand square miles of frigidity at least gave breathing space to those who else would have suffocated at home.” Jack wanted to feel like a man, not a cog in a machine. The frontier was where a rebellious young man sick of his own and his nation’s prospects could commit himself to unvarnished authenticity and emotional truth. This would be his quest.

  Yet how could Jack afford to get there? He had nothing more than the clothes on his back. Within hours of the Excelsior’s arrival, he was begging the local newspapers to send him as a reporter. Dozens of other writer wannabes had had the same idea, and celebrity columnists were already en route. Jack’s friend the poet Joaquin Miller had boarded ship, as he liked to boast, “with forty pounds on his back and his face to the stars.”

  Luckily for Jack, his brother-in-law had also been caught up in the collective madness. It is hard to imagine a less suitable stampeder than Captain James Shepard, an elderly Civil War veteran with a bad heart who had married Jack’s stepsister, Eliza. But Shepard was gung ho to go, and offered to grubstake Jack if he would take him along as a partner. The scheme involved Jack carrying all the bags and Eliza Shepard mortgaging their home. But why not? One man’s eagerness reinforced the other’s: it was Klondike or bust. Charmian London, Jack’s second wife and author of The Book of Jack London, described the next stage: “Such a buying jamboree Jack had never enjoyed. Eliza’s hundreds flowed like water: fur-lined coats, fur caps, heavy high boots, thick mittens; and red-flannel shirts and underdrawers of the warmest quality . . . The average outfit of the Klondike also must include a year’s supply of grub, mining implements, tents, blankets, Klondike stoves, everything requisite to maintain life, build boats and cabins. Jack’s dunnage alone weighed nearly 2000 pounds.”

  Jack spent a feverish forty-eight hours assembling the outfit. His mother was appalled by his “awful news.” In a letter, she begged him to “give up the idea for we feel certain that you are going to meet your death and we shall never see you again.” Her pleas were ignored. On Sunday, July 25, only eleven days after the Excelsior’s arrival, the Pacific Steamship Company’s Umatilla left San Francisco with Jack London and James Shepard aboard. In Jack’s pocket was a handbook to the North that was already out of date: Miner Bruce’s Alaska. The steamship, licensed to carry 290 passengers, had 471 on board as it steamed north to Juneau. Over 1,000 people, cheering lustily, waved it on its way.

  During the eight-day trip up the coast, on the Alaska panhandle, Jack and Shepard teamed up with three other men for the long trek ahead. Two of these men boasted invaluable manual skills. Merritt Sloper was a cheerful, slightly built forty-year-old who had recently returned from South America and who knew how to build and sail boats. Jim Goodman was a hefty fellow, keen on hunting and mining. The third man, Fred Thompson, had no experience in roughing it, but while he traveled he kept a diary. Fred’s diary gives the factual background to several of the short stories that Jack would compose, months or years after they had both left the Klondike.

  At both Skagway (above) and Dyea, shallow water and the absence of docks meant that stampeders had to haul their goods up the muddy beach.

  Fred’s diary is a laconically written document: most days he simply jotted down the party’s progress up the coast to Juneau, from Juneau north into the Lynn Canal to the wretched little harbor of Dyea, and from there toward the dread Chilkoot Pass. “Aug. 2. Arrived at Juneau . . . Aug. 6. Still on our way to Dyea. . . . Aug. 8. Laid in camp all day and purchased boat for 10.00 to carry our supplies to head of Navigation 6 miles up from Dyea . . . Aug. 12. Began to pack our goods on our backs up the trail making our cash [cache] 1 mile further up the river.” As the small party pushed north,
Fred rarely allowed himself to admit how grueling the journey was. But sometimes he couldn’t help himself: “Aug. 19. It is raining now but we still have to keep on the move . . . Aug. 23. Rain and oh the mud . . . trail very bad and are getting up pretty close to snow, it is quite cold tonight.”

  The Chilkoot Trail swarmed with stampeders this summer, most of whom were city dwellers in no condition for such an adventure. The various stopping points along its seventeen-mile length had become as well known as the Stations of the Cross. In any season it was a brutal hike, but Jack’s party undertook it at the most difficult time of year. Bill Haskell and Belinda Mulrooney had traveled in spring, so they could use sleds over the snow and ice for most of the trail as they laboriously hauled their outfits forward in several loads. Jack and his partners faced mud, landslides, endless rain, treacherous fords, flimsy log bridges—and crowds of fellow stampeders jostling on the narrow path. Hundreds of Indian packers were milling around Dyea: men, women, and children from the local Chilkat, Tlingit, Stick, and Tagish peoples. But packers’ rates for portaging stampeders’ packs over the pass had jumped from less than ten cents a pound to over thirty cents. That worked out to $600 a ton—an impossible price for Jack’s party. If they were going to make it, they would have to do as Bill Haskell and Belinda Mulrooney had done: break up their outfits into smaller loads, then pack them over the pass in relays. For every mile a complete outfit was advanced up the trail, a stampeder had to travel thirty-nine miles—twenty of them carrying the pack uphill. Hundreds of stampeders took one look at the prospect before them and abandoned the venture. Captain Shepard couldn’t face it. A couple of days into the trek, he simply turned round and headed home, “having got rumatism very bad,” in Fred’s words. It was a relief for Jack.

  From Dyea, Jack and his partners were able to drag or pole their possessions in a boat for five miles, along the Taiya River to Finnegan’s Point. The next twelve-mile section of the trail took the heavily laden stampeders across rubble-covered flats, up a dark canyon lined with spruce trees to Sheep Camp, and past overhanging glaciers to the way station called The Scales. Stampeders were now only a mile from the summit, but as Bill Haskell had discovered, that mile was up steeply pitched, ice-scoured rock where packers climbed with hands and feet. And when Jack climbed, he was in that dark line of stampeders captured in Eric Hegg’s photos—a line nobody dared step out of because you would never be able to elbow your way back in.

  In this photograph taken at Sheep Camp on the Chilkoot Trail, Jack London is the youth standing in front of the group in the center, with Jim Goodman on the left and Fred Thompson half-sitting on the right.

  According to Jack himself in the autobiographical John Barleycorn, he thrived. The journey up the Chilkoot Pass and then on to Lake Lindeman, seven miles beyond the summit, was a chance to test his muscles and manhood in a way for which there was less and less opportunity in turn-of-the-century America. “I was twenty-one years old, and in splendid physical condition,” he would write. By the time he reached Lake Lindeman, he claimed, “I was . . . outpacking many an Indian.” Consumed by the discipline and willpower required to keep going, stripped to his red underwear, he strode along the trail, heavy backpacks attached by both shoulder and head straps. “The last pack into Lindeman was three miles. I back-tripped it four times a day, and on each forward trip carried one hundred and fifty pounds. This means that over the worst trails I daily travelled twenty-four miles, twelve of which were under a burden of one hundred and fifty pounds.” His triumph at the end of the trail made up for the painful tightness of his muscles, the searing ache in his lungs, the sting of sweat in his eyes.

  The Chilkoot Trail was more than a physical challenge for Jack London. As adrenaline raced through his body, his eyes were taking in the sheer human drama surrounding him. Gold was what drove him forward, but his literary ambitions still simmered and here was the best raw material that a writer could ever ask for. This was what had been lacking when he blistered his fingertips on the old Blickensderfer: unique experiences he could polish into tales of adventure that would appeal to American readers. He stored every vivid detail in his imagination, so that what he wrote in later years might exaggerate the tensions and the tragedies yet remain true to the facts. In A Daughter of the Snows, the novel he would publish five years later, he described that awful slog over the mountains: “Time had rolled back, and locomotion and transportation were once again in the most primitive stages. Men who had never carried more than parcels in all their lives had now become bearers of burdens. They no longer walked upright under the sun, but stooped the body forward and bowed the head to the earth. Every back had become a pack-saddle, and the strap-galls were beginning to form. They staggered beneath the unwonted effort, and legs became drunken with weariness.”

  Just below the summit, while Jack’s party was in camp, an early snow squall blew up. The extreme conditions cried out for descriptive hyperbole: “A snort of the gale dealt the tent a broad-handed slap as it hurtled past, and the sleet rat-tat-tatted with snappy spite against the thin canvas . . . A few water-soaked tents formed the miserable foreground, from which the streaming ground sloped to a foaming gorge. Down this ramped a mountain torrent. Here and there, dwarf spruce, rooting and groveling in the shallow alluvium, marked the proximity of the timber line. Beyond, on the opposing slope, the vague outlines of a glacier loomed dead-white through the driving rain. Even as they looked, its massive front crumbled into the valley, on the breast of some subterranean vomit, and it lifted its hoarse thunder above the screeching voice of the storm.”

  Only two weeks after Jack and his friends passed through this area, a landslide roared down the mountain and wiped out a section of the trail. At least one man was killed and several others were injured, while dozens of tents and outfits were buried under tons of rock and mud.

  Jack was particularly affected by the gruesome fate of most horses shipped north by the stampeders. In the summer of 1897, many of the parties headed toward the Klondike had chosen an alternative route over the St. Elias Mountains, across the White Pass. The newly opened White Trail began in Skagway, just down the coast from Dyea, and was longer, but the White Pass, at 2,900 feet above sea level, was lower than the Chilkoot Pass. In theory, travelers could pack their outfits over it on the backs of horses or mules. In practice, almost every single animal died in the struggle. Most of them (as Tappan Adney had noted on the Seattle wharves) had been unfit in the first place, their owners had no idea how to care for them, and there was absolutely no forage on the route. On the northern side of the passes, where the Chilkoot Trail met the White Trail, Jack London and his partners heard how, in the words of Fred Thompson’s diary, “there are enough dead horses and mules along the trail to lay them side by side for the entire length so one can walk on horse flesh the entire length of 50 miles.” The Mounties would estimate later that 3,000 horses had been killed by abuse, starvation, and overwork on this trail.

  In his short story “Which Make Men Remember,” published in 1901 in the collection The God of His Fathers, Jack London drew on the tales he had heard about the horrors of the White Trail: “The horses died like mosquitoes in the first frost, and . . . rotted in heaps. They died at the Rocks, they were poisoned at the Summit, and they starved at the Lakes; they fell off the trail, what there was of it, or they went through it; in the river they drowned under their loads, or were smashed to pieces against the boulders; they snapped their legs in the crevices and broke their backs falling backward with their packs; in the sloughs they sank from sight or smothered in the slime, and they were disemboweled in the bogs where the corduroy logs turned up in the mud; men shot them, worked them to death, and when they were gone, went back to the beach and bought more. Some did not bother to shoot them, stripping the saddles off and the shoes and leaving them where they fell. Their hearts turned to stone—those which did not break—and they became beasts, the men on Dead Horse Trail.”

  The London party reached Lake Lindeman on Septemb
er 8, six weeks after Jack had left San Francisco. Along the way, he and his three partners had joined up with another group of men; together, they started building two boats, the Yukon Belle and the Belle of the Yukon, which they would sail, paddle, or drag through 600 miles of lakes and rivers to Dawson City.

  The days were shortening: the wind had shifted to the north; there was frost or snow on the ground every morning now when the men crawled out of their tents. The fear shared by the men was caught in Jack’s story “The One Thousand Dozen” (published in his 1904 volume, The Faith of Men): “A great anxiety brooded over the camp where the boats were built. Men worked frantically, early and late, at the height of their endurance, calking, nailing, and pitching in a frenzy of haste for which adequate explanation was not far to seek. Each day the snow-line crept farther down the bleak, rock-shouldered peaks, and gale followed gale, with sleet and slush and snow . . . Toil-stiffened men turned wan faces across the lake to see if the freeze-up had come. For the freeze-up heralded the death of their hope—the hope that they would be floating down the swift river ere navigation closed on the chain of lakes.”

  By late September, Jack had organized sails and booms for the boats, and the vessels had crossed Lake Lindeman and Bennett Lake. “Weather very cold,” noted Fred. All the talk at the campsites was of food shortages in Dawson City as winter approached. Plenty of stampeders had decided the journey was madness, and had turned tail. But Jack and his companions had no intention of retreating. At Tagish Lake, they saw a tattered British flag: this was the newly established Canadian Customs House. Customs officers, supported by a detachment of Mounties, stopped all boats to ensure they had enough provisions and to levy duties on items not purchased within Canadian territory. Jack and his partners somehow charmed their way through. “By scheming,” Thompson gleefully recorded, “got off by only paying $21.50 on our outfit—others that were not onto their job had to pay very much more and parties that did not have the money their goods were confiscated by the officers.”