At Vancouver they lost one of their small flotilla: the brigantine, badly loaded, capsized and had to be towed into port for repairs. Now they were two ships, struggling up the inland waterway, their passengers in a deadly race with the ice that would freeze the northern rivers bank to bank and shut the Klondike off from the world outside. The passengers grumbled, got jumpy. They were crowded and miserable and had good reason to be afraid.
Roxanne found her fellow voyagers to be a mixed, bag. Seven ministers from New England were among them, balanced by a number of hard-eyed gamblers and confidence men who stared boldly at Roxanne and caused Denby to redden with anger. A madam from Chicago and her girls flounced about the boat in ruffled beribboned taffetas and hats with veils, their red lips curving with delight at the very mention of the name Dawson—where, each one was convinced, droves of rich tired miners waited, eager to pile buckets of nuggets at the toes of their high-buttoned shoes.
The madam, who was named Josie Mawkins, noticed at once the sapphire-eyed blonde the male passengers called merely The Beauty. One day when Denby was occupied elsewhere, Josie swished up to the rail beside Roxanne, laid a gloved hand lightly on Roxanne’s arm and said shrewdly, “With looks like yours, you could travel first class. You know that, don’t you?”
Roxanne pretended to misunderstand. “Traveling first class wouldn’t matter much on this ship, would it?”
“You know what I mean,” said Josie, giving her a hard look. “That husband of yours doesn’t look flush to me. Hear he’s got no outfit, just some luggage. Now I’d outfit him for you when we reach Dawson, and start him out after gold, if you’d see things my way.” Roxanne stared at her.
“ ’Course you’d find it easy to pay me back in Dawson, whether he struck it or not,” explained Josie complacently. “Miners would sure fight it out for a chance at you—you’d have more gold than you ever saw.”
Roxanne, nonplussed at this direct offer of a gilded life, was momentarily unable to frame a suitable reply. As she stared at the madam, it came to her that the brown eyes she was looking into were kind eyes—cynical, worldly-wise, but kind just the same. “Thank you,” she said ruefully, “but I’ve got a jealous husband. He onced caned a man just for smiling in my direction on the way to church.”
“That,” said Josie bleakly, “is a crying shame.” She patted Roxanne on the back. “Let me know if you ever change your mind.”
“Thank you,” said Roxanne. “I’ll remember.”
She was smiling as Josie left, thinking, if Denby could have heard that conversation, he’d have had apoplexy. She went back to viewing the shoreline, for in spite of the overcrowding, she found the voyage through the green water fascinating. Below soft banks of clouds, almost unbroken forests stretched to starboard. Now and then an Indian village broke the shoreline and she saw bright totem poles rising majestically among the burial houses. Sometimes, in the distance, she spotted high-prowed Indian canoes skimming the waters, their brilliantly decorated hulls dimmed with seal oil and soot. Playful schools of porpoises gathered around the ship and, once, a group of killer whales.
Roxanne’s enchanted gaze ignored the tumbledown cabins of Wrangell and instead looked with delight at the dangerous beauty of Wrangell Narrows, where tall dark firs were reflected in the water against a backdrop of majestic snow-capped peaks. In spite of its dilapidated appearance, Wrangell did a thriving business—especially in liquor. Many passengers purchased “medicinal” liquor here,' having been warned that Alaska was “dry.”
Once through the Narrows—so treacherous they could be negotiated only by daylight, they moved beneath flights of ducks and screaming seagulls to the bustling town of Juneau, set on a knoll and backed by an almost perpendicular mountain. There they stretched their legs on the boardwalk and looked across the channel toward Douglas Island where the mighty Treadwell Mine, reputed to be the largest gold mine in the world, was situated. The storekeepers warned them there would be problems in landing the enormous amount of gear that now weighted down the ship, but no one listened. All were eager to push on.
Roxanne knew that the golden giant, Leighton Clarke, had more than a casual interest in her. It was revealed in a sudden intentness of his casual blue gaze, in the way he maneuvered to be near her. But Leighton had a delicacy in these things; his manner was impeccable. And since Denby apparently was not jealous of Leighton, Roxanne relaxed—she found Leighton’s company very pleasant. She decided that she might like the Klondike after all.
The boat had barely cleared the harbor at Juneau when their sister ship, the limping side-wheeler, blew up. Her passengers had had no idea that, contrary to regulations, she was carrying dynamite. In the resulting fire, Leighton proved to be a hero. Making off in one of the hastily launched boats to rescue the sidewheelers’s passengers, he returned to the burning ship again and again; once to open crates so that the terrified dogs in them might swim in one long frightened streak to shore and safety. Roxanne felt sorry for the side-wheeler’s passengers and did what she could to help. When the stranded adventurers had to be left at Juneau, there was much weeping and cursing on their part. Denby was unsympathetic, muttering that this misfortune had cost them a day; he feared they might be iced in. Roxanne, giving Denby a withering look, turned her blinding smile on the smoke-blackened giant who had come back from saving the dogs.
The Clara V now had her own troubles. Because the coal she had taken on at Juneau was unevenly loaded, she listed perilously to starboard. She threatened to capsize as soon as the wind came up. All the passengers took part in trying to right the vessel. It was not until they reached the Lynn Canal that they discovered the lazy crew had left most of the coal in Juneau—they were out of fuel. While the terrified passengers ran about in a driving rain, the Clara V drifted broadside into a three-masted schooner. The apoplectic captain of the schooner pulled out a rifle and bellowed at the Clara V’s captain to come out and meet his doom. Somehow the ships were pried apart. The schooner limped on. And the Clara V—the crew having rigged makeshift sails—lumbered along behind. The passengers took heart—they were almost at their destination.
Though the voyage had been a nightmare, none of them realized how lucky they were to have made it at all. Other ships in the raffish flotilla beating up the coast had run aground, foundered and sunk in fog or simply disappeared without a trace.
When the ship reached Dyea, anchoring well offshore in the dangerous mountain-bound harbor with its twenty-foot tides, Roxanne was appalled at the way they unloaded. Small lighters transported the freight to Dyea’s shallow flats. But the horses were simply lifted on slings and dumped over the side into the water to flounder ashore as best they could. Lumber too was tossed over casually, while the owners figured out how they could maneuver it ashore. Bales of hay were handled in the same manner, bobbing on the incoming tide. Surely the hay would be ruined, Roxanne thought, and the horses, if they made it through the icy water, would starve! Even the small boats that took the passengers ashore could not make it all the way.
Leighton leaped out into two feet of water and gallantly carried Roxanne to shore while Denby splashed along behind.
From the jumble on the soggy gray beach, alive with shouting people and yelping dogs and wet neighing horses, they rescued their baggage and moved on to the tent city of Dyea. There they waited while Leighton bargained with several of the short broad-shouldered Chilkat Indians about helping them to carry their tents and supplies. Roxanne noted with interest the thin sweeping mustaches on the stolid broad faces of the men and the cosmetic blackening on the women’s faces.
Up Trail Street into the winding river gorge they followed their silent packers, camping on the way until they reached Sheep Camp on a plateau at the timber-line, thirteen miles inland. Beautiful and deadly and untamed, wild Alaska lay around them.
From Sheep Camp they could view their immediate objective—Chilkoot. Pass four miles away. To cross it they would scramble and slide over slippery glaciers and rock ledges dangero
us with ice, and Roxanne would need the stout boots she had purchased in Wrangell. The first obstacle to get around was a boulder so large it was called Stone House; following that, passage was through a narrow gorge to a flat ledge called the Scales—and then the ascent, an almost impossible thirty-degree incline up the snowy face, a notch in the rugged and lofty white hills that horses could not negotiate—only men could. Leaning over the pass as if peering down to watch their progress was a three hundred-foot tall glacier, diamond white in the sunlight, a tower of ice held up insecurely by the twin granite peaks that guarded the pass. Its frightening size and insecure suspension fascinated Roxanne, who half expected to see it come tumbling down into the valley, sweeping them all before it. Everything they owned had to be heaved and struggled to the top of this white monster and carried down the other side. Even with help it took several days. Had they carried a ton of supplies apiece, which the Canadian Mounties later required, and no packers, it might have taken forty days to haul it all to the top of the pass.
Later fifteen hundred steps would be hacked in the solid ice and a single file of men, bent double under heavy packs, would lockstep up it in a swearing, sweating line. But right now it was a hodgepodge. They floundered up—and slid down.
At night, wet and ravenous, they stayed in a hastily constructed board hotel at Sheep Camp. Its lone twenty-by forty-foot room was quickly filled in the evening with a wild motley crowd of wet and dirty men who charged in and paid their seventy-five cents in advance to eat beans and tea and bacon in relays. At night everyone unrolled blankets, hung their socks and shoes on the rafters above, rolled up a coat for a pillow and fell asleep exhausted in their clothes. New people arrived daily. On the second day two of the new arrivals were women.
Roxanne was glad to see them. Aside from the proprietor’s wife, who slept with him behind a calico curtain in one corner of the room, Roxanne had been the only woman in the group since they left Dyea.
The women were Mary Jane McManus, a shoe clerk’s wife, who with her husband had sold all they owned and headed for the gold fields. And Marjorie Rawson—“Call me Marge”—a big stalwart blackhaired woman who wrung Roxanne’s hand and declared she’d flung her last half dollar in the surf at Dyea and was here to make her fortune or bust. Talkative Leighton, the only man around who topped Marge in height, stared at this Amazon as if he didn’t believe what he was seeing, and was stunned into silence. Roxanne took to Marge Rawson at once and, while Mary Jane followed her husband around in a wistful way, Marge and Roxanne talked. Marge had a huge load of supplies that would take her many days to haul up the steep pass. Once, as they stopped breathlessly to talk at Stone House,'Marge surprised Roxanne by giving her a keen look and asking, “That marriage of yours for real? Or just livin’ at it?”
“It’s real,” sighed Roxanne, listening to Denby swear in the distance as he floundered after Leighton, who was weighed down with a three hundred-pound pack.
“Hm’m.” Marge considered her. "That one wants you, you know.”
“Who?” asked Roxanne, knowing full well.
“Leighton Clarke, that's who. You gonna take him up—on his offer?”
“He hasn’t made me an offer,” said Roxanne.
“He will,” predicted Marge. “And then,” she added significantly, “you might have to make a choice.”
Roxanne thought, too, that events might come to that, but she hoped to put the dilemma off as long as possible. Regretfully, she bade Marge good-bye at Sheep Camp, just before they made their last climb over the Chilkoot Pass. Struggling over that white escarpment, Roxanne once again looked up with a shudder at the tremendous glacier that hung poised above her, guarding the pass. The day was cloudy, and the glacier’s huge insecure mass, so brilliantly white in the sunlight, was a beautiful mixture of gleaming turquoise and translucent sapphire. Denby floundered on after the packers, but Leighton, pausing beside her, observed that the glacier was the color of her eyes. As he spoke, a deafening report issued from deep within the glacier and they both froze, expecting the huge mass to shatter and hurtle down on them. But the monster remained poised above them and the noise degenerated into a sound somewhat like distant cannon rumbling, as if down deep the very mountains were locked in war.
Galvanized into action, Roxanne and Leighton hurried away from the summit and followed Denby and the packers down ten miles to the shores of beautiful blue Lake Lindeman. There they paid off the packers and pitched camp. Immediately Leighton and Denby began building a rakish boat, whipsawing the shoreline timber at a speed that wore Denby out and made him collapse under his blanket every night while Leighton sat and smiled at Roxanne. They talked of many things across the campfire as they ate their ptarmigan stew and canned milk.
At last, raising a mast and fashioning their tent into a sail, they boarded their craft and moved it out onto Lake Bennett. Crossing the difficult shallows below the lake, they fought to keep from going aground. The swift current of the deep Whitehorse River carried them down to Miles Canyon, where they made camp and consulted the map of sorts they had purchased at Juneau. Ahead lay the notorious Whitehorse Rapids, twisting down a canyon some seventy-five to a hundred feet wide.
Against Denby’s wishes, Leighton decreed that almost all the supplies should be unloaded and backpacked down the grassy path that led to the foot of the nearly mile-long rapids. Roxanne would walk. He and Denby would shoot the rapids alone.
From the bank Roxanne watched as the bucking boat, now minus its sail, whirled out into the wild white water. She could see Denby’s frightened face and Leighton’s laughing one as their craft rushed on. The boat plunged ever faster, sometimes disappearing entirely into the foam that closed over it like long white fangs, sometimes seeming to leap up out of the water, rearing and tossing. Roxanne screamed as she saw them hurtling on a collision course toward a huge boulder that stood in midstream—and almost collapsed with relief when they barely missed it, shooting past it like a bullet and charging on until at last they bobbed through the high-ridged crest to safety.
The skeletons of wrecked boats below the canyon, where they reloaded, bore mute testimony to the danger of the voyage. But the only damage sustained by their party in running the rapids was to Roxanne—she discovered two days later that she had somehow lost her precious spoons.
The floundering over the pass, the trip down from the high lakes, the portage had all taken time, and the fierce northern winter was fast setting in. Past fog-shrouded banks they slid, watching the geese fly south. For fresh food, Leighton brought down a goose or two with his rifle. But even though she was hungry, Roxanne hated to see the beautiful birds drop from the sky. Chunks of ice floated ominously down the Yukon now, and sometimes they heard a thunder that came not from the clouds but from the pounding hooves of the caribou herd as they fled this soon-to-be-icebound land. Once their boat was nearly capsized by a great herd of caribou that plunged into the water near them to swim to the opposite bank.
But it had all taken time—too much time. The flaming colors of September, with fiery birches and gold-orange aspens and purple-red buckbrush, had turned to gray as the Yukon Valley forests lost their leaves and the morning winds lashed hillsides powdered with frost. The days had shortened markedly, and along the river banks ice formed and broke off as the little streams that fed the river froze solid and the water level dropped. The river was filled with floating chunks of ice when at last they reached Dawson.
The landing was full of shocks. They arrived in time to see dozens of discouraged men climbing the gangplank of a small river steamer to depart the town. From the bank a wild-eyed man in a black hat waved his arms at them and howled, “Get out while you can! Go back! There’s no food here. Go downriver to Fort Yukon or you’ll starve!”
Denby was for sticking it out in Dawson. But Leighton, taking a quick walk through the crowded boom-town streets and asking questions in the ramshackle stores, shook his head. The three of them managed to buy tickets on one of the last boats to make it out
of Dawson before the ice closed down the river traffic.
“Does this mean we’re going home?” demanded Roxanne incredulously.
Leighton shook his head. “It means we’ll winter in Fort Yukon.”
Denby brought his fist down in anger on the ship’s rail as he watched Dawson disappear through the ice cakes behind them and they rounded Moosehide Bluff. He looked as if he wanted to cry.
Their trip to Fort Yukon was nightmarish. “Conceived in hell,” one grumpy passenger described it. Gamely, the crowded boat fought her way through floating ice until the ice jammed her rudder. When her captain managed to get her to shore, she was immediately walled in by ice. The passengers eyed each other in alarm, wondering if they’d have to walk to Fort Yukon.
But they had a bit of luck. From the coast a warm chinook wind melted the ice in the channel. For almost twelve hours they made good headway and the passengers drank liquor—always plentiful somehow—and sang boisterous songs. Suddenly their songs were hushed. In the distance came a rising roar—of moving ice bearing down on them.
“The river’s freezing,” said Leighton grimly.
No one went to bed that night. In darkness black is soot, while the water seemed to rise, the current speeded up, hurtling them along. Then, suddenly, the avalanche of ice reached them. Crashing, rending, like some giant beast it roared down upon them. The little steamer was whirled about and trapped in a narrow canyon between walls of ice. White-faced, hanging onto the rail to keep her footing, Roxanne felt the reverberations as blocks of ice smashed against the hull. The noise was appalling. Around Roxanne people were praying. Suddenly the steamer was snatched upward—held in the grip of ice that a moment before had been churning, frothing water. In that short space of time the Yukon River had frozen bank to bank.
These Golden Pleasures Page 28
