Gold Fever

by Rich Mole

  In truth, Soapy Smith didn’t yet know if his final destination was Skagway, Wrangell, Juneau or perhaps that new town near the gold fields, Dawson City. Smith would take a methodical approach and visit them all. He knew what he was looking for, and he would recognize it the instant he saw it. Arranging passage up wouldn’t be too difficult. His “associates” would get steamer tickets for them one way or another.

  * * *

  Gold fever spread north across the border. Patrons in Vancouver’s bars were soon singing up a storm:

  Klondike! Klondike!

  Label your luggage for Klondike

  For there ain’t no luck in the town today,

  There ain’t no work down Moodyville way,

  Pack up your traps and be off, I say,

  Off and away to the Klondike.

  Oh, they scratches the earth and it tumbles out

  More than your hands can hold;

  For the hill above and plains beneath

  Are cracking and busting with gold.

  Within days of the arrival of the treasure ships, so many Vancouver deckhands came down with gold fever that loading boats for scheduled trips to Vancouver Island was a challenge. For the Canadian Pacific Navigation Company (CPN) and Union Steamship Company, however, a labour shortage was a small price to pay for a sudden end to the lingering waterfront depression. Three days after the Portland docked in Seattle, Vancouver’s vanguard contingent of prospectors was sailing out of Burrard Inlet on CPN’s Alki. Two days later, the Union’s Capilano set sail for Dyea Inlet, loaded with horses, cattle and drivers. Crowded passengers slept on hastily hammered berths and deck bunks.

  When the fever hit Victoria, CPN’s twin-funnelled Islander was so overbooked with frantic Americans unable to find passage at US ports that the smaller Tees was pressed into service. Victoria hadn’t seen anything like this since the wild days of the Cariboo Gold Rush. Outside the customs building, the line of Yukon-bound Americans straggled far down Wharf Street.

  Eastern journals were quick to report gold’s arrival and the public’s reaction to it. SEATTLE HAS GONE STARK, STARING MAD ON GOLD wrote the New York Herald. COAST AGAIN GOLD CRAZY reported journalist Tappan Adney. Reporters found the simple, evocative word “gold” no longer adequate. Enticing tales were written about “hard, solid” gold, “rich, yellow” gold and “shining” gold, further firing the imaginations of susceptible readers. In North America, gold’s lustre had surpassed its legendary lure years before.

  Gold’s scarcity in the United States had become a national concern, as population growth outpaced production. Many began to horde the yellow metal in drawers and under mattresses, unwittingly worsening their economic fates. As railroads went under and mortgage companies and banks went broke, folks began stashing coins and paper money as well. Klondike gold represented an incredible once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Many had little to lose by taking a chance. To finance the dream, tens of thousands began to open drawers and lift mattresses.

  The world needed to know everything it could about the Klondike. Toward the end of summer, journalist Tappan Adney received a telegram from England’s Harper’s Weekly and the London Chronicle, asking him to get to the Yukon. Two thousand New Yorkers were planning to do the same thing. Journalism had its privileges, and two days later, at the Canadian Pacific Railway’s (CPR) New York office, the reporter managed to buy a New York to Dyea Inlet ticket, including steamer passage from Victoria. Every place he went, Adney talked with Klondike hopefuls. In Chicago, he interviewed John J. Healy’s financier, Portus B. Weare.

  “I’m afraid there’s going to be trouble in the Klondike country soon,” Weare prophesied, telling the surprised journalist that both the NAT&T and Alaska Commercial Company had been working hard to get sufficient supplies into the Yukon before winter. Time, distance and the huge influx of men were working against them, he lamented. The company couldn’t possibly feed everyone. He painted a gruesome picture.

  “I greatly fear that a vast and uncontrollable multitude will rush up to Juneau all through September and October and invade the country in a mad quest for gold,” he told Adney. “There will be thousands without proper food and equipment, and they will plunge into the midst of the snow and terrors of an Arctic winter … there can be but one sequel.” Healy’s financier urged everyone to carry over enough provisions to feed themselves.

  Tappan Adney planned to join those climbing the White Pass. In Winnipeg, where he stopped over to purchase supplies, he was stunned to learn that there were no fur coats left anywhere, and many other cold-weather necessities had already been snapped up.

  “All aboard for Minneapolis, Seattle and Klondike!” the Chicago depot master called out. Reporter Edmond Hazard Wells stepped up onto the Great Northern on the first leg of his journey to the Yukon. Wells was on assignment for a newspaper syndicate that included the Cincinnati Post. E.H. Wells was the ideal man for the job. He had been to the Yukon before. In 1890, as a member of an expedition sponsored by Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Magazine, Wells had been among the first white men granted the privilege of climbing the Tlingit’s closely guarded Chilkat trading route. He and others had floated down the Yukon River and had seen prospectors at work on Fortymile’s creeks. Now he wrote his colourful dispatches with particular zeal. For some, gold fever was a chronic illness. Wells had been a “carrier” for years. Now, his fever had broken out again.

  CHAPTER

  8

  Journey into Hell

  North-West Mounted Police superintendent Charles Constantine’s vision of thousands of possibly lawless men overrunning the Yukon was becoming a reality. It would be months before Constantine, George Carmack, Skookum Jim and some of the other early claim holders witnessed the full calamity. However, two other men, an old visionary and his son, experienced a frightening preview of what was to take place later on the Yukon River.

  Skagway, Alaska

  July 1897

  William Moore had toiled 10 years to wrest a 65-hectare townsite out of the tangle of coastal forest in Skagway. Now it was done. The site was staked out, the sawmill was up and running, roads—complete with bridges—ran in and out of the forest, and much of the first wharf was complete, as well as two neat log houses to house the work crews who were building it. Moore’s entire life had seemed a prelude to this moment, a moment he had dreamed, schemed and fought for.

  Two years before, in Victoria, he had met with the representative of a British syndicate to argue that his pass—the White Pass, not the Chilkoot Pass—was the right route for a wagon road or railway. It had been a passionate, persuasive performance. Moore had been rewarded with men and money and in return had granted the syndicate prime interest in his wharf and property. It was a paltry price to pay for the opportunity to realize his vision of creating his own town and Yukon roadway. Now, Moore and his son waited eagerly to greet the people who would make them rich.

  Moore watched the steamship float silently up the inlet. The first sound that reached his ears was the ship’s whistle, echoing off the forested slopes that surrounded the bay. The second sound that reached his ears was the frightening cacophony of frenzied human beings. There were hundreds of them—screaming, shouting and cursing.

  Moore stood rooted to the spot in disbelief. Who was in charge? Who should he meet? His questions went unanswered. Before Moore knew it, men with axes were cutting down his trees, and men with tents were pulling out his stakes! Crazed horses raced pell-mell across the beach and up the wooded riverbank, handlers in hot pursuit. In dismay, William Moore realized there was no one in charge, no one with whom to discuss purchases, leases or rights.

  “Trespassers,” Moore screamed, but the puzzled, frantic strangers simply shoved him aside. And still they came. In the days that followed, ship after ship delivered the gold-hungry hordes. Soon, the rasp of saws and the blows of hammers were added to the waterfront din. Rude buildings were thrust up on either side of a muddy trail. Somewhere, above the cries, shouts, pleas and laughter,
the sound of a piano floated.

  A meeting was held to “set up the town.” A committee was struck and a plan of blocks and lots proposed. Nobody consulted William Moore. Instead, a bartender, Frank H. Reid, was appointed surveyor, perhaps for no other reason than he already possessed the instruments, traded in by some would-be miner for a good time at the bar. Reid decided to call himself city engineer.

  Reid met with the Moores, not to ask for advice, but to suggest that they stake out a few acres for themselves before they were completely overwhelmed. Upon completing his surprisingly competent survey, Reid realized they had a problem. The wharf bunkhouse, which Moore and his wife used as a home, occupied land destined to be a downtown intersection.

  The committee’s crewmen reported that when they approached the bunkhouse with their equipment, the old man had gone into a rage. He had been there long before they had, the apoplectic Moore screamed. While his weeping wife watched, Moore yelled that he had no intention of moving for anybody. The committee gave Moore 24 hours to vacate the bunkhouse. Moore slammed the door in their faces.

  Two days later, a mob armed with saws and sledgehammers approached the home. Snatching up a steel bar, Moore jerked open the door and charged the crowd, swinging as he went. A man stepped forward and brought his axe down on the front door. Moore whirled around and brought his bar down on the man’s arm. The man yelped in pain, and the mob fled. Captain William Moore had won the battle, but he had already lost the war. The Moores were soon lodged in a makeshift hotel, and his bunkhouse was moved near the waterfront to house the syndicate’s crew. Work on the wharf continued. As even Moore realized, there were bigger things at stake than one’s personal property.

  White Pass, Alaska

  August 1897

  In the middle of the Skagway chaos, journalist Tappan Adney rarely stopped taking notes, and he never stopped asking questions. A California mining engineer surveyed the chaotic Skagway waterfront. “I have never seen people act as they do here,” he admitted to Adney. “They have lost their heads and their senses. They have no more idea of what they are going to do than that horse has,” he said. Adney concurred. He’d brought a train of eight packhorses himself and watched in disbelief as other men who’d never handled horses tried to tie on packsaddles. The “diamond hitch” was the knot required to keep the packs tied securely for hours of jostling over rough terrain. Adney was a practised packer and knew the knot well, but few others had heard of it, and no one seemed to know how to throw it. Worse still, many of the horses were nothing more than “ambulating boneyards, the infirm and decrepit” with “dropping heads, listless tails,” he reported.

  Adney had encountered this kind of ignorance days before on the Victoria wharf. One gentleman was leading a pack of dogs—Irish setters—and had taken along a lawn-tennis set. He was off to Alaska, “just for a jolly good time, you know.”

  A fit and agile outdoorsman, Adney was keen to hear more about the White Pass he was about to climb. He was curious that so many were already coming back down.

  “The road is good for four or five miles—it’s a regular cinch,” recounted one disillusioned, defeated stampeder. “After that, all hell begins.”

  The problem, said another, was “the inexperience of those who are trying to get over. They come from desks and counters; they have never packed, and they are not even accustomed to hard labour.”

  Tappan Adney’s fellow journalist, Edmond Hazard Wells, concluded that the would-be prospectors would literally die of ignorance. “Thousands of corpses will lie on the mountainsides and in the valleys,” the Cincinnati Post reporter predicted. However, Wells soon discovered lack of know-how was not the only reason for agony on the White Pass trail. In fact the trail did not exist.

  Wells was no stranger to the Yukon. He had explored the region in 1890 and was among the first white men to climb the Tlingit’s closely guarded Chilkat Route over the mountains. His past experience paled in comparison to this new one. Initially swept away by the drama he was witnessing, Wells provided his readers with positive, exciting stories of “800 men at work bridging chasms” and “gulches . . . resounding to the ring of a thousand axes.”

  Just two days later, after labouring with a tiny sweat-streaked gang of fewer than 200 men, a disillusioned Wells wrote, “The gold hunger grew so keen that after a few corduroy bridges had been thrown across marshes and streams, the attempt was abandoned and a general helter-skelter ensued.” It was, the reporter confessed, “every man for himself.”

  A few miles up, Adney was already “ankle deep in sloppy, slimy chocolate-covered mud.” Lack of planning and coordinated effort, and most of all, lack of time, would have horrific consequences. Adney was there to witness the first of them.

  On a rocky slope, an empty packsaddle hinted at an accident. Adney and climbers needed no one to tell them what had happened: a horse had rolled down off the trail and fallen hundreds of feet below. A few minutes later, they came upon three dead horses, “two of them half-buried in the black quagmire.” The stench was unbearable. Abandoned by uncaring owners, scores of spent, crippled and bloodied animals stood motionless, waiting for death to end their agony.

  Adney talked to one man who claimed to have seen a horse deliberately walk over the face of Porcupine Hill. “It looked to me, sir, like suicide,” the man stated matter-of-factly. “I believe a horse will commit suicide, and this is enough to make it.” He shook his head and gave Adney a haunted look. “I don’t know, but I’d rather commit suicide, too, than be driven by some of the men on this trail.”

  Slow-burning, wet wood fires sent dense clouds of smoke and the pungent smell of roasting horseflesh wafting down the trail. After two days, knowing it would only get much worse, Tappan Adney joined a legion of others forced to turn back to Skagway. His goods were waiting at Dyea Inlet with his companions.

  As Adney neared Chilkoot’s infamous Scales (formerly the site of large scales used by Native packers), he had a visitor at his tent, “a wreched, thin white cayuse . . . thin as snakes and starving to death.” The horse had made its way down from the pass when abandoned by its owner. The horse put as much of its body into the tent as it could, just to get out of the rain and feel the warmth of the stove.

  The next day, the horse was still there. Adney pulled out his .44 revolver, walked slowly up to the animal and mercifully put a bullet behind its ear. Before long, the carcasses of horses lay all about.

  Hazard Wells struggled up White Pass, now jammed with goods, horses and “men with haggard faces, unkempt hair and disordered attire . . . plodding along, groaning under the weight of 38 kilogram packs. Perspiration . . . bursting from every pore and their breaths coming hard and fast.”

  On August 15, Wells and “about one dozen men” had reached the summit and staggered on to Lake Bennett. Wells calculated they had left nearly 2,500 others slipping and stumbling behind them and estimated that a mere two dozen would make it. Hundreds were abandoning supplies and retreating back down to the coast. Exhausted and traumatized, Wells wrote, “I wish now, without loss of time, to send back word of warning to everybody. Keep away from Skagway and White Pass.”

  The agony and anguish on the trails continued long after Adney, Wells and others had reached the summit. To urge his exhausted oxen forward, one maddened prospector built a fire under the animals, slowly roasting them alive.

  “Clear the trail! Man dying!” was the cry of those desperate to try and save the life of an ill or injured friend. Still, hundreds would scarcely glance at the dead bodies of gold-seekers. During that hellish winter of 1897 to 1898, more than 2,000 animals and an uncountable number of men perished on the trails and in the Yukon’s frigid waters.

  Yukon River

  October 1897

  For the previous two or three years, ice had locked in the Klondike River by mid-October. By October 12, Tappan Adney and his party were entering Lake Marsh in their newly built boats. They were still hundreds of kilometres from their Dawson City destination. The j
ournalist realized it was now a race against time.

  Caught in the turbulent waters of the dreaded Miles Canyon, Adney’s Dyea Inlet companion, “the imperturbable” Al Brown, earned the journalist’s respect and admiration for his navigation skills. The two men raced breathlessly between the canyon’s perpendicular basalt walls. White Horse Rapids loomed ahead. As they manoeuvred through the rapids, water drenched the two, filling their boat. Then “a big side-wave [took] the little craft, [spinning] her like a top.” Suddenly, the two found themselves floating in a quiet eddy. Later that night, as they dried out at a sandy cove, Adney asked Brown if he had been scared.

  “Why, no,” Brown replied thoughtfully. “You said it was all right. I suppose you know,” he shrugged. “It’s your boat and your outfit.” Adney couldn’t have asked for a better partner. “I believe,” Adney wrote, “that if a charge of dynamite were to explode under Brown, he would not wink an eyelash.”

  A few nights later found them nearing the halfway point on the river journey to Dawson, at Fort Selkirk. The manager gave the men a less than enthusiastic welcome. “So many are coming in unprepared, either without outfits or common sense,” he complained that night, over a rare bottle of scotch. “They ask me what the price of flour is in Dawson. I tell them it has no price. People on the outside talk as if the steamers on this river run on a schedule,” he scoffed. “There would be winter shortages,” the manager warned. He looked hard at Adney and jerked his head in the direction of the nearby cabin where his companion was sleeping. “Has the young man with you a sufficient outfit?”

  “No,” Adney admitted, shaking his head, adding somewhat defensively, “But he’s strong. He’s willing to take the risk of finding something to do and buying grub.”