by Rich Mole
“Very foolish thing for him to do,” replied the manager, staring into his half-empty glass. “Many people are short and more may have to leave before spring.” He looked back up at Adney, and his eyes narrowed. “Time was when it would go hard with a man who was responsible for bringing in a person like that.”
The man was a crank, Adney thought later. But then, “every man becomes a crank who stays long in this country,” he concluded.
The next morning, fog delayed their departure. Standing around the trading post’s big stove, Adney and Brown fondled the skins and furs. The manager wanted them to take some moosehide with them to Dawson. Moosehide was in great demand for moccasins, he explained. After setting some aside, he hesitated and then shoved them back in the pile. “No,” he said. “I won’t send them with you. I don’t think you’ll reach Dawson.”
* * *
Adney and Brown were on the river again, watching ice chunks flow past, some as big as wagon wheels. Again and again, they were forced to pound the ice off the oars. Mitts froze stiff; moustaches became a mass of icicles. No matter how hard they worked, they could not keep warm. That night at camp, after a hasty dinner of flapjacks, beans and hot tea, they drifted off to sleep to the ominous sound of ice moving downstream in the dark.
Their eyes snapped open at a sudden, long roar from the bank. The men dashed over to the water’s edge. A 12-metre-long ice floe was tugging menacingly at the boat. The desperate men yanked their supplies to safety and shoved the empty boat beyond the reach of the river’s ice.
Shoulders heaving from the effort, his head clouded in vapour, Adney watched Brown stumble back toward the fire. He turned and looked back at the boat, its graceful contours barely discernible in the gloom. That little wooden boat was the only thing that stood between them and certain death. Adney looked up toward the clear heavens and watched the northern lights’ pale green patterns dance across the sky. The country was beautiful. He peered over in the direction of the groaning ice. It was beautiful, all right, beautiful but deadly.
Lying on the cold, hard ground, Adney reached for his notebook. “We have abandoned all hope of reaching Dawson,” he wrote. He looked into the fire and bent again to his book. “There are hundreds on the river this night feeling as we do.”
The next morning, the river was filled with grating, grinding ice floes. Drifting through the mist, surrounded by bleak, grey-black mountains, their tall spruce whitened by frost, the men in their little boat were, Adney wrote, “a picture of loneliness.” They spied two men struggling along on the ice near the shore. “There is no grub at Dawson,” one cried. “If you haven’t an outfit, for God’s sake turn right back where you are!”
Two days later, as Adney and Brown moved down the swiftly flowing river, they came upon a group that had just pulled their boats onto shore. One man in the group shouted a warning: just below, the ice had jammed the mouth of the White River. Adney knew there was just one thing the two of them could do, and they had to be quick. They steered their craft as close to the shore ice as they could, planning to drop into the safety of a quiet eddy. With a start, they realized that they were trapped in the swiftly moving ice floes. They watched helplessly as the calm eddy receded into the distance. The ice began to grind menacingly against the prow of the boat.
Suddenly, a large chunk of ice crashed into the bow. Gasping with horror, the two men expected to hear the frightening sound of splintering timbers any second. They tensed for the desperate jump onto the bobbing ice. Instead, the impact of the ice floe gently tilted the boat up and the large chunk of ice rotated harmlessly away.
Moving along, Adney and Brown stopped to talk to others who had hauled their boats ashore. For some, bound for the tributaries of the Stewart River, their Yukon River journey was over. Some had stopped out of fear, still others were halted by disquieting news of food shortages and thievery in Dawson. It was getting so bad that two men had been shot for breaking into caches. In time, the two travellers witnessed for themselves just how tense the situation in Dawson had become. It was snowing when Adney and Brown rowed out into the river the next day. Ice soon covered their oars, gunwales, boxes and bags.
Days later, just two kilometres from their overnight camp, the two men saw a large number of boats, tents and people on the bank ahead.
“How far is it to Dawson?” Tappan called out.
A man on the shore turned and cupped his hand to his mouth. “This is Dawson! If you don’t look out, you will be carried past!”
Eight days after Tappan Adney, Al Brown and others arrived, the Yukon River was frozen solid.
CHAPTER
9
Starvation City
The prediction of food shortages had indeed come to pass. By autumn, the area’s population had tripled to close to 5,000 souls. There was simply no way that the less-than-reliable riverboat system could provide the food needed for the sudden influx of hopeful and hungry prospectors. With winter on the doorstep, starvation loomed.
Dawson City, Yukon
Fall 1897
Charles Constantine was a frustrated, weary policeman. Since George Carmack’s gold discovery, the newly promoted superintendent had been beset with one trial after another. For one, Bishop Bompas had attempted to persuade the overworked detachment to protect the local Native peoples from those who shot their dogs and sold them whisky. Constantine’s common-sense advice to them had been simple: tie up your dogs and don’t drink. His recommendations had not gone over well.
Bompas had moved the Han village away from Dawson City construction, only to have them move over to property set aside for the new police post, Fort Herchmer. Constantine suspected that the “arrogant Bishop” was behind their actions. Constantine wouldn’t stand for that kind of coercion. The Native peoples were finally relocated five kilometres downstream.
Erecting Dawson City’s new post had been made even more difficult by the fact that Joe Ladue’s sawmill had not yet become operational. All logs had to be hand-hewn. Still, three buildings could be floated upriver from his headquarters at Fort Constantine.
Dawson City itself had evolved from an untidy hamlet of a few hundred souls to a centre of approximately 2,000 citizens—not all of them law-abiding. Constantine had concluded that no one—and no one’s property— was safe. Thieves had even broken into the gold commissioner’s office, located in the middle of the police compound. There were so many thieves and misfits, Constantine figured he could have filled cells at both Dawson and Cudahy. That is, if he had the men to round them all up and enough food to feed them.
Dawson was no longer the only Klondike settlement. One female entrepreneur, Belinda Mulrooney, had defied all the naysayers and built a two-storey log hotel about 20 kilometres from town, near where the Bonanza and Eldorado Creeks met. Others soon understood what she had instinctively known: exhausted miners wanted their goods and services close at hand. Soon other buildings lined Eldorado Creek, and by early fall the new town had taken the hotel’s name for its own. The creation of Grand Forks stretched already thin police resources.
Word had come that the new commissioner of the Yukon was travelling north to take charge of all police. Members of a labour-saving administration team that included a supreme court judge, mining inspectors and a land agent were on their way. The Klondike’s transformation from rude gold camps to a civilized northern centre appeared to be at hand. Fortunately, the commissioner was a well-known former policeman with a sterling track record: Major James M. Walsh. Unfortunately, winter arrived before he and the others did. Walsh got the farthest, but he was forced to stop upriver at the Big Salmon police post. A gold commissioner had been at work there since the summer, but the inept man inspired so many complaints that he was more a hindrance than a help. So, as before, most of the work overseeing justice and administration in a rapidly growing area continued to fall to Charles Constantine and a mere 40 policemen.
To be sure, there were more police in the North now. A detachment in the US town of Skagw
ay, where Mounties wore civilian clothes to maintain a low profile, kept supply and information lines open. Posts had been built at Lake Bennett, Tagish Lake and White Horse Rapids. Still, men in these far-flung outposts were of little strategic value to Constantine in Dawson.
In October, Constantine had been delighted to welcome an additional inspector and 20 extra reinforcements—until he realized they had arrived without supplies to feed themselves or anyone else. By this time, fear of food shortages was almost palpable. Both Jack McQuesten and John J. Healy had built stores and large iron-fronted warehouses, but Constantine was not misled. He wrote to the superiors with the warning that “many deaths . . . will result from starvation and privation during the coming winter.”
The first hint of trouble came in September. A steamer had not been seen for weeks. The Alaska Commercial Company’s assistant superintendent, Captain J.E. Hansen, headed downriver to discover why. He discovered three boats marooned by low water levels about 560 kilometres north of Dawson, near Fort Yukon. When he arrived back at Dawson City, 4,000 people were waiting. When the hoped-for steamer turned out to be Hansen’s lone canoe, the tense crowd grew ugly. Captain Hansen announced fearfully, “Men of Dawson! There will be no riverboats here until spring.” He advised people to leave town immediately for Fort Yukon, where, he said, the provisions they needed were available. “There is no time to lose,” he exhorted. Women and men screamed their outrage. Panic spread.
Men flooded into Dawson City from Bonanza and Eldorado Creeks. Supplies had to be brought upriver from Fort Yukon. Partners drew straws to see who would be forced to go and who would stay. Fifty boatloads of men left for Fort Yukon. When they arrived at their destination, shocked prospectors learned that gold had very little influence with store clerks, who doled out meagre quantities and carefully locked the door as each customer entered.
Meanwhile, in Dawson City, John J. Healy pleaded for calm and patience, convinced that boats would arrive. To fill the void, he began distributing two-week allotments of supplies from a rough platform on muddy Front Street.
Dawson City, Yukon
Winter 1897
As yellow leaves fell from the poplars, there was talk of storming the Alaska Commercial Company and NAT&T warehouses. The commanding officer, Sergeant-Major Davis, offered to place policemen at the warehouses to safeguard supplies. Hansen accepted the offer. Healy refused. A show of force might only incite violence, and violence, Healy knew, could mean the loss of NAT&T property and inventory. Moreover, Healy thought, the issue wasn’t food shortages, it was food distribution. Healy perceived that this so-called crisis contained a hidden opportunity.
Healy’s warehouse contained plenty of everything except flour—the miners’ staple. However, Captain Hansen’s company warehouse held plenty of flour. Here was a chance to rectify that problem. Healy approached his competitor, eager to make a deal. “If you will let me have flour, I can let you have bacon, sugar, everything else,” he suggested to Hansen. “I have one-year orders from $500 to $10,000. You have the same. My proposition is this: fill every man’s order as nearly as possible, but,” and Healy felt this was critical, “cut them down from twelve to eight months.” By then, river traffic would resume. Some might go hungry in the meantime, Healy admitted, but no one would starve.
Hansen thought it over briefly and then said, “I must fill my orders.” Healy left in disgust.
When the Portus B. Weare stopped at Circle City, desperate men who had watched boat after boat float by the riverside hamlet met the captain and crew with drawn guns. This boat wouldn’t move again, they had decided, until they had what they needed. Money was no problem. They had the money. What they wanted were supplies. They off-loaded 27 tons of supplies at gunpoint and then cheerfully paid for everything they had taken off. The Bella was similarly hijacked. She left for Dawson City 23 tons lighter.
A few days later, the sound of a boat whistle floated across Dawson City. Throngs came running to see the tall structure of the Portus B. Weare silhouetted against the slate-coloured sky. John J. Healy shouldered his way aboard. Breathlessly, he asked the NAT&T president and Portus Weare’s brother-in-law, Eli Gage, to confirm his cargo. Gage reported the ship was carrying every bottle of whisky and case of hardware they could float across the flats. Healy’s mouth flew open in disbelief. He had given orders to load only food and clothing! Enraged, Healy lunged forward and wrapped his hands around Gage’s throat until one of the ship’s men pried them loose.
At the end of the month, when the half-empty Bella reached Dawson City, Inspector Charles Constantine was aboard. Reports reaching him at Fortymile had convinced him that a firm hand was needed upriver. After quick consultations, Constantine posted a bluntly worded public notice, urging those without food for the winter to get out. The notice made the alternative frighteningly clear: “Starvation stares everyone in the face who is hoping and waiting for outside relief.”
John J. Healy was nonplussed; leaving the warmth and safety of Dawson City as winter approached was crazy. When miners organized a meeting to discuss the evacuation, Healy refused to attend, sending down a representative instead. There was plenty of food, he argued. The more he pleaded for reason, the more the animosity toward him grew.
Three hundred people departed. Many paid $50 for passage out on the Portus B. Weare. The next day, 160 left on the Bella as guests of the NWMP, paying nothing at all for the privilege and receiving a week’s food in the bargain. Ironically, both sailings proved to be profitable opportunities for Healy. Business was business, and Healy didn’t care whether fares and food were paid by prospectors or the police. A small armada of private boats and scows quickly followed down the river. It seemed that Superintendent Constantine had solved Dawson City’s problem. On the river, problems for evacuees were just beginning.
After ice hemmed the ships in at Circle City, a sudden chinook cleared the water. Dozens of boats set out for the 136-kilometre trip to Fort Yukon. Twelve hours later, the temperature plunged, and the ice was back. Trapped, splintered boats littered the frozen river. Several hundred destitute, starving men staggered along for three days in sub-zero temperatures. At Fort Yukon, contrary to assurances, the hungry wanderers were told there simply wasn’t enough food to go around. Anarchy reigned; the warehouse was ransacked and thousands in gold was stolen.
Downriver at Circle City, some people had already decided to return to Dawson City. In temperatures as low as –50°C, thousands stumbled toward the Klondike. Bent and ravaged, they climbed over and around gigantic hummocks of ice, littering the frozen surface with abandoned sleds and packs and shivering through the nights inside small tents.
Day after day, hundreds of misguided, suffering wretches stumbled on, desperately cold and hungry, toward Dawson City—the very place they had been persuaded to leave months before. Many feared they would die in the howling darkness long before seeing the warm glow of the lamps and lanterns of civilization.
All winter long, in twos and threes, the hundreds of destitute travellers shuffled off the snow-covered ice of the frozen waterway, climbed the riverbank and plodded numbly down Front Street, begging for food and shelter. The worst, they surely felt, was now over; they were safe, at last. It was not to be.
For some of these tortured individuals, and many others who’d never even left starvation city that cruel winter of 1897, the pain and suffering were far from over. Prostrate prospectors lay moaning feverishly on their cabin bunks and inside the city’s overcrowded log hospital, unconscious from exposure. For some, death came as a relief, taking some of them with pneumonia, coughing and gasping their last breath. Others, groaning in pain, pried loosened teeth out of their mouths before they succumbed to the ravages of scurvy.
CHAPTER
10
The Law and the Lawless
Reports of the enormous gold finds a few months before and the instantaneous frenzy that resulted stunned people in Ottawa, as it did in every other sizable city in Canada and the United States. Howe
ver, in Canada’s capital the sudden activity was not limited merely to the brave few who left to strike it rich.
Federal government officials who had speculated leisurely on the effect of a potential gold rush were now galvanized into action. Their particular mission was safeguarding the sovereignty of this remote corner of the nation from the sudden onslaught of foreigners, which—according to NWMP superintendent Charles Constantine—included the most lawless element of American society. The government dispatched more North-West Mounted Police. In the fall of 1897, it appointed a former Mountie hero, James Morrow Walsh, first commissioner of the Yukon and NWMP superintendent, to replace worn-out Charles Constantine. Ottawa sent the legendary Walsh north with a “court party” that included a judge, a crown prosecutor and other court officials.
A Tarnished Legend
Upon hearing that Walsh was on his way to maintain order in the Klondike, many concluded he was just the man for the job. They recalled the Mountie’s dashing exploits on the Canadian prairies, over a quarter of a century before, when Walsh’s no-nonsense approach to the arrival of the Sioux had earned him the nickname “Sitting Bull’s Boss.” Alas, now 54 years old, Walsh was no longer the man they remembered.
Even as the party laboured along the trail to Dawson City, some were having doubts. “He used to be tough,” Assistant Commissioner J.H. McIllree wrote, “but he is not as young as he used to be.” Nevertheless, Major J.M. Walsh was now the “Klondike’s Boss.” Ironically, the very first person to rue that fact was none other than a fellow NWMP officer.
On the White Pass, the raw reality of the gold rush appears to have made an impact on “spit-and-polish” Walsh. “The inhumanity which this trail has been witness to, the heartbreak and suffering which so many have undergone, cannot be imagined. They certainly cannot be described,” he reported.
