Jack London and the Klondike Gold Rush

by Lourie, Peter

  Jack hated to leave John London behind, fearing—correctly—that he might never see him again. John died while Jack was in the Klondike.

  * * *

  THE WIND WAS STRENGTHENING at the summit. Jack felt winter closing in. Flakes of snow stung his face. An icy fog rolled down out of the gray sky with a brutal rain that kept alternating with snow.

  Jack leaned over to pick up another hundred-and-fifty-pound load. He drew the strap around his forehead, adjusted the pack over the center of his spine, and turned toward the lakes, the river, and the gold in the creeks that was waiting for him.

  DOWN TO LINDEMAN

  NEARLY A MONTH into his hike, Jack’s clothes hung on his thin frame like laundry on a stick. He’d had to tighten his belt a few times. Even so, he had become one of the strongest non-native packers over the 33-mile Chilkoot from Dyea to Lake Bennett. Although his partners had had money to hire packers to help them with that last haul to the summit, Jack had grunted his way up and over with his own gear.

  He now walked on the muddy, tea-colored trail under hanging glaciers. In camp at night, he looked into the open sky above the mountains, where the iridescent reds and greens of the northern lights, the aurora borealis, swirled above him. He felt bewitched by so much silent movement of color and light, by the mute but spectacular fireworks in the night sky.

  Today’s hikers along the Chilkoot Trail find objects the Stampeders left behind more than a century ago.

  (Photo: Peter Lourie)

  Boots wore out in days and were cast away.

  (Photo: Peter Lourie)

  The next day, he and his partners passed hundreds of empty tins of canned food, evaporated milk, and beans, as well as broken beer bottles and discarded scraps of metal. He saw bits of new rubber boots already worn out by Stampeders toiling over such rocky ground.

  Big Jim Goodman, Merritt Sloper, Fred Thompson, Tarwater, and Jack finally reached a place called Happy Camp, happy because the Stampeders were on the downhill slope past a series of pristine alpine lakes with names such as Crater Lake, Long Lake, and Deep Lake. Happy, too, because after the barren summit of the pass, the Stampeders were coming again to the tree line, where they would more easily be able to build fires to warm themselves (one Stampeder mentioned it cost him $5 for the wood to build a fire above the tree line: Since $1 then is worth about $28 now, that’s $140 in today’s money).

  The clouds lifted off the glacier above, and the sun blasted down on the men. The frigid lakes mirrored the blue sky and ice-clad peaks. Jack could smell the coffee brewing over hundreds of campfires, and his spirits soared.

  Deep Lake, one of the Alpine lakes just past the summit of the Chilkoot

  (Photo: Peter Lourie)

  In the morning after a night rain, Jack and his partners squeezed the water out of their itchy wool clothes only to put them back on. They passed through increasingly wooded country. “Scarcely could it be called timber, for it was a dwarf rock-spruce that never raised its loftiest branches higher than a foot above the moss, and that twisted and groveled like a pig-vegetable.”

  * * *

  JACK HAD PLENTY OF TIME during the journey to roll over in his mind all he’d accomplished. In twenty-one years, he’d worked more jobs and had traveled and seen more of the world than many experience in a lifetime. But one of his happiest memories was of meeting a librarian who had changed his life when he was only ten years old. In the Oakland Public Library, Ina Coolbrith, a poet and magazine editor, noticed the young lad sitting there for hours until his eyes burned. One day she suggested a few books he might like, and from then on, Ina became Jack’s literary coach, making lists of books that he consumed at two per week.

  Jack’s reading expanded to all kinds of subjects. He found escape and romance in literature, and he was able to roam the world in fiction and nonfiction. He read morning, noon, and night, even though he had chores at home and needed to work long hours at hard jobs. He took out library cards in every family member’s name so he could check out more books. His best friend, Frank Atherton, called him an extremist, because whatever Jack London set out to do, he did it to the limit. When he played games and competed with other kids in school, he had to be a winner. Reading was no different. He was driven to excel. Winning was always Jack London’s goal; he wanted to be the best reader ever.

  * * *

  AT HAPPY CAMP, the sun disappeared quickly. Occasional snow flurries and driving cold rain slowed Jack as he moved all his gear downhill. A man just back from Lake Lindeman told Jack and his partners there were no more trees left and all boat building had stopped. Liars, Jack thought as he quickly loaded three fifty-pound sacks of rice on his back and picked up his pace. From Happy Camp down to Lindeman, it was a man-killing race against winter. Jack later said, “Men broke their hearts and backs and wept beside the trail in sheer exhaustion. But winter never faltered. The fall gales blew.” Snow flurries increased, and the last three miles to the lake took twenty-four miles of hiking, twelve of those under the weight of a full load.

  On September 8, 1897, nearly paralyzed with exhaustion, Jack and his partners piled their outfits on the beach at Lake Lindeman. They made camp among a hundred and fifty tents of all shapes and sizes—army tents, pup tents, saloon tents.

  Lindeman was a small tent city of mad boatbuilders.

  After Tarwater’s hearty meal of bacon and beans, Jack, Goodman, Thompson, Tarwater, and Sloper went to sleep instantly, beaten down but not taken out of the game just yet. The days were shortening fast. The wind shifted into the north and screamed off the lake, nearly ripping their tent from its stakes. Tarwater was jerking around in his bedroll, his legs running in his sleep. Goodman dreamed of hunting bear, and when Jack woke to stumble out into the night and pee, he remembered the typhoon in Japan and smiled.

  Lake Lindeman during the Gold Rush

  (University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections, UW 26992)

  PART TWO

  SEPTEMBER 9–OCTOBER 9, 1897

  DOWN THE YUKON RIVER TO SPLIT-UP ISLAND

  Stampeders build boats, possibly at Lake Bennett or Lake Lindeman, ca. 1898.

  (University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections, UW 22172)

  BUILDING AND LAUNCHING THE BOATS

  JACK WOKE IN the morning to crisp, clean air sweeping off the long, turquoise-colored lake. He looked at the snow-frosted mountains above and smelled Tarwater’s bacon frying. As he drank his coffee, he heard the rasp of many whipsaws cutting logs into crude boards to make boats.

  Along with the metallic pounding of hammers on nails, some men were singing. Tarwater was humming his old tunes. The whole place looked like a crazy boatyard with sixty odd-shaped boats all being worked on at the same time.

  Jack and his partners voted to join forces with three other men to build two boats near a stand of spruce five miles up a partly navigable creek that led into Lake Lindeman. Goodman, Sloper, and Jack began cutting trees while old Tarwater and Thompson finished packing the last of their goods down from Deep Lake. They also made daily ten-mile runs (five up and five back) to get food to the boat builders. At night around the fire, Jack told sea stories from his days sealing in the Bering Sea. Everyone played cards.

  What made them nervous was the oft-repeated stories of a looming famine in Dawson. Jack later described the desperation in his story “Like Argus of Ancient Times”:

  * * *

  The last grub steamboats up from Bering Sea were stalled by low water at the beginning of the Yukon Flats hundreds of miles north of Dawson.… Flour in Dawson was up to two dollars a pound, but no one would sell. Bonanza and Eldorado Kings, with money to burn, were leaving for the Outside because they could buy no grub. Miners’ Committees were confiscating all grub and putting the population on strict rations. A man who held out an ounce of grub was shot like a dog. A score had been so executed already.

  * * *

  Jack and his partners worked faster. But it was hard work sawing lumber with rusty and broken whi
psaws in the cold and rain that would blot out the sun for days.

  The patience of the men, often taken to its limit, could erode suddenly. Sloper blasted Thompson for not making the lines straight as they cut trees into logs, then sawed them into boards. The crude boards for the ships were ten inches wide and an inch thick. More or less.

  Merritt Sloper was the master carpenter and boat builder whose advice everyone tried to follow. Jack drew lines on the top and bottom of a log, then placed it on a tall scaffolding, called a sawpit, to be whipsawed. Making boards the hard way, in what came to be known as a Klondike sawmill, one man would scramble on top and pull his end of the six-foot-long saw upward, so his partner on the bottom could pull down, making the cut; each thought he was doing all the work. The saw continually got jammed and stuck in the green lumber. It was impossible to keep the blade on the drawn line.

  Goodman yelled down to Thompson, “Stop hanging on the saw when I’m trying to pull upward.”

  “I’m NOT,” Thompson fired back at his angry partner, sawdust burning his eyes below.

  Stampeders cut logs by hand at a “Klondike sawmill.”

  (University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections, Hegg 177b)

  They traded places, and the bickering went on day after day, truly hard work. Meanwhile someone called out, “Work together, darn it. Find the rhythm!” Which really angered everyone.

  Whipsawing could easily turn best friends into enemies. Jack wondered if the partnership would hold during this time. But the men worked fast and agreed to beat the onset of winter. First the seams and cracks had to be sealed. For hours, Jack dipped stringy oakum into the boiling, sticky pitch, then forced it into the many seams, working it in carefully.

  A week later, the boat was finished. Three more days went by, and on September 19, everyone struggled to work the boat with lines, down two miles of a swift and swollen river feeding into the lake. Then they all jumped aboard, letting it rip along the torrent with Jack at the stern, Sloper at the bow, and Goodman and Thompson at the oars. Now they were a team again.

  After they went back to fetch the second boat, everyone ate a huge celebration supper, laughing and singing on the shore of Lindeman. Tarwater did a short jig.

  Next day, Jack rigged the boom and the mast on both ships. Goodman and Sloper sewed the sails until midnight. The men agreed to name their two twenty-seven-foot, flat-bottom boats the Belle of the Yukon and the Yukon Belle. They painted the names in large charcoal-black letters on the stern, and also on each side of the bow.

  Stampeders embark at Lake Bennett.

  (University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections, Hegg 229)

  All the other Stampeders stopped building their own boats to help Jack and his crew set out for Dawson. Shouts of good wishes rose into the sky as the boats pushed into the lake. Revolver shots ripped the air.

  On September 21, just under two months after he’d left San Francisco, Jack stood at the stern of one of the boats, sail catching the wind and driving it six miles an hour down the long lake, the mountains ahead white with snow to a thousand feet above the water.

  The Stampeders built all kinds of crazy boats to travel the 550 miles to Dawson.

  (University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections, Hegg 3052)

  The beginning of their 550-mile water journey started with a series of lakes: first Lindeman, then Bennett, Tagish, and Marsh. In what seemed like no time at all, they jumped off the boats at the end of Lake Lindeman to portage their gear around a deadly, one-mile set of rapids separating Lake Lindeman from Lake Bennett. Jack again took charge of lining the boats through some deadly rocks. Now that Sloper had built them, Jack was in charge of the boats. He came to be known as Sailor Jack.

  At Lake Bennett, more boats were being built. Above the beach, dead horses littered the hills. Many of these had come over the second trail from the coast, the White Pass, also called Dead Horse Trail, where so many horses and mules had starved or were shot that some said you could put all the dead animals together and walk the last miles of the trail on their carcasses without touching the earth.

  MORE LAKES

  JACK HATED SLEEP. He’d always hated sleep because it robbed him of living life to the fullest. He rose from his bedroll before everyone else and prepared to leave the island on Lake Bennett where he and the others had camped the night.

  They loaded the boats and shoved off. Both vessels were leaking terribly, the green wood shrinking and opening up the same seams that had been caulked with oakum and pitch. All the gear and supplies that had been placed on slabs of wood above the bottom crossribs to keep everything dry were in danger of getting submerged. The men had to bail water constantly. It was sleepless and exhausting work.

  The previous February, when Jack had been working at a steam laundry for fourteen hours a day, doing the work of two men, he had tried to write on a borrowed typewriter that had only capital letters. He needed five hours’ sleep, he figured. So he set his alarm for six o’clock and counted back five hours, to one A.M. He’d permit himself to read and write until then. But most nights, he was so tired from laundry work, he fell asleep midsentence.

  Jack now applied that same sleepless drive to the long river trip to Dawson. On September 23, a stiff wind took Jack and his two boats humming down Bennett in four-foot waves. The master skipper and all aboard had seen boats capsize when they tried to turn into the wind in their crude, homemade vessels. Those unfortunate Stampeders bailed for their lives as their craft teetered and then swamped. The men swam for shore while their gear went straight to the bottom of the cold, unforgiving lake.

  Jack saw the skyline open into mountain ranges blanketed in vast forests and snowfields high above the water level. His gaze panned upward to where Dall sheep frolicked about the icy crags.

  Camped on shore, in the morning they woke to snow and Tarwater’s strong coffee and wry smile. Big Jim went out to look for moose but had no success.

  MILES CANYON AND WHITEHORSE RAPIDS

  AFTER THE LAST of the four big lakes, Jack’s boat ran swiftly down the narrowing river until the water picked up speed through a hundred-yard-wide channel. He knew the river rounded a bend and then dashed in a loud roar through a box canyon only eighty feet wide. Its rock walls rose from fifty to one hundred feet high on both sides.

  Jack heard the steady thunder long before he spotted the killer rapids of Miles Canyon. Pulling ashore in an eddy just above the white water, he and his partners got out to walk the canyon rim to study the torrent. They saw hundreds of fearful Stampeders taking their outfits out of their boats to drag all their gear around the canyon. Empty boats were then carefully guided down through the torrent with the use of lines. This would take an extra four days to accomplish.

  The river squeezed through rock in a chaos of spume, waves, and wind. In the middle of it all was a spine of water eight feet high. Jack said, “We were in a hurry. Every one was in a hurry.… October was at hand, the land covered with snow, the river threatening to freeze up at any moment, and Dawson still hundreds of miles to the north.” Confident mariner that he was, Jack voted to run the river here, something few Stampeders did. He wanted to drive his boat at twenty-five miles per hour through Miles Canyon in just a few minutes. Either he’d save a few days of hauling gear, or they’d die trying.

  As was the custom whenever a big decision had to be made, they put it to a vote. Sloper said, “Let’s do it!” Goodman, the same. Old Tarwater wasn’t so sure until Thompson smiled and put his thumb up and said, “No time to pull everything around. I’m in!” It was unanimous.

  Thompson and Goodman, untested in boats, took their positions side by side at the oars. Merritt Sloper went to the bow with a paddle; he’d told Jack he’d messed around in boats before.

  Veteran sailor Jack stood in the stern holding the steering oar, called a sweep, which he lashed down so tightly to the boat it’d never give out.

  “Keep on the ridge,” the men cried from the canyon rim as J
ack pushed off. The current instantly whipped them and their five thousand pounds of supplies into a watery storm that spun their skiff like a stick this way and that. On either side, the rock walls dashed by them “like twin lightning express trains.”

  Running Miles Canyon

  (Yukon Archives, Robert Coutts fonds, 78/69, #314)

  Astonished Stampeders stared intently down at Jack’s boat from high atop the canyon wall. Some wore smirks of “don’t say I didn’t warn you” as they watched the Yukon Belle fail to ride the main water ridge because of its immense weight. They watched it nose-dive its way along the trough of that ridge, plunging in and out of the chaotic water.

  At the bow, Sloper paddled like a crazy man. Sometimes when the front of the boat kicked up high, he paddled so furiously he stroked pure air, like a windmill in a gale. The boat plunged through the air like a stone, and Sloper, hardly a hundred pounds, got buried in the crashing spume. But he always stood fast, emerging with his paddle in motion. He yelled some warning to Jack, but the sound of his voice was swallowed by the river thunder.