Klondike

by Pierre Berton

  2

  “Gold – all same like this!”

  For five years after Schieffelin’s departure the Yukon Valley maintained a primaeval silence. Small groups of prospectors continued to dribble over the Chilkoot Pass to test the bars along the headwaters, but the main river was virtually untravelled for eighteen hundred miles. The only boats upon its surface were those of the natives and of the occasional free trader working on a commission for the Alaska Commercial Company, the lineal descendant of the old Russian-American Fur Company.

  Arthur Harper was one of these. Frustrated in his attempts to find his fortune in the shifting sands of the tributary creeks, he had taken to bartering tea and flour for furs. Thus his memory endures in the north, for he was one of a trio of traders who helped to open up the Yukon Valley for the prospectors who followed.

  The two men who joined forces with Harper had arrived the same year that he did, in 1873, but by a different route. They were a Mutt-and-Jeff combination, one a lean, wiry little thong of a man, the other a six-foot giant with a barrel chest. The little man’s name was Al Mayo; he was a one-time circus acrobat driven north by wanderlust, given to practical jokes and blessed with a dry wit. In his later years he used to remark that he had been in the country so long that when he first arrived the Yukon was a small creek and the Chilkoot Pass a hole in the ground.

  The big man’s name was LeRoy Napoleon McQuesten, but everybody called him Jack. His florid features were marked by a flowing blond moustache and his temperament by that same restlessness which was a quality of almost every man who made his way north in the days before the Klondike strike. He had been a farmer in Maine and an Indian-fighter in the west and a gold-hunter on the Fraser, but, just as Harper was a frustrated prospector, McQuesten was a frustrated voyageur. He had wanted so badly to be one of those strange forest creatures that he gave himself a course in physical training so he might perform the incredible feats of strength and endurance for which the voyageurs were noted. Then he had signed on with the Hudson’s Bay Company in the Athabasca country, only to discover, to his chagrin, that he could not sustain the crushing two-hundred-pound loads his French-Canadian companions hoisted so easily on their backs. So he had moved on, drifting across the mountains into the Yukon Valley, where he and Harper and Mayo became partners.

  For more than fifteen years these three were alone with the land, the river their private thoroughfare. They could roam for a thousand miles without seeing another white face, and, indeed, McQuesten once recalled that he went for six years without tasting flour. They took Indian wives, but in no sense did they resemble the “squaw men,” who were looked down upon by their fellows. The traders did not live like Indians; their wives and families lived like whites in handsome homes of square-cut logs, with neat vegetable gardens at the rear. The wives were partners in the true sense, and the dusky children were sent out to be educated in private schools in the United States. Years later, when McQuesten retired, he took his Indian wife to California, where she became the mistress of a big home in Berkeley; and when he died, she managed his estate and became the head of the family.

  The country changed these men. Restless they had been, but over the long decades they developed a serenity of temperament that became the envy of all who encountered them. Frederick Schwatka, a U.S. cavalry officer who was the first man to explore the Yukon River for its full length, came upon McQuesten in 1883 and watched in admiration as the trader bargained for hours with Indians, unruffled through the endless palaver that “would have put Job in a frenzy.” McQuesten and his colleagues never presented a bill for an outfit, and they were seldom short-changed. Once when a cargo of goods arrived and a group of miners became impatient for provisions, Harper told them simply to help themselves, keep their own accounts, and hand them in at their leisure. The only discrepancy was six cans of condensed milk.

  The trio’s first post of Fort Reliance became the focus for future river settlements. Several neighbouring tributaries took their names from the distance that separated them from the post. Thus the Fortymile River and the Twelvemile were named because they joined the Yukon that distance downstream from Fort Reliance, and the Sixty-mile was so called because it was sixty miles upstream from the fort. Later on, the towns established at the mouths of these rivers took the same names. It is curious that this first river settlement should have been established a scant six miles from the mouth of that stream which came to be called Klondike, for, although they hunted and prospected along its valley, none of the partners was destined to grow wealthy on Klondike gold. Nor, on the other hand, did they die in poverty as others were to do. When the madness struck they kept their heads, and when they died it was with the respect of every man who had known them. They were, in the words of an Alaska Commercial Company employee, “typically frontiersmen, absolutely honest, without a semblance of fear of anything, and to a great extent childlike in their implicit faith in human nature, looking on their fellow pioneers as being equally as honest as themselves.” Few who came after them merited that accolade.

  Without these three men and a fourth named Joseph Ladue, who arrived a decade later, the series of events that led to the Klondike discovery would not have been possible. Without the string of posts they set up along the Yukon, the systematic exploration of the river country could not have taken place. They guided the hands of the prospectors, extending almost unlimited credit, sending them off to promising sections of the country, and following up each discovery by laying out a townsite and erecting a general store. Their little steamboat, the New Racket, which they had purchased from Schieffelin, was their lifeline to the outside world. Their arrangement with the great Alaska Commercial Company in San Francisco was a casual one. In the early years they were on its payroll, but remained free to prospect if they wished. Later they operated as independent contractors, buying their goods from the company but trading on their own.

  Sometimes they worked together, as partners; sometimes separately. There were other traders scattered along the river working under similar arrangements with the A.C. Company – but it was Harper, McQuesten, and Mayo, far more than the others, who were responsible for the mining development of the Yukon.

  It is not always realized that a series of smaller gold rushes into the Yukon Valley took place before the Klondike stampede, and that Dawson City was preceded by several mining camps that sprang up along the river in the ten years before the great strike. The gold along the Yukon was placer gold, or “free gold” – gold that had long since been ground into dust and nuggets and so could be mined by any man with a shovel and a pan and a strong back. It is more immediately rewarding than hardrock or vein gold since it requires no large resources of money and machinery to wrest it from the earth.

  By 1886 some two hundred miners had crossed over the Chilkoot Pass and gradually worked their way three hundred miles down the Yukon to the mouth of the Stewart River, on whose sand-bars they panned out, in a single year, one hundred thousand dollars’ worth of fine placer gold. At once McQuesten and his colleagues built a trading post at the Stewart’s mouth, and, sensing that the human flow would increase, McQuesten left for San Francisco to order more supplies from the Alaska Commercial Company.

  That winter Harper persuaded two prospectors to try the waters of the Fortymile River, which joined the Yukon another hundred miles farther downstream. Here they found the gold that had eluded Harper, and it was good coarse gold that rattled in the pan, the kind that every miner seeks. With a fickleness that distinguishes the true gold-seeker, the men along the Stewart deserted their diggings and flocked to the new strike. Harper, in a panic, saw what was coming: as soon as the news leaked back up the river and across the mountain barricade to the outside world, men by the hundreds would tumble over the peaks and pour down to the new diggings on the crest of the spring torrents. But there was not food enough in the land to supply this horde; he must get word out to McQuesten to increase his order or there would be starvation along the Yukon.


  Harper felt like a man in a sound-proof prison. To all intents, the interior of the northwest was sealed off from the world by winter. The nearest point of civilization was John Healy’s trading post on Dyea Inlet on the far side of the Chilkoot. In between lay an untravelled wilderness which few men had negotiated in winter. Who would carry Harper’s message?

  The volunteer was no hardened musher but a steamboat man named Tom Williams, who, with an Indian companion, set off on a terrifying journey. On the two men plunged for five hundred miles, over the hummocks of river ice and the corpses of fallen trees, through the cold jungles of the Yukon forests and up the slippery flanks of the mountains. By the time they reached the Chilkoot their rations had petered out and their dogs were dead of cold, hunger, and fatigue. At the summit of the pass a blizzard was raging, and travel became impossible. They clawed a cave out of the snow and crouched in it, their faces, fingers, and feet blackened by frostbite, their only sustenance a few mouthfuls of dry flour. When this ran out, the Indian hoisted the exhausted Williams onto his back and stumbled down the slope of the pass until he could carry him no farther. Then he dropped him into the snow and staggered on until he reached Sheep Camp, a long-time halting-point on the edge of the tree line. It was March, 1887, by this time, and a group of prospectors, camped in the lee of the mountains waiting for the storm to abate, watched in astonishment as the figure of the Indian loomed out of the swirling snow. They followed him back up the mountainside and helped bring Williams down and revive him with hot soup. The Indian borrowed a sled and dragged his companion twenty-six miles down the trail to Dyea Inlet. Here the two finally reached the shelter of the trading post run by a one-time Montana sheriff named John J. Healy. Williams lived two days, and the men who crowded around his deathbed had only one question: Why had he made the trip?

  The Indian’s answer electrified them. He reached into a sack of beans on Healy’s counter and flung a handful on the floor.

  “Gold,” he said. “All same like this!”

  3

  The hermits of Fortymile

  Along the high bank at the point where the Fortymile River joins the Yukon, a weird and lonely village straggled into being as a result of Tom Williams’s dying message. It was named Fortymile after the river, and its remoteness from the world can scarcely be comprehended today, for it existed eight months out of twelve as if in a vacuum, its residents sealed off from the world. The nearest outfitting port was San Francisco, almost five thousand water miles distant, and the only links with the sea were two cockleshell stern-wheelers, the New Racket and the Alaska Commercial Company’s Arctic, built in 1889. These boats seldom had time to make more than one summer trip upstream from the old Russian seaport of St. Michael, near the river’s mouth on the Bering Sea. On her maiden voyage the Arctic was damaged and unable to bring supplies to Fortymile. The A.C. Company sent Indian runners sixteen hundred miles to the settlement to warn the miners that no supplies would be forthcoming, and that they must escape from the Yukon Valley or starve. As the October snows drifted down from the dark skies, the Fortymilers pressed aboard the New Racket, and the little vessel made a brave attempt to reach St. Michael before the river froze. She was caught in the ice floes one hundred and ninety miles short of her goal, and the starving passengers had to continue the journey on foot. Those who remained at the community of Fortymile spent a hungry winter: indeed, one man lived for nine months on a steady diet of flapjacks.

  The only winter route to the outside world was the gruelling trek upstream to the Chilkoot, more than six hundred miles distant. After Williams’s death it was seldom attempted. Four men who tried it in 1893 were forced to abandon fifteen thousand dollars in gold dust on the mountain slopes and were so badly crippled by the elements that one died and another was incapacitated for life.

  Who were these men who had chosen to wall themselves off from the madding crowd in a village of logs deep in the sub-Arctic wilderness? On the face of it, they were men chasing the will-o’-the-wisp of fortune – chasing it with an intensity and a singleness of purpose that had brought them to the ends of the earth. But the evidence suggests the opposite. They seemed more like men pursued than men pursuing, and if they sought anything, it was the right to be left alone.

  Father William Judge, a Jesuit missionary in Alaska, described them as “men running away from civilization as it advanced westward – until now they have no farther to go and so have to stop.” One of them, he discovered, had been born in the United States, but had never seen a railway: he had kept moving ahead of the rails until he reached the banks of the Yukon. They were Civil War veterans and Indian-fighters, remittance men from England and prospectors from the Far West. Many of them had known each other before in the Black Hills, or the Coeur d’Alene country of Idaho, or in the camps of Colorado. They were nomads all, stirred by an uncontrollable wanderlust, which seized them at the slightest whisper of a new strike, however preposterous. They were men whose natures craved the widest possible freedom of action; yet each was disciplined by a code of comradeship whose unwritten rules were strict as any law.

  They were all individuals, as their nicknames (far commoner than formal names) indicated: Salt Water Jack, Big Dick, Squaw Cameron, Jimmy the Pirate, Buckskin Miller, Pete the Pig. Eccentricities of character were the rule rather than the exception. There was one, known as the Old Maiden, who carried fifty pounds of ancient newspapers about with him wherever he went, for, he said, “they’re handy to refer to when you get into an argument.” There was another called Cannibal Ike because of his habit of hacking off great slabs of moose meat with his knife and stuffing them into his mouth raw. One cabin had walls as thin as matchwood because its owner kept chopping away at the logs to feed his fire; he said he did it to let in the light. Another contained three partners and a tame moose which was treated as a house pet. Out in the river lay Liar’s Island, where a group of exiles whiled away the long winters telling tales of great ingenuity and implausibility.

  Fortymile, in short, was a community of hermits whose one common bond was their mutual isolation.

  “I feel so long dead and buried that I cannot think a short visit home, as if from the grave, would be of much use,” wrote William Bompas, a Church of England bishop who found himself in Fortymile. A Cambridge graduate who could read his Bible in Greek, Hebrew, and Syriac, he was the fourth son of that same London advocate on whom Dickens had modelled his “Serjeant Buzfuz” in Pickwick Papers. His predecessor had been driven to literal madness by the practical jokes of the miners, but Bompas was far too tough for that – a giant of a man with a high dome, a hawk nose, piercing eyes, and the flowing beard of a Moses. He baked his own bread, eschewed all dainties, drank his sugarless coffee from an iron cup, ate from a tin plate with a knife his only utensil, slept in the corner of a boat or a hole in the snow or on the floor of a log hut, and allowed himself no holidays. His only furniture was a box which he used for a seat; he had torn down shelves, cupboard, and table to make a coffin for a dead Indian because lumber was so scarce. And he thought nothing of making a present of his trousers to a pantless native and mushing home in his red flannels.

  For almost half a century he lived in isolation, and he was resigned to it. When his wife joined him at Fortymile in 1892, they had not seen each other for five years. She was the daughter of a fashionable London doctor, and had been brought up in Italy. On those dark winter afternoons when she was not on the trail with her husband, she sat quietly in the mission hall with its cotton-drill walls, reading her Dante in the original or – if the keys were not frozen stiff – playing her little harmonium.

  This ecclesiastical existence was no more primitive than that of the miners at Fortymile. Each man lived with his partner in a murky, airless cabin whose windowpanes were made from untanned deer-hide, white cotton canvas, or a row of empty pickle jars chinked with moss. Cutlery was fashioned from pieces of tin, furniture constructed from the stumps of trees. Four men often lived year in and year out in a space about eig
hteen feet square. Above the red-hot sheet-iron stove there always hung a tin full of fermented dough, used in place of yeast to make bread, biscuits, and flapjacks rise. This was the origin of the name “sourdough” which was applied to the pioneers of the Yukon to distinguish them from the tenderfeet or cheechakos, as the Indians called them.

  Men moved from their fetid cabins by night into murky, constricted mine shafts by day. Mining in the sub-Arctic is unique because the permanently frozen ground must be thawed before the bed-rock can be reached; it is this bed-rock, ten, twenty, and even fifty feet below the surface, that contains the gold. At first the miners let the sun do the work. This was a long, laborious process: a few inches of thawed earth were scraped away each day, and an entire summer might pass by before the goal was attained. Soon, however, wood fires replaced the sun. The gold-seekers lit them by night, removed the ashes and the thawed earth in the morning, then lit a new fire, burning their way slowly down to form a shaft whose sides remained frozen as hard as granite. This method allowed miners to work all winter, choking and wheezing in their smoky dungeons far below the snow-covered surface of the ground as they tunnelled this way and that seeking the “pay streak” which marked an erstwhile creek channel. The paydirt thus obtained was hoisted up the shaft and piled in a mound, known as a “dump.” In the spring, when the ice broke on the creeks and water gushed down the hillsides, the miners built long spillways or sluiceboxes to counterfeit the ancient action of nature. The gravel was shovelled into these boxes and, as the water rushed through, was swept away. But the heavier gold was caught in the crossbars and in the matting on the bottom, as it had once been caught in the crevices of the streambeds. Every two or three days the water was diverted from the sluicebox as each miner panned the residue at the bottom in what came to be known as a “clean-up.” The various stages in this process had been arrived at by trial and error over the years, since the days of ’49 in California; in the Yukon Valley they reached their greatest refinement.