Klondike

by Pierre Berton

  “We’ll let you have it, same as we did before.”

  “But, damn it, Jack, I haven’t had a spree yet.”

  “Well, go and have your little spree; come back with what’s left and we’ll credit you with it and go on as before.”

  The miner had his spree; it took everything he had. McQuesten without a word gave him a five-hundred-dollar outfit and carried a debt of twelve hundred dollars against him on the books.

  Such sprees were the high points of Circle’s social life. There was something almost ceremonial about them. A man on a spree moved from saloon to saloon, swinging a club as a weapon, threatening the bartenders, pouring the liquor himself, treating the house to cigars and hootch, then driving everybody ahead of him to the next saloon, where the performance was repeated. When a spree reached its height, the miners would line up on two sides of the saloon and throw cordwood at each other from the pile that stood beside the stove. Then someone would jump onto the water barrel to make a speech, upset it, and finally roll the stove itself, often red hot, around the floor. When the spree was over, the man who began it would hand his poke of gold dust to the saloon-keeper and ask him to take the damages out of it. A spree could last for several days, and one such bill for damages came to twenty-nine hundred dollars.

  For Circle was subject only to the law of the miners’ meeting. In its first year it had no jail, no court house, no lawyers, and no sheriff, yet there was neither lock nor key in the community. It had no post office and no mail service, and a letter might take from two months to a year to reach its destination, arriving crumpled and odorous, impregnated with tar and bacon. It had no taxes and no banks except the saloons, where men kept their money; and the smallest coin in use was a silver dollar. It had no priest, doctor, church, or school, but it had the squaw men with Oxford degrees who could recite Greek poetry when they were drunk. It had no thermometers to measure the chilling cold, save for the bottles of quicksilver, whiskey, kerosene, and Perry Davis Painkiller which Jack McQuesten set outside his store and which froze in ascending order.

  It was a community divorced from the customs of civilized society. A man might easily rise and eat breakfast at ten in the evening, since the summers were perpetually light and the winters perpetually dark. On cold days, when even the Painkiller froze in the bottles, it became a ghostly and silent settlement, the smoke rising in vertical pillars to form an encompassing shroud that seemed to deaden all sound save for the incessant howling of the ubiquitous sled dogs – the wolf-like huskies and the heavy-shouldered malemutes. These ravenous but indispensable creatures dominated the town. They were always hungry, and they gobbled everything in sight – leather gloves and harnesses, gun straps and snowshoes, pots of paste, miners’ boots and brushes, and even powdered resin, which was devoured as swiftly as it was sprinkled on the dance-hall floors. One man watched a dog eat a dish-rag whole for the sake of the grease in it; another stood helpless while a dog rushed into a tent and swallowed a lighted candle, flame and all. To prevent the dogs from eating their precious cakes of soap, the Indians hung them from the branches of trees. Circle’s skyline was marked by the silhouettes of log caches built on stilts to keep supplies away from the dogs, whose teeth could tear open a can of salmon as easily as if it were a paper package. There were those, indeed, who swore the dogs could tell a tin of marmalade from one of bully beef by a glance at the label.

  Men crowded into Circle City ostensibly to look for gold, but they also came because they were the kind who wished to be left alone. Where else could a man attempt to cut his throat in plain view without anyone interfering? But here one did just that; his name was Johnson, and he made a bad job of it because he was drunk. The onlookers, seeing that he was obviously failing in his plan, patched him up and then told him courteously that he might try again if he wished. (He rejected the idea, grew a villainous black beard to hide his scars, and revelled ever after in the nickname of Cut-throat Johnson.)

  Only when a man’s freedom of action encroached upon that of his neighbour did the miners’ meeting take hold. When a saloon-keeper seduced a half-breed girl, a meeting decreed that he must either marry her or spend a year in jail, even though there was no jail in town. The miners were quite prepared to build one on the spot, but were spared this labour by the accused, who chose a shotgun wedding.

  Theft was a more heinous crime, and when one man stole from a cache his comrades sentenced him to hang. This was commuted to banishment when no one could be found to stretch the rope. The culprit was ordered to live by himself twelve miles out of town until the annual steamboat arrived. The miners gravely took up a collection, bought him a tent, stove, and provisions, bade him good-bye, and never saw or spoke to him again.

  The U.S. government obviously considered these meetings lawful, for the verdict of one of them was sent to Washington and confirmed. This was a murder case involving a bartender named Jim Chronister and the same Jim Washburn whose shooting affray in Fortymile had so disturbed Bishop Bompas. After killing Washburn in self-defence, Chronister offered himself on trial to a miners’ meeting and was acquitted in just twenty minutes.

  It was out of these meetings that the Miners’ Association, and later the Yukon Order of Pioneers, was formed, a fraternal organization whose emblem was the Golden Rule and whose motto was “Do unto others as you would be done by.” It sounds like a curiously saccharine slogan for a group of hard-bitten prospectors, but it was born of experience by men who had learned, over many years, the necessity of dependence upon one another. Each member pledged himself to help every other member should the need arise and always to spread the news of a fresh gold-discovery far and wide.

  In the end, Circle City, more than four thousand miles by water from civilization, was not immune to the inevitable corrosion of mining-camp civilization. By 1896 it had a music hall, two theatres, eight dance halls, and twenty-eight saloons. It was known as “the Paris of Alaska,” where money was so free that day-labourers were paid five times as much as they were “Outside,” as the Alaskans called the rest of the civilized world.

  In the big new double-decker Grand Opera House, George Snow, half miner, half entrepreneur, who had once starred with Edwin Booth in California, produced Shakespearean plays and vaudeville turns. Snow’s children appeared on the stage and picked up nuggets thrown to them by miners hungry for entertainment. One troupe of vaudevilleans, sealed in for the winter with only a limited repertoire, was forced to enact the same routines nightly for seven months until the audience howled as loudly as the malemutes who bayed to the cold moon.

  Circle City grew richer. Into the bars roared the miners, flinging down handfuls of nuggets for drinks and dancing out the change at a dollar a dance. They danced with their hats on, clumping about the floors in their high-top boots; and they danced from midnight until dawn while the violins scraped and the sled dogs howled on.

  Circle City grew bigger. A thick porridge of chips and sawdust from newly erected buildings mixed with the mud of the rutted streets. By 1896 it had twelve hundred citizens. John Healy’s N.A.T. Company opened up a store in opposition to Jack McQuesten of the A.C. Company. The Episcopal Church bought land for a hospital. The Chicago Daily Record sent a foreign correspondent into the settlement, which now boasted that it was “the largest log town in the world.”

  Circle City accepted culture. Up from the University of Chicago came Miss Anna Fulcomer to open a government school. The miners established a library which contained the complete works of Huxley, Darwin, Carlyle, Macaulay, Ruskin, and Irving. It filed the standard illustrated papers and supplied its members with chess sets, a morocco-bound quarto Bible, an Encyclopaedia Britannica, and an International Dictionary.

  Circle City had its greatest year in 1896. The gold-production that season had exceeded one million dollars, and lots were selling for two thousand dollars apiece. Who would have believed that before the winter was out the Paris of Alaska would be a ghost town, the saloons closed and barred, the caches empty and left t
o rot, the doors of the worthless cabins hanging open to the winds, and scarcely a dog left to howl in the silent streets?

  But, as the winter of ’96-’97 wore on, strange rumours began to filter down from the upper-river country about an almost unbelievable event on a little stream whose name nobody could properly pronounce. At Christmastime these rumours were confirmed, and Circle City was never the same again. The first act in the drama of the Klondike was already under way.

  Chapter Two

  1

  The prospector and the squaw man

  2

  The exculpation of Lying George

  3

  Moose pastures

  4

  The kings of Eldorado

  5

  Henderson’s luck

  1

  The prospector and the squaw man

  The man in the poling-boat slipped silently down the river, moving swiftly with the stiff current of the grey Yukon, keeping close to the shoreline, where martins darted from the high clay banks and the willows arched low into the water. Beneath him the waters hissed and boiled, as if stirred by some inner fire. Above him thrush and yellow warbler fluttered and carolled. And all around him the blue hills rolled on towards the rim of the world to melt into the haze of the horizon. Between each twin line of hills was a valley, and in the bottom of each valley a little creek gurgled its way down to the river. Below the wet mosses of some of those creeks, the man in the poling-boat knew, there was gold. But in this summer of 1894 he had no more stomach for it. For twenty-three years he had been climbing the hills of the world and trudging down the valleys, picking away at quartz and panning the black sand of a thousand creekbeds. Always the gold had eluded him.

  He was a lighthouse-keeper’s son from Big Island off the tattered coast of Nova Scotia, and he could scarcely remember the time when he had not thought of gold. As a child he had read Alaskan histories and wandered about Nova Scotia searching for gold but finding only white iron. “Well,” he would console himself, “It’s a kind of gold.” As a youth of fourteen he made the deliberate decision to spend his life seeking it. He believed that the southern hemisphere held out the best hope, and so he signed aboard a sailing-ship to search the seven seas, panning and picking to no avail in New Zealand and Australia and other corners of the globe. After five years he tried the northern hemisphere, working his way up through the Rocky Mountain states to the mines of Colorado, and then, after fourteen years, he was borne north with the human tide flowing towards Alaska. It was characteristic of his nature that, while other men rushed to familiar ground on the Fortymile or on Birch Creek, he had chosen to press his search in unknown country on the upper reaches of the Pelly. But he found no gold on the Pelly; and now, out of funds and out of grub, with two equally disconsolate companions he was drifting.

  His name was Robert Henderson. He was tall and lean, with a gaunt hawk’s face, fiercely knit brows, and piercing eyes. His full moustache, drooping slightly at the edges, accentuated the dour look that betrayed his Scottish ancestry. He wore his broad-brimmed miner’s hat proudly, as if it were a kind of badge. All his life he wore it, on city streets and wilderness pathways; it proclaimed to the world that Robbie Henderson was a prospector.

  Henderson and his companions had drifted for about one hundred miles when they reached the mouth of the Sixtymile River, whose tributaries curled back towards the headwaters of the Fortymile. Here, on an island, they espied a pinprick of civilization – a few cabins and tents, a sawmill and a big two-storey trading post of square-cut logs operated by the white-bearded Papa Harper and his partner, Joseph Ladue. This little community had been named Ogilvie after William Ogilvie, the Canadian who surveyed the boundary between Alaska and the British Northwest Territories.

  Harper was away, but Ladue – a swarthy, stocky figure of French Huguenot background, and a veteran of the river since 1882 – was on the bank to greet Henderson. From delta to headwaters, for two thousand miles, he was known to Indian and white man alike simply as “Joe.”

  He too had been obsessed with the idea of gold for most of his life. It had a very real meaning for him, because without it he could not marry his sweetheart, Anna Mason, whose wealthy parents continued to spurn him as a penniless drifter. She was waiting faithfully for him three thousand miles away while he sought his fortune here in a starkly furnished log post on the banks of the Yukon.

  For twenty years Ladue had pressed the search, ever since heading west from his foster-parents’ home in Plattsburgh, New York. In the Black Hills country he took a job operating a steam engine in a mine. He knew nothing about engines, but he could learn, and within eighteen months he was a foreman. He knew nothing about mining either, but he could study at night, and within a few more months he was superintendent. But Ladue did not want to mine other men’s gold, and he was off with the herd at the whisper of a new strike – from Wyoming to New Mexico, from New Mexico to Arizona, from Arizona to Alaska. He was one of the first to scale the Chilkoot, and in the next half-dozen years he dipped his pan into scores of gravelly creeks from the Stewart to Nuklayaket, including one gurgling stream whose name would later become world-renowned as “Bonanza.” But for Ladue there was no bonanza. When prospecting failed, he tried farming. When the frost ruined his cabbages and his barley, he set up as a trader. When trading was slow, he built a sawmill and sold sluicebox lumber. He did not daunt easily, for he was a confirmed optimist, wiry, keen-eyed, and cheerful to the point of enthusiasm.

  Now he expended some of this enthusiasm on the dour, dogged Henderson and his two companions. It pleased Ladue to see prospectors arriving, for, with his promoter’s mind, he foresaw that sooner or later one would find what all were seeking, and then each would be rich. If there had been a chamber of commerce in the Yukon, Ladue would have been president, for he was a born booster. The slightest trace of a colour in a pan prompted him to talk in glowing terms of a new Eldorado. He was the first in a long line of northern outfitters who realized that a gold strike often brought more fortune to merchant than to miner – but he was by no means the last. Within a few years there would be a thousand Ladues exploiting the wealth of the Yukon Valley.

  Ladue’s post lay roughly one hundred miles upstream from Fortymile. Between the two settlements, two other rivers flowed into the Yukon from the opposite side: the Indian River, about thirty miles downstream from Ladue, and then the Thron-diuck River, another thirty miles farther down. Ladue had explored the Thron-diuck in the old days, and had gone so far as to make out an affidavit swearing that there was no gold on its streams. In spite of this, he now professed to believe that the neighbouring Indian River country was ankle-deep in nuggets, and had been extolling its possibilities to every prospector who stopped at his post. Indeed, he had so annoyed the prospectors at Fortymile with his stories of the Indian River that they had all but driven him from camp. As it turned out, Ladue was right about the Indian (and wrong about the Thron-diuck), but he would have been astonished to hear it.

  The ragged men, in their thick gum boots and fraying mackinaws, were welcomed into the trader’s spartan quarters, whose grimy walls were ornamented with yellowing woodcuts torn from old newspapers. They sat down at a rickety table, and over beans and tea Ladue talked of the Indian River.

  Henderson was ready to try anything.

  “Let me prospect for you,” he said. “If it’s good for me, it’s good for you. I’m a determined man. I won’t starve.”

  His two companions were less enthusiastic. They chose to quit the north and return to Colorado. But Henderson stayed on, lured by Ladue’s promise of a grubstake, and for the next two years he stubbornly combed the Indian and its tributaries for gold. He searched with that same inquisitive restlessness that had governed his life, shifting from hill to creekbed to island but never settling for long at any given spot. He found gold, but never enough to satisfy him. On the surface bars of the main river he found gold as fine as sifted flour. On Australia Creek he found gold as delicate as lace. He
dragged his sled up Quartz Creek, and here he found gold as coarse as sand. It still was not what he was seeking. It is possible, indeed, that had he found a cache of twenty-dollar goldpieces or a mountain of solid gold, he would have felt a vague chagrin, for with Henderson it was the search itself that counted.

  Ill-fortune and misadventure served only to stiffen his resolve. He suffered the agonies of leg cramps from constant immersion in the chilling streams, and of snow-blindness from the ceaseless glare on the white slopes. On Australia Creek he endured a harrowing experience when, falling across the broken branch of a tree, he was impaled through the calf and suspended over the rushing torrent like a slab of beef on a butcher’s hook. For fourteen days he lay crippled in his bivouac; then he was away again, living off the land, eating caribou or ptarmigan, limping through the forests or travelling the shallow streams in a crude boat made from the skins of animals.

  Occasionally he would raise his eyes northward to examine a curious rounded mountain whose summit rose above the other hills. The creeks of Indian River flowed down the flanks of this dome, and Henderson guessed that on the other side more nameless creeks flowed into another river – probably the Thron-diuck or “Klondike,” as the miners mispronounced it. At last his prospector’s curiosity got the better of him. He climbed the dome to see what was on the other side.

  When he reached the summit a sight of breath-taking majesty met his gaze. To the north a long line of glistening snow-capped peaks marched off like soldiers to vanish beyond the lip of the horizon. In every other direction the violet hills rolled on as far as the eye could see, hill upon hill, valley upon valley, gulch upon gulch – and each hill of almost identical height with its neighbour, so that the whole effect through half-closed eyes was of a great plateau creased and gouged and furrowed by centuries of running water.

  From the summit on which Henderson was standing, the creeks radiated out like the spokes of a wheel, with himself at the hub. three falling off towards the Indian River and three more, on the far side, running to some unknown stream. He could not know it, but these were six of the richest gold-bearing creeks in the world. They wound through beds of black muck and thick moss, bordered by rank grasses from which the occasional moose lifted its dripping snout; they twisted in sinuous curves across flat valley floors whose flanks, notched by steep gulches, rose in tiers marking the concourse of once mighty tributaries.