Klondike

by Pierre Berton

  This done, and with no further thought to Robert Henderson, waiting for news on the far side of the hills, the three set off through the swamps, to emerge five hours later on the Klondike again, their bodies prickling with thorns.

  They had moved only a short distance downriver when they came upon four beaten and discouraged men wading knee-deep in the mud along the shoreline and towing a loaded boat behind them. These were Nova Scotians who had come to the Yukon Valley by way of California and had since tramped all over the territory without success. They were starving when they reached the Klondike looking for salmon, but here they had heard of Henderson’s strike, and now, in the intense August heat, their hunger forgotten, they were dragging their outfit upstream, searching once again for gold.

  The leader, Dave McKay, asked Carmack if he had heard of Henderson’s strike.

  “I left there three days ago,” Carmack said, holding his boat steady with a pike pole.

  “What do you think of it?”

  Carmack gave a slow, sly grin. “I don’t like to be a knocker, but I don’t think much of it.”

  The faces of the four men fell: all were now at the end of their tether.

  “You wouldn’t advise us to go up there?” Dan McGillivery, one of the partners, asked.

  “No,” said Carmack, still grinning, “because I’ve got something better for you.” With that, he pulled out his nugget-filled cartridge case, like a conjurer plucking a rabbit from a hat.

  As the Nova Scotians’ eyes goggled, Carmack gave them directions to his claim. Without further ado, the four men scrambled upriver, the tow-line on their boat as taut as a violin string. This chance meeting with Carmack made fortunes for all of them.

  “I felt as if I had just dealt myself a royal flush in the game of life, and the whole world was a jackpot,” Carmack later remarked, when recalling the incident.

  He reached the salmon camp at the Klondike’s mouth, and here he hailed two more discouraged men – Alphonse Lapierre of Quebec and his partner, another French Canadian. These two had been eleven years in the north, and now, en route downriver to Fortymile, almost starving, out of flour and bacon, their faces blistering in the sun, they had reached the nadir of their careers.

  “If I were you boys, I wouldn’t go any further,” Carmack told them as they beached their boat. “Haven’t you heard of the new strike?”

  “Oh, yes, we know all about heem. I tink hees wan beeg bluff.”

  “How’s this for bluff?” Carmack shouted, producing the gold. Again the effect was electric. The two men unloaded their boat, filled their packs, and fairly ran across the flat, gesticulating with both hands and chattering in a mixture of French and English. The abandoned boat would have floated off with the current if Carmack had not secured it.

  As Carmack made preparations to set off for Fortymile to record his claim, he continued to tell anyone he encountered about the gold on Rabbit Creek. He made a special trip across the river to tell an old friend, then sent Jim back to guard the claims and drifted off with Tagish Charley down the Yukon, still spreading the news. He told everybody, including a man who on hearing the tale called him the biggest liar this side of hell.

  Only one man Carmack did not tell. He sent not a whisper back to Robert Henderson.

  Late in the afternoon he landed at the mining camp and went straight to Bill McPhee’s saloon. It was crowded with men, for autumn was approaching and many had come in from their claims to secure their winter outfits before snowfall – a ragged, tattered group living almost from day to day in a settlement that had become a poor man’s camp.

  Carmack was no drinking man, but on this occasion he felt the need for two whiskeys, and it was not until he had swallowed these that he was ready to break the news. After more than a decade his moment had come, and he savoured it. He turned his back to the bar and raised his hand.

  “Boys, I’ve got some good news to tell you. There’s a big strike up the river.”

  “Strike, hell!” somebody shouted. “That ain’t no news. That’s just a scheme of Ladue and Harper to start a stampede up the river.”

  “That’s where you’re off, you big rabbit-eating malemute!” Carmack cried. “Neither Ladue nor Harper knows anything about this.” He pulled out his cartridge full of gold and poured it on the “blower,” upon which gold was weighed. “How does that look to you, eh?”

  “Is that some Miller Creek gold that Ladue gave you?” someone asked sardonically.

  A wave of suspicion swept the room. Nobody believed that Lying George, the squaw man, had made a strike. Nevertheless, they crowded to the bar and examined the gold curiously. A seasoned prospector could tell from which creek a given amount of gold came simply by looking at it, and this gold was undeniably foreign. It did not come from Miller Creek, nor from Davis, nor from Glacier; it did not come from the bars of the Stewart or the Indian. In texture, shape, and colour it was different from any gold that had been seen before in the Yukon Valley.

  The men in Bill McPhee’s saloon looked uneasily about them. All of them had been on stampedes before, and almost all of those stampedes had led them up false trails. And yet …

  One by one, on one excuse or another, they started to slip away. Bewildered, some went to see William Ogilvie, the Canadian government surveyor, to ask his opinion, and Ogilvie pointed out that Carmack must have found the gold somewhere. That was enough. Silently, in the twilight hours of the August night, one after another, the boats slid off. By morning Fortymile was a dead mining camp, empty of boats and empty of men. Even the drunks had been dragged from the saloons by their friends and tied down, protesting, in the boats that were heading for the Klondike.

  Carmack and Charley crossed the mouth of the Fortymile and went into the police post to record their claims. The recorder took one look at Lying George and laughed at him. Once again Carmack produced his shell full of gold dust. The recorder stopped laughing. From that moment on, few men laughed or called him Lying George again.

  3

  Moose pastures

  Up and down the Yukon Valley the news spread like a great stage-whisper. It moved as swiftly as the breeze in the birches, and more mysteriously. Men squatting by nameless creeks heard the tale, dropped their pans, and headed for the Klondike. Men seated by dying campfires heard it and started up in the night, shrugging off sleep to make tracks for the new strike. Men poling up the Yukon towards the mountains or drifting down the Yukon towards the wilderness heard it and did an abrupt about-face in the direction of the salmon stream whose name no one could pronounce properly. Some did not hear the news at all, but, drifting past the Klondike’s mouth, saw the boats and the tents and the gesticulating figures, felt the hair rise on their napes, and then, still uncomprehending, still unbelieving, joined the clamouring throng pushing up through the weeds and muck of Rabbit Creek.

  Joe Ladue already was on the scene. His quick merchant’s mind had swiftly grasped the essence of the situation. Others were scrambling to stake claims, but Ladue was more interested in staking out a townsite on the swamp below the tapering mountain at the Klondike’s mouth. It was worth all the gold of Bonanza; within two years, lots sold for as much as five thousand dollars a front foot on the main street.

  Ladue headed for Fortymile to register his site, but on the way he met a man who wanted timber to build a house. Ladue’s agile imagination saw a thousand houses rising on the swampland. Back in his tracks he turned, sending his application down to the police by runner. At Ogilvie he loaded his raft with all the available dressed lumber, then floated his sawmill to the new townsite. Soon he had a rough warehouse built, and a little cabin for himself which did duty as a saloon. It was the first building in the new mining camp, which Ladue had already named Dawson City after George M. Dawson, a government geologist.

  By this time Rabbit Creek had a new name. A miners’ meeting hastily convened on a hillside had given it the more romantic title of “Bonanza.” Carmack’s strike was scarcely five days old, but already
the valley was a scene of frenzied confusion. Men were ramming their stakes in anywhere, jumping their neighbours’ claims, arguing and scrambling for ground, and convening mass meetings which, in spite of their grass-roots democracy, served only to produce more anarchy. It took six months to straighten out the tangle.

  At the Klondike’s mouth the boats piled up on the beach, day and night, arriving as if by magic from the silent forests of the Upper Yukon Valley. Many of those who tumbled from them and floundered up the river acted like madmen in their desire to stake, and this was strange, for there were few who really believed that any gold lay in the region of the Klondike. They staked from force of habit, as they had staked so often before, and once this ritual was completed, often enough they forgot about it, or failed to record their ground, or sold it for a trifle. A Klondike claim was considered virtually worthless. If a man had enough food he stayed on, but many returned hungrily to Fortymile thinking they had found nothing.

  And some did not bother to stake at all. Two men arrived at the mouth of the Klondike from the Indian River country and debated about going up. “I wouldn’t go across the river on that old Siwash’s word,” said one, recalling Carmack’s reputation, and on they went to Fortymile and oblivion without further ceremony. Another party argued for three hours at the river mouth, agreed in the end not to stake, and pushed off for Circle City.

  Uly Gaisford, a barber from Tacoma, passed by the Klondike, still sick at heart over the infidelities of his wife, which had driven him to Alaska, and stunned by the boat wreck on the Pelly River that had cost him everything but the clothes on his back. He staked on Bonanza, but thought so little of the claim or of his own personal prospects that he went on to Circle City to take up barbering. To his later astonishment, his property produced for him fifty thousand dollars within a year.

  Another trudged up Bonanza as far as Twenty Above, then shrugged his shoulders. “I’ll leave it to the Swedes,” he said, using the classic term of derision, for Scandinavians were alleged to work ground that no other man would touch. A companion drove his stakes into the neighbouring Twenty-One, then decided not to record. He wrote a wry comment on the stakes: “This moose pasture reserved for Swedes and Cheechakos.” Along came Louis B. Rhodes of Fortymile, put his own name on the stakes, and wondered why he had bothered. For two bits, he told his friends, he’d cut it off again. Nobody had two bits, and so Rhodes stayed on and thanked his stars he had. By spring he was worth more than sixty thousand dollars and had staked all his cronies to mining properties.

  It was the old-timers who were sceptical of Bonanza. The valley was too wide, they said, and the willows did not lean the proper way, and the water did not taste right. It was too far upriver. It was on the wrong side of the Yukon. It was moose pasture. Only the cheechakos were too green to realize that it could not contain gold, and this naïveté made some of them rich.

  The men who staked were men who saw the Klondike as a last chance, men in poor luck, sick and discouraged, with nothing better to do than follow the siren call of a new stampede. Many of these sold their claims in the first week, believing them worthless, and many more tried vainly to sell, so that in that first winter two thirds of the richest properties in the Klondike watershed could have been purchased for a song. Most men were too poor to work their claims; they went back to Dawson or Fortymile to try to get work to raise funds. Others, infected by the excitement of the moment, simply wandered back and forth aimlessly up and down the valley.

  Carmack himself could not start work at once. He was forced to cut logs for Ladue’s mill to earn enough to feed himself, and even then was so short of funds that he could build only three lengths of sluicebox; as he had no wheelbarrow, he carried the gravel in a box on his back for one hundred feet to the stream to wash out the gold. In spite of this awkward arrangement, he cleaned up fourteen hundred dollars from surface prospects in less than a month. But even in the face of this evidence there were only a few men who believed religiously that there was actually gold in the valleys of the Klondike.

  4

  The kings of Eldorado

  By the end of August all of Bonanza Creek had been staked, and new prospectors, arriving daily, were fanning out across the Klondike watershed looking for more ground. None realized it, but the richest treasure of all still lay undiscovered.

  Down Bonanza, in search of unstaked ground, trudged a young Austrian immigrant named Antone Stander. For nine years, ever since he had landed in New York City from his home province of Unterkrien, Stander had been seeking his fortune in the remote corners of the continent, working as a cowboy, as a sheep-herder, as a farmer, as a coal-miner, and now as a prospector. When he arrived in the New World, unable to speak a word of English, he had just one dollar and seventy-five cents to his name, and after mastering the language and walking over most of North America on foot he was no richer. All his funds had been spent on the trip north in the spring of 1896. Now, on this last day of August, he was embarking on a final gamble.

  He was a handsome man, just twenty-nine years old, with dark, curly hair and sensitive, romantic-looking features. As he reached the south fork of Bonanza Creek, a few hundred feet above Carmack’s claim, he stopped to examine it curiously. Later Stander would look back upon this as the climactic moment of his life, for after this day nothing was ever again the same for him. The narrow wooded ravine, with a trickle of water snaking along its bottom, still had no name. The prospectors referred to it in Yukon parlance as “Bonanza’s pup.” It was soon to be known as Eldorado.

  Stander arrived at the fork with four companions, all of whom had already staked on Bonanza. They had little faith in their property, but on an impulse they walked up the pup in a group and sank their pans into the sand. Like Stander, each had reached the end of the line financially. One, Jay Whipple, was an old prospector who had come down from the Sixtymile country. Another, Frank Keller, had been a railway brakeman in California. A third, J. J. Clements of New York, had almost starved to death the previous winter. The fourth, Frank Phiscator, a Michigan farm boy, had worked his way west, carrying the mail on horseback in order to earn enough money to come north. Now they stared into the first pan and, to their astonishment, saw that there was more than six dollars’ worth of gold in the bottom. They had no way of knowing it, but this was the richest creek in the world. Each of the claims staked that day eventually produced one million dollars or more.

  As Stander and his companions drove in their stakes, others up and down Bonanza began to sense by some curious kind of telepathy, that something tantalizing was in the wind. Louis Emkins, a lean-faced and rangy prospector from Illinois, was toiling up Bonanza when he saw will-o’-the-wisp campfires flickering among the bushes of the unexplored creek. It was enough to send the blood pulsing through his veins. He and his three companions quickened their pace and burst upon Stander and the others, who tried to discourage the newcomers, saying that the prospects were small and only on the surface. Already the old code of the Pioneers was being thrown into discard.

  Two of the men turned back at once, a fortune slipping from their grasp, but Emkins and his partner George Demars stayed on. Seven had already been staked illegally for a friend in Fortymile, but Emkins, a resolute figure with a forbidding black moustache, would have none of it. He tore up the stakes and substituted his own and by that single action made himself wealthy. Within a year he was able to sell out for more than one hundred thousand dollars.

  William Johns, a black-bearded and rawboned ex-newspaper reporter from Chicago, was at the mouth of Eldorado when Emkins’s two discouraged comrades emerged talking disconsolately of “skim diggings” on a moose flat. Some sixth sense told Johns to prospect the pup anyway. He had a strange feeling that something important was afoot, and this sensation increased when he met Emkins and Demars, who were elaborately casual about their prospects, and then Frank Keller, Stander’s companion, who was curiously evasive about what he had found.

  When Johns and his three Norwegian com
panions headed up the new creek the following day, one of them pointed dramatically to the water:

  “Someone’s working; the water’s muddy!”

  The four men crept upstream, alert and silent – “like hunters who have scented game,” as Johns put it. Suddenly they surprised Stander crouching over a panful of gold with three of his companions crowding about him. They looked “like a cat caught in a cream pitcher,” and Johns and his friends needed no further encouragement to stake. One of the Norwegians who had read a great deal named the new creek Eldorado, more or less as a joke, but, as it turned out, the title was entirely appropriate.

  To the newcomers, however, this narrow cleft in the wooded hills was just another valley with good surface prospects. These really meant very little, for gold lying in the gravels on the creek’s edge did not necessarily mean that the valley was rich. Before that could be determined, someone would have to go through the arduous labour of burning one or more shafts down at least fifteen feet to bedrock, searching for the “pay-streak” (which might not exist), hauling the muck up by windlass to the surface, and washing it down to find out how much gold there really was. This back-breaking labour could easily occupy two months. Even then it was pure guesswork to estimate a claim’s true worth. Until the spring thaw came and the rushing creek provided enough head of water to wash thoroughly the gravels drawn up the shaft all winter, no one could really say exactly how rich Eldorado was – if, indeed, it was rich at all.

  Most of the men who staked claims on the new creek in that first week had already done their share of prospecting. They had sunk shafts and shovelled gravel on creek after creek in the Yukon watershed without success. To them this little pup looked exactly like any other in the territory. If anything, it looked scrawnier and less attractive. To most men, then, Eldorado was as much of a gamble as the Irish sweepstakes. Some, such as Stander, determined to take the gamble and hold their ground and work it to see whether it really did contain gold. Others decided to sell out at once for what they could get. Still others bravely set out to take the risk and then got cold feet and sold before the prize was attained.