Klondike

by Pierre Berton

  The news of the Klondike quickly released the northwest from the economic strait jacket in which it had been imprisoned. The gold coins that had lain so long in sugar bowls and strong-boxes and under floor boards were now suddenly flung into circulation. Money had been so scarce in the northwest that grocery bills habitually went unpaid, and yet within a week five-hundred-dollar grubstakes were plentiful. The feeling was epitomized by one Seattle man dying of lung trouble who nevertheless decided to make the arduous trek north and, as he boarded the Portland, announced that he would rather expire making a fortune than rot in poverty on the shores of Puget Sound.

  “Prosperity is here,” cried the Seattle P-I just four days after the Portland docked. “So far as Seattle is concerned the depression is at an end. A period of prosperity, far greater than anything known in the past, is immediately at hand.…”

  Three days later the financial barometers of the Bradstreet and R. G. Dun companies (then separate firms) endorsed this optimism. Bradstreet’s report declared that “the demand for supplies for shipment to the Clondyke gold region has made July the busiest instead of the dullest month in the commercial year in Seattle and has had an influence on sales of staples at Tacoma, Portland and San Francisco.”

  In the first two weeks of the excitement, telegraph orders on the Puget Sound National Bank increased fivefold over any other period in the bank’s history. The sale of bank drafts tripled and express business doubled. In August the city’s total business had leaped by fifty per cent.

  The midwest felt a similar upsurge. “I have never seen such a change pass over the faces and hopes of people in the last two months,” wrote Senator C. K. Davis of Minnesota, in October. “In the streets of … [Minneapolis] you will see three people and three teams where you saw one two months ago.”

  Grocers doubled their help, supply stores ran day and night, woollen mills sold out of blankets and heavy clothing. Towns as far away as Winnipeg, Manitoba, were cleaned out of furs and robes in two weeks. Plants making evaporated food stepped up production: one Washington State plant operated night and day processing seven thousand pounds a week while workmen rushed through an addition to the factory. Everyone wanted evaporated food: evaporated eggs, evaporated onions, and even evaporated split-pea soup, which was sold in the form of a sausage, each one guaranteed to make twenty to thirty platefuls. The stampeders bought milk tablets, peanut meal, saccharine, desiccated olives, coffee lozenges, beef blocks, and pemmican. One entrepreneur claimed he could put enough food into an ordinary valise to last a man a year and give him a menu as varied as that of a good hotel. He sold these valises to the gullible for two hundred and fifty dollars, claiming they would be worth two thousand in the Klondike.

  The newspapers were full of advice on suitable outfits for the Klondike, but many of the argonauts, as they were universally called, chose to ignore them and hold to their own ideas of what was proper for sub-Arctic travel. Tappan Adney, the correspondent for Harper’s Illustrated, came across one man in Victoria, B.C., whose outfit consisted of thirty-two pairs of moccasins, a case of pipes, a case of shoes, two Irish setters, a bull pup, and a lawn-tennis set. He was no trader, he told Adney, but simply a tourist going to the gold-fields for a good time. About the same time a forty-seven-year-old spinster, Miss Blanche King, sailed for St. Michael, taking along a maid, a cook, a horse, a parrot, three canaries, a piano, two Saint Bernard dogs, and a sealskin suit.

  Almost anything was salable if it had the name “Klondike” attached to it. Optometrists sold Klondike glasses, rubber manufacturers hawked Klondike boots, drugstores peddled Klondike medicine chests, restaurants dispensed Klondike soup; everything from stoves to blankets suddenly bore the necromantic name. It had become a magic word, a synonym for sudden and glorious wealth, a universal panacea, a sort of voodoo incantation which, whispered, shouted, chanted, or sung, worked its own subtle witchery. The papers talked of “Klondicitis,” and the phrase was apt. A New York printer named William Miller, suffering from Klondicitis in the first week of the stampede, tried to raise five hundred dollars from his friends to make the trip north. When he failed to get enough money he lost his reason and the police had to be called to prevent mayhem.

  Another curious example of Klondicitis turned up in the same week. A businessman named W. J. Arkell laid claim to the entire Klondike gold-fields, which he insisted were his by right of discovery. Arkell was secretary of the Sterling Remedy Company and proprietor of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly as well as the weekly humour magazine Judge. In 1890 he had organized the Frank Leslie expedition and sent it to Alaska by way of Haines Mission and the Chilkat Pass, which lies to the southeast of the Chilkoot. Arkell himself had not gone along, nor did the expedition’s members set foot in the Klondike watershed, but this did not deter him from laying claim to the entire gold-bearing region. This attack of Klondicitis spread to Arkell’s brother-in-law, who offered to buy up the interests of an officer of the expedition, one A. B. Shanz. He offered Shanz fifty thousand dollars for his share of Arkell’s non-existent claims. But Shanz, by this time, had Klondicitis, too, and he turned down the offer as being too niggardly. Nothing more was heard of Arkell’s suit.

  The Klondike had another curious effect on people: they began seeing gold everywhere. A group of Italian labourers in New York City saw gold in some sand in which they were digging and began to talk to newspapermen of fortune. A visitor to Victoria saw gold in an outcropping in a gutter near that city’s post office and tried to stake a claim on the main street. Gold started to turn up in almost every state in the union. Trinity County, California, went wild over the alleged discovery of some old Spanish mines. A farm near Elizabethtown, Kentucky, was said to be lined with gold. A report from Marquette, Michigan, claimed that the town was sitting on top of a vein of gold forty feet wide. Promoters in Columbia, Missouri, professed to find gold in the beds of dry creeks. Gold mines that had long been worked out suddenly took on a new lease of life: Peru tried to revive the gold mines of the Incas; Deadwood announced the discovery of a new gold vein; the old Cariboo and Kootenay districts of British Columbia began to report new gold finds. Mexico claimed there was gold in the Yaqui country, Russia insisted there were fabulous mines just across from Alaska, and even China talked about new discoveries. Thousands subscribed to various promotion dodges, most of which were based on no firmer evidence than the deposits of iron pyrites which caused a brief flurry in Missouri.

  The prevailing attitude towards gold, as expressed in the journalism and in the personal correspondence of the day, was an entirely sensual one. The phrase-makers hovered lovingly over their descriptions of the Klondike’s mineral wealth, caressing it with adjectives that emphasized its tactile qualities. They wrote, and talked, of “rich, yellow gold,” of “hard, solid gold,” of “shining gold,” as if the metal were to be coveted for its own sake, as a jewel or an ornament is coveted.

  So infectious was the Klondike epidemic that the flimsiest rumour served to send hundreds dashing to the farthest corners of the northern hemisphere. Transportation companies were not above making capital of these tales, the most flagrant example being the fruitless chase to Kotzebue Sound, on the northwestern tip of the continent, just off Bering Strait. This abortive race was touched off by an old sea-dog in San Francisco who claimed to have dug fifteen thousand dollars out of the ground in two hours with a jack-knife. Several parties swallowed the fairy tale and paid forty dollars each to learn the exact spot in the Kotzebue area where the gold was hidden. The story spread, the price of the inside tip soared to six hundred dollars, and soon steamship companies were advertising “Nuggets as Big as Hickory Nuts” on Kotzebue’s cold shore. More than one thousand persons travelled over three thousand miles, each thinking his party, alone of all the others, knew the secret. And so they were trapped for one long winter above the Arctic Circle, a good five hundred miles, as the crow flies, from the Klondike, which they never saw.

  Meanwhile the railway and steamship ads were crying
“Ho! For the Klondike!” while the slogan “Klondike or bust!” was on everyone’s lips. It had become suddenly very fashionable to be a stampeder, and red-lettered lapel buttons with the phrase “Yes, I’m going this spring” enjoyed a brisk sale. J. E. Fraser, who went north from San Francisco with twenty men on a wild-goose chase to the Tanana River, later recalled the sentiment of the times:

  “The man who had a family to support who could not go was looked on with a sort of pity … the man who didn’t care to leave his business or for other trivial reasons, was looked on with contempt as a man without ambition who did not know enough to take advantage of a good thing when placed in his reach; but the man who could go, and would go, and was going to the Klondike, the man who could not be stopped from going, by any means short of a wire cable anchored to a mountain, was a hero. He was looked up to; he was envied by everybody; he was pointed out in the streets.”

  Anybody who wished to get free drinks in a Pacific coast saloon had only to dress in the approved costume of the stampeder – the colourful mackinaw, the high boots, and the thick cap. Such a one was automatically treated to the best in the house by his envious fellows.

  Men who decried their friends as fools for leaving everything and rushing to the Klondike suddenly found themselves shuttering their shops and following suit, scarcely knowing why.

  “Have I also gone daft with this fever, this lust for gold?” wrote Raymond Robins, a rising young San Francisco lawyer, to his sister Elizabeth, a London actress noted for her interpretation of Ibsen’s plays. “I leave this city for Ice-bound Alaska in a few days, and then across the snow-covered mountains and glaciers to rushing Clondyke, where the Yellow God has been sporting in the turbid waters and upon the gravelly shores.” Two years later almost to the day, he was to write her again from Dawson City: “My two years’ race with fortune is over and I have lost.… I am about one thousand dollars in debt and have no assets of any immediate value.…”

  Robert Medill, a young and impoverished school-teacher from La Salle, Illinois, who rushed north in August, wrote to his wife from Seattle decrying the “calamity howlers” in his home state who looked upon the Klondike rush as a will-o’-the-wisp. “Was surprised to see how the Klondike fever has struck different parts of the country,” Medill wrote, in his curious shorthand style. “The Illinois people are quite bad – I mean this. You meet a calamity howler at La Salle quite bad. At Chicago he lets loose a little. From Chicago to Washington he is fearful, disgusting. At Seattle he is dead and all is Klondyke. What a relief!” Medill confidently expected to reach the gold-fields in fifteen days; it took him seventy-one – “an awful trip,” as he later described it. A year later, still impoverished but much wiser, he was home again.

  It was impossible on the Pacific coast to pick up a newspaper and not find the word Klondike, in its various spellings, on almost every page. The advertising columns bristled with references to it.

  “I was a physical wreck three years ago and cured by Dr. Sanden’s Electric Belt,” one testimonial read. “I am now fifty-two years old, but I am going to the Klondike and expect to hold my own with younger men.”

  Hundreds of personal stories were compressed into a few lines in the classified columns: “Anyone with $150 can secure legitimate paying business – apply Clondyke, P-I” … “Wanted by two experienced miners: stake for the Klondike” … “Wanted $700 to go to the Yukon. Will give value and personal property and if successful will give $1000 additional. Will accept grubstake. Address Success” … “Restaurant and cafe for sale, including valuable lease, beautiful colonial mansion, grand piazza, shady lawns … address Klondike, 708 Columbus Avenue, New York.”

  Tin Pan Alley, meanwhile, was busy hammering out a saccharine balled entitled “He’s Sleeping in a Klondike Vale Tonight,” and the various periodicals were printing odes to the stampede. Review of Reviews published this poetic exhortation:

  All you miners wide awake!

  Go to the Klondike, make your stake;

  Get out your pick, your pan, your pack,

  Go to the Klondike, don’t come back

  Ho for the Klondike, Ho!

  The London Daily Chronicle published its Cockney counterpart:

  Klondike! Klondike!

  Libel yer luggidge “Klondike”!

  Theers no chawnce in the street ter-dye

  Theers no luck darn Shoreditch wye

  Pack yer traps and be orf I sye,

  An’ orf an’ awye ter Klondike!

  And in New York, Huber’s Fourteenth Street Museum, searching about for a new act to headline its bill of Scottish acrobats, tumblers, black-faced comedians, and the new picture-projecting machine called the Cineograph, came up with a surefire attraction:

  Great Big Bill – EVERYTHING NEW!

  FIRST APPEARANCE OF THE KLONDIKE BRIDES

  15 brave young ladies with courage enough to

  go to the Klondike to become miners’ brides.

  15 wonderful freaks

  In most of the civilized world, indeed, the Klondike had become the chief topic of the day, at lunch counters, in trams, aboard elevated trains and streetcars. In the midwest, farmers deserted their haying to drive into town to hear the latest item from the gold-fields. “Technical mining phrases,” one contemporary reporter wrote, “have become the cant of the day.”

  In those first wild weeks there were few who had any real idea exactly where the enchanted land was to be found. The Memphis Commercial-Appeal, for instance, told its readers that the Klondike lay near Chicago. One gold-seeker arrived in Seattle and asked the station master which train he should board for Skagway. In London an enthusiast called upon Harry de Windt, an Alaskan explorer, and wanted to know if he could ride a bicycle over the Chilkoot Pass.

  By the late fall of ’97, however, a Niagara of books, maps, pamphlets, brochures, advertisements, and newspaper reports had poured from the presses. Many were filled with misinformation of every kind, but they did serve to let the average man know roughly where the Klondike was. William Haskell arrived from Circle City and was astonished to discover that “little schoolboys and girls knew the topography of the Yukon and the Klondike better than they knew the States.” He tested one Los Angeles ten-year-old by asking him to give the length of the California coastline. The boy did not know the answer, but was able at once to quote correctly the exact length of the Yukon River.

  Few men there were who remained unaffected by the excitement of the Klondike, save for the hermits, the recluses, and the occasional hobo, winding his wastrel way down the dusty roads of the nation. One such there was in California who remained entirely untouched by the spreading delirium. He had been successively a potato-digger, a gardener in a rural bordello, a dishwasher, a sandwich man, a sandhog, and an orange-picker. At this point in his speckled career he was a bum, picking up food in gutters, accepting handouts from soup kitchens, begging at back doors for bread, and strumming on his guitar to verses of a sort that he composed and sang himself. As the stampeders raced north he moved indolently south towards Mexico, scarcely aware of the frenzy that surrounded him.

  His name was Robert W. Service.

  5

  Warnings all unheeded

  In the fevered chorus chanting anthems to the Klondike, a few reedlike voices could be heard faintly counselling caution. On July 28 the white-bearded Louis Sloss, one of the founders of the Alaska Commercial Company, said flatly: “I regard it as a crime for any transportation company to encourage men to go to the Yukon this fall.… The Seattle people who are booming the steamship lines may be sincere, but a heavy responsibility will rest on their shoulders should starvation and crime prevail in Dawson City next winter.… It is a crime to encourage this rush, which can only lead to disaster for three quarters of the new arrivals.” This statement, coming from the head of a pioneer company which stood to gain immeasurably from the stampede, could be counted as an honest and reliable appraisal of the situation. Few heeded it, perhaps preferring the advice of the col
ourful Joaquin Miller, published the same day. The grey-bearded “Poet of the Sierra,” a veteran of earlier Rocky Mountain stampedes, was already en route to the Klondike as one of Mr. Hearst’s quintet of journalists. He announced that there was “no possible chance of famine” and that “the dangers and hardships and cost of getting through have been greatly exaggerated.” Miller, who was almost sixty years old, boasted that he was travelling light, with very little in the way of provisions or equipment – a fact that was to cause him great distress before the year was out.

  There were further warnings. The Travellers’ Insurance Company announced it would refuse insurance to any stampeder. An Ottawa paper published, in the form of a “Miner’s Catechism,” a series of questions that every would-be prospector should ask himself before setting out for the Klondike:

  “Have I a capital of at least five hundred dollars? Am I subject to any organism or chronic disease, especially rheumatism? Am I physically sound in every way and able to walk thirty miles a day with a fifty pound pack on my back? Am I willing to put up with rough fare, sleep anywhere and anyhow, do my own cooking and washing, mend my own clothes? Can I leave home perfectly free, leaving no one dependent on me in any manner for support? Can I do entirely without spirituous liquors? Can I work like a galley slave for months, if need be, on poor fare and sometimes not enough of that, and still keep up a cheerful and brave spirit? Am I pretty handy with tools and not subject to lazy fits? Can I swim and handle boats and canoes; put up with extremes of heat and cold, and bear incessant tortures from countless swarms of mosquitoes, gnats and sand flies?”

  Only a fraction of the tens of thousands who streamed across the passes in the months that followed could say yes to these questions. Most of them were sedentary workers, clerks and salesmen and office help, but once they caught the fever they were not to be deterred by mere words, especially when many newspaper writers, egged on by local chambers of commerce, were painting the journey to the gold-fields in the most vivid and enthusiastic terms.