Klondike

by Pierre Berton

  Ambrose Bierce was a rare exception, one of the handful of journalists who took a jaundiced view of the stampede. “The California gold hunter did good by accident and crowed to find it fame,” he wrote in the San Francisco Examiner. “But the blue-nosed mosquito-slapper of Greater Dawson, what is he for? Is he going to lay broad and deep the foundations of Empire [for Great Britain]? Will he bear the banner of progress into that paleocrystic waste? Will he clear the way for even a dog sled civilization and a reindeer religion? Nothing will come of him. He is a word in the wind, a brother to the fog. At the scene of his activity no memory of him will remain. The gravel that he thawed and sifted will freeze again. In the shanty that he builded, the she-wolf will rear her poddy litter, and from its eaves the moose will crop the esculent icicle unafraid. The snows will close over his trail and all be as before.”

  By August 10 the U.S. Secretary of the Interior, C. N. Bliss, felt it necessary to issue a state paper warning against anyone attempting to get to the Klondike that season. Clifford Sifton, the Canadian Minister of the Interior, had already published a similar plea, but both warnings fell on deaf ears. The Excelsior landed in San Francisco with a second cargo of gold, and this time the newspapers did not underestimate the quantity. There was only about half a million dollars on board, but the press reports made it two and a half millions, exciting such enthusiasm that the publicity-shy William Ogilvie, who was a passenger, had to disguise himself as a crew member to escape the reporters. There was further excitement when it was learned that a U.S. government revenue cutter was escorting the Portland down the coast on her second trip to protect her from Chinese pirates said to be lying in wait to capture the two million dollars reported aboard her.

  Such tales lent impetus to the rush which was gathering speed, snowball-fashion. When the government warning was issued, three thousand people were already hived in the erupting tent towns of Dyea and Skagway, at the foot of the passes, together with two thousand tons of baggage. Thousands of horses were already struggling, dying, and rotting on the trails. Before the warning was a fortnight old, twenty-one more steamers as well as three sailing-vessels and two scows, all jammed with men and animals and freight, had put out from Pacific coast ports, steaming towards the Lynn Canal. In one single week in mid-August, twenty-eight hundred people left Seattle for the Klondike. By September 1 nine thousand people and thirty-six thousand tons of freight had left the port.

  Although few would believe it, there was by this time no chance of any traveller reaching the diggings before the following summer. This fact was conveniently glossed over by the merchants of the various coastal ports who were bidding for the Klondike outfitting trade. Every city was a madhouse. The streets of Victoria bustled with strange men – Scots, Irish, French, German, Australian, American – garbed in outlandish costumes and dragging oxen and horses through roadways piled high with sacks of provisions, knockdown boats, fur robes, and Klondike knickknackery. In Seattle the streets were crowded all night long. Unable to get lodgings, the stampeders slept in stables and washed at fire hydrants. All the coastal ports – San Francisco, Tacoma, Portland, Seattle, and Victoria – were locked in an intense struggle for the lion’s share of the booty, each city screaming that it was the only possible outfitting port for the Klondike. The Canadians cried that every would-be miner ought to buy his goods in Canada since the Klondike was on British soil and a stiff duty would be levied on American outfits crossing the line. Victoria merchants went so far as to dispatch agents to Seattle to spread this news among the stampeders who were pouring off the trains. The Americans shouted just as loudly that every miner would have to cross the isthmus of the Alaska Panhandle, where he must pay duty on Canadian goods or else pay U.S. guards a fee to accompany bonded supplies to the Canadian line.

  Up and down the coast the arguments reverberated. Seattle papers published bitter editorials attacking the claims of Tacoma and San Francisco, and the rival cities retorted in kind. One San Francisco merchant displayed in his window a poster showing two stampeders. One was depicted tired and beaten at the foot of the Chilkoot, complaining: “I outfitted in Seattle.” The other was shown fresh as a daisy atop the pass, crowing triumphantly: “I bought my goods in San Francisco.”

  But it was Seattle in the end that seized the bulk of the gold-rush trade with a campaign planned as carefully as any military exercise. Within a week of the Portland’s arrival the Chamber of Commerce had organized a committee to boost Seattle as the only possible outfitting port. The city’s subsequent paid advertising in the nation’s press exceeded that of its competitors fivefold, but it was the superiority of Seattle’s free advertising that won the day.

  This was largely due to the secretary of the advertising committee, a veteran newspaperman of subtle ingenuity named Erastus Brainerd, a Harvard graduate who had once been an art-gallery curator. The term “public-relations man” had yet to be coined, but Brainerd was a worthy forerunner of the PR breed. In publicizing Seattle he left nothing to chance. He inserted advertisements in small-town newspapers until he calculated he had a total circulation for them of almost ten million. He saw that the Klondike edition of the Seattle P-1 was sent to seventy thousand U.S. postmasters, six thousand libraries, and four thousand mayors; then, for good measure, he distributed fifteen thousand to the Great Northern and Northern Pacific railroads for prospective stampeders heading for the west coast. Brainerd was a student of psychology, and one of his most successful schemes was to persuade Seattleites of recent origin to send letters back to their home towns, to friends and local editors, exhorting their former neighbours to go to the Klondike via Seattle. Brainerd made it easy to send such letters, for he wrote them himself, leaving blanks for names and signatures, supplied the postage, and even dropped them in the mailbox. Another scheme involved the sending of Klondike views, with Seattle’s compliments, as Christmas gifts to the crowned heads of Europe. This worked out satisfactorily in all cases but one: the German Kaiser refused to open his package for fear that it might contain dynamite.

  Brainerd had printed a series of circulars of various kinds which he sent to newspapers, diplomats, prospective migrants, governors and mayors, congressmen and senators. These documents looked more like personally dictated letters than advertising throwaways, and received wide attention. In one such circular Brainerd quoted the correspondent of Harper’s Weekly on the superiority of Seattle for Alaskan trade. He did not mention that the correspondent of Harper’s Weekly was Erastus Brainerd.

  Another circular tried to suggest that the Klondike trip was not much more arduous than a casual stroll after lunch – an idea that was fostered by all the Pacific coast ports. Shooting the Whitehorse Rapids was made to appear mere child’s play: “Of those who have gone in … not more than half a dozen have lost their lives and these from carelessness in fording.” The last phrase was a masterpiece, for it seemed to imply that the crossing of the various Yukon torrents was not much more than a wading expedition. Brainerd persuaded the Secretary of State for Washington to sign this circular, which he sent to foreign diplomats. This gave it the status of an official communication, and it was immediately relayed to overseas capitals, where it was widely published and distributed.

  In addition, Brainerd and the Chamber worked out an espionage system which (a) quietly gave Seattle merchants the names of potential customers and (b) informed the city of its rivals’ plans so that steps could be taken to forestall them. All this energy paid big dividends for the city, which by the early spring of 1898 had garnered twenty-five million dollars in Klondike trade as compared with the five million that went through the other ports. As for Brainerd, he became so mesmerized by his own campaign that, when spring came, he started for the Klondike himself.

  6

  Balloons, boatsleds, and bicycles

  Gathering momentum swiftly in the late summer months, the great stampede was moving at express-train speed by midwinter, its course illuminated by the various quirks and eccentricities, personal trage
dies, follies, fortunes, and excitements which mark any large exodus of people. The Klondike was certainly responsible for one of the strangest mass movements in history. All that winter and through most of the following summer, men and women by the tens of thousands crossed oceans and continents, moving by train, steamship, scow, horseback, oxcart, foot, and raft to reach the magic land. The movement was truly world-wide. A sloop with ninety Norwegians left Christiania in October, sailed around the Horn, and reached San Francisco in April en route to the Klondike. In February the Cape Otway left Sydney, Australia, for Alaska with two hundred and twelve passengers crammed aboard her. A Greek in Jerusalem wrote to the Central Pacific Railroad that he and a group of fellow countrymen were heading for Dawson with stores of goods to trade. An expedition of three hundred Scotsmen sailed for Montreal in January on their way to the gold-fields. A steam yacht, complete with orchestra, personal valets, and Parisian chefs, left England in February loaded with young aristocrats. A company of young Italians moved through San Francisco in the spring, announcing that they were an advance guard for an expedition of several hundred. Belted earls and washerwomen, congressmen and card sharps, millionaires and paupers all rubbed shoulders on the trails that led north. Sir Charles Tupper, the ex-Prime Minister of Canada, wrote from England that one hundred thousand stampeders would sail from that country alone. This turned out to be an overestimate, but it has been reckoned that in the winter of 1897–98 one million people laid plans to leave home and family to seek their fortune in the Klondike and that, at the very least, one hundred thousand actually set out.

  The transportation companies were as eager for the Klondike business as the coast cities. Every train travelling across the continent had its own “gold-rush car,” the walls lined with glass jars full of nuggets and dust and papered with photographs of the mining areas, and the side cabins and tables cluttered with books, maps, and pamphlets, picks, pans, shovels, hammers, quicksilver, fur, parkas, and heavy boots.

  In the fall of ’97 steamship tickets sold at fantastic prices. Before the Excelsior left on her return voyage from San Francisco to St. Michael, the agents had been forced to turn away ten times her passenger list. On July 29 one man who had bought a ticket aboard her was able to sell it for fifteen hundred dollars, which was ten times its value. By midwinter the fare settled down to a straight one thousand. Suddenly money had become very cheap. Stampeders were willing to gamble almost any sum to reach their goal. In March, 1898, the Review of Reviews estimated that the argonauts had already spent sixty million dollars in purchasing rail and ocean transport and Klondike outfits. The Klondike had been oversold: its gold-production for the year 1898 did not exceed ten millions.

  The stampeders snapped up almost anything that was offered them. They bought sleds powered by gasoline motors and others powered by steam. They bought “automatic” gold-pans set on a spindle and operated by clockwork on the gramophone principle. They bought scurvy cures, portable cabins, food tablets, earmuffs, frost cures, and a variety of useless bric-a-brac that even included “nugget-in-the-slot” machines for dispensing cigars, paper envelopes, scenes of great battles, and similar northern essentials. Bunko men rushed to the Pacific coast to take advantage of the suckers pouring through the various towns. Arthur Dietz, a God-fearing New Yorker who arrived in Seattle in February on his way to Alaska, described it as “more wicked than Sodom.” Dietz wrote that “the Devil reigned supreme. It was a gigantic chaos of crime and the city government, as an institution, protected evil.” The streets were infested with agents and beggars and confidence men hawking everything from bottled mercury to evaporated beans. Gambling-houses, saloons, and brothels ran wide open. Government stores got rid of army surplus blankets, tents, and knapsacks, many of them worn out and useless. Dietz and his party bought one hundred pounds of evaporated eggs from an agent who poured some of the yellow powder out of the sack and cooked it before their eyes to demonstrate his honesty. It tasted like scrambled eggs, but when the party reached the shores of Alaska and opened the sack they discovered that the salesman, by sleight-of-hand, had substituted yellow cornmeal. Dozens of other parties reported similar experiences.

  The so-called “Klondike Bicycle” was a popular item with the stampeders, for the Klondike strike came at the height of the bicycle craze. The velocipede was to the 1890’s what the television set came to be to the 1950’s. Sunday newspapers actually found their circulation decreasing because everyone spent the Sabbath on wheels. When the New York Journal held a contest to name the ten most popular bicyclists and send them on a tour of Europe, it received six and one half million responses. Everybody from princes to policemen pedalled, and the Herald reported with approbation that one woman had tracked down her faithless husband on a bicycle and thus secured a divorce. It was freely predicted that the next war would be fought on bicycles, and the Sunday-supplement drawings of what the world would look like a hundred years hence invariably showed the entire populace pedalling determinedly down the streets. Such was the faith in the bicycle that thousands were prepared to believe that this was the ideal way of crossing the mountain passes. Two youths, cycling around the world for a Chicago paper, switched plans and began propelling themselves towards Alaska. On September 20 the Misses Olga McKenna and Nellie Ritchie, described as “two of the best wheel-women in Boston,” started pedalling north, announcing that they expected to enlist one thousand women in their move to cycle to Dawson City. Two wheel-men from a Brooklyn club were a day ahead of them, pumping furiously across the continent wearing broad-brimmed slouch hats, blue shirts, knee-trousers, heavy woollen stockings, and bicycle shoes, a costume they described as being halfway between a cyclist’s and a miner’s garb.

  A New York syndicate meanwhile was busily marketing machines designed especially for the stampede to which were attached four-wheeled trailers with a freight capacity of five hundred pounds. There were also “ice bicycles” with a forward ski, and something else called “bicycle skates.” Two New Yorkers in the fall of ’97 left for the Klondike on a strange contraption consisting of two bicycles joined together with iron bars heavy enough to support a small rowboat containing their outfit. They declared they would reach the Klondike in ninety days by this method, but the ensuing winter found them still at the foot of the White Pass.

  Another much-advertised contrivance was the Klondike “boatsled,” a sectional steel vessel which was purported to be amphibious. Sails were provided to propel it across northern lakes; on land, a couple of panels at the side were supposed to be let down to form a flat surface under the keel, which was hollow, being fitted with air chambers to ensure buoyancy, and a burglar-proof compartment in which to store the gold dust that everybody expected to dig from the ground as easily as if it were so much sand.

  Like so many others, the boatsled scheme flopped miserably. There seemed to be no end to the ingenuity and impracticability of the inventions that sprang up during the stampede. A noted electrical expert of the times, Nikalo Tesla, a one-time associate of Thomas Edison, attempted to market an X-ray machine which he said was essential for prospectors because it could detect the presence of gold hidden in small beds of sand and gravel. Three Washington State men worked out a scheme to suck gold from the riverbeds, using compressed air. Another optimist headed north with diving-equipment, explaining that he planned to walk along the bed of the Yukon River picking up nuggets. The Secretary of the Treasury, Lyman Gage, actually gave his blessing to a snow train, propelled by a giant sprocketed wheel, that bore a remarkable resemblance to the modern snowmobile (but which never worked). An organization called the Trans-Alaskan Gopher Co. offered shares at a dollar apiece and promised returns of ten dollars a minute when it got into operation: it proposed to take contracts for digging tunnels in Klondike claims with trained gophers. A root-beer salesman announced he was leaving for the Chilkoot Pass with a thousand packages of root beer; it was his intention to sell the beverage to thirsty argonauts at an eight-hundred-per-cent profit. A Dr. Armand Ravol, the
city bacteriologist of St. Louis, planned to go to the Klondike armed with packages of deadly germs suitable for eliminating mosquitoes. And there was that abortive corporation with the jaw-breaking name known as the Klondike and Cuba Ice Towing and Anti-Yellow Fever Company, which proposed, with a wild disregard for ocean geography, to tow icebergs from the Klondike to the South Seas, where, it was believed, they could be transformed into cold compresses to alleviate the suffering of fever victims.

  Portus B. Weare, the balding and distinguished chairman of the board of the North American Trading and Transportation Company in Chicago, was the target of a small platoon of fortune-seekers who wanted financial backing for a variety of wild schemes. A lady clairvoyant cornered him in his office and asked for two thousand dollars. She claimed to be able to find the hiding-places of nuggets, no matter how far they were below the surface. A penny-dreadful writer asked Weare for a few thousands to go to the Klondike, which, he felt, must be swarming with notorious criminals in hiding. It was his plan to use his detective-novel knowledge to capture them and claim the rewards.

  There were several projects afoot to invade the gold-fields with lighter-than-air craft, for the balloon was the sensation of the age, and just six days before the Portland’s arrival in Seattle, Solomon Augustus Andrée, the Swedish polar explorer, had set out to reach the North Pole by balloon. In Dublin an Irish gold-seeker announced the construction of an enormous balloon large enough to take fifty passengers to the Klondike. In New York one Leo Stevens, Jr., adopting the more romantic title of Don Carlos Stevens, raised one hundred and fifty thousand dollars and announced he was building the biggest balloon in the world, which would take off from a point near Juneau and soar over the coastal mountains into the Klondike carrying eight to ten passengers and six or seven tons of freight. In Kalamazoo another entrepreneur declared that he would establish a regular balloon route to the Klondike, each balloon to carry a ton of goods and make a return trip in a fortnight. People all over the country wrote to him offering ridiculous sums for passage or even “a berth in steerage,” and one Illinois citizen sent along a bank draft for five hundred dollars. But after Andrée was swallowed by the polar mists, the enthusiasm over balloons began to fade.