Klondike

by Pierre Berton

  “A boat! A boat from the north!”

  Four thousand men and women, aflame with excitement and hope, streamed down upon the waterfront in the belief that a steamer laden with provisions had arrived, and then, when the little birchbark canoe rounded the bluff, drew in their collective breath in bitter disappointment, “like the sighing of the wind,” as one later recorded.

  A deadly calm settled on the crowd. The canoe touched shore and Hansen’s tall figure leaped from it, his blond hair tangled by the wind, his aquiline face haggard and blue with cold. He raised his hand for silence and in a loud, nervous voice cried out:

  “Men of Dawson! There will be no riverboats here until spring. My Indians and I have poled three hundred and fifty miles up the river to tell you this. I advise all of you who are out of provisions or who haven’t enough to carry you through the winter to make a dash for the Outside. There is no time to lose! There are some supplies at Fort Yukon that the Hamilton brought. Whichever way you go, up the river or down the river, it’s hazardous – but you must make the try.”

  A silence, pregnant with horror, greeted these words. Most of Hansen’s listeners had risked everything to reach the Klondike in the first wave, and now it seemed that they had won the race only to lose the prize. As they stood, wordless, on the riverbank, a variety of subhuman sounds seeped into their consciousness and accentuated the general mood of gloom and despair: the hoarse screaming of the ravens wheeling above in the dismal skies, the grinding and snapping of the ice cakes that poured past in a relentless stream, the mournful howling of the husky dogs tethered to cabins all across the town.

  The mood changed. A murmur rippled through the crowd; there were screams of consternation, and one or two people actually fainted. Then the mob broke up into smaller mobs of gesticulating men and women, who gathered on street corners and in saloons, threatening to seize the warehouses, fighting occasionally with their fists, shouting, bartering, trading, pleading. The restaurants closed as the news spread to the gulches and the miners poured in from Eldorado and Bonanza. For hundreds there was no sleep that night as partners pooled what they owned and drew lots to decide who would stay and who would flee. Within a few hours fifty open boats had pushed off for Fort Yukon, three hundred and fifty miles down the river, and another hundred were preparing to go.

  And those who had been frantic to reach the Klondike were just as frantic to leave it now. Stampeders who had used their wits and their physical resources to hurdle the mountains and breast the river expended the same energies in a scramble to retreat the way they had come.

  The most desperate expedition was that headed by Thomas McGee of San Francisco, who commandeered the rickety steamboat Kieukik, intending to sail it as far up the river as Fort Selkirk and then make his way overland to the Lynn Canal. So often did the machinery break down on the shuddering little craft that after a week the fifteen freezing passengers aboard the vessel found they had moved only thirty-five miles. The boat, its hull ripped open, was abandoned and a fresh start made in Indian canoes. So nerve-racking was this trip that the native guide succumbed to a weakness rare among his kind: he broke down and wept. But the party did reach the Lynn Canal, after forty days, and stumbled into Skagway, half-starved and frostbitten. The City of Seattle was in port at the time, and as her gold-hungry passengers disembarked and began their headlong race for the passes, they noted, momentarily and without comprehension, the odd spectacle of McGee and his fellows clambering gratefully aboard to book passage for home.

  While this exodus up the Yukon was under way, the Portus B. Weare and the Bella from St. Michael were gingerly navigating the Yukon flats. Stripped of their barges and half their cargo, they inched their way across the shoals and steamed triumphantly into the deeper waters of the main river, only to face a human hazard a few miles farther on: at Circle City each in turn was subjected to one of the most decorous armed hold-ups in the history of piracy.

  Some hundred and eighty miners had returned to the old camp when the first flush of the Klondike receded, and these had watched in growing frustration as boat after boat passed them by on the way up to Dawson. When the Weare arrived on September 20, they decided to take the law into their own hands. A committee of six climbed aboard and offered to pay the company’s price for enough provisions to last the winter. When Ely Weare, the president, refused, fifty men with rifles and shotguns emerged from the bushes and drew a bead on the boat. With the ship’s crew at bay, the miners quietly began to unload the cargo, checking it carefully and paying for it as it was removed. When the Weare left the following morning, she was thirty tons lighter.

  A similar scene was enacted on September 25 when the Bella arrived. Her portly and peppery captain, E. D. Dixon, an old Mississippi hand, grew almost apoplectic with rage as the insurgents swarmed aboard. Captain Patrick Henry Ray of the Eighth Infantry, U.S. Army, a passenger aboard the steamboat, shouldered his way to the forefront and tried to reason with the miners, who were already unloading the cargo while the fuming captain shouted and cursed and spat tobacco juice upon the deck. Ray had been sent north by the U.S. government to investigate the possibilities of relieving destitute miners; but now he was forced to tell the very men he had come to succour that their action was unlawful.

  “There’s no law or any person in authority to whom we can appeal,” the chairman of the miners’ committee retorted, and since this was only too true, Ray yielded. The government had failed to place any officials in Circle City, whose only law was the law of the miners’ meeting. Although Dixon continued to roar that he would not leave a single pound of supplies at Circle, the Bella left the town twenty-five tons lighter. Save for the unregenerate Dixon, it was difficult to tell the victims from the hold-up men. As Ray later wrote in his report to Washington, “The feature that was most prominent when the Bella was held up was the cheerfulness and alacrity with which all the employees of the company, from the agent down, facilitated the work of the miners – and their expressions of approval.”

  There was a sequel of sorts to this incident. The following spring, when the steamer Rideout docked at Fortymile with two hundred dance-hall queens aboard, the miners, emboldened by the example of Circle City, quietly stole one of the girls for their private use.

  2

  Revolt on the Yukon

  The Yukon Valley was aflame with colour that September. The birches and the aspens turned to fiery yellow-orange, while the buck-brush on the hilltops changed to deep crimson-purple. Then, as the month reached its end, the world went grey as the leaves fell away and the ashen trunks stood naked to the autumn winds. In the mornings the hillsides were powdered with a talcum coating of frost, and the pale sun, rising only briefly, seemed to have lost its warmth.

  In the lifeless forests the scuttling hare shed its protective brown and turned as white as the first fresh snow; the ptarmigan followed suit, and the darting weasel. Here and there a nodding grizzly, bloated by feasts of blueberry and salmon, sought out the darkness of a mountain cave and relapsed into his long coma. The songbirds were long since gone; only the plump chickadees remained, and the grey juncos, and the white little snow buntings.

  As the sun vanished, and the surface soil froze solid, holding its moisture locked within it, the mountain streams dropped to thin trickles and ceased to feed the mother river. Along the margin of the Yukon, shore ice formed, extending for thirty feet out into the stream; and as the river, starved of nourishment, began to drop, this ice was left to project unsupported from the high banks. Chunk by chunk it broke off and toppled into the current until the waters were thick with it.

  In Dawson, men took to the hills to search for Arctic hare, while others, sitting on the banks, tried to catch grayling through holes chopped in the shore ice. A few men even ventured towards the distant mountains in an attempt to capture big game.

  In front of the town the rustling mass of ice slipped by like an endless chain. Then, on the night of September 28, to the surprise of all, the Weare, her twin black
smoke-stacks puffing furiously, steamed into Dawson through the floating ice mass. The effect was shattering. Guns were fired and bonfires lit, while cheers resounded from the thousands who greeted her.

  As the Weare’s whistled pierced the gloom and her gangplank was lowered onto the frozen and crowded bank, John J. Healy shouldered his way through the impatient throng and fairly raced aboard his company’s ship. Ely Weare, the son of his old Mississippi crony and now the president of the N.A.T., greeted him with enthusiasm. Healy, in his crusty way, brushed this welcome aside and demanded to know how much cargo was on board. Weare answered, not without a certain pride, that the ship was loaded with all the whiskey and hardware that could be floated across the Yukon flats.

  These words drove Healy into a fury, for he had given direct orders, as general manager, to load the boats with food and clothing only. Blinded by rage and frustration, he seized Weare by the throat and might have choked him to death had not his assistant, an amateur boxer, separated the two men.

  Two days later the Bella arrived with an equally limited and disappointing cargo, and Constantine, who came up from the Fortymile headquarters aboard her, realized that one thousand persons would have to be evacuated from Dawson. They could not get far, as the river would shortly be frozen solid and all water travel come to an end for the season, but with luck they might reach Fort Yukon, Alaska, some three hundred and fifty miles downriver from Dawson – eighty-six miles past Circle City. It was near this old Hudson’s Bay post on the Yukon flats that the steamboats loaded with provisions were stranded. Accordingly, Constantine posted a notice on Front Street:

  … For those who have not laid in a winter’s supply to remain longer is to court death from starvation, or at least the certainty of sickness from scurvy and other troubles. Starvation now stares everyone in the face who is hoping and waiting for outside relief.…

  The Collector of Customs and the Gold Commissioner addressed street-corner meetings, urging people to escape, while Hansen of the A.C. Company, nervous and alarmed, ran up and down Front Street from group to group, calling out: “Go! Go! Flee for your lives!”

  Only John J. Healy remained calm in the face of the panic. The tough old frontiersman refused to be panicked. Hansen, he said contemptuously, was a hysterical cheechako. There was food enough for all in Dawson, he insisted, and he urged all to stay.

  “There will be no starvation,” Healy kept saying, to Hansen’s annoyance. “Some may go hungry, but no one will starve. If there is starvation, it will not be until spring.”

  In spite of this, Healy permitted those who wished to leave aboard the Weare to take passage to Fort Yukon for a nominal fifty dollars. (“There’s nothing at Fort Yukon,” he warned them.) Constantine, meanwhile, determined to speed the departure of scores more by allowing them free passage on the Bella and five days’ allowance of food. One hundred and sixty took advantage of this offer; but when the steamboat was ready to leave at four p.m. on October 1, it was found that forty had taken the food and vanished. Many of those who did go on board did so under fictitious names. They did not wish the ignominy of this retreat to reach the ears of their friends Outside.

  They crowded up the gangplank like defeated soldiers, the raw north wind plucking at their greatcoats, the leaden and wintry sky hanging over them like a pall. Here was a doctor who had abandoned a growing practice in Chicago to seek greener fields in the north; he was one of three skilled physicians forced out of town. Here was a watchmaker who had arrived with three thousand dollars’ worth of jewellery but with no provisions, and was leaving with his wares unsold. Here was a feeble creature of seventy who had scraped five hundred dollars together from his friends and relatives to invest in this last great adventure. “I’d rather starve or freeze to death among strangers than die of humiliation and a broken heart at home,” he had cried when the first epidemic of Klondicitis spread across the country. Now he was among strangers, starving and freezing. Here was a bank clerk from Boston who had left for the Klondike to begin a career as a businessman – his career at an end before it had truly begun. Here were half a dozen midwestern farmers who had hoped to garner enough gold from the Klondike to pay the interest on the mortgages that they had been forced to increase in order to secure the means to go north. Sitting morosely on their blankets on the deck or in the messrooms or on top of the cordwood stacked in the hold, they listened to the ice blocks grinding against the hull, which had been sheathed in an eighteen-inch strip of steel for protection.

  Out into the channel the little Bella chugged, leaving behind a forlorn huddle of townspeople who watched this last link with civilization drift stern first in the direction of Fortymile, her rudder jammed in the ice so that the pilot could not correctly head her downstream. Slowly, like a cork in a bathtub, she rotated until the rudder was repaired.

  For forty miles she kept her course until the suction pipe feeding the boiler became clogged with ice. Then, out of steam, she was driven ashore and tied up. The passengers cramming every corner slept uneasily in their light blankets or munched on their scanty supplies of hardtack and bacon while her captain and crew fought to get her under way once more.

  For another forty miles the resolute Dixon forced his vessel downriver in an unequal battle with the ice. Again she ran out of steam, and again he got her under way. The ice jammed her rudder and she floated broadside towards the mouth of the Fortymile. He forced her into the shore, where the ice formed a solid prison around her. But now a rare and almost miraculous natural phenomenon came to his aid: a warm chinook wind, blowing through the mountains from the distant coast, melted the ice in the main stream. Dixon was able to clear a channel out to the river and continue on his way. The thaw lasted for twelve hours, and then the ice returned with new fury, driving the little steamboat before it into a bank. But Dixon repaired her and chugged on. A few hours later the ice drove the ship onto a sand-bar. She clung to it for two days and nights while the ice poured down at five miles an hour, pounding with terrifying force against her hull, until one enormous block, striking the paddlewheel, smashed a blade and jarred the vessel from stem to stern. But Dixon spat tobacco, dislodged his ship, and finally brought her limping into Circle City. He bore the river no grudge, for he loved her almost as if she were a woman, and would brook no criticism of her. To him she was “one of the prettiest rivers under the sun,” and when he died five years later it was at the helm of his steamboat, as she unloaded cargo at Circle City, with the tawny Yukon hissing around him.

  While Dixon was battling the river, the Weare, having reached Circle, was facing a second bout of armed violence. Her captain had refused to proceed farther, and the passengers, many of them drunk, were talking of seizing the boat by force. Ray, the infantry officer, who was still in town, quietly went about securing arms and ammunition to defend the ship’s stores, if necessary with his life. On October 10 the captain of the Weare, whose own state of intoxication now matched that of the passengers, announced that if the boat could be cut free of the ice he would continue for eighty-six miles farther to Fort Yukon, where supplies could be had for the winter. At this news, one hundred men set to work hacking away at the ice that fettered the vessel, working themselves into a state of fury because the captain, in spite of his promises, gave no further sign of connecting up the engines. Only the armed presence of Ray prevented a mutiny.

  It was at this point that the chinook wind cleared the river of ice. The N.A.T. Company supplied three boats with a capacity of sixty men and provisions for four days, and at eight a.m. on October 12 this small flotilla sailed off and was soon joined by more and more boats fleeing from Dawson. Indeed, the channel, miraculously clear for the moment, was alive with craft of every description, each straining to reach the source of supplies as they had once strained to reach the source of riches. They could not know – and had they known, would not have believed – that at this same moment other boats, farther down the river, were fighting against time and weather, trying to reach the Klondike befor
e freeze-up. In the same week in which one set of passengers fought with the captain of the Weare at Circle City to take them away from the Klondike, another set of passengers battled with the captain of the tiny St. Michael, also at Circle City, trying to force him to take them on to the Klondike.

  Ray’s boat was at the centre of the scattered fleet attempting to reach Fort Yukon from Circle. The captain was certain there would be violence when hundreds of hungry men landed, and he was determined to prevent bloodshed if he could.

  For twelve hours the river remained clear, and then, as the swift dusk of evening descended and the aurora glowed greenly in the sky, the men in the boats could hear once more the distant roar of ice in motion. An Indian in Ray’s boat called out that the river was freezing, and the men steeled themselves for the onslaught, as an army, listening to the rumble of cannon in the distance, waits for an enemy attack.

  In inky blackness there followed a macabre scene. The water rose, the current seemed to increase in speed, the boats strove vainly to reach the shore until – roaring and crashing, rending and tearing – the ice descended upon them. Ray and his companions, fighting the current in their whirling craft, found themselves caught in a gorge formed by masses of ice piling high on either side of them as the river froze inward from both shores. Each member of Ray’s crew battled desperately to keep the boat on an even keel, their oars and rudder smashed by the repeated blows of the blocks that bore down upon them. Then, almost in an instant, the frothing waters seemed to solidify above them, around them, and beneath them, until Ray’s boat was borne upward by the freezing action, as if by unseen hands.

  Thus they remained, locked in the ice, until morning. In the dawn’s pale light Ray spotted five other boats caught in the pack, some of them smashed to kindling. From shore to shore the river now presented an appalling sight: the entire channel as far as the eye could see was clogged with enormous up-ended cakes jammed and frozen together in a solid, unmoving mass.