Klondike

by Pierre Berton

  Yet a few miles away, closer than Rosebud Creek, closer than Swede Creek, closer than Monte Cristo Island, gold, still undiscovered, lay almost as thickly as sand. It was hidden in the bowels of the hills and benches above the creeks. There was a mountain streaked with it above Dick Lowe’s fraction and another mountain of it above Tom Lippy’s Eldorado claim. There was a highway of it running a serpentine course along the western rim of Eldorado Creek and down Bonanza and across the main valley of the Klondike.

  It was the greenhorns who found it. They searched the benches while the old-timers jeered, for no seasoned Yukon prospector could conceive of placer gold lying high above the creekbeds. Gold was heavy, was it not? It had to sink into the bed-rock; how could it rise? Yet anybody gazing at those terraced hills might have realized that high above the present streams older watercourses had once flowed, and in these former streambeds would be gold. Indeed, as was later realized, it was from one of these ancient channels, cropping from the brow of a hill, that Carmack’s original nuggets had come: the flaky gold had simply washed down to be discovered by an accident.

  In the fall of 1897 the old-timers in Grand Forks, gazing up at the western rim of Eldorado above the Lowe fraction, were astonished to see some men working away. On one side of the hill was a Californian named Albert Lancaster. On the other side, on the bench above Big Skookum Gulch, were Nathan Kresge and his partner, Nels Peterson. These two had arrived in the summer of 1897, and both noticed a queer thing about the benchland above Bonanza: the miners had been dragging their winter wood down the slopes, and in the furrows left behind, the spring freshets had exposed a peculiar white gravel. This excited the suspicions of Kresge, a born prospector and a geology student who had been seeking gold ever since he had dug in the sand as a child in Pennsylvania. The two men began to look for exposed bed-rock on the hills and to sink shallow shafts until, suddenly, from an eighteen-inch hole they pulled a ten-dollar nugget. This discovery sent them tumbling pell-mell down the hill to Grand Forks. Here they borrowed the traditional miner’s “rocker” – a box-shaped sieve, built on the principle of a baby’s cradle, to separate the fine sand from the coarse gravel. Dick Lowe’s foreman watched them lugging this awkward contrivance up to the ridge, and swore and laughed at them for wasting their time. But in the next ten days they washed out six thousand dollars’ worth of gold from a piece of ground no larger than a cabin floor.

  Yet, in spite of the stampede that followed, in spite of the fact that both flanks of Big Skookum Gulch were quickly staked, the significance of Kresge’s discovery was lost on the prospectors. The hills remained empty because men still did not understand that the white gravel above Big Skookum was part of an old riverbed. On the opposite side of Gold Hill, as it was now called, Lancaster, the Californian, continued to work in plain sight, and to endure for the duration of the winter the laughter of the Eldorado kings and their employees. His little hundred-foot claim – actually the first bench claim staked in the Klondike – was eventually to produce two hundred thousand dollars for him.

  It is odd that out of all the hundreds and thousands who roamed the creeks that winter and dashed off on abortive stampedes to nowhere, only two others besides Kresge and Lancaster unravelled the riddle of the Klondike hills. Both were newcomers to the country, and each worked out his theory quite independently of the other.

  The first was William Dietering, a round-faced German immigrant from Evanston, Illinois, better known as Cariboo Billy. The other was Oliver B. Millett, who had quit his job in a sawmill the day the Portland arrived in Seattle with her ton of gold, and, lightly equipped, had managed to reach Dawson on October 9.

  Cariboo Billy knew something about bench diggings, for he had seen them years before in the Cariboo gold rush of British Columbia. He was convinced that a lost channel ran through the Klondike hills, and so, with his partner, Joe Staley, he began a systematic exploration of both sides of Eldorado. The two men worked their way up slowly from the mouth of the creek until they reached French Hill, directly above Tom Lippy’s claim, a mile and a half upstream. They began to dig into the very brow of the hill, and here they hit the same white gravel that had marked Kresge’s find. At a depth of four feet there was gold. They sank a second test shaft, and this was far richer: three pans of dirt yielded one hundred and ninety dollars. Boiling with excitement, they filled the holes so that the Eldorado miners, hauling wood along a path just twenty feet away, would suspect nothing. But when on March 19 they recorded their claim, the secret was out and another stampede took place. Still the old-timers refused to believe there was gold on French Hill. They said that Cariboo Billy must have salted his claim; and they let the cheechakos do the staking.

  Meanwhile, Oliver Millett was developing his own theories. He had gone to work as a layman on Forty-One Eldorado, and it puzzled him that Eldorado gold should be so different in texture from that found on the parent Bonanza. What happened to the Eldorado gold after the creek joined Bonanza? Could it be that the old channel, after reaching the Bonanza valley, moved on through the hills on the left bank of the creek?

  All his life Millett had been an adventurer. He came from the old German-Canadian town of Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, and, like so many of his townspeople, he had left home at fourteen to follow the sea before seeking his fortune in the West. Here he was venturing again, a lanky, pale-faced would-be prospector of thirty-three, ambitious, intense, and stubborn. His lay on Eldorado produced no gold — indeed, there was no gold on Eldorado above Forty — and so Millett set out to test his theories in the hills of Bonanza just below the point where Eldorado flows in.

  He climbed the steep hillside above George Carmack’s claim, through two feet of snow, scrub timber, and thick frozen moss, and then worked his way along the ridge until he found the hard rim of the hillside at the point where an ancient creek had started to cut its way downward. He burned a shaft nine feet before he gave up: but not before he found what he was seeking – a single nugget. He sank a second shaft, toiling alone day after day while the labourers below him on Tagish Charley’s claim looked up occasionally and thought him mad. He bored twenty-six feet and found nothing, but still would not give up. He set to work at once on a third shaft; and here, suddenly, he came upon the telltale gravel – gravel so white that it might have been bleached – and in the gravel there was gold. Millett had struck the White Channel (as it has since been called), the track of a bygone stream that runs along the rim of Eldorado and lower Bonanza and then crosses Bonanza to vanish into the main Klondike Valley, which was barren of gold.

  Now the discoverer worked like a man possessed. He was already suffering from scurvy brought on by meagre rations and overstrain, but he had no time to consider treatment. He rushed down to Pete McDonald’s cabin on Two Below, asked for lumber, and was told not to waste his time; but he could not be dissuaded. He built himself a rocker, laboured up the hill with it, and in his first day took out more than eight hundred dollars. On he worked, his legs turning black and scabrous, until he had twenty thousand in gold. Then, almost dead from scurvy, his claim still unsurveyed and unregistered, he headed downhill for Grand Forks to get some raw potatoes to arrest his disease. In his absence somebody suggested they call his hill Cheechako Hill because only a newcomer would be silly enough to look for gold there – and Cheechako Hill it became.

  Millett was now too ill to work. He got Captain Billy Norwood, a Nova Scotia friend, to certify his discovery as required by the mining law, and then went into hospital. Within a few days Cheechako Hill was swarming with stakers who hammered in their location posts so quickly that Norwood himself was able to secure only a wedge-shaped fraction. Millett, unable to work his claim, sold out for sixty thousand dollars. The new owners took half a million from it.

  By summer, every hill in the Klondike watershed was scarred by shovel, axe, and fire, and the Reverend John Pringle, the Presbyterian minister at Gold Bottom, was able to remark dryly that “the only benches not staked are those in my log church.” Bu
t the new claim-owners were mostly newcomers. The sourdoughs, stubborn to the end, continued to shake their heads and explain why there never could be gold high in the hills of the Klondike.

  6

  The Saint of Dawson

  The starvation that Hansen and Constantine had predicted loomed closer. By Christmas 1897 the stock of supplies in the town was running low and the last restaurant had closed its doors. The police were on reduced rations and would arrest no one unless he had his own provisions. There was no escape from Dawson anyway, for once again the town was isolated from the world. An occasional dog-driver could be found who would attempt the trip to Skagway, but the fee for passage was one thousand dollars and the passengers were forced to run behind the sleigh rather than ride upon it.

  As the cold came down and the food diminished and the days shortened and the sun vanished entirely, the community slowed almost to a standstill, like a man in a state of catalepsy. Back in the hills the bears were in hibernation; so, too, was Dawson. Men lay in their bunks until noon, half suffocated by the glowing oil-drum stoves, then ventured forth into the searing cold, their nostrils sheathed by heavy scarves, to hack a six-foot hole in the river for fresh water, or to haggle with the listless clerks in the stores for a handful of beans or flour. They wolfed their food, half-cooked and cold, and often they rotted from the resultant scurvy.

  It cost as much to die as to live. Two men died on Clarence Berry’s claim that winter, and the price of their funeral was astronomical. It cost two thousand dollars to hire a team of six malemutes to take the bodies into town. The nails for the coffins cost eight dollars and fifty cents a pound and the lumber forty cents a foot. Two workmen took six days to hack the graves out of the frozen ground and were paid two hundred dollars in wages.

  By mid-January, flour was so scarce that hunters had to trade an entire mountain sheep to get a sack of it. Speculators had cornered the market and were doling it out a few pounds at a time to keep the price up. But as spring approached, the price began to drop; and one man who had hoarded one hundred and eighty sacks was ruefully left holding the bags.

  The previous fall a small boat loaded with supplies had been wrecked on a sand-bar, and Belinda Mulroney went into partnership with Big Alex McDonald to buy and salvage the cargo. McDonald moved quickly, collaring all the food and leaving her with nothing but several cases of gum boots and whiskey.

  “You’ll pay through the nose for this,” Belinda vowed, and she meant it. That spring at clean-up time when Big Alex arrived at her road house post-haste looking for rubber boots for his workers, she forced him to pay one hundred dollars a pair.

  In April a few hardy souls took advantage of the improving weather to mush in from Dyea and Skagway with articles for sale. They did not bring staples such as flour, meat, or butter (which was selling for five dollars a can), but with a rare understanding of human nature brought luxuries. One man arrived with a lady’s hat made of black ostrich feathers which was snapped up at once for two hundred and eighty dollars. Another brought in several tins of oysters and a turkey, ready cooked and dressed. Oyster stew went on sale at fifteen dollars a bowl. The turkey was put on display at the Pioneer Saloon, where men gloated over it and licked their lips. It was raffled off for one hundred and seventy-four dollars.

  As Healy had predicted, no man starved in Dawson that winter, perhaps because so many had fled the town in the late fall. The real victims were the Indians in the hinterland. On the Porcupine River, north of Fort Yukon, the native women and children were dying on the trail. Once they had been the best customers of the trading companies. Now they were forgotten.

  Hunger’s companion was scurvy, and the need for Father Judge’s new hospital became apparent as miner after miner dragged himself to its open door. The cadaverous priest, who was already earning his name as “the Saint of Dawson,” had never ceased working since he had arrived the previous spring. The task of building hospital, church, and staff residences was enough to tax the energies of a much more powerful man, and yet the priest, in spite of his thin and wasted body, seemed able to perform superhuman tasks. He was his own architect, his own contractor, and his own workman. He did every job, including cooking for those who helped him. He roamed the hills collecting dried grasses to fill his mattresses, and herbs to amplify his small medical stock. He invented a mixture of muslin and sizing, coated with white lead, which took the place of plaster. He made the furniture himself, using rough boards placed on stumps for pews in his church, and tacking heavy white muslin onto frames in place of stained-glass windows.

  And he suffered bitter disappointments. His church was scarcely completed, after months of careful work, before fire destroyed it utterly – on the morning of Trinity Sunday. Everything was reduced to ashes: the altar which he had carved so painstakingly himself with a common penknife, and the hand-hewn furniture – even the vestments for the choir. Without complaint, the priest began once again the herculean task of rebuilding from the ground up. In this he was aided by an immediate collection taken up by the Protestants and Catholics alike and by a substantial donation from Big Alex McDonald, a devout Scots Catholic, who volunteered to pay for the chapel. One of the features of the church, when it was rebuilt, was that the priest refused to collect a penny of pew rent, or to take up collections at any of his services – a sobering decision in a community where on every other occasion gold was tossed to the winds.

  The townspeople helped him to raise the thirty-five thousand dollars needed to complete the hospital. Women roamed through the mining areas, passing the hat; others held bazaars and dances night after night. And, in return, Judge took into his hospital all who required aid. By March there were forty-five scurvy cases alone, jamming the wards and even the hallways.

  By this time, tales of Dawson’s famine had seeped to the Outside. Captain Ray, indeed, had sent a special messenger out by dog-team to tell the world about the Klondike’s plight, and various chambers of commerce in the Pacific coast cities, fearful that the bad news would ruin the spring trade, bombarded Congress with petitions for Yukon relief. Congress responded in December, 1897, by voting an appropriation of two hundred thousand dollars for the purchase of a reindeer herd, which Washington naively believed could be shipped north in time, as meat to assuage Dawson City’s hunger. Thus was unfolded another tortured chapter in the Odyssey of the gold rush.

  The reindeer herd, five hundred and thirty-nine strong, was purchased in Norway, shipped to New York, shuttled across the continent by train to Seattle, and then taken north by steamer to Haines Mission, at the end of the Dalton Trail on the Lynn Canal. The herdsmen, specially trained for the job, included forty-three Laplanders, ten Finns, and fifteen Norwegians. They were a hardy lot. One had crossed Greenland with Nansen a dozen years before and had been awarded a medal by King Oscar for the exploit. Another bore the proud title of world’s most northerly mail-carrier. But none had experienced anything like the trek upon which they now embarked.

  It was May, 1898, before the reindeer reached Haines. Nine months later they were still struggling along the trail towards Dawson, and by this time a series of mishaps had decimated the herd. The swamps, the mountains, the snowfields and glaciers, the canyons and fallen trees which they had to traverse caused them to die by the scores, like the horses on the Skagway trail. Wolves killed several; the Indians shot more; some strangled themselves on their harness. But these were minor mishaps. Most of the animals succumbed to a more ironic fate. In the early stages of the trek, dozens collapsed from lack of reindeer moss, their staple diet, and from then on there was never really enough to eat. As the months wore on and the very dogs dropped in their tracks from hunger, the herders were reduced to picking up raw beans spilled on the trail by the gold-seekers ahead of them and stuffing them, filthy and frozen, into their mouths.

  “Do you think there is any hell worse than this one?” one of the Lapp drivers asked Hedley E. Redmyer, the Norwegian-American in charge of the expedition.

  “No,”
replied Redmyer, “I think this is all the hell I want.”

  And so, after a trek of seven hundred and fifty miles, the expedition staggered into Dawson City – to the amusement of the townspeople. The date was January 27, 1899, and the herd, which had been a year in transit, was now reduced to one hundred and fourteen animals, about one fifth of its original size. In that Starvation Winter the real victims of starvation had been the wretched reindeer themselves, and the greatest paradox, in that season of paradoxes, was that in the end it was the Klondike Relief Expedition itself that required relief.

  Chapter Seven

  1

  The trails of Ninety-eight

  2

  Rich man’s route

  3

  Frozen highways

  4

  “Bury me here, where I failed”

  5

  Overland from Edmonton

  6

  The road to Destruction City

  1

  The trails of Ninety-eight

  On New Year’s Eve 1897, six young Englishmen sat at midnight supper in the moss-chinked cabin on the shores of Great Slave Lake in the Northwest Territories of Canada. They had hoarded three quarters of a bottle of whiskey to see the old year out, enough to allow each of them a single swallow; and now, as the unaccustomed liquor burned their throats, they slowly became aware of the incongruity of their position. If anyone had told them six months before that the New Year would find them imprisoned by winter on the shores of a frozen inland sea as big as Belgium, nine hundred miles north of the nearest town, with the grey-green conifer forest stretching endlessly around them, they would have thought him mad. Yet here they were, unable to advance or retreat until spring, with another two thousand miles of hard travel facing them.