Klondike

by Pierre Berton

  The whiskey gone and the New Year properly launched, each man returned to his separate shack and to bed; but one of them, a Cambridge University law graduate named William Ford Langworthy, paused long enough to scribble some reflective notes in his diary.

  “I wonder whether Dolly and the others are at St. Moritz dancing the old year out as we did in 1897?” he wrote. “This world is a farce – what a difference between this New Year and my last. At St. Moritz last year and now here, – of all places in the world this is the last I thought I’d be in on New Year’s Day. I wonder where I shall be this time next year – and in what condition – shall we have found gold? or blank? … I did not imagine how lonely one can feel until today, when about six thousand miles from home and friends. I hope to goodness we ‘strike it rich’ within a couple of years.…”

  All over the northwest corner of the continent, in an unexplored wilderness area almost a million and a half square miles in size – half as big again as the subcontinent of India – thousands of others were thinking similar thoughts. A scenic artist from Boston, for example, found himself trapped for nine months in an Eskimo village of beehive huts on the upper delta of the Yukon River. A policeman from New York City found himself dragging a sled-load of provisions and machinery across the creaking surface of the terrible Malaspina glacier on the southern underbelly of Alaska. A schoolmaster from Edinburgh found himself living on wild berries on the banks of the frozen Nisutlin River in the southwest corner of the Yukon Territory. A Methodist preacher from Farnellville, Ohio, found himself with his wife and daughter and a scarecrow of a horse on the summit of Laurier Pass in the heart of the northern Rockies. A ventriloquist from Chicago found himself in a huddle of tents on the banks of the Rat River in the tundra country north of the Arctic Circle.

  The complete implausibility of each man’s situation made the most absurd incidents, the most unexpected scenes, appear commonplace. The gold-rush trails were marked by various episodes which have a tinge of madness to them. There was, for instance, the little circus that wended its way north towards the Klondike along the Ashcroft trail through the wild interior of British Columbia – a circus complete with tightrope dancer, music box, striped marquee, performing dogs, and a beautiful black horse with a white star on its forehead which was lost in the olive-green flood of the cold Skeena. And there were the four young English aristocrats who built a log cabin on the Kowak River along the Arctic Circle five hundred miles northeast of Dawson, named it Quality Hill, and trained an Eskimo as a valet to black their mukluks and serve them coffee and cigars while they lay abed till noon, amusing themselves by shooting at stray mice and at knotholes in the log walls until their castle in the wilderness resembled a Swiss cheese.

  As the white fog of winter settled over the north, the stampede ground to a halt. From the Cariboo to the Arctic, from the Mackenzie to the Bering Sea, from the Rockies to the Pacific, thousands of William Langworthys sat huddled in lonely cabins awaiting spring. Major J. M. Walsh, the ex-Mountie appointed Commissioner of the newly created Yukon Territory, could not reach Dawson and fidgeted the winter out at the mouth of the Big Salmon River. Jack London could not reach it either, and wintered on the Stewart River, where his cabin became a mecca for miners, who listened open-mouthed as he told stories memorized from the classics. Nor could Rex Beach reach Dawson; he wintered at Minook Creek several hundred miles downriver from the town. Here he encountered a pessimistic newspaperman who told him: “There’s no drama up here, no comedy, no warmth. Life is as pale and as cold as the snow. Back in ’49 there was something to write about, but we’ll never read any great stories about Alaska and the Klondike. This country is too drab and dreary.” Most men in that winter would have agreed; there seemed to be little drama in that chilly vigil. Only when they talked or wrote about it years later did it begin to take on a romantic aura. Then they told each other over glasses of beer or snifters of brandy, or at meetings of sourdoughs organized to recall old times, that it was an experience they would not have forfeited for all the world’s lost gold.

  There was no single trail of ’98; there were dozens. The stampeders advanced on the Klondike like a great army executing a giant pincer movement, and those who took part in it poured in from every point of the compass.

  The main force, planning a frontal assault, was concentrated in the teeming ant-hills of the White and Chilkoot passes. Far to the west, small platoons and companies were making minor flanking movements over the pitted glaciers that sprawl across the mountainous southern coastline of Alaska. But the great left arm of the pincer, several battalions strong, was advancing up the Yukon from the Bering Sea by steamboat.

  A central column was forcing its way northward through the heart of British Columbia, following the route of a forgotten trail cut out by the Western Union Telegraph Company many decades before in an attempt to link Siberia with the United States by cable. This column was joined by a second, moving by steamboat, dog-team, and foot up the Stikine River from the Pacific coast and heading for Teslin Lake on the headwaters of the Yukon.

  The great right arm of the pincer, at least a brigade in strength, was launched from Edmonton. From this point it fanned out into companies, platoons, and sections, trickling through the Peace River country, struggling through canyons and rapids of the Liard, pouring down the Mackenzie to the Arctic Circle, and filtering over the continental backbone at a dozen different points, almost to the edge of the Arctic Ocean itself.

  Thus, in that strangest of all winters, the once empty northwest was swarming with stampeders. There were stampeders at Dutch Harbor on the Aleutian Islands of Alaska, and there were stampeders at Fort Chipewyan on Lake Athabasca, more than two thousand miles to the east. There were stampeders at Old Crow on the Porcupine River, two hundred and fifty miles due north of Dawson City, and there were stampeders on Disenchantment Bay, which lies three hundred miles due south. There were stampeders dragging their sleighs up the Gravel River, where the Canol pipeline was built during World War 11; there were stampeders moving up Jack Dalton’s trail, which now forms a spur of the Alaska Highway; and there were stampeders deep in the South Nahanni Valley with its caves and its canyons.

  They were everywhere. Relics of their passing remain here and there in the form of a crumbling cabin or a rotting grave-marker on a silent riverbank or in a lonely forest. But their great legacy was less tangible and more enduring. In a very real sense they broke down the barrier of the frontier and opened up the northwest.

  2

  Rich man’s route

  The rich man’s route was the all-water route, and to anyone with money it seemed the easiest route of all. It was a long way round: three thousand miles from Seattle to St. Michael, and seventeen hundred more upstream to Dawson City; but in theory no one needed to walk a foot of the distance: it was a boat ride all the way.

  Yet those who chose to buy their way around the left flank forgot or never understood the brevity of the navigation season on the Yukon River. Eighteen hundred stampeders took the all-water route in the fall of 1897, but only forty-three reached the Klondike before winter and, of these, thirty-five had to turn back because in the last frantic moments they had flung their outfits aside and could not replace them in Dawson.

  No one who left the United States after August 1 reached the Klondike by the all-water route that season. One of the first ships to leave, after the news was out, was the Excelsior, but only ten of her passengers attained their goal. Most of these were newspapermen. John D. McGilvray of the New York Herald and his staff artist Max Newberry, for instance, managed to arrive in Dawson, but only by changing steamers four times on the river and hiring Indians to pole them upstream for sixty miles.

  When freeze-up came, some twenty-five hundred persons (including several hundred old-timers) were stranded along the seventeen hundred miles of river between Norton Sound and Dawson City. At least one quarter of these were at the end of their financial resources. None would reach Dawson until the following July; so
me would never reach it at all.

  The embattled mayor of Seattle, W. D. Wood, who had narrowly escaped lynching on the docks at San Francisco, reached St. Michael with his boat-load of stampeders on August 29. Here, on the bleak volcanic beach, the passengers realized for the first time that a steamboat would have to be built before they could embark for the Klondike. A hundred tents were pitched and a mess set up to feed the horde in a style which one described as “worse than a cheap Japanese restaurant.” It now became clear to all that the voyage was no luxury cruise. If the passengers wanted to reach the gold-fields they would have to work like Trojans, unloading the cargo and pitching the tents and even helping to construct the river steamer on which they had so trustingly bought passage.

  And so there was chaos, confusion, distrust, and discontent. Wood tried to abandon the party, but was held almost by physical violence and made to stay as a sort of hostage. It took three weeks to build the steamboat, which was christened Seattle No. 1 but unofficially dubbed The Mukluk because of her uncanny resemblance to that piece of Eskimo footwear. A smaller vessel, the May West, was under construction at the same time, and there was considerable rivalry to see which expedition would start off first. The May West won by a day, but it really made no difference. The two boats were not able to navigate more than half the distance to the Klondike before they were frozen fast. Dawson City was eight hundred miles and nine months away.

  Around these two steamers a jerry-built cluster of cabins and shacks sprang up. Officially titled Woodworth in honour of Mayor Wood and Captain Worth of the May West, it was generally referred to as Suckerville by the disgruntled inhabitants. Indignation meetings had already become a regular feature of the Wood expedition; and now more were called to force the mayor to sell, at Seattle prices, supplies which he had hoped to retail in Dawson at a handsome profit. Wood, who by now must have been heartily sick of the word “Klondike,” was obliged to agree to these terms. As he pointed out mildly, most of his passengers had been helping themselves anyway. There were undoubtedly many moments when he wished he had never relinquished his post as Seattle’s chief magistrate for so-called adventure in the North.

  As soon as opportunity afforded, the ex-mayor escaped from Suckerville and made his way on foot back to St. Michael. It was an arduous trip, but anything was better than the ceaseless recriminations that dinned into his ears day and night. His passengers were forced to stay on the riverbank until spring, by which time two of the ladies had married two of the gentlemen. These were the only members of the expedition who gained any reward from the venture. At three a.m. on June 25, 1898, embittered and discouraged, they all finally trudged down the gangplank at Dawson City, exciting considerable comment by their tattered clothing patched with old flour sacks. It had taken them three hundred and fourteen days to reach the Klondike by the all-water route, and those who had any funds instantly booked return passage for home.

  While Wood’s “Suckerville” was being established, the new boom town of Rampart City was taking form about one hundred miles farther up the river at the mouth of Minook Creek. Had it not been for the Klondike, Minook would itself have caused a stampede from the United States. Here in August, 1896, while Carmack was on Bonanza, a Russian half-breed named Minook was scooping three thousand dollars from a hole eight feet square and fifteen feet deep. In 1897, with steamboats frozen in all along the river, Rampart was expanding. Its population was approaching one thousand, its poorest cabins were selling for eight hundred dollars, and its lots were fetching twelve hundred. Its “mayor” was the same Al Mayo who had been McQuesten’s partner on the Yukon for so many years. He presided at the miners’ meetings and settled their disputes, including one memorable argument between Sidney Cohen and his partner, Rex Beach. The latter had been dumped at Rampart that fall with a fur-lined sleeping-bag, a rifle, a dogskin suit, and a mandolin. He and Cohen got on each other’s nerves so badly that a meeting had to be called to straighten the matter out. Mayo, who had a dramatic flair for old-time justice, decided that they should settle the issue by personal combat. The two men accordingly stripped to their underwear and exchanged a few misplaced haymakers. Then, their sensitivities assuaged, they shook hands and called it a day.

  Early in September a curious craft with an equally curious crew chugged into Rampart. This was the tiny stern-wheeler St. Michael. She was manned entirely by amateurs who knew nothing about steam-boating – a lawyer, a doctor, several clerks, some salesmen, and one lone tramp printer. These people had been passengers on the ocean steamer Cleveland, known on the coast as a ship of ill-fortune. The Cleveland lived up to her reputation. On reaching Alaska, her passengers were dismayed to learn that the transportation company would not allow them to take more than one hundred and fifty pounds of luggage up the river to Dawson. This left them in a perplexing quandary, since each had, at great expense and trouble, brought along a full ton of appurtenances, ranging from gold-pans and pickaxes to the ubiquitous soup cubes, and none wished to surrender so much as an ounce. Accordingly, sixty of them formed a limited stock company and purchased the St. Michael from a near-by Jesuit mission, solely for the purpose of moving their personal freight to Dawson. They elected a crew from among themselves to take the little craft up the river, while the remainder boarded the N.A.T. Company’s John J. Healy.

  By the time the St. Michael reached Rampart, fourteen of the stockholders had had enough. The little freighter had been in difficulties ever since Norton Sound, where the ocean swell lifted her stern so far out of the water that the paddle-wheel whirled helplessly in the air. The decampers removed their share of the cargo and went prospecting on Minook Creek, where one immediately froze to death. The remainder insisted on steaming ahead. They had no fuel because the transportation companies had tied up all the cordwood on the river; but by one of those pieces of incredible happenstance which marked so many Klondike expeditions, they discovered a seam of coal in the banks of the river, and this kept them going – even in the face of two boiler explosions and one fire.

  On September 19 the unhappy little boat met the Healy coming back downstream, having failed to cross the Yukon flats. Six of the stockholders of the St. Michael were on board, and they insisted on rejoining their comrades and heading back up the river again in the teeth of the oncoming winter. Twelve more had been set ashore by the Healy at Fort Yukon, and when the St. Michael reached this river port these twelve climbed on as well. Now, jammed with passengers, crew, and freight, the little craft pushed on to Circle City. By the time the settlement was reached it was almost October and most of those aboard had lost their enthusiasm, yet nineteen die-hards still persisted in pressing forward. As one later wrote, “we were all monomaniacs on the subject of getting to Dawson.”

  At this point the situation on the river was completely confused. Half the population of Dawson was trying desperately to get away, so that the ice-choked waters were thick with boats fleeing from the Klondike. These boats met other boats jammed with men and women equally desperate to reach the gold-fields at any cost, many of them so heavily laden with shovels, gold-scales, food and clothing, bedding, whiskey, and other paraphernalia that they could make little headway against the current.

  The men who remained aboard the St. Michael had purchased the outfits of all who had disembarked, and now nothing would do but they take every last scrap of freight with them. The boat was thus so badly overloaded that when she backed out into the river she could not move an inch against the flow, but stood motionless, her ancient engines throbbing and shuddering with futile effort. The captain refused to go farther unless half the passengers got off, but this suggestion was of little use since “each man wished his neighbour to remain but wanted to go himself.” When the captain quit in disgust, the passengers elected a new one. It took him four hours to move the vessel one mile. The engineer resigned, too, and again a new one was elected. He placed the safety valve on the boiler twenty pounds higher than his more cautious predecessor, who had survived two explosions. A
steam connection began to leak, and a panicky amateur fireman cried out: “Save yourselves! The boiler’s bursting!” All hands clambered for the rails, while the new captain, trying to reach shore, rammed the boat into a sand-bar. And that was the end of the cruise of the St. Michael.

  All this while, some hundreds of miles downriver, the members of the ill-fated Eliza Anderson expedition were having their own trials. At St. Michael they had rejoined the other vessels of their odd convoy – the yacht and the steamboat – only to discover that the river steamer W. K. Merwyn, scheduled to take them to Dawson, was not large enough to accommodate them all. A makeshift scow with a bunkhouse built on top had to be pushed ahead of the vessel.

  On the morning of October 10 the Merwyn’s voyage began, but she was hardly into the web of the delta when the river froze around her. The steamboat went into the winter quarters of the Alaska Commercial Company, while the scow was tied up at an Eskimo village. It slowly dawned on the passengers that this would be their home for the eight months of the sub-Arctic winter. They reacted in various ways to this dismal news. One of them, an artist, became so morbid that he wandered aimlessly about in the snow until he died. Another, a dog-driver named Jack Carr, simply traded his outfit for a team of huskies and mushed off through sixteen hundred miles of wilderness to Dawson, thereby setting a new long-distance record for Alaska.

  The remainder of the Eliza Anderson party, being made of sterner stuff than the artist but possessing less stamina than the dog-driver, simply sat and rotted until spring. Most of them had been so numbed by the vagaries of the journey up the coast that this latest episode in the expedition’s chequered career only served to desensitize them further. They hibernated on the fog-shrouded banks of the river, and when the ice broke they set off again, mechanically, for the gold-fields. The urge to reach the Klondike had become a habit more than an obsession, and when at last on June 30 they walked glumly down the gangplank at Dawson most of them turned right-about-face and went home again. By fall only three members of this expedition were left in the gold-fields. Several had died of scurvy, one had hanged himself, dysentery claimed another. The rest had worked their way or paid their way to the Outside. Only two actually dug for gold. One of these, oddly enough, had started out with less than any of the others – had, indeed, thrown his last ten cents into Elliott Bay out of Seattle, leaving for the north with only the clothing he wore. His name was Thomas Wiedemann, and he returned eventually to Seattle with five thousand dollars.