Klondike

by Pierre Berton

  By late fall, however, most stampeders leaving Edmonton by the overland route headed for Peace River Crossing, 320 miles away. The best route took them by boat down the Athabasca and up the Lesser Slave rivers, then across the seventy-five-mile expanse of Lesser Slave Lake, and finally overland via a last seventy-five-mile portage that led them to the banks of the Peace.

  When the lakes and rivers froze, most parties were forced to cross the Swan Hills by way of the so-called Chalmers Trail. The government of the North West Territories, under pressure from the merchants of Edmonton, assigned a party under T. W. Chalmers, a road engineer, to hack out a 120-mile trail between Fort Assiniboine and Lesser Slave Lake. By the time the route was finished in July, 1898, the main body of stampeders had moved ahead of the trail blazers and the “trail” itself was an almost impassable pathway “landmarked with carcasses” and littered with broken boxes, smashed sleighs, and discarded harnesses. Tree after tree had been blazed so that disappointed gold-seekers might scrawl out their feelings about the Edmonton route in poetry and invective. “Due north to Dawson: starvation and death; due south, home sweet home and a warm bed,” one such inscription read.

  Here the familiar stench of rotting horseflesh, the telltale perfume of the Klondike stampede, began to permeate the route to the Peace. Of the four thousand horses that expired or were shot on the overland routes, two thousand died of starvation in the Swan Hills. The country was devoid of feed. At some points the maddened animals gnawed the bark from the trees or staggered on, sustained only by scraps of frozen moss, until they dropped in their tracks. With the trail blocked by stranded parties, those who followed were forced to detour, hacking new trails out of the forests as they pressed on towards the Swan River. By spring, the Chalmers Trail had become a two-way route, with those in the rear crying “Forward!” and those in front shouting “Back!” as in the days of Horatius. Close to one hundred men gave up before reaching Peace River Crossing and trudged disconsolately back to Edmonton, where the Bulletin was still trumpeting the advantages of the back-door route to the gold-fields.

  For the hardy few who pressed stubbornly onward after the Peace was reached, there was virtually no trail at all. Four main routes led out of either Fort St. John or Peace River Crossing to the Liard country, each of them about four hundred miles long. A Canadian guidebook told of a road all the way north to Fort Selkirk, where the Pelly flows into the Yukon, but this was fiction. The Edmonton town council had hired W. P. Taylor for $950 to open a trail from Peace River Crossing by way of Fort Nelson to the Pelly Banks, but his occasional slashes on trees were the only sign of the roadway that some promoters insisted ran clear to the Klondike. Taylor remained loyal to his backers. When, on his return trip, he met a party moving north, he urged them on.

  “They’re taking lots of gold out of the Nelson,” he said cheerfully, “and on the Liard they’re making thirty dollars a day.”

  It was one thousand miles from Peace River Crossing to the junction of the Pelly and the Yukon. Few made this full journey. Some set their faces homeward; others chose the alternative route down the Peace and the Slave to Great Slave Lake and thence down the great Mackenzie to the Arctic. Those who continued onward found themselves in a savage land of muskeg, bogs, and deadfalls, where acre upon acre of dead spruce lay fallen crosswise, the trunks so close together that it was impossible for the horses to avoid scraping their legs to shreds on the rough bark. The animals, clambering and leaping constantly over these miles of obstacles, died as easily as the mosquitoes of summer, and it was said that one could trace their trail over the deadfalls by blood alone.

  At the very top of British Columbia the Liard was reached, and up this wild watercourse with its hot springs, its canyons, its whirlpools, and its rapids the remaining stampeders now forced their way in home-made boats. Up they went through Hell’s Gate and the Grand Canyon by means of boathooks and pike poles and even their own fingers thrust bleeding into the rock crevices. Up they went through the Rapids of the Drowned, where boats capsized and men vanished into the foam. On they went past banks so precipitous that there was no footing at water level and they could only pull their craft from the clifftops by means of hundred-foot towlines. On they went across Devil’s Portage, where the river, twisting through a horseshoe gorge, became unnavigable and everything had to be dragged for eight miles over an intervening mountain.

  By the time the boatmen reached Liard Post on the Yukon border, they were at the end of their tether. The route now led up the Liard’s tributaries towards the mountain divide that blocks it off from the Pelly, but only the hardiest dared face it. Dozens began to head back to civilization, striking south through British Columbia to Glenora and the sea coast. In the spring of 1899 men were still faltering through the forests, trying to escape from the trap; some, disabled by sickness, frostbite, and hunger, were imprisoned in little cabins along the banks of the Liard and its tributary, the Dease, emaciated, scabrous, and foul with scurvy. When a local trading company outfitted a relief expedition to succour this human wreckage, about sixty suffering stampeders were gathered up and taken to Telegraph Creek. Some were so ill or so lame that they had to be lifted on and off the pack horses and scows. Of the thirty-five deaths on the overland trails out of Edmonton in the stampede years, twenty-six occurred in the Liard-Cassiar area and most of these were from scurvy.

  Of every five men who set out for the Klondike by the overland routes, only one reached his destination. One party that did get through, for which there is a complete record, was not composed of gold-seekers at all but of North West Mounted Policemen. The patrol, headed by Inspector J. D. Moodie, was under orders to compile a gazetteer of information on the best routes to follow across the Rockies and through northern British Columbia to the gold-fields and to supply the government with all the reliable information that anybody leaving Edmonton would need. The inference was that the stampede would go on for years, but by the time Moodie reached his objective it was all over. Nor was the route he chose, by way of Fort St. John, Fort Grahame, Sifton Pass, and the Dease River, one which the Edmonton merchants believed in or which many stampeders followed.

  Moodie started out in September, 1897. It took him almost fourteen months to cover the sixteen hundred miles to Fort Selkirk on the Yukon. He and his men chopped their way through the wilderness, paddled, climbed, waded, and trudged, their clothes in tatters, their horses half dead, their packers constantly deserting them, and their constitutions weakened by illness. In one instance Moodie and his men had to hack their way through three hundred miles of fallen timber. At another point a forest fire almost wiped them out, and only an eleventh-hour change of wind saved them from roasting to death. Their ponies devoured poisonous weeds and expired on the spot. One of their guides went mad and vanished into the forest. Snow threatened to halt them for a full winter, but Moodie fought on through the drifted mountain passes, killing his pack horses to feed his sled dogs and hiring more teams and sleighs to keep going. His superiors thought him lost, for he was out of touch with the world for months, but in the end he crossed the mountains alone and reached the Pelly. Down the great turbulent river he raced in a canvas canoe until the sharp-edged floes tore into the sides and rendered it useless. He built himself a raft and kept on going, but it was too bulky and the ice in the channel blocked its passage. He spent four hundred and fifty dollars to buy a Peterborough canoe from another stampeder and plunged on, half starved, half frozen, his underclothing caked to his body and his uniform in rags. The current grew fiercer, and the ice began to suck him under. He flung the canoe aside, donned his snowshoes, and plodded onward over the ice-sheathed boulders and through the fast-forming drifts. He would not stop for sleep, and when at last he arrived at Fort Selkirk, dazed with fatigue, Inspector Moodie had been on the move without respite for forty-eight hours. The date was October 24, 1898.

  6

  The road to Destruction City

  The alternative route from Edmonton led straight down the Macken
zie river system towards the Arctic Circle. The trails fanned off towards the west and over the mountain divides like the branches of a tree, with the Mackenzie as its trunk. Though all these water routes were far longer than the trails through the Peace River country – longer by as much as one thousand miles – a larger contingent reached the Klondike this way. Many a stampeder learned to his regret that the shortest path to the gold-fields was not necessarily the easiest and that simple routes in the end turned out to be more complicated than those that seemed tortuous on paper. Of an estimated 885 who took the water route to the gold country, it is said that 565 actually reached their destination, although some were eighteen months and more in transit. One couple actually conceived and gave birth to a child somewhere between Edmonton and Dawson City.

  Those who chose this circuitous passage first moved overland from Edmonton one hundred miles towards Athabasca Landing. Along that trammelled pathway, where the tall pines often shut out the sun, a river of humanity flowed in two directions, shuttling freight, machinery, animals, trail outfits, and even steamboats from the railhead across benchland and sloughs to the banks of the Athabasca.

  Here, as elsewhere, the cosmopolitan character of the stampede could be glimpsed. A. D. Stewart, the former mayor of Hamilton who had become a public figure as a result of laying the formal charges against Louis Riel after the Saskatchewan Rebellion of 1885, was leading the Mackenzie River-Klondike Expedition (Arthur Heming’s original party) and planning to build a steamboat on the Athabasca to bear the wistful name of Golden Hope. Jim Wallwork, a cowboy from the foothills, actually hauled his steamboat with him; she was the Daisy Belle, a North Saskatchewan stern-wheeler, which he and his partner had bought in Edmonton and which they confidently expected would take them to Dawson. For Otto Sommer, of Chicago, this was a honeymoon trip, albeit an arduous one. It had been forced upon him when his girl friend refused to let him depart alone for the flesh-palaces of the Klondike; he solved the problem by marrying her and taking her with him. For Frank Hoffman, a recent immigrant from Germany, the pitfalls of the trail held no terrors – he was a veteran of both the Sedan and the Metz engagements, and even the fact that his wife was pregnant did not deter him.

  There were embezzlers on the Athabasca Trail and there were paupers, and these fared no better and no worse than the wealthy boat owners or honest trailbreakers. Somewhere in the crowd was the Edmonton agent of a New York insurance company who had decamped with his clients’ funds. And moving along the same route was a Massachusetts carpenter named Frank Nash who had arrived in Edmonton with less than five dollars in his pocket and was working his way north in stages by plying his trade. There was a Dutchman who stood six foot seven in his stocking feet and a French Canadian who was only four foot six (and who was presented on Good Friday with a hot cross bun for being the smallest stampeder on record); and there was one black man on the trail, very much in demand because he entertained his companions with Negro melodies.

  By the spring of 1898, the Hudson’s Bay settlement of Athabasca Landing had swollen to ten times its original size. Tents bleached the river banks for two miles, and between the tents half-formed pathways had been chopped out of the timber bearing crude signs labelling them “The Strand,” “Piccadilly,” and “The Bowery.” On either side of the settlement were camp grounds known as East and West Chicago, so named because men from that city outnumbered their fellows four to one. On the north side of the river, along a winding trail (identified by a scrawl of red paint on a spruce tree as “Fifth Avenue”), were camped several parties of boat builders from Ontario. Southeast of the Hudson’s Bay post lay a line of shacks known as Bohemian Row, “the first thing in the village to resemble a street.” Here – where, it was said, ten languages were spoken – the tenants included an artist, two miners, three carpenters, two ex-tramps, an actor, a Boston policeman, a one-time temperance lecturer, a banjo-playing Englishman, a butcher, and “seventeen dogs of every species known to science.”

  At its peak Athabasca Landing boasted two hotels, a restaurant, four general stores, a butcher shop (which did duty as a concert and dance hall), a barber shop, two bakeries, and half a dozen thriving boat yards where every type of craft was under construction, from ungainly scows to sixty-foot steamboats capable of carrying fifty passengers. “I confess I think no part of the world, Liverpool included, can boast so many different models,” one correspondent reported to Edmonton. “It looks as though every man who ever had an idea that he was a boat engineer was here and had tried his hand and the result is boats – beautiful, practical, pathetic, ludicrous.…” There were more than one hundred craft, and by late May, the entire flotilla was drifting down north. Within two months it had lost its bunched-up character and was scattered for thirteen hundred miles along the Mackenzie River system.

  One hundred and ten miles of rapids faced the boatmen on the Athabasca River before Lake Athabasca was reached. The boats churned around the great boulders of Pelican Rapids, where the spray was flung twenty feet into the air, and then forced their way through Boiler Rapids, Strong Rapids, Crooked Rapids, and Grand Rapids until they reached the Big Cascade, where the current raced over a ledge of rock at twenty-five miles an hour. Boats were mired, crushed, abandoned on sand-bars, and wrecked on rocks. One man was drowned; many turned back. The rest surged on down the broadening river, past the oozing and mysterious tar sands that hung from the banks like treacle, then over the hard portages of the Slave River, whose rapids were so fierce that white pelicans bred in masses on an island in the centre where neither man nor beast could reach them, and finally out onto the leaden expanse of Great Slave Lake, where the storms were as fierce as those on the ocean and the tossing waters vanished over the rim of the horizon.

  Once they had crossed this dismaying inland sea, the stampeders found themselves swept into the Mackenzie proper, the great waterway that would lead them to the Arctic. Out of the mountains, from the west, into the mile-wide river poured the turbulent Liard. About eighty men turned up this stream, to fight their way through canyon and rapids in the hope of joining those who had come overland from the Peace (and who were in many cases fleeing the Liard country in favour of the Mackenzie). The remainder continued on down the main river, where hidden seams of coal smoked and smouldered perpetually, where great blue ice-lenses lay exposed on the tottering clay banks, where ghost-like thickets of scorched aspens and “drunken” forests of spindly spruce reeled at awkward angles in the permanently frozen soil, where Indian children ran naked and babbling along the sandy shoreline, and squaws like Oriental idols squatted unsmiling on high green cliffs.

  Halfway down the Mackenzie, not far from the site of Old Fort Norman, a second contingent peeled off the main body and turned west to assault the continental divide by way of the Gravel River (later renamed the Keele). Through this gaunt mountain country no white man had yet penetrated, but now a thin human seepage was trickling in. Some ninety-five men assaulted the divide and of these perhaps seventy or seventy-five eventually got through. But for many the Klondike was another year away.

  The hardships, both psychological and physical, were so great that no man could say he remained unaffected. Since no one could haul more than a hundred and fifty pounds at a time over that seven-thousand-foot barrier, the trip had to be divided into ten-mile stages, each man doubling and re-doubling in his tracks between camps so that, in many cases, men trudged a total of twenty-seven hundred miles in order to move their outfits three hundred. It was bitterly cold in the mountains – so cold, indeed, that during one noon-hour break, Ernest Corp of Hamilton watched an inch-long icicle form on the spout of a coffee pot from which steam was also issuing. It is small wonder that almost every party that attempted to cross the divide by way of the Gravel River split up before the gold-fields were reached, and the divisions were often so bitter that equipment was sometimes chopped in half and boats sawn in two.

  On the far side of the divide lay the rock-strewn Stewart, and when spring came, those who
had managed to cross the mountains plunged down its unknown canyons and rapids aboard home-made scows caulked with spruce gum and winter underwear. They travelled blindly down the boiling stream, never knowing what the next bend would reveal, their numbers diminishing as they whirled on, until the remainder reached the Yukon River and thence, in August and September of 1899, managed to arrive in Dawson City.

  This was an eddy in the main current of the stampede down the Mackenzie. The majority kept drifting deeper and deeper into the North, borne along without effort on the tawny breast of the mother stream. On they floated, into the land of the Dogrib Indians, who pitched their ragged tents on islands for fear of an invisible enemy stalking the forest glades; on past the yawning mouth of the Great Bear River, pouring its cobalt waters out of another fresh-water ocean athwart the Circle; on past blue-green forests and rust-red ponds, salt sinkholes, dried-up channels yellow with weeds, and ribbed cliffs jutting blackly a quarter mile above the water’s crest; on down the widening river with nothing to do but loll against the rudder bar until the silt-laden waters suddenly splayed out into the skein of the delta within hailing distance of the Arctic Ocean, and the long eleven-hundred-mile slide from Great Slave Lake was at an end.

  The boats quit the Mackenzie here to turn up its two northernmost tributaries, the Arctic Red River and the Peel, whose headwaters stretched back like slender blood vessels into the labyrinth of the Mackenzie and Richardson mountains. This was sullen country: the bald, wind-swept land of the Crooked-Eye Indians, who lived in hide tepees and believed in a ghostly cannibal, black-faced and yellow-eyed, who gobbled women and children. Across this dun terrain, with its lifeless plains of muskeg broken only by the occasional stunted spruce and a few thin groves of skeletal willows, the winter snows shifted ceaselessly. Long before the main body of the stampeders reached the divide, the snow was upon them. Some turned off the Peel and headed west up its tributary, the Rat, hoping to cross the mountains and drift down the Bell and the Porcupine into Alaska to reach the Yukon River. Others pushed farther up the Peel, heading for other tributaries, the Wind or the Bonnet Plume, which led to passes in the mountains directly north and east of Dawson City.