Klondike

by Pierre Berton

  The camp lay in a deep basin which seemed to have been scooped by a giant paw out of the encircling mountains. In one of these a small notch could be glimpsed; this was the Chilkoot. Sheep Camp was so named because it had once served as headquarters for hunters seeking mountain sheep, and the stampeders, gazing up at the barrier of encircling white, might well feel that these were the only creatures who could cling to the slippery precipice. On most days the peaks were shrouded in a gloomy fog, but when the sun was out and the sky clear, the pale light glinted on the evil masses of glaciers which hung from the rim of the mountain wall. The summit was only four miles distant, but it was a long way up – thirty-five hundred feet above the town of Dyea.

  From the vantage point of Sheep the new arrival could see, spread in front of him and above him, a vast human panorama framed by the snow-grimed hovels of the camp and set against the alabaster backdrop of the sharp-edged peaks. The once-immaculate slopes were spattered by the flyspeck figures of men, and the newcomer, already smarting under the tug of his pack, could view the dimensions of the task that faced him. Within a few days he would be another midge on the mountain inclines, reduced to a cipher by the despotism of the crags above.

  There were seldom fewer than fifteen hundred people in Sheep Camp, whose contours shifted daily with the ebb and flow of the human tide. The tents and shacks were wedged so closely together that it was difficult to squeeze between them, the only open space being the semblance of a street, about sixteen feet wide, which curled haphazardly along the bank of the narrowing river. At times the camp seemed like a giant dry-goods repository. Outside of the log and tarpaper cabin occupied by the Red Front Sheep Camp Supply Company hung a ragged curtain of pots and pails and tall rubber boots, while heaped against the front and almost obscuring the doorway were stacks of kitchenware, stoves, barrels, and coils of rope, along with the inevitable piles of firewood. Private post offices, situated in tents, offered to carry mail to Dyea or the lakes for ten cents a letter. Canvas emporiums offered groceries, hay, rifles, and laundry service. The biggest store of all, a log building with a slat and tarpaper roof run by T. Lubeski, offered everything from drugs, medicines, cigars, tobacco, candy, nuts, and stationery to “first class beds.”

  A potpourri of curious shelters sprang up at Sheep. A group of Maoris, fresh from New Zealand, put up strange huts of wattles to keep out the winds, and a Boston medical man brought along a patented aluminum shelter for the same purpose. It was the less successful, for with any drop in temperature a crust of ice formed on the ceiling and melted upon him when he tried to light a fire.

  Here the professional packers had their club, a shack known as the Packers’ Rest. Here, in one or another of the tents or makeshift sheds, a man could buy a woman for five dollars or a meal of bacon, beans, and tea for two-fifty. Here were fifteen “hotels,” none of them more pretentious than a hut. The best known was the Palmer House, named after its owner, a Wisconsin farmer who had been driven north by hard times just before the stampede began. He had come so far, with his wife and seven children, and, having only eight dollars left, had gone no farther; now, in a shapeless one-room dwelling, he was reaping a fortune. He and his family fed five hundred people a day and slept forty of them each night, jamming them so tightly together on the plank floor that it was impossible to walk through the building after nine in the evening. But, until freeze-up, the Palmer House did boast running water: a brook rippled through one corner of the building.

  By the time the snow began to fall, early in the autumn of ’97, Sheep Camp had become a bedlam of sweating men, howling dogs, and abandoned horses. Cut adrift by their masters, who could not get them over the pass, these starving creatures hobbled about the camp, their backs raw from wet blankets, their legs lacerated by the rocks, stumbling into tents, tripping on guy ropes, seeking food, shelter, and companionship. In the end they were rounded up and shot and their bodies hidden under the swiftly falling snow. All that winter the snow continued to fall. It fell day and night and sometimes for weeks on end, and was packed down, hard as concrete, by the trampling men, so that the valley floor rose slowly and no man knew how far the ground lay beneath him. In midwinter one party punched a hole in the snow with a pole to test the depth, forcing it down for seven feet before it hit bottom. The pole squinched into something yielding. “Bottom” was a dead horse.

  2

  Up the Golden Stairs

  From Sheep Camp the trail rose sharply until in the last assault on the pass it reached more than thirty-five degrees and a man could drop to his hands and knees and still seem partially upright. There were only two points on this four-mile stretch where a climber could properly rest. The first lay beneath a huge overhanging boulder which, because it afforded some shelter, was known as the Stone House. The second was a flat ledge only a few city blocks square at the very base of the ascent, known as the Scales because everything was reweighed here and the packers’ rates increased to a dollar a pound. Loaded animals could go no farther, though one or two horses did make the climb; even sleds and dogs had to be packed over on men’s backs. Thousands of tons of outfits, half hidden by the ceaselessly falling snow, were piled here, waiting for their owners to gather stamina for the supreme effort of the last climb.

  All winter long, from Sheep Camp to the summit, for four weary miles the endless line of men stretched up the slippery slope, a human garland hanging from the summit and draped across the expanse of the mountainside. From first light to last, the line was never broken as the men who formed it inched slowly upward, climbing in that odd rhythmic motion that came to be called the Chilkoot Lock-Step. As on the White Pass, all individuality seemed to end as each man became a link in the chain. Even separate sounds were lost, merged in the single all-encompassing groan which rose from the slow-moving mass and echoed like a hum through the bowl of the mountains.

  This was no Technicolor scene. The early photographs render it faithfully in black and white: the straining men in various shades of dun limned against the sunless slopes. For two months of perpetual twilight the Chilkoot was without tint or pigment.

  To any alpinist, even an amateur one, the ascent of the pass would have seemed child’s play, for it was in no sense a difficult or arduous climb. But the men of ’98 were not mountaineers. Poorly attired in heavy furs and wools, rather than in the light hooded parkas which were far more practical, the novices sweated and froze alternately. Unable to disrobe or bathe, seldom free of the winds that were the terror of the trail, bent double under their packs by day and by the need to curl up for warmth at night, half nourished by cold beans and soggy flapjacks, plagued by the resultant dysentery and stomach cramps – filthy, stinking, red-eyed, and bone-weary, they still forced themselves upward. The delays were interminable. Blizzards and gales made the slopes impassable for days on end. Mishaps on the trail caused the line to move by fits and starts. A single trip from Dyea to Lake Bennett was no great hardship, but the gold-seekers had to suffer it over and over again. It took the average man three months or more to shuttle his ton of goods across the pass, and by that time the word “stampede,” which connotes a thundering herd running untrammelled across an open plain, seemed a cruel misnomer.

  As the winter progressed, the more enterprising men began to hack steps out of the ice wall above the Scales. The first stairs were chopped out of the last one hundred and fifty feet of climb, where the going was so steep that one stampeder compared it “to scaling the walls of a house.” Two partners cut the steps out with axes in a single night and collected more than eighty dollars a day in tolls, and then, after six weeks, took the money, went on a tear, and blew it all. But others came after them to cut more steps and to charge more tolls until there were fifteen hundred steps cut in the mountainside, with a rope balustrade alongside and little shelves where men could step out of line and rest their packs. Yet few stepped out, because a man might have to wait all day before slipping back into place. Each paid his toll in the morning to climb the “Golden Stairs
,” as the stampeders called them, and for this set fee could use these stairs as many times as necessary until nightfall. Most used them only once a day, for it took them six hours to climb a thousand feet encumbered by a fifty-pound pack, and fifty pounds was as much as the average man could handle.

  Up the golden stairs they went, the men from the farms and the offices, climbing into the heavens, struggling to maintain the balance of the weight upon their shoulders, occasionally sinking to their hands and knees but always rising up again, sometimes breaking down in near-collapse, sometimes weeping in rage and frustration, yet always striving higher and higher, their faces black with strain, their breath hissing between their gritted teeth, unable to curse for want of wind yet unwilling to pause for respite, clambering upward from step to step, hour after hour, as if the mountain peaks themselves were made of solid gold.

  The packers took the ascent more casually. Most of them carried one hundred pounds, and one or two performed memorable feats of physical stamina. An Indian packer managed to reach the summit with a three-hundred-and-fifty-pound barrel on his back. A Swede crawled up on his hands and knees with three huge six-by-four timbers strapped to him. An Iowa farm boy on a wager carried a hundred-and-twenty-five-pound plough up the final slope. A Swede named Anderson and a Siwash Indian called Jumbo each made one trip from the Scales to the summit on a bet with a staggering three hundred pounds. They returned in a dead heat, whereupon the Swede immediately hoisted a second three hundred pounds on his shoulders. The Indian stared at him in dismay and retired from the contest.

  The new arrivals quickly learned that their ton of supplies had to be packed in such a way that it could be divided into fifty- or hundred-pound portions. Fresh eggs survived the haul in special canvas-covered cases. Flour was poured into light sacks which, in turn, were placed in heavy canvas sacks sewed so tightly that water could soak into only one quarter-inch of flour, turning it into a protective crust. The two prize cargoes were whiskey and silk, one for the Klondike dance halls, the other for the dance-hall girls. The silk was soldered into waterproof tin boxes and packed in stout wooden crates, but the whiskey presented a more difficult problem, since every packer was intent on smuggling it past the Canadian customs officials. Scores of ingenious devices were designed by San Francisco wholesalers to move liquor across the border. They built special kerosene tins whose spigots produced coal oil but whose interior content was a tin of whiskey. They invented egg crates with false bottoms and white-lead kegs that contained no white lead. In bales of hay they concealed small barrels of liquor, which the customs officials finally detected by means of specially made steel needles attached to long rods. Sometimes the Frisco merchants played it safer, sending a duplicate bill to the Canadian customs men so that the whiskey would be confiscated and the customer would have to order a second shipment.

  Whiskey and silk, steamboats and pianos, live chickens and stuffed turkeys, timber and glassware, bacon and beans, all went over on men’s backs. If a man was too poor to hire a packer, he climbed the pass forty times before he got his outfit across.

  A representative list of groceries required for one man, to be lugged over the mountains, suggests the magnitude of the task:

  400 lbs. flour

  50 lbs. cornmeal

  50 lbs. oatmeal

  35 lbs. rice

  100 lbs. beans

  40 lbs. candles

  100 lbs. granulated sugar

  8 lbs. baking powder

  200 lbs. bacon

  2 lbs. soda

  36 yeast cakes

  15 lbs. salt

  1 lb. pepper

  ½ lb. mustard

  ¼ lb. ginger

  25 lbs. evaporated apples

  25 lbs. evaporated peaches

  25 lbs. evaporated apricots

  25 lbs. fish

  10 lbs. pitted plums

  50 lbs. evaporated onions

  50 lbs. evaporated potatoes

  24 lbs. coffee

  5 lbs. tea

  4 doz. tins condensed milk

  5 bars laundry soap

  60 boxes matches

  15 lbs. soup vegetables

  25 cans butter

  But this was not all. There were a steel stove, a gold-pan, three nests of granite buckets, a cup, plate, knife, fork, two spoons, two frying-pans, coffeepot, pick, hand saw, whipsaw, whetstone, hatchet, two shovels, three files, draw-knife, axe, three chisels, twenty pounds of nails, butcher knife, hammer, compass, jack-plane, square, Yukon sled, two hundred feet of rope, fifteen pounds of pitch, ten pounds of oakum, and a canvas tent.

  And there were clothes: three suits of heavy underwear, a mackinaw coat, two pairs of mackinaw trousers, a heavy rubber-lined coat, a dozen pairs of wool socks, half a dozen pairs of mittens, two over-shirts, two pairs of snag-proof rubber boots, two pairs of shoes, two pairs of blankets, four towels, two pairs of overalls, a suit of oilskin clothing, and five yards of mosquito netting.

  When he had dumped his day’s load on the summit and marked it with a pole, each man turned back down again, for there was no shelter at the top. The return trip was swift and precipitous; the stampeders simply tucked their boots beneath them and tobogganed down the slope on their rumps, gouging deep chutes in the snow, and hitting the bottom in a matter of minutes.

  Inevitably, human ingenuity won over nature. By December, 1897, the first crude tramway – an endless rope wound around an upright wheel and turned by a horse moving in a circle – had been opened by Archie Burns, a sourdough from Fortymile and Circle City. Burns’s tramway set the pattern for later and more ambitious devices. By May there were at least five of them operating over the pass. One consisted of a heavy cable, powered by a steam engine, which carried two buckets each capable of holding five hundred pounds. Travelling some three hundred feet above the ground, the buckets made the round trip from the Scales to the summit in about fifteen minutes. Another, operated by the Dyea and Klondike Transportation Company, consisted of an endless chain of buckets – hundreds of them – each carrying a hundred pounds. These soared a mere fifty feet over the line of struggling men. A fourth, worked by a gasoline engine and a rope wound around a drum, dragged sled loads of equipment up the ice of the pass directly beside the climbers. By far the most ambitious device was the one built by the Chilkoot Railroad and Transportation Company, whose president, Hugh C. Wallace, later became United States Ambassador to France.

  Wallace’s tramway did not open until the spring of 1898, but it made it possible for a man’s goods to be transported aerially all the way from Canyon City to the summit of the pass. Its copper steel cable, supported by towering tripods anchored in concrete, was originally dragged up, a coil at a time, on the backs of mules and men. There were fourteen miles of it, with only one splice. At the time the tramway was built, it had the longest single span in the world, twenty-two hundred feet from one support to the next. Steam engines at each end supplied the power, and men struggling along the trail could gaze up and see carloads of goods hurtling through the snow-filled air eighteen hundred feet above them. The cars, each loaded with three hundred pounds, were dispatched at the rate of one a minute, day and night, so that by spring freight was being dumped on the summit of the pass at the rate of nine tons an hour.

  3

  One of everybody

  On top of the pass a silent city took shape. The “buildings” were towering piles of freight; the “streets” the spaces left between. The blizzard that rarely ceased covered the goods soon after they were dropped, making it necessary for the owners to leave poles or long-handled shovels marking their property. Even these were ineffectual, for almost seventy feet of snow fell on the summit of the Chilkoot that winter, and before spring two “cities” of goods had been buried and could not be retrieved until the thaw.

  The pass at this point was a trench one hundred yards wide, through which a spray of snow whirled. On either side the mountains rose for another five hundred feet, their tops masked by clouds and blowing snow. Occasio
nally the weather cleared, and then, for a few brief moments, a watcher on the summit could look back towards Dyea, thirty-five hundred feet below, or forward towards Lake Lindemann, twelve hundred feet below, and see the unending line of men merging with the horizons. Then the storm would close in again and nothing would be visible for more than ten feet.

  The piles of freight provided the only shelter on the summit. Firewood was priced at a dollar a pound to cover the cost of hauling it seven miles by sled from the timberline on the Canadian side. Those who could afford to paid two dollars and fifty cents for a stale doughnut and a cup of weak coffee (five times the price of a three-course meal in Seattle), gulped it down, and were away, for no one wished to tarry. Only the North West Mounted Police held fast to their post. The presence of these men in their huge buffalo coats with the brass buttons of the Force marked the summit as the international border. The first Canadian post had been established farther inland at Tagish Lake, but when the United States failed to take possession of the headwater lakes, the Canadian government placed the Mounties on the mountaintops. It was this summary action that, in the end, established the much contested border at this spot. The sight of a tattered Union Jack fluttering in the storm, and the blurred outlines of a sentry with a Maxim gun, always on duty, was the first indication the stampeders had that they had reached Canadian territory.

  Here, every man was required to pay duty on the outfit he had hauled across from the Alaskan side. The prices ranged from three-quarters of a cent on a pound of corn syrup to sixty cents for a barrel of flour. Many an American resented having to pay such prices. One man, whose total duty came to four dollars and ninety cents, paid up with a five-dollar bill and demanded change. The policeman in charge had none.