“Well,” came the reply, “you’d better cough it up; you can’t rob me more than the law allows.”
The Mountie went to some trouble to borrow the necessary ten-cent piece but then walked outside and asked to inspect the traveller’s outfit.
“As you were so particular about that ten cents, suppose you open it up,” he said. “It’s just possible you may have been overcharged. There may possibly be another ten cents due to you and, combining that with a nickel, you can buy a cup of coffee on the trail.”
In the end the luckless stampeder paid more than twenty additional dollars for goods he had not declared. He had no choice: when he tried to protest he was told that if he did not pay, his goods would be confiscated and he himself would be sent back into American territory.
In spite of the Mounties’ general reputation for honesty, a few stampeders insisted there was graft at the customs house. One writer, P. Bernard, told the Dyea Trail that after he had paid duty of $20.40 he was asked for an additional five dollars “for sinkerage.” As he handed over the money he asked what sinkerage was.
“For this,” said the customs collector, dropping the bill into his pocket.
Others were high in their praise of the good sense of the police at the summit. Captain Jack Crawford, the noted “poet scout” of the western plains, moved two tons of goods over the pass under difficult conditions. He hired packers to take his outfit to the summit while he followed on horseback. He managed to ride as far as the Scales, at which point his horse broke through the snow and rolled over on him, causing some injuries. It was so cold by this time that everyone had fled from the area of the pass for shelter; even the tramways had stopped operating because of the severity of the storm. But Crawford was so worried about his supplies, on which no duty had been paid, that he hoisted his bedding on his back and made the climb through the whirling snow, in spite of the protests of his comrades. When he reached the customs house he discovered that it was empty; the storm was so fierce that all business had ceased and the broker’s office was covered by twelve feet of snow. The Mounted Police invited him in for a roast beef dinner and told him that because he was so well known they had let his goods go through with the packers on credit. Crawford was elated. He exclaimed: “I would not have missed seeing the Chilkoot summit and climbing it, and sliding down again to its base, for a thousand dollars.” He told the press that “the Canadian officials are neither strict or offensive and not one party in five hundred had their outfits closely examined. If a man has common sense he need have no trouble with the customs officers.”
At night, when the summit was silent and empty, when the climbers had retreated to Sheep Camp on the south or moved on down to Crater Lake on the north, the police held their ground in a tiny hovel perched in the shadow of the overpowering mountains on the rim of the precipice. So thickly did the snow come down on cabin and tents (six feet in a single night, sometimes) that Inspector Bobby Belcher, the officer in charge, had to post a sentry to shovel it away as it fell, to prevent the sleeping men from smothering to death. One storm raged for two months, stopping almost all movement on the trail, but still the police clung to their post, their hut dripping like a shower bath as the snow was melted by its warmth, while the supplies, the blankets, the documents, and the records were slowly coated with a creeping fur of mildew.
On one occasion the detachment was driven from its post by the shrieking gale. The Mounties retreated into the lee of the mountains, pitching their tents on the ice of Crater Lake, a cupful of frozen water in an old volcanic hollow just below the peak of the pass. Here in a below-zero blizzard they crouched while the water rose six inches above the ice, soaking their bedding. Unable to move their tents in the storm, they pulled their sleds inside and slept on top of them. Then, when the wind abated, they returned to their perch on the mountain.
The police checked twenty-two thousand men across the pass that winter – Scots and Canadians, Yanks and Greeks, Swedes and Australians, Japanese and Kanakas. And there were women, too: stocky soubrettes heading for the dance halls of Dawson, their charms concealed beneath their heavy clothing … lithe Indian girls who carried seventy-five pounds on their backs and scaled peaks more nimbly than some of the cheechakos … an old German woman, almost seventy, in a full dress and a lace apron … and, on the lower slopes, a middle-aged woman, all alone, who tugged a hand sled onto which a glowing stove was fastened, so that whenever she stopped she was able to warm her hands and enjoy a hot meal. Jack Crawford, trudging back to the summit from Lake Lindemann, met “a handsome girl, straight as an arrow, blue eyes, curly blonde hair, dressed in boy’s clothes – blue shirt, no coat, with a belt with a .44 Colt pistol strapped around her waist.” Her brother walked ahead of her, carrying a guitar.
Mixed in among the real gold-seekers were fake stampeders sent up from Skagway by Soapy Smith to fleece the argonauts. These confidence men mingled with the endless line of plodding figures, tugging sleds behind them or carrying authentic-looking packs that seemed to be bulging with Klondike gear. Actually the packs were stuffed with feathers, hay, or shavings, while the sleds were specially built dummies designed for fast travelling and a quick getaway. The canvas lashed down over them concealed a hollow shell from which protruded the occasional axe-handle, at the proper angle, to preserve a bona fide effect.
It was difficult for many of the weary climbers to resist the blandishments of Smith’s gang along the trail. The con men built fires for them to warm themselves by, and put up tents to keep out the piercing winds, and constructed seats or ledges for the tired packers to rest on, with shelves at the back so that a gold-seeker could ease the weight of his pack from his shoulders. To a physically demoralized man toiling up the straight and narrow path of the Chilkoot, such temptations could not but appear inviting. On a single mile of trail one observer counted four shell games in operation, each surrounded by an eager knot of players.
As each man, with his ragged beard and sunken eyes, looked as sinister as the next, the devil himself could have moved among them without remark; and if his minions had any distinguishment, it was that – being well fed and unburdened – they appeared slightly less villainous than the shaggy, red-eyed men upon whom they preyed. Old Man Tripp, the saintly looking sinner, was here in his element, working with a younger colleague, Frank Brown, nicknamed “Blue Jay.” One would carry a cane which unfolded into a three-legged support, and the other a book which opened into a counter twelve by eighteen inches across. Thus equipped with the traditional con man’s “tripe and keister,” Tripp ran the game while Blue Jay acted as shill. Tripp could slip a rubber pea out from under the shells so deftly that no one could tell it was gone. As it was impossible for anybody but Blue Jay to win at the game, the two men made daily clean-ups equal in size to those of some of the Eldorado kings. One Skagway pioneer wrote that, as Soapy’s men never lifted a shell for less than twenty dollars, it was not uncommon for the gang to realize two thousand dollars in the space of a day.
Every variety of the human species had a representative on the pass that year. On one hand there was an English nobleman, fastidiously dressed in tweeds, with a valet who, in the late fall, fed him morsels of food while he reclined beneath a net to protect his skin from insects. On the other, there was Wilson Mizner, wit, bon vivant, and gambler, who was later to become famous as a Broadway playwright and as the owner of Hollywood’s Brown Derby restaurant. Mizner, scarcely old enough to vote, was the son of an aristocratic Californian family, a towering figure of a man who had already, by his own account, been a pimp and an opium-smoker, as well as a crooner in the bar-rooms of the Barbary Coast. Mizner’s ton of goods on the Chilkoot included certain luxuries; his main item of baggage was a dance-hall girl from San Francisco named Rena Fargo.
Like Soapy Smith and his men, Mizner was not so much interested in finding a gold mine as he was in finding a man who had already found a gold mine. Many of those who crossed the pass with him had the same idea, although their methods w
ere more legitimate. A newsboy struggled up the slopes with a sackful of old newspapers which he hoped to sell at high prices to miners starved for information. Another managed to lug a grindstone over the summit; it had occurred to him that by spring most of the picks in the Klondike would need sharpening. Frank Cushing of Buffalo took ten thousand bottles of mosquito lotion across the slopes. He had bought them for twenty cents each and hoped to sell them in Dawson for ten dollars to the insect-maddened prospectors.
Some showed a profit long before they reached the gold-fields. One woman brought a banjo over the pass and paid her way by giving impromptu concerts as she went along. She wore a man’s tweed coat and heavy pants, but made one small concession to her femininity by carrying, under one arm, a fancy mirror.
Arizona Charlie Meadows planned to arrive in the Klondike with a fortune. He carried a portable bar with him which he set up on every possible occasion, raising the price of the drinks in direct ratio to the height of the trail. At Canyon City, for instance, Arizona Charlie served whiskey for twenty-five cents a shot, but at Sheep Camp the price was doubled, and by the time the Scales were reached every drink cost seventy-five cents. The price, no doubt, would have risen to a dollar at the summit, but a sudden flood was the finish of Charlie’s outfit. This did not deter him, for he was an old western scout and sharpshooter inured to vicissitudes, whose family had been wiped out by Apaches and who had himself fought hand to hand with Geronimo. A veteran of both the Buffalo Bill and the Pawnee Bill wild-west shows, he picked up loose change whenever he needed it by shooting the spots off a playing-card at thirty feet.
The singleness of purpose with which these men and women flung themselves at the mountain, time and time again, would have astonished a dispassionate observer. It was as if each was pulled by invisible strings from whose insistent tug he could not free himself. The worst hardships, the most racking personal tragedies often failed to dampen the fanaticism which impelled each one. A man lay on the trail for all of one day, in agony from a broken leg, while hundreds passed him by, unseeing, their eyes fixed firmly on the road ahead, almost as if each was wearing blinkers. At last a professional packer, Tom Linville, who had carried heavier loads and walked farther than any of them that day, happened by, and picked up the sufferer and trudged uncomplaining all the way to Dyea with his hundred-and-eighty-pound burden.
The harsh story of the trials of an English couple named Rowley who attacked the Chilkoot that winter illustrates the intensity of the common desire to reach the Klondike.
The Rowleys’ first misfortune occurred when the S.S. Corona, on which they were Dyea-bound, was shipwrecked. The couple lost their entire outfit, but, rather than turn back, they attempted to earn enough to keep going by freighting goods across the pass. The effort was too much for Rowley, who took sick at Sheep Camp, but this only caused Mrs. Rowley to redouble her efforts as a packer. She managed to move thirteen hundred pounds of goods as far as the Scales, often working twenty hours at a stretch and seldom leaving the trail before two in the morning. The strain was too great, and before her husband was fully recovered, she herself was worn out from fatigue. Rowley resolved to send her back to San Francisco. Her brother wrote that he had sent her one hundred dollars to the Dyea post office, but she did not receive the money. This was too much to endure. Distraught and enraged at the supposed theft, Mrs. Rowley bought a gun and tried to shoot the postmaster. She was shipped to Sitka, the Alaskan capital, on a charge of attempted murder. En route she leaped from the steamer, but her husband pulled her from the water, and she was shortly released from jail on grounds of insanity. While all this was going on, the Rowleys’ entire second outfit, purchased with money earned from freighting, was stolen at Lake Lindemann. Did this deter them? Not in the least. As the Reverend J. A. Sinclair of Skagway wrote to his wife: “You can imagine the intensity with which the gold fever possesses these men when I tell you that Rowley still intends to go on to Dawson.”
4
Death beneath the snows
The greatest crime on the Dyea Trail that winter, as on all the trails, was not murder but theft. On the American side of the border any man caught stealing from his fellows faced the swift verdict of a miners’ meeting.
The most macabre of these summary trials was held within a tent saloon at Sheep Camp on February 15, 1898. Here, in the capricious flicker of smoking oil lamps and candles, three men, Wellington, Dean, and Hansen by name, went on trial for their lives, accused of theft. The circumstances of their apprehension were as freakish as the environment of their inquisition. Their capture had been effected through an odd quirk of the weather: a thin coating of ice on the side of their stolen sled had acted like a varnish on a painting to reveal the half-obliterated name of the rightful owner.
Into the tent, with its leaping shadows – the scene was worthy of a Goya – each prisoner was conducted separately. The first, Dean, was swiftly freed, since it was obvious that he had but recently joined the other two. But Wellington’s and Hansen’s stories conflicted so seriously that both were found guilty. The verdict was scarcely rendered when Wellington broke from his captors, whipped out a hidden pistol, tore a hole in the tent wall with a knife end, and, firing over his shoulder at the pursuing pack, flew off down the trail. It was a futile gesture. As the leading man reached him, Wellington turned the gun on himself, blowing most of his face off and falling into the arms of Wilson Mizner’s brother Addison, an architect who was to become the most flamboyant figure in the Florida real estate boom of the 1920’s. The two men plowed into a near-by tent, one dead, the other drenched with blood.
Three Mizner brothers were all witnesses to this incident. Edgar, the Alaska Commercial Company’s manager at St. Michael (who was known as the Pope of Alaska because of his arrogant manner), had persuaded Wilson, Addison, and a third brother, William, to join him in Dawson. It was the start of two eccentric careers which have been chronicled several times in the folk-history of the continent.
The meeting, on reconvening, sentenced Hansen to fifty lashes rather than death, and a small wiry man with dark beady eyes volunteered to carry out the punishment. Outside the blood-spattered tent, a great circle was formed as the thief, stripped to the waist, was tied to a post; men climbed up on cabin roofs to take photographs, while one woman squeezed into the front row and asked the prisoner to look at her as she snapped him with her Kodak. Then a hush fell over the buzzing crowd as the man with the whip stepped up.
“I do not do this because I like it,” he announced, “but because I like honesty and feel that it must be preserved in this community to save lives.”
His actions belied his protestations, for he seized the knotted thong and swung it with his full weight across the miscreant’s naked back so that two purple stripes, showing every twist of the rope, followed each blow. The miserable Hansen writhed and leaped in the air as the whip descended, but this only seemed to increase the passion of the executioner, who shrieked and howled crazily as the vigour of his blows increased. By this time the crowd, too, was caught up in a frenzy, some shouting “More!” while others cried “Enough!” until the Mizners moved forward at the fifteenth stroke and freed the prisoner. Apparently unconcerned about his ordeal, Hansen consumed a monstrous meal and was then marched down the trail, smoking his pipe and wearing a large placard on which had been scrawled the word THIEF.
Wellington was buried at once, and an itinerant minister preached a solemn two-minute sermon ending with the words: “He that maketh haste to be rich shall not be unpunished.” It was not a particularly propitious text, as Addison Mizner was quick to discern. “I thought this odd,” he wrote dryly, “as everybody on the trail, including myself, was on a gold rush.”
The remarkable thing about this affair was that it was the exception rather than the rule. There were hardships on the trail, certainly, but comparatively few deaths and, considering the circumstances, little major crime. Soapy Smith’s men did take some money from the stampeders; there were a few suicides a
nd some murders on the American side; there were a few score deaths from meningitis, influenza, and pneumonia; a large number of men turned back rather than face the final moments of the climb; but a great multitude, leaderless and unorganized, passed over the summit of the divide like an army on the march.
It is equally remarkable that only two natural disasters marred the course of the winter’s progress across the Chilkoot, although both were spectacular in the extreme.
The first occurred in September, 1897. For years, travellers had been fascinated by a prodigious glacier that hung like a brooding monster over the pass. Harry de Windt, a British explorer who crossed the Chilkoot in the mid-nineties, saw it suspended insecurely between two granite peaks, looking “as though a child’s touch would send it crashing into the valley below.” The face was three hundred feet high, “indescribably beautiful” because of the shifting light effects – turquoise and sapphire on dull days, dazzling diamond-white in the sunlight, delicate mauve, pink, and green in the twilight hours. From this scintillating mass there issued occasional reports like the distant rumble of cannon, sometimes faint, and sometimes so deafening that the watchers below expected the entire ice sheet to tumble into the valley below. In the end, that is what happened.
During the summer the warm weather and heavy rains had caused a lake to form within the heart of the glacier. Then the autumn winds, whistling through the mountains, tore half an acre of ice from the edge of the mass. With a noise like a thousand cannon, a wall of water descended upon the pass. The reverberations woke the twenty-five campers who had pitched their tents on the dry ground of an old gorge, and these raced for the hills as a wave twenty feet high tore down upon them. The roaring waters picked up the Stone House as if it were a pebble and moved it a quarter of a mile down the valley, smashing to pieces about forty tents and outfits, including the entire gambling casino and liquor supply of Arizona Charlie Meadows. But there were only three deaths.
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