The swift journey down the Yukon to Dawson now took on all the elements of a race. Two large boats contained the personnel, equipment, and hard cash of two leading Canadian banks – the Bank of Commerce and the Bank of British North America – and each was eager to be the first to obtain the bulk of the mining business. Two more contained the printing-presses and staffs of two would-be Klondike newspapers, one of them to be named the Klondike Nugget, the other the Midnight Sun. The Sun published along the way under various names; the Nugget’s bright-eyed proprietor, a bundle of nervous energy named Gene Allen, had left his own boat and press far in the rear, racing on over the ice by dog-team in an effort to be in town, even without equipment, before his rivals. A variety of other boats contained perishables and luxuries which the owners hoped to sell at sky-high prices to the starving and isolated camp. Thirty or forty were loaded with eggs; several more with recent newspapers; one contained fifteen hundred pairs of boots, another was stocked with tinned milk, and a third carried a case of live chickens which the owner had managed to pack intact across the Chilkoot. One man had a scow-load of cats and kittens, a cargo that puzzled most of the stampeders. Signor R. J. Gandolfo, an Italian fruit merchant, had sixteen thousand pounds of candy, oranges, lemons, bananas, and cucumbers. H. L. Miller had a milking cow aboard a barge and was determined that it should be the first in Dawson. Mike Bartlett, a famous packer on the Chilkoot, moved his entire outfit downriver aboard a series of scows fifty feet long, each laden with twenty tons of grain and provisions.
E. A. Hegg, the Swedish-born photographer from Bellingham Bay, Washington, who had moved his portable darkroom across the passes on a goat-drawn sled, was now in the forefront of the race. Hegg travelled in a poling boat which bore the legend VIEWS OF THE KLONDIKE ROUTE. He had photographed the weary climb up the Chilkoot and the tent town of Bennett. He had photographed the flotilla as it set off across the lake. He had photographed the scenes at the canyon and the rapids. Now, as the river broadened and the armada began to come apart, he continued to record the sweep and grandeur of the stampede: a raft crammed with men and animals moored in an eddy, a flag dropping from its mast; a stern-wheeler being guided through Five Finger Rapids by a scow; and the serene face of the river, still shining brightly at midnight when the sun had dipped briefly below the placid hills. Such photographs would make Hegg immortal, but in July of 1898, his floating darkroom was just another dot on the muddy surface of the Yukon.
Below the rapids, for hundreds of miles, the swift-flowing waters were speckled with boats. There were half a dozen to be seen around every bend, from Bennett to Dawson City. In the broad, terraced valley of the Yukon, once so silent, empty, and unknown, a man was never free of the sight of his fellows. All along the banks were camped the Stick Indians, dirty, ragged, and sick-looking, smoking salmon and offering to buy or sell everything and anything from those who floated by. They traded like Arabs, and the cry “How muchee? How muchee?” rang through the low blue hills.
The early spring flowers had given way in June to bluebells and lupins, which ran in violet drifts across the high tableland. The perfume of brier rose was carried across the valleys by the hot summer breezes. Among the rocks and mosses the wild fruit was ripening – clusters of currants, scarlet and glossy black, acres of raspberries and cranberries, and, in the open headland, the creeping vines of blueberries. But by midsummer much of this lotus land lay under a pall of yellow smoke, for the stampeders had left their campfires smouldering, and these touched off raging blazes in the tinder-dry woods until it seemed as if the entire countryside was aflame.
The boats, on leaving the rapids, whisked down that section of the Yukon river system which is called the Lewes, and then, after checking in at the Lake Laberge police post, holsted their sails once more to let the wind sweep them down thirty miles of ice-choked water. The lake, in its turn, led into the twisting Thirtymile, a swift, clear stream of beautiful blue, but so treacherous that it was lined with wrecks for all of its brief length; on July 8 the remains of nineteen boats were counted on a single rock in the main channel.
There were no further obstacles of importance. Five Finger Rapids looked formidable, but few found them really troublesome. Here the river took the shape of an outstretched hand, pointing towards the gold-fields, the five fingers of water frothing between four knuckles of conglomerate rock. The Mounties, who were on the spot as usual to counsel and to caution, warned each boat to follow the right-hand channel, where a swift whirlpool appeared to dash the craft against the rock but at the last moment spun each one about and into the clear. There were few who had time to notice the small cabin perched on the left bank of the river, but some of those who tarried could still discern the name G. W. Carmack on the door.
As the main fleet slipped down the river it was joined, or preceded, by smaller flotillas. Men frozen in for the winter along the upper Yukon were on the move, and, indeed, in the very vanguard of the race. Some had made boats out of their sleds, and one youth was seen sitting on his Yukon sled with his dogs around him, having lashed two logs to the sides to serve as floats. A contingent of about one hundred and fifty boats moved directly behind the crumbling ice, long before the upper lakes gave way. These included the government party under the new Commissioner of the Yukon, J. M. Walsh, the fifty-four-year-old ex-Mountie who had been frozen in at Big Salmon all winter and who was now heading for Dawson post-haste to take over his duties as virtual dictator of the Klondike district.
Other boats poured down from the Teslin River loaded with men who had successfully negotiated the Stikine and Ashcroft trails, while some others slipped down the Pelly and the Stewart, bringing a remnant of the stampeders who had come overland from British Columbia and Edmonton. Like the rivers that fed the Yukon, these small human tributaries nourished the main stream of the stampede.
Twilight and darkness had been banished by the sun, which dropped below the horizon shortly before midnight, to rise again around two o’clock each morning. At the peak of the day the temperature rose to the nineties, and the merciless light beat harshly on the blistered faces of the boatmen. In the steaming forests, mosquitoes, gnats, and blackflies buzzed and hummed in clouds as thick as wood smoke, driving the newcomers to a state of near-dementia. Without the protective covering of a fine-meshed net, sleep was impossible. The mosquitoes were so fat that they seemed more like blowflies, and if a man as much as opened his mouth, he sucked in a horde of insects.
Now the tensions which had subsided momentarily on the calm lakes sprang up again, and bitter feuds arose once more between comrades who had survived previous estrangements. It was as if, with the goal in sight at last, each man was intent on casting off his friends and seeking his fortune in splendid isolation. George T. Moir, a young telegrapher from Stratford, Ontario, who passed down the river with the main flotilla, summed up the situation when he wrote that “brother fought brother and father fought son, and the spirit of forbearance and forgiveness was not known on the trail of land and water into Dawson.”
A man sitting in a boat and watching the banks roll past him like a moving scrollwork could watch in fascination the little human scenes which, like brief tableaux, illuminated and punctuated this final chapter in the movement north:
- Two men caught on the rocks in the middle of the Thirtymile River and, oblivious of their surroundings, fighting with their fists in white-hot anger;
- Two more, on a lonely beach not far from the mouth of the Teslin, solemnly sawing their boat down the middle;
- Ten men at Big Salmon dividing everything up ten ways onto ten blankets, including an enormous scow, which was torn up to build ten smaller scows so that each could go his separate way in peace.
Once again the Mounties were called in to arbitrate these disputes. Two men tried to divide up a single skillet and, this being impossible, were at each other’s throats until a policeman arrived and solved the situation by tossing the implement into the river, to the satisfaction of both. Sometimes, however,
arbitration was out of the question. Inspector Cortlandt Starnes listened for an entire day while six ministers of the gospel, who had formed themselves into a mining company, tried to unform themselves again. The policeman finally threw up his hands in despair and reported that each of the reverend gentlemen had accused all the other reverend gentlemen of telling un-Christian falsehoods.
The names along the river attested to the bitterness which was engendered in these last few miles before the gold-fields. There were a Split-Up Island and a Split-Up City on the Yukon that summer. The former was at the mouth of the Pelly, and here boat after boat put ashore to allow partners to divide up their goods and find new partners. There were so many men on this island that they picked a “mayor,” a man from Worcester, Massachusetts. He wore a red oilcloth heart sewed into the seat of his pants as a mark of good will, so that he could be identified as adjudicator when he stepped between two angry associates tearing up a tent or cleaving a stove in two.
Split-Up City lay at the mouth of the Stewart River, where the Yukon splays out into a confusing tangle of channels and islands and where a boat can be lost for hours or even days. The selection of the wrong channel led to endless recriminations, and the halves of boats lying all along this section of the river were mute evidence of a common disenchantment.
From this point it was only a few hours’ run to the Klondike. Eagerly the stampeders pushed on, travelling without sleep during nights as bright as the days, the tension rising as the miles ticked by until every man was taut as a watch-spring. Each boat kept close to the right bank in case, by error, it should be swept right past the city, for no one knew quite where the city was.
Then at last each in turn swung around a rocky bluff and saw spread before him a sight he would remember all his life. Roaring into the Yukon from the right was the Klondike River, of which he had heard so much. Beyond the river rose a tapering mountain with the great scar of a slide slashed across its face. And at its feet, spilling into the surrounding hills and along the swampy flats and between the trees and across the junction of the two rivers, were thousands of tents, shacks, cabins, caches, warehouses, half-erected hotels, false-faced saloons, screeching sawmills, markets, shops, and houses of pleasure. Here, in the midst of the encroaching wilderness, a thousand miles from nowhere, was a burgeoning metropolis. It seemed a little unreal, shimmering in the June heat, bathed in a halo of sunlight, blurred slightly at the edges by the mists that steamed from the marshes. The stampeders caught their breath, half expecting the whole phantom community to vanish as in a dream. This was the goal they had set themselves; this was the finish of the long trail north; this was where the rainbow had its end. They turned their boats towards the shore – a shore already thickly hedged by scores of other craft – and they debarked, still in a daze, yet inwardly exultant at having, after long vicissitude and much remorse and no little disillusion, set foot upon the threshold of the golden city.
Chapter Ten
1
“Cheechako!”
2
Carnival summer
3
Champagne for breakfast
4
Remember the Sabbath …
5
Graft and the Nugget
1
“Cheechako!”
Dawson was waiting – for what it did not quite know.
From those few dog-drivers who had pierced the winter wall of isolation, the townspeople had heard tantalizing tales of an army of gold-seekers camped on the upper lakes. Everyone sensed that the stampede was reaching some sort of climax; none realized the dimensions of the human torrent.
The spring was unseasonably hot. The sun shone eighteen hours out of the twenty-four, and in the afternoons the temperature rose to one hundred and ten degrees. The snow vanished from the mountains at an alarming rate, and a dense sub-tropical growth sprang up along the hillsides. Through the leafy woods the sound of gurgling water came rippling. Frothing little streams bubbled where no streams had been visible before; small cataracts tumbled from the cliff tops; and far back in the mountains the tributary creeks broke their fetters and ran black between ragged lines of shore ice. On Bonanza and Eldorado, sweating men dammed the unleashed waters and guided them into flumes and sluiceboxes, and began to shovel the paydirt from the winter’s dump into the foaming current. As the water did its work and the dross gravel and mud was swept off down the valley, the greenish glitter of fine gold could be seen caught in the cross-riffles at the bottom of the long, slender boxes.
By May, nature was at work filling up the great Yukon River as if with a thousand pumps. Dark spots appeared on its still frozen surface. And then, on May 6, the great ice mass was gradually forced upward at the centre by hydraulic pressure until it resembled the crown of a road. The water drained off the middle of the slushy surface to the shorelines, where it flowed in channels above the ice. Now the Indians recalled that these flats had been flooded one spring twenty years before, and that they had paddled their canoes across the very spot where the new dance halls were being erected. Everyone saw by this time that Dawson had been built in the wrong place; yet how could it have been built elsewhere? After all, it was built where the gold was.
Constantine came up from Fortymile and walked the riverbank all night, watching the ice rising stealthily, his brow creased with worry. Just as Steele felt himself the protector of the stampeders, so Constantine, in an inexplicable way, felt himself the guardian of the gold camp. Already a wave of panic was sweeping over the community; a bad flood could sweep the city from its precarious position and send horses, tents, dogs, and men hurtling down the ice-choked river.
The water rose to within two feet of the top of the bank, so that Constantine could dip the toe of his polished boot into it. Then, on May 8 at four a.m., there came a crackling roar; the ice, weakened by the shore connection, was forced into motion at the centre by the current beneath. It split asunder, and slowly and smoothly the entire mass started on its long journey towards the Bering Sea. Faster and faster the ice seemed to move until jagged lines like glacial crevasses appeared in the surface. The swift current, catching the ice masses, whirled them about so that they ground into each other; and the black water boiled up from below, spurting in dark fountains between the heaving blocks.
The river was a hissing mass of ice. In the narrow curves the grime-encrusted cakes were squeezed out of the channel and flung high onto the shore. Scenes of natural carnage followed as the banks along Front Street were piled high with mounds of broken ice and snow, covered in muck and gravel, some of the individual pieces higher than a man. As the townspeople watched in horror and fascination, the river crept upward towards the bank.
There was no time for panic, for even as the water started to spill into the city the cry “Cheechako!” went ringing through the hills. The first boat had already arrived, amid the ice blocks still running in the river. With the water lapping at their boots, several hundreds trotted along the bank, following the craft for about a mile before it could be beached. There were five men with dogs and sleds aboard; but, as it turned out, they were from the Stewart River country a scant hundred miles away, and had no news at all. Disappointed, the crowd melted away.
A second cry went up. In between the ice cakes slid a green Peterborough canoe, and again the whole town rallied to the waterfront. The new arrivals were also old-timers, but they had actually been at Bennett earlier that winter. They had dragged their canoe on sleds down the frozen Yukon until the ice broke, then floated down with it, and now for the expectant throng on the riverbank they painted a verbal picture of thousands of men camped as close to Dawson as Lake Laberge, waiting for the ice to break and hoping to steal a march on the main body of stampeders.
A few more boats arrived, and then a lull followed. The ice had jammed at the mouth of the Pelly, stopping all movement.
All during the month of May, while the water rose slowly upon the town, boats in twos and threes slipped in from various wintering-points bet
ween Bennett and Dawson. But, as everybody knew, the main onrush was yet to come. Arriving from his camp on the upper Yukon, the new Commissioner of the Yukon, J. M. Walsh, told the excited town that the police at Tagish had already checked three thousand boats, and more were pouring through every hour.
A few hardy souls bent on winning the race to the Klondike had sledded their outfits down the river before the break-up. Few of these intended to stake claims; they brought eggs, which were worth as much as gold. A Seattle entrepreneur who reached Dawson City with two hundred dozen eggs disposed of them all in less than an hour for thirty-six hundred dollars. He had neglected to include a newspaper, which would have increased his profits, but he consented to give verbal news: war had been declared on Spain, he said, and the cruiser New York had reduced the fortifications of Havana to rubble within three hours. A second arrival, who also offered eggs, denied this story flatly: he insisted the Spaniards were winning the war. He, too, sold his eggs, but the price had already dropped to fourteen dollars a dozen. Within a week so many boats had tied up loaded with eggs that the price was reduced to three dollars. But when one man drifted in with an ancient newspaper soaked in bacon grease he was able to sell it for fifteen.
More boats trickled in. The man with the boots arrived and sold all fifteen hundred pairs at fifteen dollars a pair, which was twice what he paid for them in Montreal. The man with the load of tinned milk was paid a dollar a tin for it. Another made a clear profit of five thousand dollars on women’s hats and dresses. The man who had struggled over the Chilkoot with a crate of live chickens set them up in a box at the police barracks, and a crowd gathered to watch the first egg laid that year in Dawson. It sold for five dollars before the hen had finished cackling. The man who dragged a grindstone over the pass set to work sharpening miners’ picks for an ounce of gold per pick. The newsboy who lugged a pack of papers across the mountains was able to return home, his passage paid and two hundred and fifty dollars in his wallet. The man who brought in the scow-load of kittens confounded the scoffers by getting an ounce of gold per kitten from lonely miners craving the companionship of a pet. But Frank Cushing of Buffalo, who had planned to sell cheap mosquito lotion at ten dollars a bottle, arrived empty-handed. He had tested a sample on himself while floating down the Yukon; it had certainly discouraged the mosquitoes, but had raised such painful skin blisters that he had thrown the entire consignment of ten thousand bottles into the boiling river.
Klondike Page 35
