Klondike

by Pierre Berton

  But Henderson’s descendants still live in Dawson City. His son Grant, a huge bear of a man, died shortly after World War 11, frustrated in his life’s ambition to find the mother lode from which he believed the gold of the Klondike came. Year after year Grant Henderson vainly drilled into the bowels of the great dome from which his father had first spied the radiating pattern of the tributary creeks. But no one has ever found the mother lode of the Klondike; there is little doubt that the veins were ground away long ago by glaciation and erosion.

  Grant Henderson took various jobs in Dawson. The Yukon Consolidated Gold Corporation, which in the end came to control the lion’s share of the creekbeds for dredging purposes, hired him occasionally. The company’s president was a tiny white-haired Englishman named G. Goldthorpe Hay, who periodically visited his Yukon holdings, looking strangely out of place in his wing collar, director’s suit, and gum boots. When the mud of the creeks got too deep, Grant Henderson was hired to carry the president about on his shoulders. It makes a curious tableau: the great bear-like prospector lumbering through the mosses of the creeks which his father had first happened upon, and the diminutive financier clinging to his broad back; but it is doubtful if the symbolism of the scene impressed itself on Henderson. He was an uncomplicated man, like his father before him, interested only in pursuing that kind of quest which has no ending.

  2

  The legacy of the gold rush

  “I had thirty-five cents in my pocket when I set foot in Alaska, but I gave that to a mission church at Dutch Harbor. I did not have so much when I left the country more than two years later.… I made exactly nothing, but if I could turn time back I would do it over again for less than that.”

  So wrote Walter Russell Curtin thirty years after the gold rush, which he had witnessed as a youth aboard Pat Galvin’s ill-fated steamboat the Yukoner. Curtin was frozen in for eight months on the river, a prisoner of winter on an icebound vessel. It grew so cold that mattresses had to be uncrated from the cargo to insulate the cabin walls. Curtin saw one man in a neighbouring camp go mad from the continual darkness and another die of scurvy. The tension drove the captain to such eccentricities that the crew mutinied and overthrew him. But when he recalled these scenes in his fading years, Curtin realized that the experience was the high point of his life.

  Thousands like him looked back on the Klondike adventure for the rest of their days with insistent pangs of nostalgia. In all the written memoirs of the gold rush there is scarcely one note of regret, except the general regret that it ended so soon. Though few of the writers found any gold, it turned out in retrospect to have been a golden period for them. And the times that were remembered with zest and affection were not the easy times in the dance halls, but the hardest times: the chilling days on the passes, the thrilling moments in the rapids.

  In this sense, as in so many others, the stampede resembled a great war. It was impossible to emerge from it unchanged, and those who survived it were never quite the same again. It brutalized some and ennobled others, but the majority neither sank to the depths nor rose to the heights; instead, their characters were tempered in the hot flame of an experience which was as much emotional as it was physical.

  As is so often the case in war, they gave all the proper and conventional reasons for going, and set out for quite different ones. Because it was an age when a man must offer a practical motive for a foolhardy enterprise, they talked glibly of digging for gold and getting rich quick. To aspire to great fortune in the nineties was, as respectable and as honourable an emotion as is patriotism in wartime; it excused and made sensible the wildest kind of goose-chase, and tens of thousands were ready for a fool’s errand in the drab, adventureless days that followed the panic of ’93. Like soldiers marching to the insistent beating of a drum, they set off with pounding hearts, mouthing pat slogans and often enough believing them, until months later when the adventure was at an end they came to solve the personal riddle of why they had gone to the Klondike.

  One forgets sometimes, on seeing the bearded faces in the old photographs, or on listening to the bent old sourdough recall the good old days, that the great majority of those who took part in the stampede were young men in their mid-twenties. It is this youth that helps explain the impetuosity of the gold rush. The argonauts were still young enough to want to search for something even though they did not exactly know what it was they were searching for. They were still young enough to be gullible, young enough to be foolhardy, young enough to be optimistic, young enough to be carefree. They were young enough to see a mountain and climb it, though they had never climbed a mountain before; to see a glacier and cross it without a second thought; to build a boat and attempt a rapid, though they had never wielded axe or paddle in their lives. The Klondike was their Everest; they sought to reach it because it was there.

  Long before they attained their goal the subtle realization must have dawned upon them that there was no pot of gold at the end of their personal rainbow. The adverb “when” that distinguishes the early diary entries becomes an uncertain “if” as the journey progresses. “When I’m rich” is displaced by “if I should be lucky enough to strike gold;” then, as the journey grows harder, there is no further mention of gold at all.

  Nevertheless, thousands continued to push northward, sometimes to their own apparent loss. Francis George Berton, of Saint John, New Brunswick, was one of these, a bearded young civil engineer fresh out of college. He had, on graduation, applied for a teaching job at Queen’s University at Kingston, Ontario, a position he had long coveted; but before any reply came he was off to the Klondike with a train-load of his fellow townsmen. He tried to drag his sled up the slushy surface of the Stikine River, but by the time he reached Glenora the whole land was a heaving swamp and he realized that attempting further passage by this route would be pointless. He turned back to the coast, then headed north to Dyea. At the foot of the Chilkoot Pass a letter caught up with him: the sinecure was his; he had only to return to civilization and a comfortable lifetime awaited him. He looked up at the pass, sheathed in its cold mantle of freezing cloud, with the ever-present human garland draped across it. Then he shouldered his pack and continued on, knowing that he was changing the current of his life. He was one of the breed recalled by Bert Parker in his memoirs of the White Pass trail “who finish anything they start, or die in the attempt.” Parker himself was such a one. Fifty years after the rush, in which he took part as a teen-age boy, he was told that he was dying of cancer. Suddenly it occurred to him that he should write for his grandchildren the story of those golden days. And so, propped up at a typewriter, clinging to life as he had once clung to the mountain trails, refusing to quit until the goal was reached, he pecked out his memories. When the manuscript was finished, he died at peace.

  To thousands of others the Klondike also became a sort of symbol. They strove to reach it as a matter of personal honour, and, like soldiers who fear to flinch more than they fear to fight, they stubbornly refused to retreat before the natural forces that threatened their passage. There is much about the Klondike story that is sordid and shameful and much more that is ludicrous. And yet there gleams through the whole tale this unifying thread of steadfastness.

  This is the common characteristic that joins the thousands who poured up the coast and over the mountains like flocks of sheep; even more, it is the distinguishing mark of the shepherds who convoyed them. It can be seen in Tom Powers, the ebullient captain of the Eliza Anderson, roaring that he will sail his creaky vessel to St. Michael come hell or high water, and in Dixon, the bellicose master of the Bella, forcing his little steamboat through the grinding ice masses of the Yukon. It can be seen in the giant figure of Steele, bestriding the passes like a colossus, and in his colleague Moodie, hacking his way northward through the frozen jungles of the Peace River. It can be seen in Ogilvie, the incorruptible servant of the people, and in Judge, the inexhaustible servant of God, and in a dozen others of the calibre of Ray, Abercrombie, and C
onstantine. One other characteristic unites these men: not one of them showed any personal interest in digging for gold; in each case, duty was the main tenet of their personal creed. They are the great heroic figures of the gold rush.

  Others, equally heroic, are all but forgotten. In the annals of the stampede there are two instances of men who followed no beaten pathway to the Klondike but hiked over country which no man, native or white, had traversed before and which no man traversed again.

  One of these was Frank Neill, who was shipwrecked at Juneau with the eleven other technical school boys whose fathers had sent them around Cape Horn on a private schooner chartered from a smooth-talking Philadelphia promoter. All the others fled back to civilization, but Neill himself was determined to press on north. He bought himself a map of the Alaska coast and picked out the new gold-camp of Atlin, British Columbia, as his immediate goal. It did not occur to him to travel in any direction other than a straight line and it did not seem to matter that the straight line would take him directly across the dreaded Taku Glacier and then over the unexplored Llewellyn Glacier, one of the largest ice-fields south of the Arctic. Miraculously, he arrived at his destination, went to work cutting logs, and then continued on to the Klondike to establish a profitable sawmill business.

  The other expedition was even more astonishing. In the fall of 1897, Fred Fysh of London, Ontario, and his brother-in-law, Charles Williams, found themselves working a small creek flowing into the sea well to the north of the Seward Peninsula. They had travelled north from San Francisco on a small schooner to St. Michael. Then, hearing of a minor strike farther around the coast of Alaska, they had continued on north of the Arctic Circle. Their real destination, however, remained the Klondike. When freeze-up came, they realized that they had two choices only: to return at once to St. Michael by an overland route or to strike southeast to the Canadian Yukon. They unhesitatingly opted for the second plan and so, while thousands of others along the rich man’s route holed up in cabins, waiting out the winter, Fysh and Williams pulled a hand-made toboggan across half of Alaska, crossing wind-swept tundra, snow-choked valleys, and ridge after ridge of unknown mountains until they reached Fort Yukon and the comparatively easy highway of the river. No man had ever come that way before, nor is there a record of any other stampeder who followed in their footsteps.

  The days of ’98 underline Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s words, that “all actual heroes are essential men, and all men possible heroes;” for, in one sense, every man who reached the Klondike was a sort of hero – or would be considered so today. If, in 1972, anyone wishes to earn the plaudits of the popular press or to see his name enshrined as the central figure of a magazine article, he has only to repeat the achievements of the argonauts of sixty years ago: to haul a ton of goods on his back up the Dyea Trail and over the Chilkoot Pass in the dead of winter, to construct a serviceable boat of green lumber whipsawed by hand on the shores of Lake Bennett, to tempt the swift river and its rapids for more than five hundred miles, and, on arrival at the Klondike’s mouth, to build a log cabin capable of withstanding temperatures of sixty below zero. It is doubtful if a single person has repeated this full exploit since the turn of the century, but seventy-five winters ago twenty thousand greenhorns did just that.*

  They returned from the Klondike, as young men return from war, wise beyond their years. In the brief span of the gold rush they learned more about life, more about their fellows, and more about themselves than many mortals absorb in threescore years and ten. There was scarcely one of them who at some moment on the bitter road north had not descended into hell and risen again. They learned the hard way the same lesson that the early prospectors at Fortymile and Circle City had learned before them, until at last the slogan of the Yukon Order of Pioneers, “Do unto others as you would be done by,” came to have a real meaning for each of them.

  In some ways the great trek represents one of the weirdest and most useless mass movements in history. Something like fifty thousand men wasted something like one thousand dollars each on a fruitless errand. By 1901 the combined gold-fields of the Yukon Territory had scarcely produced that much money.

  But the stampede also brought its benefits. It was the making of Alaska and, to a lesser degree, of the Canadian northwest. The great strikes that followed, at Nome and Fairbanks, at Keno Hill and Atlin, were spawned by the Klondike discovery. The North was flung wide open by the stampeders. Men clawing their way across the Valdez Glacier found copper and stayed to mine it. Men trudging through the wilderness of the Peace found land and stayed to farm it. The Klondikers were the first to see gold on Yellowknife Bay, cobalt bloom on the cliffs of Great Bear Lake, and lead-zinc ore at Pine Point – all sites of future mining development.

  Half a dozen cities owe their growth to the gold rush. Tacoma, Portland, Victoria, and San Francisco all felt its impact. Vancouver’s population almost doubled during the stampede period. Edmonton sprang from a hamlet of twelve hundred to a flourishing town of four thousand. The greatest effect was felt in Seattle; in 1899 alone, twelve hundred new houses mushroomed up in the city, and the merchants, who before the rush had sold goods worth an annual three hundred thousand, now found that their direct interest in outfitting amounted to ten million.

  There were some subtler side-effects. In the United States the output of Klondike and later of Alaska gold from Nome produced the same results that Bryan had hoped for in his advocacy of free silver. It meant the end of the depression as much as it meant the eclipse of the Bryanites. North of the border, the transcontinental rail traffic that the Klondike inspired became an important factor in the great western Canadian boom that ran unfettered for more than a decade.

  The real legacy of the stampede is less tangible, however, for it has to do with the shaping of human character. Sprinkled across the continent were thousands of men stamped indelibly with the Klondike experience. One such was Norman Lee, the thirty-six-year-old Chilcoten rancher who tried to drive two hundred head of cattle north to the Klondike along the Ashcroft Trail. Fighting mud, poisonous weed, and starvation, Lee and his wranglers somehow managed to get most of their beef to Teslin Lake. By then the animals were not much more than skin and bone, but Lee determined to push forward. He built two scows, butchered his meat, and sailed off down the long corridor of the lake, with a fresh breeze carrying him north. Three days later a storm came up, both scows were wrecked, the beef was lost, and Lee, who had operated a prosperous ranching business in British Columbia, was destitute. He sold everything he had, including his only overcoat, to raise enough money to buy provisions for the long journey back. And off he went, dragging his sleigh behind him – retracing the same dismal route through the ghost-towns of Glenora and Telegraph Creek and then down the slushy Stikine to Wrangell. By the time he reached Vancouver, after three months of hard travel, all he had left in the world was a dog, a blanket roll, and a dollar; but he did not seem particularly concerned with his plight. After the Klondike experience, there was very little that would faze Norman Lee. He started afresh again in the Chilcoten, and when he died at the age of seventy-nine – a prosperous rancher and merchant – he had become a legend in his own time.

  It is not surprising that an extraordinary number of public figures in the last half-century have had a Klondike background. The Mayor of San Francisco during the earthquake was a Klondiker, and so, for seven terms, was the senior senator from Nevada. During the 1930’s a Speaker of the Canadian House of Commons was a veteran of ’98; so was the Premier of British Columbia. During the Great War, Joe Boyle, the sparring-partner of Frank Slavin, enriched by mining concessions, personally recruited and equipped a machinegun battalion of Klondike pioneers. They became the most heavily decorated group of combatants in the Canadian Army; more than sixty per cent received medals for bravery.

  The Klondike experience had taught all these men that they were capable of a kind of achievement they had never dreamed possible. It was this, perhaps more than anything else, that set them apart
from their fellows. In the years that followed, they tended to run their lives as if they were scaling a perpetual Chilkoot, secure in the knowledge that any obstacle, real or imagined, can be conquered by a determined man. For each had come to realize that the great stampede, with all its searchings and its yearnings, with all its bitter surprises, its thorny impediments, and its unexpected fulfilments, was, in a way, a rough approximation to life itself.

  3

  River of ghosts

  In Dawson City the weeds grow rankly along the rotting wooden sidewalks. The willows and the aspens, the currant bushes and the bearberries have encroached upon the town, blurring its edges and hiding the rusting mining machinery that lies in heaps in some of the vacant lots. From the hills above, the checkerboard pattern of streets and avenues, laid out so neatly in the days of Ladue, can still be discerned; but there are great ragged gaps in the town now where buildings have been burned down, or been torn down, or simply fallen down.

  There are about five hundred people living here today.

  Lousetown has vanished and so has West Dawson, on the far side of the river; no vestige of them remains.

  A few false-fronted buildings, empty now, still stand on Front Street. One or two of them go back as far as 1900. It is doubtful if a single one remains from the climactic days of 1898. There have been too many fires.

  Around the corner, on King, only a few steps from the spot where the Oatley Sisters danced and Nigger Jim Daugherty ran the Pavilion, there stood until 1962 a reeling cadaver of a building whose former splendour could be seen dimly in the ornately carved pillars, the intricate cornices, and the rococo lines of its entranceway. It was propped up on one side by beams because the permafrost on which it rested had caused it to lean drunkenly to the east. A sign identified it as “The Nugget Dance Hall,” but this was a modern title designed to attract the tourists who drove into Dawson from a spur of the Alaska Highway. This old and broken structure was really Arizona Charlie’s famous Palace Grand, the only noteworthy landmark that had survived from the stampede days. In 1962, it was restored to its former splendour and it is today a major tourist attraction.