Klondike

by Pierre Berton

  Here, again, the influence of the book was apparent. It has become, one of the Americans told me, the bible of the proposed park. Everyone seemed to have a worn copy, as do many of the individual hikers who are now crossing the Chilkoot each summer in ever-increasing numbers (a Swiss couple, for instance, was carrying a German edition). Some there were on that trip who seemed to know the book better than I did myself and who were able to refer to passages that I had forgotten or to correct me on points on which I had become hazy.

  And so, almost three-quarters of a century after my father climbed the Chilkoot, I followed in his footsteps, clambering on hands and knees over man-high boulders, slippery with fog, in the teeth of a sixty-mile wind that screamed through the notch of the pass. Some of the paraphernalia of the stampede days were still to be seen: old rubber boots, rusting food tins, the remnants of barrels, the bones of dogs and horses, the skeletons of boats and sleds, tangled cables, rope, glass insulators, and bits of tramway machinery – and, here and there, the rotting foundations of a cabin or a shack. These artifacts are also part of our heritage – the fading reminders of an incredible moment out of the past – and it is important that some of them be preserved before they are carted away by souvenir hunters, just as it is important that this hike through history be made accessible to those who wish to follow in the wake of the stampeders and re-live, in some fashion, the experiences of ’98. For no man who crawls over the Chilkoot can help but think back on those who performed that feat not once, but thirty times or more, in the chill of winter, with a fifty-pound pack pressing down upon their shoulders.

  As I wrote in the 1958 edition, my whole life has been conditioned by the Klondike; it haunts my dreams and my memories, and although at the time I said I would never return, I find myself going back periodically to the ghost town that was, for so many childhood years, my home.

  My father, having failed to reach the gold-fields by the abortive Stikine Trail in 1898, crossed the Chilkoot Pass and took a canoe down the Yukon River with the main stampede. He was a University of New Brunswick graduate, spoiling for adventure. In the summer of ’98 he staked a claim on Quigley Gulch. It produced nothing but gravel, but, nonetheless, he lived for forty years in Dawson City, where he was variously miner, labourer, cook, Mountie, French professor, cabinet-maker, school principal, dentist, engineer, and civil servant.

  My mother came to the Klondike as a kindergarten teacher in 1907. She married my father in 1912 when he was a labourer working on Bonanza Creek for the old Yukon Gold Company. They spent the first summer of their marriage in a tent on Sourdough Gulch. Her own story of that odd era can be read in her book, I Married the Klondike.

  I was born in 1920 in Whitehorse but lived the first twelve years of my life in the shell of Dawson City, a town of about twelve hundred in those days. I suppose, really, that the research for this book began at that time, for my boyhood memories are tied up with the relics of the great stampede and its aftermath.

  Our home was across the street from the cabin of Robert Service, who had known my parents but had departed the North before I was born; the cabin had become a shrine which tourists visited each summer. I used to wade in the shallow waters of Bonanza Creek and, in the winter, drive my dog up the hard-packed snow of the Klondike Valley road. As children we played steamboat in the relics of some of the old stern-wheelers rotting in the boneyard across the river.

  The names associated with that other era were always with us: there were a Harper and a Hansen Street in Dawson, and the name “Ladue” in cracked paint on a faded building, and a village called Carmacks up the Yukon River, and an Ogilvie Bridge, and a McQuesten Creek, and a town called Mayo, and two children named Henderson with whom I played at public school.

  Around me were the relics of the early days, human and inanimate: old saloons, dance halls, and gambling-houses, creaky and vacant, crammed with Klondike bric-a-brac – old seltzer bottles and tarnished gold-scales; ancient calendars depicting the Floradora Sextette; stacks of gold-pans long disused and rusty; oil paintings, thick with dust, of voluptuous women; the occasional satin slipper, worm-eaten; creaky pianos long gone flat; chipped mahogany bars, glasses, beds, armchairs, hand organs, porcelain chamberpots, spittoons.

  And once, digging into a dusty trunk in an abandoned dance hall which my father was using as a workshop in which to build a boat, I came upon a bundle of love letters tied with pink ribbon – from a miner on the creeks to a soubrette on Dawson’s gay way.

  On the streets, in the hotel lobbies, and, indeed, in my own home were the living reminders of that era: men and women whose lives had been wrenched into a new pattern by the experience of the stampede. They did not talk about it specifically, except at odd times, as men sometimes, at odd times, talk of war; but, like the experience of war, the stampede was always an undercurrent in the adult conversation that swirled about me. Indeed, as a child, it never occurred to me that this was anything but normal; I did not realize I was living in a queer town (a ghost town, really), any more than I realized that there were people in the world who did not have this gold-rush background.

  Yet, looking back on it today, I can see how remarkable and unusual it all was: the red-bearded man in tatters who sat in the public library gobbling up books on philosophy; the remittance men from England, with their impeccable public-school background, who were visitors in our home; the various cosmopolites not usually found in small towns; the little Japanese who read his way through the Encyclopaedia Britannica; the Frenchwoman who sold Paris fashions from her frame store; the gaudily dressed, heavily rouged and veiled women who were the last relics of Dawson’s dance-hall era.

  Later, when I was in my late teens, I returned to the Klondike for three seasons and worked as a labourer on Dominion Creek, for the Yukon Consolidated Gold Corporation, in order to earn my university fees. Once again I was caught up, drowned almost, in the memories of the stampede. The valleys in those days were a thick mass of shovels, picks, wheelbarrows, machinery, cabins, dumps, old flumes, rotting sluiceboxes. Ancient newspapers from ’98 littered the ground. Old road-houses and tottering ghost towns from the old days were everywhere – and old miners, too. Here, really, my interest in the period began, but it was not until after the war, in 1946, that I started some hesitant research for a series of radio talks on the subject. This grew, eventually, into more serious research, and the present book is the final result.

  Anyone who looks at the bibliography that follows may well ask: why another book about the Klondike gold rush? The answer is simple; of more than one hundred volumes that deal directly with the phenomenon or some aspect of it, only two, in my opinion, make any attempt to describe the stampede as a whole. These are Tappan Adney’s The Klondike Stampede of 1897–98, published in 1899, and Kathryn Winslow’s Big Pan-Out, published in 1951. Both make excellent and lively reading, but neither is intended to be complete. Adney’s work has one great advantage: he was there, as a correspondent for Harper’s Illustrated Weekly; his book is written from first-hand observations and from interviews with people on the spot. This is also its weakness. Adney could not be everywhere, nor was the subsequent mountain of Klondike documentation available to him at the time he wrote. His book remains the single most valuable work on the subject, in my view. Miss Winslow’s shorter work is also entertaining, but her terms of reference are narrower than my own. She deals in detail with the White and the Chilkoot passes, for instance, but makes only passing reference to the other routes to the Klondike.

  One of the great problems in putting the story together was to separate fact from fiction. Fortunately, there is such a large body of evidence, published and unpublished, now available that it is possible, I believe, to do this. I have followed the rule of trusting more to contemporary first-hand witnesses than to later memoirs, and of crosschecking all dubious statements against others more reliable. In some cases where I have not been able to resolve conflicting versions of an incident (as in Carmack’s encounter with Henderson or in the
story of Swiftwater Bill and the eggs) I have so indicated in the body of the text.

  It is undeniable that the Klondike odyssey has been subject in the past to some fantastic misstatements, errors, half-truths, garblings, over-romanticizations, and out-and-out fabrications. There are several reasons for this. One is that the tale is a very complicated one: the geography is difficult and the narrative sequence intricate. Writer after writer has put certain events in 1898 that actually occurred in 1897 or 1899 and vice versa, thus throwing the story out of kilter. I have tried to straighten this out by starting at the beginning and ending at the end. An added advantage has been my own knowledge of the ground. I have crossed the White Pass half a dozen times by rail and have been down the Yukon River by small boat, steamboat, and airplane. I have covered the whole of the Mackenzie route from Edmonton to the delta by boat and plane, and most of the Peace River and interior British Columbia routes as well. I have travelled the Alaska Highway for its full length by car and been up and down the Alaska Panhandle several times. I know the creeks of the Klondike and Indian River watersheds almost as well as my back yard.

  A second problem in this field has been the tendency of so many writers to overdramatize the Klondike stories, to “build up” scenes that really need no further enrichment, to add to anecdotes which are complete and satisfactory in their original versions. During my researches I was to discover, time and again, that the stark facts, when tracked down and sorted out, were far livelier and often stranger than the gloss of fiction with which they had been overlaid. But old-timers in print and in person tend to stray from the truth; tales get changed in the retelling, memories fail. More than that, many Klondike stories are sifted through a third person, a ghost writer, whose own knowledge of the era is imperfect. These ghost-written books, though easy to spot, are a curse to the researcher.

  A great Alaskan historian, Clarence Andrews, once wrote that if all the men who claimed to have seen the shooting of Soapy Smith were laid end to end “the line would extend to the Equator and back again.” It is obvious that almost every man who wrote a personal account of his days in the Klondike wished to make it appear that he was in on the big events and knew all the colourful figures. Even such a respected writer and jurist as the Hon. James Wickersham writes (in Old Yukon) that, in the summer of 1900 in Skagway, “in one of the banks a gentlemanly clerk named Bob Service was introduced smilingly, as a writer of poetry.” The fact is, of course, that Robert Service never worked in a Skagway bank and, indeed, did not reach the North or write any Yukon poetry until 1904. Writer after writer makes the same mistake. In Far North Country, Thames Williamson writes: “Service was in the Klondike during the fevered days of the gold rush,” and Glenn Chesney Quiett falls into the same error in Pay Dirt. Actually, Service’s most famous book of verse, Songs of a Sourdough (containing his three best-known poems, “The Law of the Yukon,” “The Shooting of Dan McGrew,” and “The Cremation of Sam McGee”), was written before he ever set foot in the Klondike. Stanley Scearce in Northern Lights to Fields of Gold says that he met Service in Dawson in 1898 (ten years before the poet actually arrived) and goes on to tell of his encounter with Soapy Smith in Skagway in the winter of 1899–1900, about eighteen months after Smith was killed. In Gold, Men and Dogs, A. A. “Scotty” Allan, a famous Alaskan dog-driver, also claims to have met Smith in Nome, although the outlaw was dead before Nome was properly established.

  In spite of such errors, all the above-mentioned books can be useful, as long as the stories are taken with a grain of salt and the incidents cross-checked against other accounts. Some Klondike tales, however, seem to be made up entirely of whole cloth. Among the most preposterous are Frances Lloyd-Owen’s Gold Nugget Charlie and E. C. Trelawney-Ansell’s I Followed Gold. The latter persists in referring to Belinda Mulroney and the Oregon Mare as the same woman; it would be hard to imagine two more disparate characters.

  Klondike legends die hard, and there will be many old-timers, no doubt, who will dispute some of the versions of the famous tales that appear in this book. I call their attention to a singular incident that took place at a Sourdough Convention on the Pacific coast some years ago, which featured Mike Mahoney, the hero of Merrill Denison’s book Klondike Mike. For years Mahoney (who is popularly supposed to have carried a piano over the Chilkoot Pass) used to entertain at various gatherings by reciting Service’s “The Shooting of Dan McGrew.” The recital was enhanced by the fact that Mahoney claimed to have witnessed the incident and could, on request, give a glowing and detailed eyewitness account of it. When Mahoney’s talents were finally pressed into service by the Sourdough association, one member, Monte Snow, decided that he had had enough. Snow (who, readers may recall, appears briefly in this book) had far more right to the name of “sourdough” than any others in the banquet hall that evening. His father, George Snow the entrepreneur, had taken him over the Chilkoot when Monte was still a boy. He had been brought up in Circle City before the Klondike strike and had reached Dawson early in 1897. He knew very well that there never had been a Dan McGrew in Dawson, or a Malamute Saloon, and he determined to expose Mahoney. Before “Klondike Mike” could rise to speak, Snow was on his feet to announce in ringing tones that the featured guest of the evening was a charlatan making stories up out of whole cloth. But, to his dismay, the assemblage of old-timers shouted Snow down and then gave Mike Mahoney the greatest ovation of his career. They did not really want to hear the truth.

  Nonetheless, the unvarnished story of the Klondike phenomenon is, in my opinion, the best story, and it is puzzling that anyone should feel the need to embellish it. It is really not necessary to invent any incidents because in every case somebody has been on the spot to record, somewhere, exactly what happened. Every Klondike historian must be grateful to William Ogilvie, for instance, for taking affidavits from Carmack and Henderson and the two Indians, Jim and Charley, so that we have a reliable account of the original discovery of gold. Ogilvie also cross-examined each of the participants in the drama and repeated his interviews some time later in order to discover whether any of the stories had changed over the intervening period. Here was a man with a sense of history, and his book Early Days in the Yukon, like Tappan Adney’s, is invaluable. So is William Haskell’s Two Years in the Klondike and Alaska Gold fields, on which I have drawn heavily in the early sections of this book. Several other books, notably Arthur Walden’s A Dog Puncher on the Yukon (despite some obvious exaggerations), give a good picture of the early stages of the stampede.

  My Chapter Four is drawn largely from the contemporary newspaper and magazine accounts as well as from the lengthy shelf of guidebooks to the gold-fields (many of them wildly inaccurate) published at the time.

  There are several excellent personal accounts of the various routes to the Klondike. Some of the best include Mrs. George Black’s My Seventy Years (the Chilkoot Pass), Walter Russell Curtin’s Yukon Voyage (the story of Pat Galvin and the steamer Yukoner), Arthur Arnold Dietz’s Mad Rush for Gold in Frozen North (the Malaspina Glacier), Angus Graham’s The Golden Grindstone (Edmonton to Wind River), Elizabeth Page’s Wild Horses and Gold (Mackenzie and Peace River routes), Martha Ferguson McKeown’s The Trail Led North (the White Pass), Thomas Wiedemann’s Cheechako into Sourdough (the story of the Eliza Anderson expedition), Hamlin Garland’s Trail of the Goldseekers (the Ashcroft and Teslin Trails), Walter Hamilton’s Yukon Story, and, last but certainly not least, Colonel Sam Steele’s own story, Forty Years in Canada.

  The Alaska Sportsman, in Ketchikan, has for almost half a century been publishing the personal memoirs of scores of Klondike old-timers, usually written without the dubious benefit of ghost writers. These eyewitness accounts have been invaluable as source material, and I place this magazine as the single most important periodical for anyone researching the Klondike story.

  My chapter on Dawson’s starvation winter (1897–98) comes from a variety of sources, but two, in particular, I found most useful: Captain P. H. Ray’s reports to Washing
ton of the events on the Yukon River and Sam C. Dunham’s reports, made at the same time, to the U.S. Department of Labor.

  My most valuable single source for the two chapters dealing with Dawson City in its heyday has been the Klondike Nugget. There is only one complete set of files in existence, that bequeathed by the editor, Gene Allen, to the University of Washington at Seattle. These have been microfilmed by the Public Archives of Canada since Klondike was first published. In addition, incomplete files of the other Klondike newspapers, in various libraries, were also valuable. As well as the books already mentioned I would rate Jeremiah Lynch’s Three Years in the Klondike and Frederick Palmer’s In the Klondyke as readable books about this later period.

  My chapter on Soapy Smith comes from so many sources that it would be impractical to detail them all. I was fortunate in interviewing four men who had been present at the time of his death and in Skagway during the months leading up to it. In addition, through the kindness of his late widow, I was given access to the considerable store of letters and papers of the Reverend J. A. Sinclair, the Union Church minister in Skagway who also witnessed the shooting and presided at the fallen dictator’s funeral. Soapy Smith’s biographers, W. R. Collier and E. V. Westrate, give a detailed and lively account of his pre-Skagway history, but their narrative of his gold-rush period is, in my opinion, less satisfactory.

  Most of the material in the last chapter of this book comes from personal interviews with Klondikers, all of whom have died since Klondike was first published. Their names are listed in the Bibliography. If I had waited a few more years to write the book, such personal memories would have been impossible; indeed, before I finished the text a good many of my informants had already gone. Yet without these personal conversations, the book would be much less effective: the facts that the old-timers provided were not as important as the feeling for the times that they communicated to me. The same is true, in large part, of the diaries and letters. A man sitting on a riverbank with a stub of a pencil and a tattered notebook after a hard day’s travel has neither the time, space, nor inclination to write an essay. Klondike diary entries usually consist of simple statistics: miles covered, pounds carried, temperatures, and so on. Yet you cannot read these wavering pencilled entries without catching something of the spirit of those men and those days. And here and there, in the brief story of a bitter quarrel or a death or a sacrifice, the theme of the Klondike rush emerges.