Jack London and the Klondike Gold Rush

by Peter Lourie

  Yet in spite of the tensions, Jack felt a great sense of unity among his partners and among the Stampeders as a whole. What bound them like brothers was the hard work and the general fear of the last leg of the upward climb; everyone chatted constantly about the infamous Chilkoot summit ahead.

  After Shepard left, Jack took on a new partner, a feisty sixty-six-year-old veteran prospector from Santa Rosa, California, named Martin Tarwater. He traveled light and didn’t add to the group’s gear. And he said he was good at repairing shoes and boots.

  Tarwater made his case to be brought into the group: “I got a proposition, boys. You can take it or leave it, but just listen kindly to it. You’re in a hurry to get in before freeze-up. Half the time is wasted over the cooking by one of you that he might be puttin’ in packin’ an outfit. If I do the cookin’ for you, you all’ll be better, and that’ll make you pack better. And I can pack quite a bit myself in between times, quite a bit, yes, quite a bit.” They looked at the wiry old buzzard and figured he wasn’t lying, so they voted him in.

  Tarwater’s cooking skills were complemented by his energy for cleaning and hunting for dry wood. He freed up the other four to conduct the endless task of packing their gear up the trail. Thompson couldn’t have been happier.

  Jack’s constant back-and-forth, miles and miles, only to move all his gear forward by a mere mile or two, felt like being in prison; at this rate he’d never make it to Dawson before winter. There was no escape from the toil. Yet he sweated and struggled on, every muscle and tendon inflamed when he crawled into his bedroll for a few hours of sleep. The campfires had turned his clothes to smoke rags, and he could fall asleep instantly no matter how much Thompson would chatter on.

  Pack trains on the Chilkoot Trail, which has been blocked by a fallen horse, 1897

  (University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections, La Roche 2030)

  As Jack moved closer to Sheep Camp, he smelled an even more pungent odor than the unwashed men—the rotting flesh of dead horses. He was again appalled by the way many treated their animals, as his writing about the White Pass (also known as the Dead Horse Trail) shows:

  * * *

  From Skaguay to Bennett they rotted in heaps. They died at the Rocks, they were poisoned at the Summit, and they starved at the Lakes; they fell off the trail, what there was of it, and they went through it; in the river they drowned under their loads, or were smashed to pieces against the boulders; they snapped their legs in the crevices and broke their backs falling backwards with their packs; in the sloughs they sank from sight or smothered in the slime, and they were disembowelled … men shot them, worked them to death, and when they were gone, went back to the beach and bought more. Some did not bother to shoot them—stripping the saddles off and the shoes and leaving them where they fell. Their hearts turned to stone—those which did not break—and they became beasts, the men on the Dead Horse Trail.

  * * *

  Some Chilkoot outfitters turned their horses loose when the trail got too steep for the weak ones to climb farther. Without anything to eat, the pitiful beasts hobbled through camp, tumbling over the guy wires of tents and rummaging through empty boxes for food. It broke Jack’s heart to see them. So many horses starved near Sheep Camp.

  SHEEP CAMP

  THREE MILES FROM the summit, Sheep Camp was the last place for firewood and tent poles. The gorge they had followed for days opened into a broad valley. Jack’s eyes panned across the chaos of tents and piles of goods sprawled over the open notch in the mountain. The swift river, maybe sixteen feet wide, poured through camp. Here were crowded saloon tents and a twenty-by-forty-foot wood structure with a sign out front that said HOTEL. It was one large room where scores of men flopped on the floor like dead fish to sleep at night.

  Jack heard the crack of a rifle and saw a man putting his horse out of its misery rather than letting it die slowly of starvation. One man sat crying softly beside the trail that led into the camp. He’d lost all his gear over a cliff. Some had turned tents into stores and were trying to sell their supplies before heading home.

  * * *

  On a trail where hard-working men learned for the first time what work was … Driven desperately on by the near-thrust of winter, and lured madly on by the dream of gold, they worked to their last ounce of strength and fell by the way. Others, when failure made certain, blew out their brains. Some went mad, and still others, under the irk of the man-destroying strain, broke partnerships and dissolved life-time friendships with fellows just as good as themselves and just as strained and mad.

  * * *

  At Sheep Camp, Sloper, Goodman, Tarwater, Thompson, and Jack stood among bearded men for a photograph. The picture shows just how young Jack was on his Klondike adventure; he was by far the shortest and youngest-looking of the shabby Stampeders. He had a sensitive face and the eyes of a dreamer, yet those were also the fierce eyes of a man who would find his gold somehow.

  In this photo at Sheep Camp from August 1897, Jack London is believed to be the shortest and youngest-looking man (see detail, second man from left).

  (University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections, La Roche 2033)

  The hardier Stampeders plodded on like oxen. Jack confronted the challenge of the Chilkoot head-on, just as he had done in every pursuit in his life. As he gladly left Sheep Camp, he skirted huge boulders blocking the trail and recalled the long, tedious hours shoveling coal to make money for his family back home. The memory injected new vigor into his movements. He threw another big load onto his back and trudged a short distance before dropping the pack and returning for more.

  On August 23, in the rain and mud, three weeks after leaving Dyea, Jack and his partners camped in a less crowded spot above Sheep Camp. Tarwater whistled as he mended everyone’s shoes.

  Some days were warm and rainy; others were raw cold and rainy, though at any moment the shifting weather could blow snow and ice. Blizzard conditions were common. And now that they had climbed above the tree line, nighttime temperatures dipped well below freezing. Occasionally, if he could build a fire with wood carried from below, Tarwater managed to cook mush, fried bacon, hot rolls, and coffee for breakfast. Stiff and sleepless, the others woke to the old man’s good cheer and constant humming. Most days, breakfast was scant for lack of fuel, but Jack approached the snowline with a light heart.

  * * *

  A FEW WEEKS LATER, the Dyea River would swell into a wall of water that flooded Sheep Camp, picking up miners’ outfits like toys and dashing supplies helter-skelter down the valley. This was caused by the collapse of a glacier dam that sent tons of water, rocks, and other debris down the steep mountainside and into the valley above the camp. At least one man died. Many Stampeders would take this as another sign to pack it in and return home.

  In the three miles between Sheep Camp and the Scales (where gear was weighed before being taken over the summit into Canada), Jack, Tarwater, Goodman, Sloper, and Thompson climbed past another part of the trail, where, the following April, an avalanche would kill seventy miners in one of the worst disasters of the Stampede.

  Native packers wisely refused to work in heavy, deep springtime snow, which the warm southern winds could make unstable. They knew the dangers of attempting to climb the Chilkoot in these conditions. But on April 3, 1898, a group of miners from the flat states of the Midwest were camping at the Scales when an avalanche hit them in the early morning. Some retreated downslope to Sheep Camp, only to be hit by at least two more blasts of snow, back-to-back. A massive wall of white death crashed down the slope, burying scores of men under fifty feet of snow.

  Volunteers search for bodies after the Chilkoot avalanche of April 3, 1898.

  (University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections, Hegg 202)

  After a short, eerie silence, gunshots rang through the valley. Fifteen hundred Stampeders stopped their treks in order to help save people from the avalanche. As the victims lay buried in snow, rescuers hurried to dig them out,
hoping to find some still alive. Legend says one woman looked feverishly for her man and found him lying with the dead. She refused to believe he’d departed. She threw herself on her lover, rubbed his chest for hours, and breathed air into his lungs, until, in a miracle of love, he opened his eyes and called her name. She was known as the Lady of the Chilkoot. (A variant of this story is that her “lover” didn’t recognize her and had no idea who she was!)

  Many of the dead from the avalanche were carried back to Dyea and buried in a small graveyard. Some of the bodies were shipped on steamers home to family.

  TARWATER

  WHEN JACK AND HIS PARTNERS replaced Shepard with Tarwater, they had no idea what a wonderful asset the old man would be. But he soon proved indispensable. Jack captured this remarkable character in his writing:

  * * *

  Tarwater became a striking figure on a trail unusually replete with striking figures. With thousands of men, each back-tripping half a ton of outfit, retracing every mile of the trail twenty times, all came to know him and to hail him as “Father Christmas.” And, as he worked, ever he raised his chant with his age-falsetto voice. None of the … men he had joined could complain about his work. True, his joints were stiff.… He moved slowly, and seemed to creak and crackle when he moved; but he kept on moving. Last into the blankets at night, he was first out in the morning … and, between breakfast and dinner and between dinner and supper, he always managed to back-trip for several packs himself. Sixty pounds was the limit of his burden, however. He could manage seventy-five, but he could not keep it up. Once, he tried ninety, but collapsed on the trail and was seriously shaky for a couple of days afterward.…

  Work! Old Tarwater could shame them all, despite his creaking and crackling and the nasty hacking cough he had developed. Early and late, on trail or in camp beside the trail, he was ever in evidence, ever busy at something, ever responsive to the hail of “Father Christmas.” Weary back-trippers would rest their packs on a log or rock alongside of where he rested his, and would say: “Sing us that song of yourn, dad, about Forty-Nine.” And, when he had wheezingly complied, they would arise under their loads, remark that it was real heartening, and hit the forward trail again.

  * * *

  One late afternoon when the men rested beneath a boulder, with Tarwater already up ahead making dinner, Big Jim Goodman said as he smoked his pipe, “Tarwater sure earned his passage with us, didn’t he?”

  Sloper agreed and said he should become a full partner. Thompson quickly said, “NO way. The deal is that when we reach Dawson, he’s on his own.”

  Jack listened but kept quiet. He was thinking how glad he was to have this ever-upbeat and feisty old man along instead of his arthritic and complaining brother-in-law.

  THE SCALES

  ON AUGUST 27, JACK finally lugged his outfit above three thousand feet, where the shrubs of the subalpine zone, caressed by swirling clouds, looked more like animal apparitions to the minds of exhausted men. No trees or shelter, only the stacks and stacks of provisions the miners would carry in hundreds of loads on the last terrible leg up and over the summit.

  The Scales was indeed a pitiful place, full of crazed men in a cul-de-sac at the foot of a rock wall. Yet in all that gray, Jack noticed the unexpected dots of color where men had thrown bright blankets on the boulders to dry.

  The scene above the Scales sent terror through Stampeder blood. It was a sheer wall of mountain with a tiny, thin line of humans leading straight upward. On August 28, 1897, Jack and his partners finally joined that long string of Stampeders pushing for the top. Everywhere along the trail could be spotted discarded gear: bits of worn-out boots and tin cans, and even crates and bags of flour, left there by men who had panicked at the sight of that last push to the summit.

  These photos give an idea of what the majority of Stampeders went through as they left the Scales and headed up the last steep climb to the summit. Although Jack faced bad weather at the top, since he arrived here in late August, he would have seen less snow and a lot more rock.

  (Library of Congress LC-USZ62-41760 & LCUSZ62-41761)

  Out of the corners of his eyes, Jack saw remnants of glaciers. At times, he had to crawl on hands and knees from boulder to boulder, where stubborn mosses and hardy lichens thrived. An occasional alpine flower grew out of a crag near the site where Jack and his partners set up camp. When it got too dark to climb, the group dropped their blankets on the cold, stony ground and fell into dead-man sleep. Icy water ran everywhere in the rocks below their blankets. The wind howled like the voices of ghouls.

  In the morning, Jack dragged his body off the hostile rocks to climb back up to the summit with another hundred-pound load. Hand over hand, pulling to the summit, Jack clenched and unclenched his fingers to keep them from cramping. He blew warm air through his fists.

  Up that relentless face of broken rock fragments, he clawed his way out of the last of the dwarfed shrubs below and joined once more the twisting line of men, a long string of leaf-cutter ants marching up and over the crest, where they seemed to vanish.

  Suddenly, Jack had to shake his head in disbelief. Someone near him was carrying a sled dog over his shoulders up the trail to the summit! It was just one of many crazy ideas of the Stampeders. Others brought large iron stoves. Someone said that the grand piano at the Palace Grand Theatre in Dawson had also been carried over the pass.

  In another few months, unfazed by winter, the Stampeders would still be clawing and inching their way over the ice. On this final ascent, enterprising Stampeders would chop 1,500 crude stairs into the hard-packed snow for easier climbing, then charge a fee to use what came to be known as the Golden Stairs.

  If you left the line leading to the summit, you were out of luck.

  (University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections, Hegg 97)

  Jack’s problems in August were mud and constant cold rain. His boots sloshed heavily with something like liquid ice.

  In that desperate line of men scrambling up the last five hundred feet of elevation, while his own load cut deep into his flesh, Jack saw some lose their toeholds and move to the side of the trail. In a few weeks, when it would be covered in snow, men would slide all the way back down and have to join the line again—if someone was kind enough to let them in.

  After countless trips back and forth, battered and utterly out of breath, Jack finally reached the summit one last time. He dropped his load and stepped out of the snaking line of ever-moving men.

  He stood motionless at the top. He turned and looked down at the laboring miners gasping for air, lugging their stoves and crates and sleds and tents and beans and rice and beer and whiskey and boards and sometimes even their animals up the ridiculously steep face.

  For a moment, Jack felt part of something bigger than just greed for gold. He lifted his eyes from the trail below him and gazed out through the gloomy mist that had settled over the coastal mountain chain.

  He’d left California on July 25, and it was now the last day of August. He’d been on the journey for a month, and he knew he had perhaps two months more travel to reach Dawson (he figured he’d be lucky to get there sometime in October). He felt good that he’d made it this far, all the way to the summit, when so many had turned back. He had hauled thousands of pounds of gear in small but heavier and heavier loads. He’d grown stronger than he’d ever been in his life, even more than in the days when he’d shoveled coal for ten hours at a stretch to help support his family.

  He was only twenty-one. The gold was waiting. The adventure stretched out before him. But something deeply troubled him.

  He looked down at the rocky and shrubby land enshrouded in mist, and had time to think of his father—not John London, the man he had always thought was his father—but another man with whom he had exchanged letters just before leaving California. In fact, it was only the month before Jack headed north that he learned the truth about his real father.

  * * *

  FOR A BRIEF TIME, Jack’s mom
had lived with a man named William Henry Chaney, a cranky but avid astrologer, distinguished orator and lecturer, a traveling lawyer, editor, and preacher. In many ways, Jack was a lot like him—highly intelligent. Both of Jack’s parents were eccentric freethinkers. They were similar to each other in many ways, but they could not get along. So by the time Jack was born John Griffith Chaney on January 12, 1876, in San Francisco, his father, William Henry Chaney, had already jumped ship.

  Jack had a complicated and emotional mother. Flora Wellman was prone to depression and rages. She made money as a seamstress and piano teacher; she was always scheming to get rich. She also believed in spirits and conducted séances in their home (Jack was embarrassed by this when his classmates came over to the house).

  Eight months after Jack was born, an older man named John London, who was living in Flora’s rooming house, married Flora and gave her son his surname. John London was a carpenter and small-time farmer, and also a Civil War veteran who needed a wife to help raise his two daughters by a previous marriage.

  He was a kind and gentle man, a stable influence in the family, and a good farmer. Jack had done thousands of chores on John London’s small farms. Scraping for cash, John tried his hand at carpentry and selling sewing machines door-to-door, but he did best growing potatoes, corn, grapes, fruit, and olives. He raised chickens and kept bees.

  Jack loved the man. Mostly he liked to listen to John London’s adventure tales from his younger days, when he worked as a scout and Indian fighter, or so he said. John, in turn, had great faith in Jack. When Jack was madly preparing to depart for the Klondike, his parents weren’t at all opposed to the upcoming adventure. John London thrilled to the idea. If he weren’t seventy years old, he said, and prone to sickness (weak lungs and broken ribs), he, too, would go to the Klondike with Jack. Maybe even get healthy in that clean, crisp Yukon air! And he fully believed Jack would come home from the gold fields triumphant. “He’ll come out all right, you watch his smoke, and come out big, mark my words.… Jack is going to make a success out of the Klondike—whether he digs it out of the grassroots or not.”