Jack London and the Klondike Gold Rush

by Peter Lourie

  White Fang and The Call of the Wild and “To Build a Fire” and “The White Silence” are Jack’s pay streak. In more than fifty Klondike short stories and novels, he painted powerful scenes and drew unforgettable characters from his experiences living the Stampede. Jack took back gold from the Yukon, but not in physical form. His gold—and ours—is in the stories of the people he met along this amazing Arctic journey.

  AFTERWORD

  WHEN I VISITED Dawson on a recent summer, Dawne Mitchell, curator of the Jack London Museum, drove me to the north edge of town to the spot where Jack had pitched his tent near the Bond cabin in the fall of 1897. For years, this side of town had been used as a garbage dump, but now it was clear and open. Father Judge’s hospital would have been only yards from Jack’s tent.

  Dawne and I found fresh bear scat in the brush that kept us alert. We had no gun or bear spray. We walked to the grave of Father Judge, where a monument was erected to the man who convinced Jack to get medical attention for his own good.

  My visit to Dawson happened to coincide with the biannual festival of the First Nation tribe of the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in (Hän) in the village of Moosehide, three miles downriver. At the Dawson beach in the cold summer rain, a gang of dogs was messing about as I waited for a boat to go to the opening ceremony at Moosehide. The villagers had moved their residence three miles downriver to Moosehide just after Jack left the Klondike. They’d moved to get some peace and quiet after being squeezed out of Tr’ochëk by the Stampeders.

  In the rain, I imagined riverboats arriving in June of 1898 with crates of fresh vegetables and hundreds of gold-crazed Stampeders, along with their outfits. Riverboats actually ran along the Yukon until 1956, but Jack’s cabin on Split-Up long ago fell into the river from erosion.

  The Klondike Nugget in Dawson published this note around the time Jack departed on a raft with fellow Henderson Creek prospectors Charley Taylor and John Thorson.

  * * *

  THE NEWCOMER IN DAWSON

  There are many men in Dawson at the present time who feel keenly disappointed. They have come thousands of miles on a perilous trip, risked life, health and property, spent months of the most arduous labor a man can perform, and at length with expectations raised to the highest pitch have reached the coveted goal only to discover the fact that there is nothing here for them.

  * * *

  On an even more negative note, one character from London’s novel Burning Daylight described what the Klondike would look like in a few years, after so many miners had ravaged the land around Bonanza and El Dorado Creeks. Greed is not pretty:

  * * *

  It was a scene of a vast devastation. The hills, to their tops, had been shorn of trees, and their naked sides showed signs of goring and perforating that even the mantle of snow could not hide. Beneath him, in every direction, were the cabins of men. But not many men were visible. A blanket of smoke filled the valleys and turned the gray day to melancholy twilight. Smoke arose from a thousand holes in the snow, where, deep down on bed-rock, in the frozen muck and gravel, men crept and scratched and dug, and ever built more fires to break the grip of the frost.… Figures of men crawled out of the holes, or disappeared into them.… The wreckage of the spring washing appeared everywhere … all the debris of an army of gold-mad men.

  * * *

  After Jack left Dawson, some of his partners stayed on. Fred Thompson worked as a customs broker until 1913, when he returned to Santa Rosa, California, to resume his old job as court reporter. Big Jim Goodman, joined by his brother, Dan, raised a family and opened a hardware store in town, in a building that still stands today. A sign out front says GUNS, AMMUNITION, HARDWARE, TOBACCO, FURNITURE, GROCERY, CLOTHING, TENTS. Dan lived above the store. He brought his daughter, Zella, to the Yukon, where she danced, sang, and played the piano for silent movies that were shown in the saloons. Some say that even today you can hear her singing when you walk past the tumbledown building that was her home. The Goodman brothers prospected and operated various businesses in the Yukon and Alaska from 1897 to 1922.

  Mining claims, Eldorado Creek 1898. Mining for gold can devastate the streams and the land around them.

  (University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections, Hegg 792)

  Martin Tarwater split off from the group when they first got to Dawson and later died of acute asthma in 1898. Merritt Sloper left the Klondike the same summer as Jack. When he returned home to San Francisco, his wife filed for divorce because he had not struck it rich.

  Father Judge’s hospital burned to the ground for a second time in February 1950 and was never rebuilt.

  * * *

  IN 1900, just after his first collection of Klondike stories was published, Jack got a letter from Cornelius M. Gepfert, another pal from Split-Up Island. In his reply, Jack’s letter recalls the old days (three years before!) and talks about how he’d had to “modify” some things from the Klondike in order to make fiction:

  * * *

  Have you read my book “The Son of the Wolf”? They are all Klondike stories, collected, and I am busy wondering how the Klondikers, who know all about it, will take them. If you read them, tell me what you think of them, and don’t be chary of whatever adverse criticism comes into your mind. You see, I have had to take liberties, and to idealize, etc. etc. for the sake of the artistic effect, and often from the inherent need of the tales themselves, and for their literary value.

  * * *

  Jack London died on November 22, 1916, at the age of forty, of a stroke and heart failure. His body had taken a beating throughout his life, and it finally just gave out at his ranch in California, which he’d worked for many years.

  His adventurous life spanned the history of the United States between the Civil War and World War I. He witnessed the great technological revolutions of the telephone, the moving picture, the airplane, and the automobile. Although it was a short life by today’s standards, never has anyone lived a fuller four decades than did Jack London. Perhaps Jack’s pal from the mining camp best described his passion for life. Nearly thirty years after they’d been together at Stewart River, Emil Jensen captured Jack’s desire for learning:

  * * *

  Monotony found no place to light in Jack London’s make-up. The little as well as the big things in our daily life held for him, always, a stimulus that made his every waking hour worth living. To him, there was in all things something new, something alluring, something worth while, be it a game of whist, an argument, or the sun at noonday glowing cold and brilliant above the hills to the south. He was ever on tiptoe with expectancy, whether silent with wondering awe, as on a night when we saw the snows aflame beneath a weird, bewildering sky or in the throes of a frenzied excitement while we watched a mighty river at flood tide, and the ice “go out” in the moonlight.

  * * *

  Jack died young, but during his brief time in the Klondike, he did find his gold—in the land he loved, in the creeks, on the trails, in the muddy streets of Dawson, and in the dogs and Stampeders who inspired his world-famous stories and novels.

  Perhaps it is fitting to let Emil Jensen have the last word.

  Emil says:

  * * *

  He is gone now. But the world remembers. I, too, remember. Not because of the greatness that the world has recognized, nor because of the achievements that startled a skeptical world, but because there are depths stirred within me when I recall the curly-headed boy I learned to love in the cold and silent Northland.

  * * *

  NOTES FROM THE AUTHOR

  TO TELL THIS TALE I’ve taken a few liberties. We have no direct record of how much mining Jack did on Henderson Creek, or how much dogsledding experience he had, or how he actually felt and what he actually saw during his Klondike adventure. Much of what we know about Jack’s experience comes through the prolific writing he did after he returned to California, from his wife’s and daughter’s books about him, and from the memories of those who were with him in the creeks. I
n this telling, I have Jack do a few things that he may or may not have done. For instance, we don’t know if he confronted a wolf, and we don’t know how many wolves he saw. He could easily have seen more than one. When I was in Dawson a few years ago, I stood before the magnificent creature early in the morning right at the mouth of Bonanza Creek. Certainly Jack and the other miners could have had any of the experiences I attempt to capture in this book. The object of my tale is to convey the spirit and drama of the Klondike Stampeders as much as the amazing history of that wild time. I believe I have kept this tale well within the realm of the possible. And if I can inspire just one of my readers to have his or her own adventure in the great outdoors, then I will have accomplished what I set out to do.

  A FEW THOUGHTS ON THE NOTION OF WILDERNESS

  THE TRIBES OF THE COAST and the interior of Alaska and the Yukon, now collectively known as the First Nations, did exist—and still do—as their own civilization in the Yukon. Therefore, “raw” and “wilderness” are not factual descriptions of the place but our own cultural constructs. To keep in the spirit of Jack London’s own writing, I use these words to describe how the Stampeders saw the terrain.

  The Klondike is a fast and shallow stream, long known as an excellent salmon fishing river in the Yukon. The point of land between the Klondike and Yukon Rivers is the heart of the traditional territory of the First Nations Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in tribe (literally “People of the Klondike” or “People of the River”), sometimes referred to as Hän. For hundreds of years, families gathered there to fish for salmon, hunt moose up the Klondike Valley, and meet, feast, and trade. Klondike comes from thronduick (or tr’ondëk), a Native Hän word meaning “hammerstone,” a tool used to hammer down stakes for setting salmon traps.

  George Carmack

  (Yukon Archives, James Albert Johnson fonds, 82/341, #14)

  George Carmack’s wife, Shaaw Tláa (Kate Carmack), her brother Keish (Skookum Jim), and nephew Káa Goox (Dawson Charlie) were members of the Tagish tribe. The names Dawson “Tagish” Charlie and Skookum Jim Mason are their “white” names, given to them because the Europeans usually could not pronounce their real names.

  Keish (Skookum Jim Mason) at his mine on Bonanza Creek

  (National Park Service, Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park, Candy Waugaman Collection, KLGO Library DP-116-10570)

  Káa Goox (Dawson “Tagish” Charlie)

  (MacBride Museum of Yukon History Collection 1989.1.004)

  Kate Carmack and George Carmack pose with their daughter, Graphie, in front of their log cabin on Bonanza Creek, 1897.

  (Yukon Archives, James Albert Johnson fonds, 82/341 #15)

  MAKING A CLAIM

  THE FIRST STEP for a miner arriving in the Klondike was to find sufficient gold to warrant staking a claim. You did that by going up or down a stream panning along the way (as Jack and his partners did when they first arrived at Henderson Creek), and if you found gold in significant quantities, you blazed a nearby tree and wrote on it something along the lines of what George Carmack wrote: To whom it may concern—I do, this day, locate and claim, by right of discovery, five hundred feet, running up stream from this notice. Located this 17th day of August, 1896 G. W. Carmack. Then you paced five hundred feet upstream and posted a second similar notice. If you didn’t have a nearby tree, you took along wooden stakes to drive into the ground—thus, you staked your claim. The first to make a claim on a stream (called the discovery claim) was entitled to two claims, or one thousand feet along a stream. Subsequent claims were numbered depending on how far above or below the discovery claim they were (one above, two below, etc). Then, of course, you went into town to register your claim. Before Dawson was a town, prospectors had to go downriver to Forty Mile, where there was a claim office.

  The actual size of each claim varied depending on the terrain. Generally, valleys are wider at the mouth of a stream than at the stream’s beginning, so claim sizes would be bigger at the stream mouth. That might not mean much because the richest concentrations of gold could be anywhere along the stream. In the Klondike, the richest gold findings were at the junction of Eldorado and Bonanza Creeks. The real problem with the initial discovery on Bonanza Creek was that everybody’s pace was different, and so one man’s 500 feet might actually have been 489 feet or perhaps 507 feet, or some other figure. This caused huge problems when claims were officially surveyed with instruments; all sorts of discrepancies were found, and miners had to make lots of adjustments. It was a mess.

  George Carmack on his discovery claim, 1898

  (Yukon Archives, James Albert Johnson fonds, 82/341 #19)

  Application filed by George Carmack when he recorded his discovery claim on Bonanza Creek, 1896

  (University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections, UW 2747)

  BOOKS ABOUT JACK LONDON IN THE KLONDIKE

  THREE GOOD BOOKS have been written about Jack London in the Klondike, any one of which would make a fine follow-up source for students interested in how Jack’s writing ties into his Klondike adventure: Franklin Walker’s Jack London and the Klondike, Mike Wilson’s Jack London’s Klondike Adventure, and Dick North’s Sailor on Snowshoes: Tracking Jack London’s Northern Trail. This last one is an exciting yarn of how Dick himself believes he found the cabin up Henderson Creek where Jack carved his name into a log in January 1898, then how Dick and friends brought that very cabin, log by log, back to Dawson in the Yukon Territory of Canada and to Oakland, California. In fact, half of the original logs were used for building a replica in Oakland, California; the other half for building a second replica in Dawson, honoring both Jack’s California home and his adventure home in the north.

  A FEW FINAL INSIGHTS

  THERE’D ALWAYS BEEN another side of Jack, a softer, more sensitive side. From the age of six, he loved to read books yet had little time for reading, due to chores and work. As a reader, he lived partly in an imaginary world of literature. In his spare time, he dreamed of adventures and romance in far-off places. Even as a child, he had a restless spirit. He loved to read the adventure tales of explorers such as Captain Cook and Francisco Pizarro.

  When he was eight, he read Washington Irving’s The Alhambra, a collection of tales and sketches about Moorish Spain. Jack built a replica of the Alhambra, the Moorish palace in Granada. At the Cole Grammar School in Oakland, he often sat reading a book during recess instead of playing ball. One day a bully teased him and threw Jack’s book on the ground. Jack got up and bloodied the boy’s face. The bully never bothered him again.

  And what exactly is an oyster pirate? Why was it so profitable? The oyster industry of San Francisco Bay relied on the Southern Pacific Railway leasing its lands (the tidal flats area off San Mateo) to commercial oyster growers. The public was not happy that the railway company had a monopoly over the industry (a monopoly is when a group has exclusive control over a service or commodity). When only one company controls a business, it can drive prices too high, and this is what happened with oysters. The so-called pirates who raided the oyster beds at night and sold their loot in the morning had the sympathy of the public because they could sell their oysters at a much lower cost. The pirates made fast money (Jack said he made one hundred and eighty dollars in a twelve-hour period), but they also had to take chances.

  After about a year, when it started getting too dangerous to be an oyster pirate (competition among pirates had grown stiff since more and more people were entering the lucrative business), Jack cleverly traded sides and joined the California Fish Patrol. Now he could get paid for his skills in a boat as well as for his pirate knowledge even as he protected the very oyster beds he’d just been raiding. He operated in a different part of the bay so that he didn’t arrest any of his former pals.

  NOTABLE PLACES

  Bennett, Bennett City—Settlement on Lake Bennett, thirty-three miles above Dyea on the Chilkoot Trail, where Stampeders constructed boats for the Yukon River journey to the Klondike.

  Chilkoot Trai
l—A traditional transportation route through rugged mountain terrain, connecting the Pacific Coast of Alaska with the upper Yukon River in British Columbia. It is best known as the route used by thousands of prospectors on their way to the Yukon gold fields during the gold rush of 1896–1898.

  Dawson City—Town site laid out by Joseph Ladue and Arthur Harper at the confluence of the Yukon and Klondike Rivers in 1896, and named for Canadian geologist George Dawson.

  Dyea—Boomtown at the foot of the Chilkoot Trail on the Alaskan coast.

  Fort Selkirk—Trading post established in 1848 by Robert Campbell of the Hudson’s Bay Co., at the junction of the Pelly and Lewes Rivers. The post was burned down a few years later by Tlingit traders who did not appreciate the competition.

  Golden Stairs—The 1,500 or so steps carved and worn into the ice up Chilkoot Pass in the winter of 1897–1898.

  Happy Camp—A popular camping spot twenty-one miles above Dyea on the Chilkoot Trail, and four miles from Lake Lindeman.

  Klondike—Gold district encompassing the Klondike River and its tributaries. The name comes from the corruption of the Hän (Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in) word meaning hammerstone, which was used to hammer down stakes to set salmon traps.

  Lindeman, Lindeman City—Settlement at the start of the Yukon River headwaters on Lake Lindeman.