by Rich Mole
Five weeks after telling his story to Healy, William Moore and his son stood at Skagua, looking up the Taiya River. “Here is the future,” Moore shouted, his words leaving a trail of vapour in the cool, moist air. “Before too many years, I expect to see a pack trail through that pass, followed by a wagon road.” Moore paused and grinned. “I wouldn’t be surprised to see a railroad through to the lakes.” He saw more: a fine home, a town—his town—and a busy wharf. All he had to do was find the money to build it.
A few days later, John J. Healy and his partner watched Moore and his son wrestling logs from the forest, rolling them to the site of a future wharf. “It will never amount to anything,” Healy shouted at Moore. “I feel sorry for you, wasting your time here!” Then, Healy and Wilson pushed their canoe into the bay. Moore looked up and paused to catch his breath. He wasn’t about to listen to such naysayers—especially Healy, who had much to lose if most prospectors chose a route that bypassed his trading post! Moore knew that it took sweat, toil and time to make a dream reality. It took money, too. Moore was confident that he would find it.
* * *
With the discovery of the White Pass, the future of Healy’s store at Dyea Inlet at the foot of the Chilkoot Pass was threatened. But Healy had a plan. Rather than spending time and energy fighting the rival White Pass, Healy decided to take a broader view. He realized big profits would be made supplying the Yukon’s new prospectors at Fortymile. At the moment, the only supply firm in the whole territory was the Alaska Commercial Company. To seize this opportunity, Healy needed financial backing, and he knew where he could find it.
John Healy’s trading background extended back to frontier days in Montana, when he had ridden across the border to establish the most infamous of all the Blackfoot whisky posts, Fort Whoop-Up. At the fort, Native peoples had traded buffalo robes and fox furs for whisky that Healy called “coffin varnish so strong you’ll be able to shoot the injun through the brain or heart and he won’t die until he’s sobered up!” The whisky trade was enormously profitable until the North-West Mounted Police (NWMP) arrived and closed Whoop-Up down.
An old friend from Healy’s wild Montana days, Portus B. Weare, was now a wealthy Chicago commodities dealer. Weare represented more than an old friendship; he represented financial business connections. Healy hoped that Weare and his associates would be eager for a chance to profit from the growing number of prospectors moving into the Yukon. In the summer of 1892, Healy travelled to Chicago, intent on persuading Weare and his associates that this mercantile opportunity was simply too good to pass up.
Healy’s plan had been hatched years before, as he had watched Chilkoot Native peoples carrying supplies from the store over the Chilkoot Pass. The Native packers protected their interests closely. Because of their stamina and business acumen, Healy had developed a grudging respect for the Chilkoots, although he would never say so. Instead, he called them liars, cheats and thieves.
Healy decided to control the packing and charge miners a toll to use the trail. At that time, he had shrugged off the testiness of the Native packers. It was just business, Healy reasoned. You tried to beat the competition, not kill him. But Healy learned otherwise when a group of Sitka Tlingit arrived, eager to pack. A shouting match between the rival bands led to a bloodbath, with the dead scattered everywhere. None of that mattered now. What mattered was Healy’s scheme: teams of packhorses, trading posts and a fleet of steamboats.
Fortymile, Yukon
Winter 1894–95
As bishop of Fortymile’s Buxton Mission, William Bompas had watched in dismay as prospectors plied Native peoples with liquor. “There has been drunkenness of whites and Indians together with much danger of the use of firearms,” he complained in a letter to Indian Affairs in Ottawa. With the Washburn saloon shooting, his worse fears were realized. Bompas wrote to Ottawa again asking for police protection, a force of at least ten officers. Months later, only two had arrived—Inspector Charles Constantine and Staff Sergeant Charles Brown. Constantine left after the season to deliver his report, while Brown stayed on alone.
At the same time, trader John J. Healy was also writing letters. He didn’t even consider the Native peoples—he had other priorities. Healy’s trip to Chicago to finance his scheme had been a stunning success. Healy and his wealthy Chicago investors had formed the North American Transportation and Trading Company (NAT&T), building posts in St. Michael and Circle City, Alaska. In the spring of 1893, as NAT&T general manager John J. Healy stood proudly beside the wheelhouse of the company’s new steamboat, the Portus B. Weare. With its whistle blowing and twin smokestacks belching, the steamboat pulled up at Cudahy. For Healy, events were unfolding as they should. Most events, at least.
Prospectors appreciated Healy’s lower prices and better selection, but not his strict payment policy. They wondered why he couldn’t be more flexible, like McQuesten, who worked for the Alaska Commercial Company. However, Healy had bigger problems. It was hard to keep law and order, and he suspected the Portus B. Weare’s skipper of stealing. When he finally confronted the skipper, shouting led to fisticuffs. After bystanders separated the combatants, Healy fired the skipper. To settle the dispute, a miner’s meeting—the crude method of dispensing justice—was convened. The prospectors quickly awarded the thieving skipper all of the fees stated in his three-year contract with Healy. Then it was drinks all around.
“The bad men of the country have settled at Fortymile Creek,” Healy wrote to the minister of the interior. “These men are not miners but a class who make their living at the expense of others.” The time had come for formal, impartial law and order. “We beg that you send a sufficient force of police to the Yukon so that life and property may be protected.”
Healy had no illusions about slow-moving Ottawa bureaucrats. What the Yukon needed was a man of action. He addressed his next letter to the commanding officer at Fort Macleod, the man who 20 years earlier had helped shut down Healy’s own prairie trading enterprise, Fort Whoop-Up. Sam Steele was the kind of man the Yukon needed, but Steele would be a long time coming.
CHAPTER
3
The Days Everything Changed
By 1896, the short, frantic gold stampede to Fortymile River was already a memory. However, each day on the banks of a dozen creeks, prospectors were still washing out just enough gold to prompt newspaper stories in southern cities. The reports inspired a brave—or desperate—few to leave starvation wages or unemployment behind to try their luck in the North. Upriver from the mouth of the Fortymile, and in a number of nearby creeks, prospectors were pouring barely enough gold into caribou-hide pokes to keep them panning and digging. They trusted that someone soon would make the next big find. Each one harboured the secret hope that he would be the one.
Traders Jack McQuesten, Joe Ladue and John Healy were hoping the same thing. McQuesten and Ladue continued to advance the prospectors’ grubstakes against the day someone would strike it rich and rescue them all.
Ogilvie, Sixtymile River, Yukon
Fall 1894
The weary, dejected prospectors told the man at Sixtymile River they were from Colorado. Joe Ladue, part owner of the trading post and sawmill, looked closely at the trio. Like them, Joe Ladue had been a rootless wanderer, leaving his sweetheart in New York to seek gold throughout North America. For him, finding a fortune meant instant acceptance from his girl’s wealthy family. Still, Ladue had finally had it with the creeks. There must be another way to make it out here, he thought. Ladue had a way about him: a real gift of the gab. Prospectors fed on enthusiasm like that. Earlier, trader Jack McQuesten had recognized this gift in Ladue and helped set him up at Sixtymile. The post had been named Ogilvie, after the Canadian government surveyor. Leading the weary prospectors into the store, Ladue gave them one of his usual rousing speeches, but only one man, Robert Henderson, seemed to respond with interest. He asked too many questions for someone ready to go back home.
There were great prospects on Indian Rive
r, Ladue told Henderson. Indian River was less than 30 kilometres down the Yukon. The more Ladue smiled and talked, the more intrigued Henderson became. Then, Ladue asked a few questions of his own. Henderson had left his family in Colorado, but that was only his most recent home. A lightkeeper’s son from Nova Scotia, Henderson had sailed the world in an endless quest for gold, spending the last 14 years in Colorado alone. It was obvious to Ladue that Henderson had the tenacity every prospector needed but few possessed.
“Whaddya need?” Ladue asked. Henderson pulled a dime from his coat pocket and looked back at him. Robert Henderson was willing to take one more gamble and hoped Ladue was, too.
“Let me prospect for you,” he told Ladue. “If it’s good for me, it’s good for you. I’m a determined man. I won’t starve,” he promised. If a dedicated prospector needed a grubstake, just like his Alaska Commercial Company colleague, Ladue was happy to oblige.
Seattle, Washington
1895–96
Thomas Lippy, the Seattle YMCA secretary, reflected on the irony of his situation. Thanks to a knee injury, his new office job paid more than his former position as a phys. ed. instructor. With so many out of work, Lippy knew he should count his blessings. Yet he yearned to do something more than push a pen. Just what that was, he wasn’t sure.
Stories about Yukon prospectors had caught Lippy’s eye. Men were finding gold up there. He couldn’t get the stories out of his mind. Worse, he found he wanted to be a part of those stories. Lippy could feel the pull of the North, and in some indefinable way, he knew this was his chance. The Yukon was physically punishing, Lippy had heard. That didn’t concern him, but he knew that the longer he spent sitting behind a desk, the faster his muscle tone would disappear. He couldn’t afford to wait much longer to make a decision.
Lippy had checked out the cost of Alaska outfits. Money was a problem. He and his wife, Salome, would have to borrow for what they needed. Still, they were young, without children. Lippy marshalled all his arguments and prepared to broach the subject of going north with Salome. When he did, he would avoid the word “hunch.” Using a word like that was no way to win over one’s wife.
Beneath King Solomon’s Dome, Yukon
1896
For two years, Robert Henderson had endured black clouds of summertime insects. He had suffered freezing, snow-driven winter winds. He had worn out boots and pants, and he had eaten through all of his supplies. He had suffered temporary snow blindness and another time barely managed to make it ashore when his skin boat capsized. Once, he slipped on a tree he had just felled, impaling his leg on a jagged branch. Henderson had hobbled off to lie alone in his tent for more than 20 days of agony, not sure he would survive. He had used strips of bacon as a poultice, throwing them to the wolves when they became too rancid. The leg still bothered him, but at least he was alive, and he always found enough gold to pay Joe Ladue for the next outfit—sometimes alone, sometimes with a partner.
In the early summer of 1896, Henderson had broadened his search for gold in the Yukon, wandering down to a little creek on the northern side of the mountain called King Solomon’s Dome. He dipped his pan into the waters, washing away the gravel to reveal eight cents worth of gold. That was good, very good. He named the creek Gold Bottom and then hurried back to persuade three other luckless prospectors to return with him to the creek. Within weeks, the four men had shaken $700 worth of gold into their pokes.
Fortymile, Yukon
1896
Around the same time as Henderson was prospecting at Gold Bottom Creek, George Carmack had an incredibly vivid dream that made further sleep impossible. In his dream, he reached down in blue-green water to grasp a salmon. This was no ordinary fish. The salmon’s scales were made of glistening gold flakes and gold pieces covered its eyes. The only blue-green waters George knew about flowed into the Yukon 70 kilometres south from a salmon stream that prospectors called the Klondike. Before morning, Carmack told his wife that they would fish for salmon on the Klondike and then prospect for gold.
On the swampy, mosquito-infested flats where the Klondike and Yukon rivers met, Carmack constructed a willow fish weir and set out the nets. The first few days passed pleasantly enough beneath the barren mountainside called Moosehide. However, catches were few and far between. Carmack doubted they would have enough fish for winter, and the thought left him both frustrated and fearful.
An unexpected family reunion dispelled the gloom when Skookum Jim, Tagish Charlie and Charlie’s younger brother bobbed down the Yukon. It had been many years since Kate had seen her brother. Skookum Jim and Tagish Charlie told them they’d tried prospecting, but nothing had come of their efforts. Even the caribou had eluded them. “Rejoin your old prospecting friend, if you want to rid yourself of evil spirits,” a Tagish shaman had advised, and so they did! Carmack listened to them with interest and then shared his own vision with the newcomers.
“I’m anxious to start up the Klondike. That’s why I came here,” he told them. “But first I want to lay in a good supply of salmon. Then we’ll go prospecting.”
What if the salmon don’t come? Skookum Jim asked. Carmack had an answer: they would cut trees and float logs down to the sawmill at Fortymile. “We sell the logs, buy grub, go prospecting,” he said casually. They were still fishing a few days later when another visitor came calling.
Robert Henderson was returning from yet another trip for supplies at Ladue’s post, where he had shared news of his findings on Gold Bottom. Henderson decided to paddle down the Yukon to the Klondike. As he poled his loaded craft past the flats at the mouth of the river, he could see people at work.
The pungent smell of smoking salmon wafted across the water. Henderson wrinkled his nose. Here was a surprise: one of the fishermen was white. “There’s a poor devil who hasn’t struck it,” Henderson thought to himself as he slid his boat up on the mud. Why else would he stoop to fishing with the Natives? Maybe he would like to join them on Gold Bottom. As he walked closer, Henderson realized the white man in the group was George Carmack. That explained everything, thought Henderson. Carmack was known to spend most of his time with the Tagish.
“Hello,” Carmack yelled, walking over to Henderson. Carmack was anxious to find out what he was up to. “I heard at Fortymile you were working for Billy Readford up on Quartz Creek. You still there?”
“Naw. Went over the divide to a little creek on the other side of the Dome. I’ve got a good prospect going there—named the creek Gold Bottom.” Carmack became more interested. Henderson explained that he had been to Ladue’s for supplies and was heading back to the creek.
“Any chance for us to stake up there?” Carmack asked eagerly.
Henderson shot a glance over George’s shoulder at Skookum Jim and Tagish Charlie. “There is for you, George. But I don’t want any damn Siwashes staking on that creek,” he sneered.
As Henderson pushed his boat out into the water and paddled past the camp, Skookum Jim walked up to Carmack, his eyes narrowed—he had overheard the insult. Carmack turned to him and whispered, “Never mind. This is a big country. We’ll go find a creek of our own.” Telling his wife that they would be back in a week or so, the men began to pole up the Klondike.
After the first few trees had been felled and limbed, it was obvious to Skookum Jim and Tagish Charlie that it was gold—not logs—that Carmack was after. When a south fork of the Klondike called Rabbit Creek held out little promise other than as a source of timber, Carmack led his two companions through the swampy country and over the domed mountain to join Henderson’s group at Gold Bottom.
Before long, supplies dwindled. Skookum Jim and Tagish Charlie asked Henderson if they could buy some of his tobacco. Henderson refused. The previous winter, he had almost starved when one of his food caches had been pilfered. As the only white man within miles, he knew who was responsible. It was clear that relations between Henderson and the Native peoples were as frosty as they had been weeks earlier. Carmack was harmless enough, Henderson fe
lt, as long as you didn’t take him too seriously. He had a reputation as a teller of tall tales.
Carmack decided to return to Rabbit Creek. True to the prospectors’ code, he and Henderson promised to keep each other posted on developments.
Rabbit Creek, Yukon
August 16, 1896
No one really knows who made the find on Rabbit Creek or the exact nature of that find. Was it, as Carmack insisted, a thumb-sized gold nugget he saw wedged between slabs of bedrock? Was it the nugget Skookum Jim spied beneath the clear water while washing out a dishpan? Was it, instead, course gold that glinted in the bottom of a prospector’s pan?
Laughing and yelling, Skookum Jim, George Carmack and Tagish Charlie danced wildly around the gold pan sitting on the gravel on the bank of the small, meandering stream. Inside that metal pan was gold—more than the three men had ever seen in a single prospector’s pan. The pan was heavy with it. They had heard stories about gold finds like this, dreamed of it, wished for it, and now . . . there it was.
The three men calmed themselves enough to attempt some serious panning. Within minutes they were dumbstruck. They could not believe what the creek bottom revealed. Ten- or twenty-cent prospects were enough to make a prospector’s heart pound. On Rabbit Creek, the average pan was yielding $4 worth of gold, an amount that a man might work for days to shake into a caribou-hide poke.
Others would need proof of the find. Carmack pried open a shotgun shell and dumped its contents onto the rocks. Then, he scooped up some of the gold and poured it carefully into the empty shell, crimping the folded cardboard tight at the top.
The find changed the men and their families forever. For Carmack, gone was any notion of living on the land. Nor would he would ever work for a trading post, fish a river or sell logs. Kate would never have to sew moccasins for white men again. The men sang all night around the fire. That night, chanting Tagish songs, it seemed to Jim that he had found the golden key that unlocked the door to life as a white man.