Wolf: The Lives of Jack London

by James L. Haley Coffin

  In the previous couple of years he had reached high. He had left high school, but prepared for and been accepted into a leading university, and had his writing win contests and be published. That quickly became cold comfort now that he was staring again into the pit of menial labor, but for the summer of 1897 he agreed to accompany Herbert Shepard, Eliza’s stepson, to work in the newly automated steam laundry of another preparatory academy, in Belmont on the peninsula southeast of San Francisco. The wage must have seemed like Fate’s cruelest joke on him: $30 per month, the same as he had made shoveling coal at the electric train power station. Remembering daily the gall of being expelled from a prep school for daring to be smarter than the rich kids made the arrogance and superiority of the Belmont Academy students who dropped off and picked up their laundry that much harder to bear. They idled about, gossiping over iced drinks while London and Shepard sweat their pores out over the steam presses. (“So help me God,” he told his second wife some years later, “no circumstance could make me touch an iron again if I died for it.”)15 Now a credentialed socialist, London made an attempt to organize the laundry workers but got nowhere;16 he and Shepard had to content themselves with exacting an unmentionable form of revenge—over-starching the girls’ underwear, knowing that the victims could never bring themselves to complain that they were being chafed raw. Dissimilarly from shoveling coal, here his $30 a month was in addition to bed and board, so he endured to the end of the term before retreating back to Oakland, desolate that having worked so hard to improve his mind, he was still a Work Beast. No matter what he did, it seemed he could not break the chains.

  6

  THE PROSPECTOR

  By adulthood Jack London had come to understand desperation, and having nothing to lose. His memory was crowded with his mother’s playing the Chinese lotteries and ruining his stepfather with one overreaching venture after another. Perhaps he should have recognized something of his mother in himself, when the grimy little steamship Excelsior docked in San Francisco on July 14, 1897, bringing news of the discovery of gold in the Klondike.

  If gold is a fever, the gangplank of the Excelsior injected the disease into the United States. An owlish little one-time secretary of the YMCA and his wife trundled off the ship with $85,000 in gold; others rolled off even more. So too did the Portland when she tied up in Seattle two days later, and some of the first Klondikers had to hire porters to lug their sacks of nuggets and gold dust to the banks. The newspapers were not modest in their coverage:GOLD! GOLD! GOLD! SIXTY-EIGHT RICH MEN ON

  THE PORTLAND. STACKS OF THE YELLOW METAL!

  Word of the Klondike had already reached Seattle when she docked and she was met by a crowd of 5,000 who watched more than a million dollars in gold come off the ship.

  The news held immediate appeal for Jack London, Work Beast. Financial independence won with Alaskan gold would free him to pursue his writing while supporting his family. It would also give him license to marry Mabel Applegarth and maintain her in the state that her family would require.

  At least minimally circumspect, London went to seek the advice of Joaquin Miller, California’s most famous poet and an intimate of Ina Coolbrith—only to discover that he had already bolted for Alaska. London wanted to consult Eliza, but he was already so much in her debt that he didn’t dare—but then he received a shock: James Shepard, his aging and ailing brother-in-law, had also caught the fever and determined to go. Shepard declared that he and Eliza would bankroll the venture; Shepard would go with him, but London must do the hauling for them both. It seemed like a fair exchange. The Shepard house was in Eliza’s name, and hopelessly she put a thousand-dollar mortgage on it. “They’re both as crazy as loons,” she said, “one no better than the other.”

  She might well have extended her remark to the whole stampede, which was, in essence, madness. Although the prospectors sailed to Alaska, the gold was not in Alaska. Thousands left the United States with no clue that the Klondike River emptied into the Yukon at the town of Dawson, in the heart of the Canadian Yukon Territory. That was a good five hundred miles of packing, climbing, boat-building, sailing, and rafting from where they came ashore. It should have been obvious that the locals had long since staked the best claims. It should have been obvious that by leaving the lower forty-eight in mid-summer, the survivors of that terrifying overland trek would arrive in the gold mining region just in time to confront the greatest terror of all, the Arctic winter, which they would have to survive before even thinking of prospecting for gold in the spring.

  The Canadian government did its best to discourage this massive migration, barring entry to any who did not bring a year’s supplies and $500 in cash. But the news stories of gold being disgorged by ships like the Portland and the Excelsior set in motion a horde that would not be denied, which said as much about the lingering depression that began in 1893 as it did about the lure of riches needing only to be plucked from streambeds. “Klondicitis,” the newspapers called it.

  Ironically for Northern California, which had endured its own gold rush a half century before, the history was conveniently forgotten that for every miner who struck a fortune, a vast number ended their venture penniless, and more than a few lay in unmarked graves. The odds were not good.

  Some immediately saw the folly for what it was. Ambrose Bierce, the cynical Hearst columnist for the San Francisco Examiner and later a grudging familiar of London’s, wrote of the Klondiker, “Will he clear the way for even a dog-sled civilization? . . . Nothing will come of him. He is a word in the wind, a brother to the fog. At the scene of his activity no memory of him will remain. The gravel that he thawed and sifted will freeze again. In the shanty that he builded, the she-wolf will raise her poddy litter. . . . The snows will cover his trail and all be as before.”

  Sharing Bierce’s gloom was Mabel Applegarth’s mother, the omnipresent chaperone who liked London in spite of himself. She wrote him three days before he was to sail: “We have just received the letter with the awful news that you are about to start for Alaska. Oh, dear John, do be persuaded to give up the idea for we feel certain that you are going to meet your death and we shall never see you again. . . . John, do give up the thought for you will never come back again, never. Your Father and Mother must be nearly crazed over it. Now, even at the eleventh hour, dear John, do change your mind and stay.”1

  Mrs. Applegarth’s sentiment was understandable, but she was wrong on at least one count: his parents were not opposed. John London was now nearly seventy and confined to bed, his one functioning lung helping him cling to life. But his eyes lit up when he learned of his stepson’s pending adventure; if only he could go, he said, he was sure the clean, cold climate would restore him. Jack was reduced almost to tears at the leave-taking, certain that it was a final goodbye. “Watch his smoke,” John London said to comfort Eliza during the ensuing weeks when she sat up at night, keeping vigil over him. “He’ll come out all right, and come out big, mark my words.” Flora shared his confidence. If a typhoon in the open Pacific couldn’t kill him, a little ice and some wolves would only make enough of an impression to write about later. Jack London did not go to the Klondike to gain material for the dozens of books, stories, and essays he produced in the following years; he went with the dream of returning a wealthy man. Mining the Yukon for literary wealth probably occurred to his mother first of all.

  The speed of it all was staggering. The Excelsior had docked on July 14; just ten days later, London and Shepard went to the outfitters and spent a large portion of Eliza’s mortgage money within a few hours: “fur-lined coats, fur caps, heavy high boots, thick mittens; and red-flannel shirts and underdrawers of the warmest quality . . . a year’s supply of grub, mining implements, tents, blankets, Klondike stoves, everything requisite to maintain life, build boats and cabins.”2 (The day before, when Shepard and Eliza were on a streetcar bound to meet London and finalize their plans, Shepard’s excitement worked him into a small heart attack. The conductor stopped the car, and
he and Eliza laid him gently on a lawn until a doctor could be sent for, who ordered Shepard to bed for two weeks, but the rendezvous was kept and Shepard insisted on persevering.) London’s own drayage included items not common to the others: first and most important, a copy of Miner Bruce’s Alaska: Its History and Resources, with its instructions detailed right down to which side of a river contained the main channel. He would have his own uses for Darwin and Spencer and Marx—and appropriately enough, Milton’s Paradise Lost and Dante’s Inferno.

  The day after buying supplies, London and his wan brother-in-law boarded the S.S. Umatilla, the same vessel on which London had stoked coal on his way home from tramping. She was licensed to carry 290 passengers; this day she sailed with 471, most of them Klondikers with all their gear. She docked again at Port Townsend, Washington, just at the entrance to Puget Sound, where most of the would-be miners transferred to the S.S. City of Topeka and continued to Juneau, to arrive on August 2. Most of the men were traveling individually or in pairs, but by the time they got there, many of them had coalesced into larger partnerships to better bear the expense and the rigors of the coming test. London and Shepard fell in with three others: Fred C. Thompson, Jim Goodman, and Ira Merritt Sloper, who had been lately traveling in South America.

  Their three days in Juneau were a fitting introduction to Alaska weather—it rained. Local natives were able to capitalize on the influx of northbound white men by charging them hefty fares to continue transport to the jumping-off point on the march for gold. On the 5th, London and Shepard engaged Indians to haul them and their gear in seventy-foot canoes up a sheltered arm of the inside passage called the Lynn Canal, past Haines to Skagway, finally beaching at Dyea. The hundred-mile paddle took three days, with London enjoying the presence of the Indians’ “squaws, papooses & dogs.” The previous summer London had vacationed with the Applegarths in the Yosemite Valley, which he recalled to Mabel in a letter written on their arrival. Their whole journey on the water “lay between mountains which formed a Yosemite Valley the whole length, & in many places the heights were stupendous. Glaciers & waterfalls on every side.”

  At Dyea he learned something else about the Alaskan summer. “I am laying on the grass within a score of glaciers, yet the slight exertion of writing causes me to sweat prodigiously.” London had calculated carefully how to haul his and Shepard’s outfit and avoid having to pay native porters. On a good trail he could carry a hundred pounds on his back, seventy-five on a bad trail. If he divided their half-ton of supplies into an average of fifteen loads, he could advance a mile, cache the pack, and return for another load. To move the whole outfit one mile up the trail would require him to walk twenty-nine miles, fifteen of it under burden. Such a thought did not faze him. “Am certain we will reach the lake in 30 days.”3

  London would certainly not be alone in plodding the trail. He estimated that there were about 3,000 novice Klondikers ready to start overland at this same time, but most of them were mired in confusion. Two-thirds of them landed at his location at the very head of the waterway, the rest five miles back down the coast at the slightly less raw town of Skagway. The head of the Lynn Canal was twice daily inundated with thirty-foot tides, so Dyea had no wharf. From where the ships dropped anchor, arrivals had to negotiate fees to load their gear onto lighters to ferry it to shore, which was nothing compared to the pandemonium on shore. Packs from different outfits were piled together, quarreling was hot, and fights were frequent. More local Indians were available to hire out as packers, but their rate had quintupled to forty cents per pound. London’s party of five found it more economical to buy an old boat and pull their outfit the first six miles, up the Dyea River to where the boat grounded, then continue up its canyon, repeatedly fording the ice-cold stream. Following this narrow defile steadily, gradually upward, for eight miles he marched, carrying a pack, returning for another, carrying the second pack, returning for another, fifteen times for each mile. Thompson, a redhead of slender frame, lacked London’s ability to haul his own gear and hired Indians at twenty-two cents per pound. The labor was backbreaking, and London, having worn his red flannels to Alaska, found himself sweating so profusely that he stripped off his outer layers to the red undershirt. He did begin to take some pride, though, that he was out-hauling nearly all the other white men, and a fair number of the hired Indian porters. Even with London doing the hauling, it took only a couple of days for Captain Shepard to come to his senses and realize that he would never survive to see the Yukon. After he turned back to catch a ship home, his place in the partnership was assumed by a man named Tarwater, later recalled by name and character in one of London’s very last Alaska stories, “Like Argus of the Ancient Times,” written the year he died and published posthumously.4

  It took almost three weeks for them to reach the first resting place, a flat known as Sheep Camp. Four days more they continued through the rain, higher, crossing the tree line, until they reached a second campground near a large, block-shaped boulder called the Stone House. Of the Klondikers who eventually realized that they had sunk perhaps all their means into a project they could not consummate, some went mad, some killed themselves. Those who lasted a few more days saw their hope of accomplishment dashed as they looked up at the cruelest obstacle yet, the summit of Chilkoot Pass, a final ascent of three-quarters of a mile at a 45-degree angle, taken single file. London’s party craned their necks upward to see it on August 27. There was an easier route to the interior, via White Pass a few miles to the south, but it required a trek of forty-five easier miles, as opposed to the twenty they had come. To save time, London’s group, like most of the others, chose the shorter, harder trail.

  All his life as a boy and young man, London had harbored a soft spot for animals, especially dogs and horses. What he beheld along the path up to the Chilkoot Pass made his heart ache. Many of the Klondikers had—stupidly—brought horses to do their hauling for them, despite the terrain, the season, and the lack of forage. As the trail became worse, they whipped the overloaded animals mercilessly. Some were beaten to death; some tumbled from the trail into gulches, where they lay flailing with broken legs or broken backs, with no one willing to spend a bullet on them to end their misery. Later, it was probably only a small exaggeration when it was said that one could walk the length of the trail to the Chilkoot Pass and never set foot on anything but dead horses. To London it was a soggy hell.5

  London, Goodman, Thompson, Sloper, and Tarwater took their place in the long, thin line hiking slowly, painfully to the summit of the pass; London and the others who hauled their own gear one load at a time did so many times. The summit was also the Canadian border, and there Northwest Mounted Police weighed freight and determined who would be allowed to continue into the interior. From there to the Klondike would be downhill, but downhill, they soon learned, would be even worse than the climb. They would follow the watercourses for the five hundred miles through the upper tributaries of the Yukon to reach Dawson, but that five hundred miles contained some of the wildest water on the planet. Dawson was only fifty miles from the eastern boundary of Alaska, but from where they now stood it was north halfway to the Arctic Circle.

  London and his partners followed the trail northeast, around the margins of small bodies of water, Long Lake and Deep Lake, continuing their grueling regimen. Eventually they hauled over an enormous rise to see the southern finger of narrow, glacial Lake Lindemann; one of the last stops on this leg was at a place called Pleasant Valley, whose name, they discovered, was something of a sick joke. Pleasant Valley was little more than a frigid marsh, and in places the weight of the packs drove London almost up to his knees in cold ooze.

  Perhaps because London had studied Miner Bruce’s book in such detail, they arrived on September 8, exactly one month after starting the trek, as he had predicted to Mabel Applegarth. Snow was already dusting the spikes of the tall spruces; the threat of winter, with the imperative to reach the gold region before the waterways froze up, was already in the ai
r.

  London’s preparation, his strong back, and his dogged determination on the trail had been advantages over the less provident Klondikers; at Lake Lindemann he was to enjoy another, for if anyone knew how to build a small boat, he did, and Merritt Sloper was also knowledgeable. The advantage of having formed a partnership also became apparent, as Goodman, Thompson, and Tarwater took over packing their gear, while London, accompanied by Sloper, selected a campsite near a good stand of spruce and began felling trees to build their boat. Indeed, they found it helpful to pool their labor with another group of three men named Odette, Rand, and Sullivan; they sawed the spruce logs into stout lumber and built two flat-bottomed, shallow-draft boats, twenty-seven feet long: the Yukon Belle for London’s team and the Belle of the Yukon for the other. The Lake Lindemann watershed would soon be denuded of trees, as during this year and the next more than 7,000 boats, rafts, and flats that defied categorical description set off down the lake. Many would sink of their own accord or be dashed to pieces in rapids, the drowned bodies of their crews surfacing in calmer eddies downstream.

  The first blizzard of the year was roaring by the time the boats were loaded, and then rowed and sailed down the length of the lake. With Arctic winter fast approaching, they began gambling on dangerous shortcuts to save time. Lake Lindemann emptied through a whitewater chute that connected to the lower Lake Bennett; the experience of outfits up to that point was that it was safer to portage gear down the stream bank and careen down the rapids in an empty boat; London’s and Rand’s groups bit their lips and shot through fully loaded. For their first major risk, luck was with them and they emerged onto the stillness of Lake Bennett, silently passing the wreckage of the less fortunate. They were favored by a hefty south wind as they traversed the lake and another rapid outlet to Lake Tagish, and on then to Lake Marsh. They realized just how fortunate they had been in their progress when, on Lake Tagish, they were hammered by crosswinds at the aptly named Windy Arm, and they saw two other boats near them founder and sink, their crews splash about for a moment and then slip beneath the surface. Thompson called on London to beach and camp for the night, but if oyster pirating had taught London anything it was how to sail at night, and they pressed on.