Wolf: The Lives of Jack London

by James L. Haley Coffin

  The outflow of Marsh Lake was into the majestic, powerful 50-Mile River, as much as a quarter-mile wide and promising an easy stretch to navigate. Halfway down its length that proved to be a lie, as the banks rose to sheer rock walls and narrowed to a width of only eighty feet. The entire volume of the river ripped through the Box Canyon with such force that a ridge of water six feet high or more had formed down the middle. Beaching the Yukon Belle amid scores of other craft whose crews had determined to spend time portaging around the fearsome obstacle, London surveyed the canyon and—not surprisingly for him—decided that he could run it, despite the presence halfway through the canyon of a vicious whirlpool where the walls widened just enough to split the current. Still, running the canyon would take only a couple of minutes, measured against a two-day portage. It seems astonishing that the other men would place their faith in a twenty-one-year-old who seemed to have the confidence that he could defy any force of nature, but he had gotten them this far, and they acquiesced. As at Lake Lindemann, he did not show the canyon the respect of unloading the boat and running through it empty; overloaded and sluggish, he would take her through as she was. Leaving Tarwater ashore and placing Goodman and Thompson on the oars with Sloper in the bow, London lashed the steering oar down securely, they pushed off, intending to ride the Ridge down the middle of the stream well clear of the vertical walls. Other Klondikers gathered on the shore and the cliff tops to watch the daredevils, some yelling encouragement; once they were swept into the Box Canyon their fate was sealed, for good or ill.

  The hardest thing about the Ridge was initially getting on top of it. London steered for it with all his might, and Sloper with the bow paddle pushed for it, sometimes just when the Yukon Belle would make a great upward heave, leaving him slashing at thin air before soaking him with a downward plunge. They just gained the crest as they entered the canyon, but then slipped off, Sloper breaking his paddle and London leaning on the steering oar until it cracked. The Belle began to turn her beam to the current and they approached within six feet of the sheer wall that would splinter them, but London managed to force her back up onto the rushing crest, just in time to encounter the whirlpool. For someone as classically read as London, the moment must have seemed like something out of Homer—Scylla and Charybdis, the choice of death between the crushing cliff face or the whirlpool. Still, he managed to skirt the swirling funnel of water, leaned on the steering oar to push the boat back up on to the Ridge and down to smooth water. Sensible men would have not pushed their luck further, but London had become friends back upstream with a team headed by a man named Rett who had brought his family with him. With little apparent thought London walked back up the length of the canyon and took their boat through as well.

  After the terror of Box Canyon, two miles on loomed the even more dangerous White Horse rapids, where most of the crews banked their boats and pondered again whether to push their luck. The following year, entrepreneurs started a freight company that portaged the Klondikers and their gear around the danger, which was the first commerce that began the town of Whitehorse, destined to become the capital of Yukon Territory. But at the time London and his company were there, it was raw rock and water. Similar to Box Canyon, the White Horse rapids had at their center a raised chute of water, this one dubbed the Horse’s Mane for its spray, and it also embraced a whirlpool. This one, however, lay where the main channel was thrown from the right bank to the left by a raised reef of rocks, which was incalculably more dangerous.

  The Yukon Belle entered the Horse’s Mane dead center, bucking high over mountainous waves before plunging her square bow deep into water that poured into the boat. Then, again, she turned sickly, presenting her beam to the current just as they approached the whirlpool. London bellowed to ship oars, intending to maneuver only with the steering oar. Briefly he fought the suction before realizing his mistake, then steered through a whole circuit of the swirling water, gaining the speed that would break them free. Up in the bow Sloper, who had broken a second paddle, was certain they would crash, and he leapt out onto a projecting rock, then as the boat made its circuit he realized what London was doing and leapt just as neatly back in. London heaved the Belle out of the whirlpool and back up onto the Horse’s Mane, which they rode through to still water.6

  Eventually the 50-Mile River widened out into Lake Laberge, later immortalized by the fictional cremation of the actual local character Sam McGee. It was September 25, a thick blanket of snow covered the ground, and blizzards were coming harder and colder. Three times in three days London’s group set out to traverse Laberge’s forty-mile length, driven back each time by stout north winds and waves that froze even as they broke over the freeboard. Other groups of Klondikers were admitting defeat and preparing winter camps to hunker down until spring, as it was plain that the lake was on the brink of freezing, even though the river below would continue to run. Again London assumed leadership, declaring on the 28th that unless the others were content to winter there on Lake Laberge, they would cross and stop for nothing. They sailed that day and all through the night; by morning they emerged onto 30-Mile River. Looking back, they beheld a thin sheet of ice flattening the surface of the lake.

  For all intents and purposes, the mouth of Lake Laberge is the head of navigation on the Yukon proper, and fed by such brawling torrents as the Teslin and Big and Little Salmon rivers, the sheer weight of stream gave them a well-deserved smooth run downstream, after all this still in company with the Belle of the Yukon. For some time they had been meeting discouraged Klondikers heading back the way they came, bearing woeful tales that there was not enough food in Dawson to last through the winter, and the whole of the gold-mining area was already staked out. If that was true, they might as well try their luck where they were, so at mid-afternoon October 9 the Yukon Belle slipped onto the bank of Split-Up Island, near the mouth of the Stewart River, to make winter camp; her sister paused to take on Tarwater and continued the eighty miles to Dawson. London and his partners found shelter in a cabin that had once been manned by the Alaska Commercial Company, and the next morning unloaded the boat and began organizing the camp. On the 11th, Jim Goodman, the only one with any mining experience, explored a small nearby stream called Henderson Creek, and when he returned he showed around the tiny flecks of gold he had panned.

  First thing the next morning, London, Thompson, and two other prospectors who had fallen in with them left camp for three days in the same watershed. When they returned, London was jubilant at having found his own little showing of gold; although Thompson later wrote that London actually came back with iron pyrite—“fool’s gold”—he probably did actually find a smidgen of the metal he had come for. On this same October 15, John London died at home in Oakland, confident to the last that Jack would triumph. Perhaps Flora had discussed the literary possibilities with him, for Eliza later told Jack London’s second wife that the long-dying man said not once, but often, “Jack is going to make a success out of the Klondike—whether he digs it out of the grassroots or not.”7

  On the 16th, London, Thompson, and the two newcomers, Charles Borg and Emil Jensen, packed tents, blankets, and food for three weeks, and launched the Yukon Belle for the two-day trip on to Dawson to register their claims. They beached on the south bank of the Klondike and rode the ferry across into Dawson City, a beehive of a frontier boomtown that, during the course of the gold rush, mushroomed from fewer than 5,000 people to more than 20,000. In the inflation of the boomtown, breakfast cost $3.50; it took $5 for a pound of tomatoes and $30 for a gallon of milk. Most of the Americans wintering in Dawson were still cheechakoes—tenderfeet—who had not actually done any mining and were living expensively off their grubstakes. There had been little mention of alcohol during all these long weeks on hiking and rafting, but once again a man among men, London and his companions visited one of the many saloons. In it London chanced across two fellow Californians, the brothers Louis and Marshall Bond, whose father was a judge in Santa Clara. They had a cabi
n in the town and invited London’s group to pitch their tent next to it. With his partners securely in possession of Henderson Creek, London felt little urgency to file the claim right away, but he did so on November 5.

  Of much greater interest to him were the Bond brothers, both Yalies, and young men with whom he could have an intellectual exchange. During one frozen, lamp-lit bull session in the Bonds’ cabin, the talk passed to socialism. Various of the company made their ignorant stabs at it; one got it mixed up with anarchism. “Then,” according to Marshall Bond, “from out of the shadow of the lamp, from the blur of beard and cap, came a quick-speaking, sympathetic voice. He took up the subject from its earliest history, carried it through on a rapid survey of its most important points and held us thrilled. . . . This was my first introduction to Jack London.” Admitting that he had been educated into a goose step of conventionalism, he found London’s independent intellect a blast of fresh air.8 Of equal interest to London as having the Bond brothers to talk to was their massive, woolly dog, Jack, half collie and half St. Bernard, with whom he bonded and whose fond memory he would recall in a future year.

  With the Yukon just starting to freeze—it was a disquieting notion that these brutal conditions had actually been a mild beginning to the winter, and the river was freezing later than normal—London started back to the Split-Up Island cabin on December 3. It was a hard trek back up to the Stewart River, for the foot traffic and dog sleds had not yet packed the snow smooth on the trail, but it was a winter hike that later furnished the setting for his classic short story “To Build a Fire.”

  With no Yale men to counter him, London began opening intellectual fire on his cabin mates, who were badly overmatched. Another Klondiker who was one of a growing group who wintered on the island, one W. B. “Bert” Hargrave of Colfax, Washington, first met London at such a moment.

  His cabin was on the bank of the Yukon, near the mouth of the Stewart River. I remember well the first time I entered it. London was seated on the edge of a bunk, rolling a cigarette. He smoked incessantly. . . . One of his partners, Goodman, was preparing a meal, and the other, Sloper, was doing some carpentry work. From the few words which I overheard as I entered, I surmised that Jack had challenged some of Goodman’s orthodox views, and that the latter was doggedly defending himself in an unequal contest of wits. Many times afterward I felt the rapier thrust of London’s, and knew how to sympathize with Goodman.

  Winter, however, would have been colder without the intellectual fire, and London never rubbed his partners’ noses in their ignorance. “Though a youth,” concluded Hargrave, “he displayed none of the insolent egotism of youth . . . [but] the clean, joyous, tender, unembittered heart of youth.”9

  Having visited the saloon in Dawson, there was no other mention of London in association with alcohol at the Split-Up Island bivouac, save one. Emil Jensen’s partner needed an operation, without which he would die, and a foraging expedition to nearby camps, including ransacking the packs of a medical doctor, produced neither chloroform nor ether. Upon being told that a liberal consumption of whiskey would at least dull the pain, London produced a bottle from his packs and said, “Take it and welcome.” In later days, when London was famous enough for his drinking to come in for censure, Jensen defended him as sober and kind. Jensen, however, had the luck to know London when he was engaged in hopeful work and good companions; unlike on the Oakland waterfront, he had no need to drink on the Yukon.10

  Winter in the Arctic is shut-in time, with ample opportunity to talk during long hours wrapped in their bedding, and time to consider the present and the future. London did make various forays eighteen miles out to their claim on Henderson Creek to prospect. There he sheltered in an abandoned dugout, reflecting on what he had gotten himself into, and on what kind of future he could expect when he returned.

  Common among the miners during the winter was the “Klondike Plague,” scurvy, brought on by a diet limited to bacon, bread, and beans. Easily preventable as it is with fresh vegetables and fruit, if left untreated scurvy can become lethal. By May London was showing all the symptoms: flaccid skin, bleeding gums, and loose teeth (although what irked him more than scurvy was the lack of sugar in the staples; his voracious sweet tooth had not been placated in months).

  Even worse, the sense of high adventure with which he had begun was supplanted by daily drudgery. He was cold, lonely, and increasingly frustrated as the vaunted gold proved elusive, and now he was getting sick. Since reading Nietzsche he had been enamored of the Superman, but now had to confront his physical limitations and what they meant for his future: he could not be a Work Beast much longer. If he tried he would end as one of the hopeless wretches he encountered on the road, one of the lame tramps who desperately wanted to work but could not. He must find a way to earn his living with his mind. In the Call’s literary contest he had bested the best Berkeley had to offer, eight of his stories had been published in the Aegis, and since then he had applied himself ruthlessly to the study and use of language. The dugout on Henderson Creek became his frozen crucible, in which his determination to become a writer finally hardened, to learn to do it professionally, no matter what it took. Having concluded this, he scrawled some portentous graffiti onto the log beside his bunk:

  JACK LONDON MINER AUTHOR JAN 27 1898

  The miner half of his self-assumed identity came to an unexpectedly rapid conclusion, for London’s scurvy had become acute. Back down on Split-Up Island, the extended confinement caused tempers to run short among his partners; London ran afoul of Sloper when he used the latter’s ax to chop ice to melt for drinking water. He swung too hard, striking rock beneath the ice and seriously dulling the blade. In the North this was a serious matter, and Sloper’s abuse was so severe that London took up residence with a nearby camp, which included “Bert” Hargrave and a medical doctor, B. F. Harvey. Like London, Hargrave had an appreciation for the cross-section of humanity among whom they found themselves. In later years he provided a short list of the Klondikers who shared Split-Up Island. One was a Texan named Peacock, who beat the odds and actually became wealthy from Yukon gold; another was Elam Harnish, sardonically known by his sobriquet of Burning Daylight—another name that would appear in a later London tale.11 Examining London’s advancing scurvy, Dr. Harvey gave strident advice to leave for home at the first thaw, which would begin at any time. In preparation, London’s partners and others who had taken up residence on the island began dismantling the cabin that housed London and his partners, lashing its logs together into a raft to carry him down to Dawson.

  The spring thaw on the Yukon is an event of unstoppable power. London and Dr. Harvey watched the enormous blocks of ice rise and heave with cataclysmic explosions and slowly move downstream. Where their edges caught the bank they gouged out huge chunks of soil and rock, tumbling mature trees into the torrent, and when the ice would jam downstream the surging river would rise and rise until it would finally float them and carry them on. It took hours for the Yukon to run clear and within its banks. Upstream the Stewart River was still frozen and would cause similar deadly conditions on the river, but London’s need for medical attention was so grave that the raft was launched with Harvey and London on it.

  In Dawson London found potatoes to eat, a rich source of vitamin C and fast relief for scurvy. He also found the hospital run by a Father Judge, who administered as well as he could, but he urged London, if he valued his life, to get back to civilization. London and Harvey got $600 for the logs of their raft, and London procured a small boat in which he meant, as though he had not tempted fate enough, to descend the whole length of the Yukon—1,500 miles.

  Loading in supplies and two traveling companions named Taylor and Thor-son, they pushed off from Dawson on June 8, bound ultimately for St. Michael’s, on the south shore of Norton Sound, an inlet of the Bering Sea. For long stretches they passed the wide marshes lining the Yukon, in which mosquitoes awakened by the spring thaw emerged hungry, causing London and his companion
s endless grief. They slept under netting but were badly bitten nonetheless; one morning when London awoke in misery from them, Taylor “swore that he has seen several of the largest ones pull the mesh apart & let a small one squeeze through.”12 The mosquitoes had to be braved, though, to obtain the goose eggs that formed a large part of their diet. They also consumed ducks raw, which may explain London’s penchant for them in his later famous years. Still suffering, no longer able to straighten his right leg but able to limp on his toes, London rested as much as he could, and even sketched some thoughts about the previous months—the first of a long career writing about Alaska and the Yukon. Ten days brought them to Anvik, a settlement on the south-flowing Yukon right before it swings west and enters its vast delta. There the Episcopal missionary provided London with vitamin C-rich canned tomatoes and fresh potatoes, “worth more to me at the present stage,” he wrote, “than an El Dorado claim.”