Jack London and the Klondike Gold Rush

by Lourie, Peter

  PART FIVE

  MARCH–JULY 1898

  HEADING HOME DOWN THE LONG YUKON RIVER

  ICE BREAKUP AND LEAVING THE WHITE SILENCE

  WALKING THROUGH THE WOODS in March and April, Jack heard the trees explode like gunshots in the frozen silence. After a couple of warm days, sap would rise in the spruce saplings; then a cold wave would plunge them back into a deep freeze, and the trees would just snap.

  Outside, the snow kept flying through late winter—a hard, fine, dry snow, “more like sugar. Kick it, and it flew with a hissing noise like sand. There was no cohesion among the particles, and it could not be molded into snow-balls. It was not composed of flakes, but of crystals—tiny, geometrical frost-crystals. In truth, it was not snow, but frost.”

  In the Arctic gloom, Jack heard the huskies crying to the moon, as he later wrote in a nonfiction essay for Harper’s Weekly called “Husky: The Wolf-Dog of the North.”

  * * *

  When the frost grows bitter and the aurora-borealis trails its cold fires across the heavens, they voice their misery to the night. Heartbreaking, sobbing, it rises like a wail of lost and tortured souls, and when a thousand huskies are in full chorus it is as though the roof had tumbled in and hell stood naked to the stars.

  * * *

  Well into April, the sun lingered longer in the sky, setting farther to the west. At the end of the month, the days stretched out for hours. Snow began to melt. Invisible streams moved under the snow. “Tiny white snow-birds appeared from the south, lingered a day, and resumed their journey into the north. Once, high in the air, looking for open water and ahead of the season, a wedged squadron of wild geese honked northward. And down by the river bank a clump of dwarf willows burst into bud.”

  Panning for gold

  (Museum of History & Industry, shs11388)

  Now water everywhere was moving again, and life flooded back into the lifeless earth. When May arrived, Jack wrote:

  * * *

  last-year’s mosquitoes, full-grown but harmless, crawled out of rock crevices and rotten logs. More and more geese and ducks flew overhead. And still the river held. By May tenth, the ice of the Stewart, with a great rending and snapping, tore loose from the banks and rose three feet. But it did not go down-stream. The lower Yukon, up to where the Stewart flowed into it, must first break and move on. Until then the ice of the Stewart could only rise higher and higher on the increasing flood beneath. When the Yukon would break was problematical. Two thousand miles away it flowed into Bering Sea, and it was the ice conditions of Bering Sea that would determine when the Yukon could rid itself of the millions of tons of ice that cluttered its breast.

  * * *

  Some parties traveling on the river’s sun-weakened ice just disappeared into the water through invisible openings. Whole dog teams fell through and were never seen again.

  On into the summer, when the earth around the streams thawed, the prospectors emerged from the caves of their cabins to work outside and in the shafts. Fighting off hordes of attacking mosquitoes, they built dams along the creeks to channel the water for washing the gold out of the muck they drew from the shafts.

  Now Jack witnessed firsthand the terrifying drama of Yukon spring breakup.

  * * *

  The down-stream movement began at five in the morning.… The ice tore by, great cakes of it caroming against the bank, uprooting trees, and gouging out earth by hundreds of tons. All about them the land shook and reeled from the shock of these tremendous collisions. At the end of an hour the run stopped. Somewhere below it was blocked by a jam. Then the river began to rise, lifting the ice on its breast till it was higher than the bank. From behind ever more water bore down, and ever more millions of tons of ice added their weight to the congestion. The pressures and stresses became terrific. Huge cakes of ice were squeezed out till they popped into the air like melon seeds squeezed from between the thumb and forefinger of a child, while all along the banks a wall of ice was forced up. When the jam broke, the noise of grinding and smashing redoubled. For another hour the run continued. The river fell rapidly. But the wall of ice on top the bank, and extending down into the falling water, remained.

  * * *

  For the first time since November, Jack saw open water.

  Bert Hargrave had already gone down to Dawson before river breakup to be treated for his own scurvy. Jack’s other cabinmate, Doc Harvey, said it was now time for Jack to get out, too, not only to head down to Dawson for treatment in the hospital, but maybe to leave the Yukon altogether. The only problem was that with so much broken ice cluttering the river, leaving now would be a treacherous game. Doc said it was necessary; Jack was in bad shape.

  So even though it would have been safer to leave a few weeks later, when the Yukon River was clear of ice, he and Doc Harvey prepared for the journey. Doc helped Jack dismantle their cabin in order to build a raft. Jack was mostly limp. His movements were slow and he fumbled, panting from weakness.

  They launched their raft into the river, and Jack’s head swam as he tried to get his balance in the swift and jolting current. Together they fought off the ice using poles and pushed off sandbars until they reached Dawson, where they sold the wood from the raft for six hundred dollars.

  Jack spent his half of the money on good food and medical attention at the hospital.

  DAWSON ONE LAST TIME

  SPENDING HIS LAST THREE WEEKS in the Yukon with his pal Emil Jensen was a good way to end his Arctic adventure. Jensen wrote, “Jack camped with me and my mate in our tent at Dawson. If there had been trouble between them [his original three partners] I did not know it, for he did not complain, and I did not ask. ‘Our food gave out,’ he said simply.”

  Jack loved the lively saloons and gambling houses of Dawson.

  (University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections, UW6624)

  A horse-drawn cart hauling lumber gets stuck in the mud on Front Street, Dawson.

  (University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections, Hegg 3094)

  Jack found some relief from his scurvy in the vitamin C of a type of beer flavored with spruce shavings. Soon he was strong enough to get a little work picking up driftwood logs with a rowboat. He started to visit the dance halls and saloons again. After so many months without alcohol, he returned happily to his drinking ways.

  Unusual flooding that spring turned the streets to a nightmare of mud. Horses and men stumbled through the black slime. Jack crawled from gambling den to dance hall. He could walk the high, narrow boardwalk that lined both sides of the street until he had to get across the mud to reach another saloon.

  FATHER JUDGE AND HIS HOSPITAL

  ALL OVER DAWSON, penniless men and women were dying of pneumonia, malaria, typhoid, dysentery, starvation, and scurvy. “Get out of town” was common advice. If the Stampeders didn’t have the money or resources to spend another long winter there, they were warned to go quickly. New and untested gold seekers might arrive one day, sell what they had, and leave the next day. Others had no choice but to work for the miners who had claims, like Big Alec, who paid sixteen dollars a day for hired hands.

  Many Stampeders were buried in a graveyard above Dawson. You can visit those graves today.

  (Photos: Peter Lourie)

  Some hardy ones stayed long after the Stampede ended in 1899. These often found work at their previous trades and made new lives for themselves. When they died in Dawson, their graves were marked with a simple wooden marker in the cemetery above the town. Those graves are still there.

  St. Mary’s, a log hospital, was founded in the summer of 1897 by a Catholic priest named Father William Henry Judge. Dawson residents called him the Saint of Dawson because of his relentless care for sick and dying Stampeders. For fifty dollars, you could get a ticket that allowed you to be admitted into the hospital anytime for up to a whole year.

  The Jesuit priest befriended Jack and strongly advised him to get out of Dawson as soon as he could. The scurvy couldn’t be cured o
therwise, he said. He also told Jack about an incident that had happened to him along the trail when he spent hours in subzero weather trying to make a fire to fight off frostbite. The priest apparently fell through the ice on the Yukon. With wet feet, he pushed forward, thinking he could reach his cabin nearby. Two hours later, when he found the cabin, he tried starting a fire in the stove but had to go back down to his sled to get a candle as he was having difficulty lighting matches. He thought a lit candle might more easily start the stove. His hands were so frozen that he had to use his elbows to pull himself up from the ground. Jack added parts of the priest’s experience to what he’d learned about the Irishman Keogh when he wrote the short story “To Build a Fire.”

  Originally from Baltimore, Father Judge arrived in the Yukon in 1894 and established a mission in the early mining town of Forty Mile. When gold was found on Bonanza Creek, he moved to Dawson in March 1897, where he began to treat patients in a tent, then in his newly constructed hospital, which Big Alec had helped pay for. Father Judge supplied food and shelter and medicine to prospectors, including Jack. Judge was so loved that when he died of pneumonia in 1899 at the age of forty-nine, his funeral was the largest Dawson had ever seen.

  SHOVING OFF

  IN EARLY JUNE, the sun never dips below the horizon—that’s why it’s the “land of the midnight sun.” It’s daylight all summer long.

  Soon, the big riverboats, which had been stuck for months in winter ice, would move upriver again. They’d disgorge hundreds of ever-hopeful gold seekers. More than likely, these cheechakos would meet the same misfortune as Jack—if not scurvy, then dysentery, frostbite, or starvation. Certainly, their chances of striking it rich were infinitesimal.

  Masses of other gold seekers arrived the way Jack and his friends had come, from the Alaskan coast by way of the Chilkoot and White Pass Trails. With the spring thaw, the hordes were on the move from Lake Laberge and beyond.

  When the ice broke and the Yukon flowed again, steamboats carrying thousands of cheechakos came up the long river to Dawson.

  (University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections, Hegg 740A)

  The June 1898 inaugural issue of Dawson’s Yukon Midnight Sun newspaper ran a front-page story entitled “Gold Output for the Year: Twenty Millions.” It explained, “Not more than twenty-five claims on Eldorado have been extensively worked. During the winter, while drifting was going on, very little thorough prospecting for the purpose of determining the value of the gravel was done.” And so on.

  On June 8, Jack said good-bye to his pals Hargrave, Harvey, and Jensen. They looked on with envy as Jack and two other friends dropped into a small boat and left the Yukon on another adventure, poling for the river’s mouth at St. Michaels. A brisk six-mile-an-hour current sucked at the little vessel. Jack “turned about for a final glimpse of Dawson—dreary, desolate Dawson, built in a swamp, flooded to the second story, populated by dogs, mosquitoes and gold-seekers. Our friends attempted a half-hearted cheer, and filled the air with messages for those at home.”

  Emil Jensen remembered the day Jack left town, with so many miles to drift, sick with scurvy, but also “sick with the failure consciousness that had gripped so many, and yet, as I bade him farewell, the well-known boyish, engaging smile took the sting out of our parting, though it haunts me still.”

  When he’d taken Emil’s hand, Jack had said, “I shall be glad, Emil, when some day next summer I shall open my door and find you waiting on the porch.”

  With the June sun blazing above, Jack said good-bye to the Klondike, a place that would define him as a writer of the Arctic north, of wolves, sled dogs, and gold seekers. Some say Jack London went north for gold but left with great stories percolating inside him. He’d certainly explored a remarkable region at a notable time in history. In the Arctic, Jack had lived among people from different backgrounds, real people that he could now mold into fictional characters.

  On that day in 1898, he must have felt a great release, not just from sickness and cabin fever, and not from disappointment, but because he was excited to know he finally had the inspiration and material he needed to become a published writer. When he set his boat adrift in the powerful current of the mighty Yukon for the long journey to the Bering Sea, how could he not feel a release from the harshness of winter, from scurvy, and from not finding any gold?

  Later he wrote:

  * * *

  Our boat was home-made, weak-kneed and leaky, but in thorough harmony with the wilderness we were traversing. A smooth and polished creation of the boat-builder’s art might have been more beautiful, but we were quite agreed that it would have been less comfortable and a positive discord to our rough-hewn environment. In the bow was the wood shed, while amidships, built of pine boughs and blankets, was the bed chamber. Then came the rower’s bench, and jammed between this and the steersman was our snug little kitchen. It was a veritable home, and we had little need of going ashore, save out of curiosity or to lay in a fresh supply of firewood.

  * * *

  Twenty-three days after leaving Dawson, Jack and his boat mates arrived at the mouth of the Yukon. In the vast delta, Jack saved a French-Italian priest named Robeau who was in danger of capsizing in his kayak. Taking the priest aboard, Jack found the man to be a kindred spirit, one of the most interesting characters, he said, that he’d met in the Arctic. Robeau had been in Alaska working on an Inuit grammar book for twelve years. Even as he departed, Jack was soaking up details and finding characters to create. He always loved meeting people, asking them questions and listening closely to their stories.

  He found work shoveling coal on a steamer headed for Port Townsend, Washington. He was still weak from scurvy, but he managed to earn passage money for a boat from there to San Francisco.

  HOME

  1898–1899

  CAPTURING THE KLONDIKE IN STORIES

  FINALLY HOME IN THE FALL of 1898—the whole trip had taken him just one year—Jack recovered from the effects of scurvy but felt the pain of losing his stepfather. John London had left him a fifteen-dollar overcoat, which Jack had to pawn for two dollars. Jack still had no money.

  Feverishly, he began to write story after story, mostly Klondike tales, some nonfiction and poetry. He continued to struggle to get published even as he looked for work. He mailed his stories to magazines, only to have publishers reject them. Each time Jack saw the self-addressed stamped envelope that he had included with his submissions, he knew it was another rejection. But he didn’t give up.

  He applied to work for the US Postal Service. He even sold his only treasure from the Klondike—$4.50 worth of genuine Yukon gold dust. When the old wanderlust came over him again, he tried his hand at prospecting once more, this time in Nevada. He failed and returned home to write more stories and receive more rejections.

  Jack remained hopeful and resilient. He’d read somewhere that a writer could make ten dollars for a thousand words, so he pounded out words, but his stories were rejected many times.

  Then came his big break. Overland Monthly, a respected literary journal that published Mark Twain, offered Jack five dollars for “To the Man on Trail.” A whole week’s wage. Never mind that they didn’t pay him for months. Then another story was accepted in the Black Cat, for which they would pay him a whopping sum of forty dollars. The editor said it was that good! (Remember, $40 in 1897 would be $1,120 in today’s dollars!)

  In June 1899, less than a year after returning from the Klondike, Jack was asked to cut a twelve-thousand-word manuscript for the Atlantic Monthly. He didn’t like the idea of cutting at all, but managed to whittle it down to ten thousand words, and a few months later, his literary reputation and financial success were sealed when his story “An Odyssey of the North” appeared in the January 1900 issue of the magazine. He now knew he could publish with the best of them, and his writing career began to take off.

  * * *

  MAYBE, IN THE END, Jack London is the only King of the Klondike. Carmack, Keish (Skookum Jim) an
d Káa Goox (Dawson Charlie), along with a few hundred other Stampeders, did get rich. Mighty rich. A lucky few managed to hold on to their riches to pass along to their families. Most Eldorado Kings, though, like Big Alec McDonald, squandered their loot and died penniless.

  Although Jack was never good with money and probably could not have been the shrewd businessman he thought he might be, he did pass along to the world his own kind of Klondike gold. He produced ten published short stories in a single year, for which he was paid a mere $7.50 apiece. Only two years after he left Dawson, at twenty-four years old, Jack published his first book, a collection of eight Klondike tales, The Son of the Wolf.

  Jack in 1903 when The Call of the Wild was published.

  (Photo JLP 210, Jack London Papers, the Huntington Library, San Marino, California)

  Jack’s career as a writer would soar the way he’d always imagined. With the publication of The Call of the Wild in 1903, at the age of twenty-seven, Jack became the most famous and highly paid writer in the world.

  After returning from the Klondike, he continued to write a thousand words a day, which is like the hard work of placer mining, sifting the literary gold from the loose gravel of raw experience.

  Perhaps the metaphor works. You build a fire to thaw the frozen ground and then you scrape out a few feet of loose gravel, and then you build another fire and scrape down again. You dig for twenty frozen feet until you reach bedrock and, with luck, also the pay streak.