Klondike

by Pierre Berton

  One of the periodic features of the stampede was the emergence of the “syndicate of wealthy New Yorkers,” a vague and shadowy group of titans who continually popped up, propounding various get-rich-quick schemes. One “syndicate of wealthy New Yorkers” was said to be establishing a reindeer postal service to the Klondike along the lines of the pony express, while another syndicate of wealthy New Yorkers was reported engaged in building a bicycle path to the Klondike to service a chain of trading posts.

  A scheme devised by a Milwaukee man involved the use of carrier pigeons to establish communication between the Klondike and the rest of the world. A series of pigeon stations was envisaged, with the birds carrying letters that had been photographically reduced to the size of a needle point. These were to be enlarged at Victoria, B.C., and re-mailed from there. The trouble with this idea was that nobody could work out a fast way of getting the pigeons to the Klondike.

  If these schemes were taken seriously, it was because of the peculiar blindness produced by the Klondike fever. One plan actually entertained by responsible businessmen in Canada and the United States called for the construction of a railway from Chesterfield Inlet on Hudson Bay across seven hundred miles of Arctic tundra to Great Slave Lake, a region almost totally unexplored, unmapped, and unknown. This was only part of a grandiose rail-and-water route which was pictured as stretching all the way from Sault Ste Marie to Dawson City, a distance of more than four thousand miles – and thence on to the Bering Strait, where the ferry line would link North America with Russia. A writer in the Toronto Globe reckoned that by this route a traveller could reach Dawson in seven days. A group of Canadian businessmen actually secured a charter for it, and the Financial Times of London commented favourably on the scheme. Needless to say, no such railway has ever been built, but there is little doubt that the Klondike boom spurred the tremendous railway expansion that marked the development of Canada in the first decade of the twentieth century. By 1910 the Canadians had commenced two more transcontinental railways, in addition to the Canadian Pacific. Both eventually went bankrupt.

  But in the fall of 1897 the wildest plans seemed practical, the most impossible ventures attainable. There was the Irishwoman who planned to take a group of children to the Klondike: she would teach them lessons by day, they would dig gold by night. There was the dancing-master who planned to practise his craft in Dawson City: he would teach the two-step to Indians and miners all winter and dig gold all summer. “Dig” was the operative word. To many, it was as simple as that: you stuck your spade into the golden soil and shovelled the results into the bank. There were those who actually took gunny-sacks with them on the trip north to serve as containers for the nuggets.

  All across the land, syndicates, co-operatives, investment and colonization companies were being formed to exploit some aspect of the Klondike. On August 1 the New York World carried a solid page of advertisements for Klondike organizations of one kind or another. By the end of August there were eighty-five syndicates in operation in twenty-two American cities, with a total capitalization of one hundred and sixty-five million dollars. Dozens more were forming almost hourly.

  These syndicates and co-operatives operated with a board of directors or executive; each member paid a weekly sum to finance a few men to go to the Klondike and strike it rich for the whole. Some of the syndicates were fairly far-fetched: a group of Chicago spiritualists formed a syndicate, gazed into crystal balls, drew maps with the aid of clairvoyance, and sent a representative to the Klondike; a group of barbers met and formed a syndicate to shave the beards off Klondike miners, an enterprise generally considered rewarding in view of the whiskers sported by prospectors debarking from the treasure ships. The Bowery Mission of New York formed a syndicate and sent an expedition of seven men to the Klondike, headed by a reformed gambler who proposed to convert his fellow stampeders en route and dig for gold at the same time. Dozens of Bowery habitués tried to go along, threatening to empty the mission.

  In Philadelphia a promoter talked twelve technical-school students into persuading their fathers to buy a schooner and send them around Cape Horn to the Klondike. It was a measure of the madness that the fathers acquiesced. The promoter was supposed to be a navigator, but turned out to be a very poor one. After a series of fits and starts, delays and bunglings, storms and calms, the vessel finally stumbled into Juneau, Alaska, where it foundered. All of the boys went home except one, a particularly determined youth named Frank Neill who was not deterred by shipwrecks or bankruptcy. He continued to press on towards the Klondike and finally reached his goal in the summer of 1900. The gold was all gone, but, as others were to discover, it was not all in the ground. Neill made a small fortune hauling logs, used it to get a start in the construction business in Long Island, and did well enough to marry and make a wedding trip back to the Klondike.

  Of the colonization schemes, the most intriguing was a plan, launched by members of the congregation of the Beecher Memorial Church of Brooklyn, to charter a boat and build a second Brooklyn City on the Yukon River, from which gamblers, drinkers, and other un-Christian citizens would be banned. The group announced that the city would be eventually the largest on the western side of the continent. None of the participants seemed very sure of where it was they were going, but their literature placed the site at the foot of “a mountain which is said to be the fountainhead of the gold field.”

  The single status of ninety-eight per cent of the Klondike miners was not lost on the entrepreneurs promoting various expeditions to the gold-fields, or upon the hundreds of spinsters who put personal ads in the newspapers offering to accompany men to the Klondike “in any capacity.” The movement for emancipation was well under way in the nineties, and the distaff side was beginning to insist with increasing vigour that anything men could do, women could do better. One of these was Charlotte Smith, a well-known sociologist of the era, who talked up a scheme to transport four thousand spinsters from the sweatshops and factories of New England to the Klondike. She received thousands of applications but no financing. There were other ideas along the same lines. A midwife announced that she would guarantee a yearly income of fifty thousand dollars to any partner who would invest five hundred in a hospital she planned to build in Dawson. There were no takers. A man from Pittsburgh laid plans to establish a matrimonial agency in the Klondike: he said he would secure employment in advance for groups of one hundred women, “poor but thoroughly respectable.” Their future employers would advance funds for the trip north and “under their influence the camp would take on a homelike appearance and the miners would not feel a sense of isolation which sends so many to their graves.”

  Another promoter in South Dakota, described as “a strict Presbyterian,” proposed to send a consignment of marriageable women north, plus a clergyman to marry them. Each maiden was asked to sign a pledge that she would not get off the steamboat until she and her would-be spouse had taken the vows and paid a commission.

  Several women’s Klondike expeditions were actually financed and organized. One ambitious group, promoted by a New York newspaper-woman, planned to travel in caravans which could be collapsed and taken on horseback over the passes and then floated down the river on rafts. There were to be five vans for every twenty people, three of them to be fitted with portable sleepers to accommodate seven women in each.

  Few of these schemes got under way, but one party of women actually did set out for the Klondike under the aegis of Mrs. Hannah S. Gould, a nurse and businesswoman who booked passage for five hundred passengers, mostly widows, to the gold-fields as part of the Women’s Clondyke Expedition. The company chartered the steamship City of Columbia, painted a four-leaf clover on the smokestack, and announced that they would sail it on a twenty-thousand-mile voyage around the Horn to Alaska. J. J. Clements, one of the original stakers of Eldorado, broke a bottle of champagne over the ship’s bow in New York harbour, while Mrs. Gould, in a natty yachting-cap and pea jacket, toasted the voyage in wine, talking all the
while of establishing a library, church, recreation hall, restaurant, and hospital in Dawson. One hundred cases of champagne were stowed away below decks as a cure for seasickness, and the ship got under way. The champagne came in handy in the Strait of Magellan, where the entire expedition was shipwrecked and the luckless women marooned for twenty-four hours on a bleak rock off Tierra del Fuego. Here Mrs. Gould had a brief but unhappy encounter with a Patagonian cannibal who, as far as could be determined, was attempting a proposal of marriage. The doughty widow refused to be swerved from her Klondike objective, which, at this point, was quite literally at the other end of the earth. “Go away, you ugly brute!” she exclaimed and led her flock back aboard the patched-up vessel, which limped on into Valparaiso. By this time the company was on its last legs.

  The unhappy women scraped up twenty-eight thousand dollars to repair the ship, and reached Seattle in April, all their savings dissipated. They had paid in advance for outfits which were supposed to be awaiting them in Seattle, and also for their steamer passage north, but there was nothing for them on arrival. The entire party disbanded, their dreams of rich husbands shattered. Only one ever reached the Klondike, a determined little woman with snapping black eyes named Nettie Hoven who simply walked aboard the steamship Hayden Brown and worked her way north as a stewardess.

  The great majority of the Klondike syndicates met similar fates. Few paid off for the investors who stayed behind. In the spring of 1898 Captain W. B. Richardson of the U.S. Army, who had been sent to Alaska the previous fall, reported from St. Michael that almost all the syndicates had laboured under incapable management and with insufficient means, and that “in nearly all instances” they had come to ultimate grief or abandonment.

  7

  Fearful passage

  As the winter progressed, a grotesque flotilla of oddly assorted craft, many of them little more than floating coffins, shuttled up and down the Pacific coast crammed with stampeders bound for Skagway, Dyea, Wrangell, or St. Michael. By February there were forty-one regular ships operating out of San Francisco harbour alone, “greater in point of numbers, efficiency and carrying capacity than any fleet ever collected in any harbor in the world to engage in a specific enterprise,” according to the Examiner – enough ships, indeed, to transport one hundred thousand people and six million pounds of freight to Alaska.

  Ships that had long been condemned were resurrected from bone-yards, hastily patched up, and put into use. Yachts, sloops, barques, scows, barges, ancient steamboats, and sailing-schooners – anything that could float was pressed into service. The Tartar, a once proud mail boat on the Cape Line which had carried South African millionaires through tropical waters, steamed north from Vancouver past the peaks and glaciers of the Lynn Canal. The Danube, which had brought Livingstone’s body to Europe from Africa, puffed out of Seattle so crowded that during one storm the captain was forced to lock forty-four men in the hatches among the horses.

  The Rosalie, a transformed sailing-vessel, the Cutch, once the private yacht of an Indian rajah, the Laurada, an old blockade-runner from Cuba, and the Hermosa, an ancient Catalina Island-San Pedro ferryboat, were all pressed into service. The North Fork, which for years had been freighting soap across San Francisco Bay, was headed for the boneyard when the stampede began. Soon she was shuttling passengers to St. Michael at one thousand dollars a head. The Ning Chow, a creaky Chinese freighter, was brought across the Pacific for the coastal trade and fitted out with rough lumber bunks four tiers high. So cramped were these quarters – she carried close to one thousand people – and so bad the food, that a Texan, suffering from claustrophobia and indigestion, tried to shoot the dining-room steward. The Cleveland, a very old steamer that had barely survived a series of ugly accidents along the South American coast, headed north with two hundred passengers, all of whom had the gravest misgivings, for the vessel was known as an unlucky ship. And indeed, as later events were to prove, bad luck was to be visited upon them.

  In the first five weeks of the stampede, twenty steamers left the Pacific coast for Alaska. New ones were being chartered daily. The little Al-ki was the first to set off, on July 19. So great was the excitement among the thousand who squeezed onto the dock that scores refused to give up their places to go and eat.

  “If the ship doesn’t leave soon, my husband will be crazy,” one woman was heard to say. “He hasn’t closed his eyes for twenty-four hours, he won’t eat, and if he fails to find gold in Alaska, well, God pity him and his family.”

  All day long and into the night the crowd waited patiently. An aged confectioner moved about selling peanut candy cakes called Yukon Nuggets at a quarter apiece (the price of a meal) while small boys dodged in and out hawking copies of the British mining laws. “Hurrah for the Klondike!” cried the crowd, shouting the accepted cliché for all northern good-byes, as members of the ship’s crew forced them back and drove a bleating herd of nine hundred sheep aboard. There were, in addition, one hundred and ten passengers, sixty-five cattle, thirty horses, and three hundred and fifty tons of supplies. When the Al-ki finally got away, there was not an inch of room left.

  Every ship going north was similarly overloaded. When the Humboldt after a series of delays finally escaped from San Francisco on August 16, W. D. Wood, the Seattle mayor who had chartered the ship, tried to leave some fifty thousand pounds of his passengers’ personal baggage behind. This so enraged them that a group actually attempted to hang the former mayor on the dockside. Cooler heads prevailed, and the ship was reloaded.

  Space was at a premium on all Alaska-bound vessels. On the Islander, which left for Alaska on July 28 with four hundred passengers, the horses were wedged side by side so tightly that there was no way for them to lie down. Many of these wretched creatures had their heads so close to the engines that they were in a state of continual panic, rearing, biting, kicking, and throwing themselves on their halters at the throb of the machinery and the blast of the whistle.

  A passenger aboard the Canadian steamer Amur described it as “a floating bedlam, pandemonium let loose, the Black Hole of Calcutta in an Arctic setting.” This vessel, which had normal accommodation for one hundred passengers, crammed five hundred aboard, together with almost as many dogs – Danes, mastiffs, collies, Saint Bernards, Newfoundlands, and wolfhounds, all yapping, howling, and struggling, and none of them, as it turned out, of the slightest use under northern conditions. The tickets promised separate berths, but the passengers, who included among their number fifty prostitutes, were stacked ten to a cabin. As there were only three berths to a room, each argonaut had to be prepared to pounce upon a bunk as soon as it was vacated, and to sleep in his clothes for the entire voyage. The ship’s dining-room could accommodate twenty-six people comfortably, which meant that every meal took seven hours to serve, and the famished passengers fell into the habit of lying in wait for the stewards as they passed by and ravenously snatching morsels of food from the trays.

  Such conditions did not deter thousands from purchasing tickets at premium prices for the voyage north. In Vancouver men tried to bribe ships’ officers to let them onto northbound vessels; and some who were known to have tickets were slugged and robbed by others who would take their place on deck. One Tacoma man, unable to buy a ticket aboard the Willamette, raised such a furore that the captain was obliged to put him in irons.

  When the Willamette left Tacoma on August 7 there were seventy-five hundred people pressed together on the dock to wish her Godspeed, an ocean of struggling humanity who waited for hours for the ship to get under way. The voyage that followed was seared into the minds of passengers and crew for the remainder of their lives. The Willamette was an old coal-carrier converted into service by the Pacific Coast Steamship Company. Rough berths for the passengers had been thrown together by carpenters and, as in many similar vessels, were designed to be ripped apart at Skagway and sold as dressed lumber for three hundred dollars a thousand feet. As nobody had bothered to sweep the coal dust from the vessel, the passengers
were soon grimy with it. The ship carried eight hundred men, women, and children, three hundred horses, and so much hay that the bales had to be stacked on deck, where the piles cut off the forward view from the bridge. Since the company had built eating facilities for only sixty-five, the meals went into nine or ten sittings, with one man sliding in behind another as soon as the first had finished. The food was sickening, the surroundings filthy, and the floor sprinkled with shavings to hide the refuse. Beef was hung on two sides of the dining-room, so that no one could get to one side of the table without rubbing against raw meat. The passengers were quartered under the rough plank decks upon which the horses were tethered, and the excretions of these animals leaked through the cracks in the boards onto the sleeping men. Most of the passengers tried to stay up above decks because of the unbearable stench below. Here for much of the voyage they stood drenched in the driving rain, since there were chairs and shelter for only a third. Second-class passengers were even worse off. The hold where they were quartered was, in the words of one witness, “a veritable beehive [where] the atmosphere resembled that of a dungeon in Afghanistan.”

  Few of the ships plying the coastal waters bothered with safety precautions. The steamer Bristol steamed out of Victoria early in August with six hundred horses jammed in two-foot-wide stalls and rough bunks filling every available cranny. She was so badly and heavily loaded that a few miles out of port she almost turned turtle and was forced to creep back to harbour to readjust her topload. In her wake she towed a frail stern-wheeler, but this craft was so un-seaworthy that the captain cut her adrift off Vancouver Island – an action that touched off a series of lawsuits and recriminations.