There were many similar mishaps, some ludicrous, some tragic. The Nancy G., billed as “a fine schooner in tow of a powerful ocean tug,” started off for Dyea twenty days behind schedule and sank on her return voyage. Neither captain nor pilot aboard the Whitelaw had been in Alaskan waters before. This ship foundered in the Lynn Canal, and although her passengers were saved, they lost everything they owned in the fire that followed the wreck. The Clara Nevada, ignoring the laws against booking passengers when the cargo contained dynamite, blew sky-high between Skagway and Juneau with the loss of all sixty-five souls, except for the inevitable dog that survived. The City of Mexico struck West Devil’s Rock off Sitka and was sunk, though her passengers and crew were saved. The Corona struck a reef at the Skeena’s mouth and sank, a total loss. The Laurada, attempting to tow two old river steamers to St. Michael, was driven ashore at Sitka in the teeth of a gale. The barque Helen W. Almy, an old South Seas trader, was wrecked on the Alaskan coast. The Queen broke her steering gear in Wrangell Narrows and threatened to keel over, causing such a panic that one woman tried to kill the captain with a pistol and had to be handcuffed. The Pakshan’s decks were piled so high the pilot could not see and smashed the steamer upon a rock. The sailing-schooner Hera lay becalmed two months off Vancouver Island, her crew and passengers almost starving to death when food supplies ran low. The barque Canada, loaded with lumber, horses, and freight, ran onto the rocks a few miles south of Dyea; all the horses had to be shot, but the passengers were rescued by a passing ship. That same week another barque, Tidal Wave, was wrecked, the steamer Oregon all but foundered on a sand-bar near Treadwell, while the passengers on the Cleveland, having been lost for four days (although within hailing distance of Skagway) and out of water for sixty hours, were reduced to making coffee from brine.
The Blakely, a square-rigged brigantine condemned by the U.S. government two years before, was chartered by four Klondike syndicates from Connecticut, New York, Texas, and Minnesota, although she had been rotting on the Tacoma beach for twenty-four months. The trip that followed was a nightmare, the leaky hull groaning and creaking, the pumps working continuously, the captain refusing to take charge until he had consumed the entire supply of whiskey. The ship survived a storm so fierce that one seaman was flung overboard by the wind, and one passenger died of starvation because he was too seasick to eat. The cargo, badly loaded, shifted to one side and threatened to capsize the vessel; the passengers had to fight to get it back into position to restore equilibrium. Conditions were so bad that many of the dogs died in their crates. After more than a month at sea, the old vessel, waterlogged and coated in a thick jacket of ice, was finally beached at Yakutat on the south coast of Alaska, where her rueful passengers found that all of their machinery, equipment, and food had been ruined by sea water. But their subsequent trials on the Malaspina glacier made the trip up the coast seem like a pleasant Sunday outing.
The strangest voyage of all, however, was the one made by the Eliza Anderson. Her bizarre odyssey was the epitome of all the crazy peregrinations of that demented winter. The ship herself was the oldest vessel on the coast, an ancient side-wheeler built forty years before and long since consigned to the boneyard. She had once figured prominently in the rush to the Coeur d’Alene, but for years she had been tied up at a bank in Seattle harbour, where she did duty as a road house and gambling-hall. The news of the Klondike was but a few days old when this decrepit craft was plucked from retirement and hastily made fit for a three-thousand-mile ocean voyage to the Bering Sea. So eager were her promoters to squeeze the last ounce of profit from the expedition that duplicate tickets were sold for passage aboard her. This device so enraged her passengers that they tried to hurl her purser into the sea and were only prevented from doing so by the skipper, a redoubtable sea-dog named Tom Powers, who was not in the least fazed by hostile customers, incompetent crew members, or mediaeval equipment.
The Anderson seemed to lack every item necessary for a sea voyage. She had no propeller, no up-to-date boilers, no water-condensers, no steam hoisting tackle, no electric power, no refrigeration, and, incredibly, no ship’s compass. Her coal-bunkers were makeshift and totally inadequate, a factor that almost proved her undoing.
She was the flagship of a weird flotilla of five vessels that set out from Seattle on August 10 to the cheers of five thousand well-wishers. The limping side-wheeler led off the pack, her decks jammed with the familiar paraphernalia of the stampede: tables and chairs, collapsible silk tents and collapsible canvas beds, sleeping-bags, tin and granite pots, pans, cups, dishes, and stoves, patent gold-rockers, assorted sleds of curious shape and odd construction, and mounds of clothing and provisions. Close behind, puffing furiously, came the tiny ocean-going tug Richard Holyoke. She had three queer craft in tow. The first was a coal barge of romantic origin: a former Russian man-o’-war, the Politofsky, built in Sitka a year before the Alaskan Purchase, once the flagship and pride of the Russian Pacific fleet but long since shorn of her superstructure and now a hulk – weather-beaten, derelict, and black with coal dust. The second looked at first glance like a replica of Noah’s Ark. This was the W. K. Merwyn, a seventeen-year-old stern-wheeler which had been used as a hay-and-grain carrier but was now intended for Yukon River traffic. It was planned to abandon the Anderson at St. Michael and transfer the passengers to the Merwyn for the river trip to the Klondike. Her smokestack and paddle-wheel had been removed for safety and stowed on her main deck, and the entire steamboat was now encased in a wooden jacket from stem to stern. Inside this grotesque craft, boxed like rats in a cage, were sixteen passengers, the overflow from the Anderson. All that kept the Merwyn on a steady keel was a cargo of tinned goods and supplies, which, lashed to the main deck, acted as a sort of counterweight. The final craft in the flotilla, also towed behind the tug, and looking oddly out of place among its ungainly neighbours, was a sleek pleasure yacht, the Bryant. This was owned by an adventurous Seattle clubman named John Hansen, whose brother was the town’s leading jeweller. Hansen had tried to book passage aboard the Anderson, but even the duplicate tickets had been sold. He persuaded three business friends to come along with him and hooked his yacht behind the Holyoke.
The Anderson’s first mishap occurred at the coal port of Comox on Vancouver Island where she stopped to take on fuel. The seamen were so inexperienced that they loaded the coal unequally into the bunkers. As a result the ship listed dangerously to starboard and her rudder went out of action, whereupon she drifted broadside into the three-masted clipper Glory of the Seas, shattering a large section of her side-wheel paddle-box.
This and other mishaps kept the alarmed passengers in a continual uproar, and there were repeated demands for the vessel to turn back. Captain Powers refused all of them with disdain, roaring that he would sail the Anderson to St. Michael “come hell or high water,” two eventualities that both seemed imminent. By the time the Anderson and her sister vessels had reached Kodiak, the port on Kodiak Island off the south coast of Alaska, five passengers were ready to give up. They fled the ship, and no amount of exhortation could lure them back on board.
The Anderson struck out for Dutch Harbor, the bleak port on the island of Unalaska at the very tip of the Alaskan peninsula where the Aleutian Islands have their beginning. Soon she was wallowing in a raging storm, her engines straining to keep her on course. At this crucial moment the ship ran out of coal. The lazier members of the crew had hidden half the coal sacks at Kodiak so that nobody would notice that they had not loaded the full amount. The escorting tug and coal barge had vanished into the driving rain, and the Anderson was foundering. The passengers were routed out to tear the wooden bunkers apart and use the heavy planks for fuel. When these had been consumed, the large wooden water tanks were ripped asunder and flung into the furnace. The ship’s furniture followed, and finally the stateroom partitions, until the Anderson was little more than a hollow shell tossing fitfully in the North Pacific.
The passengers by this time were all writi
ng farewell notes and stuffing them into bottles in the accepted tradition of the romantic novels, and there were plenty of bottles for the purpose, since most of the whiskey on board had been consumed in an attempt to bolster waning spirits. By the time the storm reached its height, the life rafts and boats had been swept overboard, the vessel was out of control, and the captain gave the order to abandon ship. Then fate intervened in an extraordinary fashion.
The rescue was in keeping with the general eccentricity of the expedition. A six-foot stranger with a wild mop of greyish-white hair, a hawk nose, and a flowing white beard, dressed in oilskins and rubber boots, appeared suddenly out of the storm, strode into the pilothouse, seized the wheel, got the vessel under control, and steered her into a quiet cove on Kodiak Island, where she was anchored, protected from the raging winds. This done, the mystery man vanished as suddenly as he had appeared. To the terrified and overwrought passengers he must have seemed to be a god or demon from another world, but actually he was a stowaway, a Norwegian recluse who lived on the island with his brother and was trying to get free passage to Unalaska (a fact which did not emerge until a subsequent investigation by the U.S. Navy).
Safe in harbour, but far from her destination and completely out of fuel, the Anderson now experienced a second fantastic piece of luck. The passengers happened upon an abandoned cannery loaded with coal. Refuelled, the ancient side-wheeler staggered along the coast of the peninsula towards the tundra of Unalaska. As she stumbled into Dutch Harbor she swivelled sideways, smashing into the docks with what was by now a familiar splintering of woodwork. The ship and passengers were still shuddering from this blow when a pipe in the boiler room burst, sending great clouds of scalding steam in all directions.
None of this in the least deterred the captain, who roared he would sail on for St. Michael, but the numbed passengers had had quite enough. Twenty-eight of them immediately booked passage for home. The remainder, still intent on getting to the gold-fields, chartered the whaling-schooner Baranof to take them the seven hundred and fifty miles across the Bering Sea to their destination. The whaler deposited them on the bare mud shores of the old Russian port, where, to the surprise of all, the rest of the flotilla was awaiting them. Here each man breathed an understandable sigh of relief. Most of them no doubt expected that the worst part of the long journey was over and that the remainder of the trip up the Yukon River to Dawson would be swift and gentle. Few realized that the Klondike was seventeen hundred miles and, for them, ten months away. For these people, as for the tens of thousands struggling at the foot of the Chilkoot and White passes, and across the hummocky glaciers of southern Alaska, and up the soggy, tangled interior of southern British Columbia, and down the long, weary stretches of the Mackenzie, the adventure and the hardships, the triumphs and the heartbreaks of the great stampede had only just begun.
Chapter Five
1
Captain Billy’s last stand
2
The swarming sands of Skagway
3
The dead horse trail
4
Hell on earth
5
The human serpent
1
Captain Billy’s last stand
For threescore years and ten the life of Captain William Moore had been crammed with enough adventure and melodrama to fill a dozen paperbacks. Now, at the age of seventy-four, the white-bearded mail-carrier was enthusiastically contemplating the most exhausting enterprise of his career. He was determined to build a boom town at the head of Skagway Bay.
Long before Carmack’s strike, Moore was convinced that there would be a gold rush to the Yukon and that the main body of stampeders would pour through the narrow funnel which he had discovered in the Coast Mountains and named the White Pass. He had staked out a townsite on the edge of the glistening tidal flats, in the shadow of the chalk-white peaks, and now, in the dying days of July 1897, he was waiting.
This was the same old man who, the previous winter, had trotted through seven hundred miles of hitherto impassable wilderness to carry Ogilvie’s first report of the Klondike to civilization. Moore’s whole career had conditioned him for this kind of trek. He had been born in Germany in 1822 and by the age of seven was sailing aboard schooners in the North Sea. He was hardly out of his teens before he had reached New Orleans and was operating a towboat service on the lower Mississippi. He fought in the Mexican War and then for the next half-century followed gold – to California, Peru, the Queen Charlotte Islands of British Columbia, back to California again, and then on to the Fraser, the Cariboo, and the Cassiars. He was the kind of man who would try anything. He had on one occasion transported camels, of all creatures, up the Fraser River in his steamboat The Flying Dutchman, the most colourful of the British Columbia stern-wheelers.
When he headed for Alaska in 1887, the captain had reached his lowest ebb. His five steamboats had earned him a fortune in the Cassiar stampede, but now, with the rush at an end, he was bankrupt, his fleet and his mansion in Victoria auctioned off to satisfy his creditors. His sons had already left for Alaska, and one had sent back word about a mysterious pass in the mountains, not far from the precipitous Chilkoot, which was said to be low enough to allow pack animals through. The old man’s imagination was excited by this tale, and, following the instincts of a lifetime, he once again set his face north.
Under the direction of William Ogilvie, Moore sought out and surveyed the pass with the help of Carmack’s Indian friend Skookum Jim, and named it after Sir Thomas White, the Canadian Minister of the Interior. It was forty-five miles long – ten miles longer than the Dyea trail across the Chilkoot but more than six hundred feet lower – a zigzagging, roller-coasting, switchbacking route through hill and canyon, mountain and valley, suitable in good conditions for travel by pack horse, ox, mule, dog, or goat. Moore saw its possibilities at once. As Ogilvie later recalled, “Every night during the two months he remained with us, he would picture the tons of yellow dust yet to be found in the Yukon Valley. He decided then and there that Skagway would be the entry point to the golden fields … and the White Pass would reverberate with the rumble of railway trains carrying supplies.” He had no doubt about the future of the area. His son Bernard told a pioneer banquet in Skagway in 1904 that from the very outset “my father would tell me and numerous other people in Juneau and elsewhere how he pictured to himself the future of this place. He never tired of predicting how roads would be built through here; of a little city built here; of steamers on the upper Yukon; and of large steamers, loaded with freight and passengers docking at the waterfront.” All of this came to pass.
In 1888 Moore built a cabin at the foot of the pass, where the Skagway River rushes eagerly from the mountains to spend itself on the wooded flat at the head of Skagway Bay. The name is derived from an Indian word, “Skagus” – the home of the North Wind – and here at his front door was a setting of unequalled majesty. The bay forms the northern tip of the great Lynn Canal, a limpid fiord which runs for ninety miles, straight as a stiletto, to pierce the throat of the Alaskan peninsula at the point where it joins the body of the continent. In its glassy waters the sharp-peaked mountains with their tumbling cataracts and swirling glaciers are mirrored with perfect fidelity.
In these idyllic surroundings Moore was virtually a monarch, for the only other cabin in the district was the trading post established by John J. Healy on the neighbouring Dyea Inlet, three miles to the west. But on July 26, 1897, when the first gold-rush steamer anchored in the bay and dumped its load of kicking horses, yelping dogs, and scrambling men into the shallow waters, Moore’s idyll ended.
They poured ashore like an invading horde, these first arrivals, and they paid as little attention to the protesting old steamboat captain as if he had been one of the trees that were now slashed down to make room for their tents and shacks. They heaped their goods on the beach, tethered their animals in the forest, then burned, hacked, and gouged away at Moore’s sylvan sanctum until the rough sem
blance of a town began to emerge. Ship after ship spewed its human cargo onto the beach, until by early August there were enough newcomers to set up a local government and choose a committee to lay out the town properly with sixty-foot streets and neatly parcelled lots fifty by a hundred feet. Frank Reid, a gimlet-eyed ex-school-teacher and Indian-fighter, was appointed town surveyor, and a commissioner was assigned to take a five-dollar registry fee from everybody who wished to locate on the land. Rule by committee, as Skagway was to learn, did not always mean rule by justice. In vain Moore protested that the land was his; nobody listened. It was the practice of the hastily assembled “miners’ courts” to march upon those buildings that failed to conform to the new street pattern and demolish them out of hand; and though this summary action was often resisted by men with guns and axes, the community invariably got its way.
The crowning ignominy came when it was discovered that Moore’s own home lay in the middle of one of the newly surveyed thoroughfares. He was ordered to move. When he angrily refused, another committee was elected to move him anyway, and Moore looked out one day to find it on his threshold with peevees and handspikes. The old man grabbed a crowbar and, while his wife stood sobbing in the doorway, slugged the man nearest to him, ripping off his trousers with the first swing. The crowd dispersed, but Moore knew that the game was up. He moved, but still refused to give in. He applied to the courts for redress and hung on stubbornly while the litigation dragged on for four years. In the meantime he shrewdly realized a fortune from a mile-long wharf which he had built out over the tidal flats so that the boats could dock properly. In the end he won his court action and was awarded twenty-five per cent of the assessed value of all the lots within the original townsite.
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