Klondike

by Pierre Berton

  Other stampeders would be met on the street by men pretending to be naïve cheechakos. The “cheechako” would strike up a conversation about the prospects of getting over the pass, leading up to the fact that new maps, complete information, and weather forecasts could be obtained at the Information Bureau. “Let’s go along together and see what we can find out,” he would say, linking arms with his quarry, and so the two new-found friends would head for another Smith establishment.

  At the Information Bureau a man was posted to find out all he could about the newcomer: the size of his outfit, the amount of his ready cash, his friends, his background, his immediate plans.

  At this point the luckless innocent was either steered to one of Smith’s crooked gambling-games or, if he balked, the details were filed so that others in the gang could shear him when he took to the trail.

  Smith’s Telegraph Office was a particularly ingenious establishment, and its operation underlined the ignorance and gullibility of many stampeders. There was, of course, no telegraph line to Skagway in 1898, but Smith guaranteed to send a wire anywhere in the world for five dollars. Scores paid their money and sent messages to their families before leaving for the passes, and Smith always saw that they got an answer within two or three hours. It invariably came collect.

  On one occasion the gang had pamphlets printed warning against poison water on the White Pass trail. Smith’s men steered newcomers to the Merchants’ Exchange, where maps of the poisonous springs were supposedly available. In this false-fronted shack, in dim candlelight, men fresh off the boats were speedily relieved of their money.

  Often Smith’s operatives were the very ones who organized the landing committees which handled the freight. Thus did they worm themselves into the confidence of hundreds who, swindled out of their money and possessions, found themselves caught in Skagway, unable to move forward or back. At this point, on occasion, a kindly philanthropist with a dark, pointed beard and probing grey eyes appeared and advanced them, in the name of Christian charity, just enough cash to take them home again. And so they returned the way they had come without raising any awkward fuss, comforted that the Devil did not rule supreme in Alaska, their hearts warm towards their benefactor, whose name, of course, was Jefferson Randolph Smith.

  5

  The human serpent

  When the mud froze hard as granite, and the rivers turned to ice, and the snow swept down from the mountains so thickly that a man could scarcely see his neighbour, the Dead Horse Trail reopened and thousands once more took up the struggle to cross the White Pass.

  But this time the Mounted Police at the border were enforcing a new regulation. No one could enter the Yukon Territory of Canada without a year’s supply of food, roughly eleven hundred and fifty pounds. Together with tents, cooking-utensils, and tools, this made about a ton of goods in all – lime juice and lard, black tea and chocolate, salt, candles, rubber boots and mincemeat, dried potatoes and sauerkraut, string beans and cornmeal, cakes of toilet soap and baking-powder, coal oil and lamp chimneys, rope, saws, files, mukluks, overshoes – in short, everything needed to keep going for a year in a northern climate without outside aid.

  All of these goods had to be packed on the backs of animals or of men, or dragged on sleds and parcelled up into manageable loads. The average man carried about sixty-five pounds, moved it about five miles, cached it, and returned for another load, continuing this laborious process until the entire ton of supplies was shuttled across the pass. Thus, a man who depended on his own back for transportation might have to make up to thirty round trips to move his outfit, and his total mileage before he reached Lake Bennett could exceed twenty-five hundred miles. Most contrived to pull sleds with larger loads, but even these found they were covering more than one thousand miles, which explains why even a hard-working man took ninety days to move through the White Pass.

  All along the trail, often buried in twelve or more feet of snow, lay the packs and equipment of those who were backtracking in this onerous manner. After days and days of painfully slow forward movement, men were ready to fling themselves down by the side of the trail and sob their hearts out in frustration. Others spent their passions on their animals. One who finally completed the journey across the pass uncoiled like a steel spring, and in his rage beat his dogs so unmercifully that they could go no farther. Beginning with the lead dog, he pushed the animals one by one into a waterhole under the ice and only then, coming to his senses and realizing the enormity of his conduct, collapsed in the snow in tears. Henry Toke Munn watched one man deal with a pair of oxen that were so exhausted they could not continue on. He built a fire under them and then began to poke at them with burning brands, but they still could not move the load and so were slowly roasted alive before his eyes. Those who passed such scenes rarely paid them heed, for all were too much occupied with their own misfortunes to mind anybody else’s business on the Dead Horse Trail. A dead man sat beside the right of way for hours with a hole in his back staring glassily out at the passers-by, who trudged on past with scarcely a second glance.

  As the winter wore on and the snow continued to fall, the trail changed its physical shape, literally rising above the surrounding countryside. The soft snow on either side was blown off down the valley by the screaming gusts, but the trail itself was kept so hard-packed by the trampling of thousands that no wind could budge it. And when more snow fell, it too was packed down, hard as cement, until in certain places the pathway was ten feet high. Bert Parker, a teen-ager from Ontario who crossed the pass that winter and who set down his memories of it years later when he was dying of cancer, likened the trail to a huge pipeline, six to eight feet in diameter, and the men who moved along it to a chain gang. The wind-blown snow on either side was so loose that if a man toppled off the trail he had difficulty clambering back up again.

  “If a man forgets for a moment what he is doing, his sled is liable to get off the trail and upset in the snow,” Parker wrote. “The minute this happens the man behind him steps up and takes his place and he stays there till the whole cavalcade passes by. Sometimes you would think that a man had gone crazy when his sled had upset off the trail. They would throw their caps in the snow, shake their fists, throw their heads back and ask Jesus Christ to come down there on the trail so that they could tell Him what they thought of Him for playing a trick like that on them.”

  The solid line was so closely packed with men that it could take four or five hours to pass a given point without a gap appearing. From Porcupine Hill to the summit the movement was unceasing, for there was no level place to sit down. Here each man’s individuality seemed to be smothered in the impersonal and all-encompassing human serpent that wound slowly through the mountains. On it moved, with its thousand identical vertebrae, each figure bent forward in its jack-knife attitude of strain, each face purple with the stress of hauling a heavy sled, a rope over every shoulder, a gee-pole for steering purposes gripped in every right hand.

  Down the mountain corridor a bitter north wind whistled incessantly. The ranges that guard the coastal strip block off an immense ocean of frigid air which is thirty degrees colder than the sea-tempered air of the coast – and the pass that winter was like a waterfall over which this air tumbled. On the far side of the divide, as if to match the temperament of the men who managed to cross, all was tranquillity. To arrive in the interior, beyond the mountains, was like passing onto the calm body of a lake after breasting a turbulent stream.

  The summit of the pass was a symphony of white, although few of the stampeders who reached it had time or inclination for the aesthetics of mountain scenery. Here the sun glittered on the dazzling peaks, and the flanks of the mountains, blue-white in the shadows, merged with the feathery white fog that rose from the sea coast. In the intense cold, men walked in an aura of vapour compounded of the lazy white steam that rose from the campfires and the white jets that burst from the snouts of the animals and the nostrils of the struggling climbers.

  Through t
his eerie world moved the shadowy, frost-encrusted forms of the stampeders, men of every kind and description, made brothers for this brief moment by the common travail of the trail: a man with a string of reindeer pulling a sled, for instance; a group of Scots in furs and tam-o’-shanters led by a bagpiper; a woman with bread dough strapped to her back so that it rose with the heat of her body – every kind of human animal, each struggling forward with a single purpose.

  A steamboat man and his wife moved two entire stern-wheel vessels in bits and pieces across the mountains that winter. He was A. J. Goddard, a wiry engine-designer from Iowa, and he was determined to get the first cargo down the river that spring.

  A photographer was in the crowd as well. E. A. Hegg, who had closed his two studios on Bellingham Bay, had arrived with a darkroom fastened to a sled drawn by a herd of long-haired goats. He was obliged to heat his developer to keep it from freezing, to filter his water through charcoal, to coat his wet plates with a mixture improvised from herbs and egg albumen, and to work his bulky camera in forty-below weather; but the pictures he made of that strange mountain migration were so effective that when some of them went on exhibit in New York, crowds fought to get a glimpse of them and police had to be called to restore order.

  There was a boxing champion among the climbers, too. His name was Jim Carroll, and his fighter’s physique was not equal to the journey. But when he dropped exhausted on the trail and called out to his young wife that he was turning back, she put her hands on her hips and turned on him savagely: “All right, Jim, we’ll split the outfit right here on the trail. I’m going on to Dawson.” The threat spurred him forward, and the following summer found him giving boxing lessons in Dawson while she opened a road house that earned three hundred dollars a day.

  For every man who found the strength to press on, there was at least one who turned back. Some grew deathly ill on rotten horseflesh fed to them in the little cafés that sprang up along the way; others suffered the agonies of pneumonia or grippe or spinal meningitis. On one black night there were seventeen deaths from meningitis, and Goddard, the steamboat man, recalled hearing victims in neighbouring tents screaming with the pain in the nape of the neck that is a characteristic of the disease. Their cries would last for three or four hours, and then, suddenly, they would cry no more.

  So the leaderless rabble swarmed forward – leaderless except for the small band of North West Mounted Police who officially took possession of the summit in February, 1898, on orders from the Canadian government. Nobody had paid much attention to the boundary until 1897, but now it was in dispute, the Canadians insisting that it lay close to the seashore, the Americans attempting to push it back to the headwaters of the Yukon. But the Mounties, using an old international principle that possession is nine points of the law, established a custom-house on the razor’s edge of the divide. Here, where firewood and cabin logs had to be hauled uphill for twelve miles, where winds howled ceaselessly and the snow seemed to fall day and night, the twenty policemen endured conditions so terrible that no stampeder lingered longer than necessary. The Mounties suffered privations that damaged their health; Strickland, the inspector in charge, worked through a long siege of bronchitis until his superior, the legendary Sam Steele, heard about it. Steele, too, was racked by the same disease as a result of wading waist-deep in icy water and then working in his wet clothes, but he defied his doctor, scaled the pass, ordered Strickland off duty, and carried on himself.

  Here, from his perch on the very summit of the mountain wall, high above forest and river, far from the tinny cacophony of Skagway, Steele, the iron man, could gaze down, godlike, on the insect figures striving to reach his eyrie – on the whimpering horses and the cursing men, and on the women bent double beneath man-sized loads. It was a scene that was almost mediaeval in its fervour and in its allegory, and it was enacted against a massive backdrop: the cloud-plumed mountains in the foreground, the rolling hills in the middle distance, and far below – as if in another world – the bright sheen of the ocean and the tiny outlines of shuttling boats disgorging, endlessly, more human cargo, and, glittering wetly in the pale sun, the flats of Skagway, where William Moore had once reigned as a lonely monarch.

  And hanging over the whole, like an encompassing pall, the sickly-sweet stench of carrion, drifting with the wind.

  Chapter Six

  1

  Starvation winter

  2

  Revolt on the Yukon

  3

  A dollar a waltz

  4

  Only a coal miner’s daughter …

  5

  Greenhorns triumphant

  6

  The Saint of Dawson

  1

  Starvation winter

  Those few hundred souls who slipped through the passes in the fall of 1897 and reached the Yukon River were borne swiftly on the crest of the current towards the Klondike, secure in the knowledge that they had won the race for the gold-fields. They had held the lead while others faltered, because they travelled light, ignoring all advice to encumber themselves with a year’s provisions. They had money; they were prepared to make more money; with money you could buy anything.

  But as their boats slid past the fog-shrouded banks amid the cakes of floating ice, faint but disquieting cries reached their ears:

  “There’s no grub in Dawson. If you haven’t an outfit, for God’s sake turn back!”

  The caribou were fleeing the country in thundering herds, swimming the rivers in clusters so close to the drifting boats that the newcomers could almost reach out and touch their horns. In the skies the geese in ragged V’s were winging south. Only men, it seemed, were moving north into a dying land.

  They stopped for supplies at Fort Selkirk, Arthur Harper’s old post, and were baffled to find that the morose and silent trader, J. J. Pitts, had nothing to sell them except condensed milk at a dollar a tin. In vain they proffered bank-notes; no steamer had touched this point since 1895, and their money was useless. It was a tiny intimation of what was to come.

  Joaquin Miller, the grey-bearded “Poet of the Sierras,” had made a fetish of travelling light. When he stepped off his barge at Dawson’s waterfront he happened to pull a lone onion from his pocket. To his astonishment, an onlooker instantly offered him a dollar for it. When Miller refused, the offer was increased at once to five. The significance of this incident escaped the poet, who had eyes only for the gold that was pouring from the creeks, for, like the other stampeders, he confused it with wealth.

  “No,” he wrote firmly, “there will be no starvation. The men who doubt supplies will get here, where gold is waiting by the ton, miscalculate American energy. As for the gold here, I can only say, as the Queen of Sheba said to Solomon: ‘Behold, the half was not told to me!’ ”

  Constantine of the Mounted Police viewed the situation with foreboding. As early as August 11 he had written bluntly to Ottawa that “the outlook for grub is not assuring for the number of people here – about four thousand crazy or lazy men, chiefly American miners and toughs from the coast towns.”

  The trading companies, too, began to measure the shortage of food against the new glut of people with growing dismay. Both the A.C. and the N.A.T. proceeded to dole out supplies in small amounts as men in queues fifty deep lined up in front of the warehouses pleading for a chance to buy. The company clerks admitted one man at a time, locked the door behind him as they would the door of a vault, sold him a few days’ supplies, and sent him on his way. A man could have half a million dollars in gold – as many did – and still be able to purchase only a few pounds of beans, but it was some time before the newcomers could understand this. They found it hard to comprehend a situation in which gold by itself was worthless.

  As more and more boats drifted in with the ice, an air of panic began to settle over the Yukon Valley, like the cold fog that rose from the Klondike’s mouth. Somewhere downriver there were five steamboats bound for Dawson with cargoes of food, but there was no sign of the
m. What had happened? In September, Captain J. E. Hansen, the Alaska Commercial Company’s assistant superintendent, decided to head downstream to find out.

  Some three hundred and fifty miles below Dawson, near the old Hudson’s Bay post of Fort Yukon, in the shallow and desolate maze of the Yukon flats, he found the lost steamers marooned in the low water. He knew now, for certain, that Dawson faced famine, and so started back up the river at breakneck speed to warn the town of its danger.

  This trip was almost the end of Hansen. His Indian companions deserted him, and for four days and five nights he was isolated on an island in mid-river with neither axe nor bedding. Picked up at last by a passing boat, he commandeered a birchbark canoe and pushed on through the ice as fast as he could force his boatmen, poling and tracking along the banks and changing Indians every few dozen miles as they dropped from fatigue.

  He set a record for speed. On September 26 two natives on the hills above Dawson spotted his canoe, and a cry rippled across the town: