The worst experience of which there is a record was that of the party of Arthur Arnold Dietz, a God-fearing young man who advertised in the New York Herald in January, 1898, for a partner or two to form a mining company. By February he had recruited eighteen from the scores who replied, and the full group met faithfully each Sunday to plan the trip and familiarize themselves with Arctic conditions. They were a fair cross-section of Klondike stampeders, moderately well educated, middle-class white-collar workers, mainly: a doctor, a policeman, a mineralogist, a tinsmith, an engineer, a clerk, and so on. In April they found themselves dumped on the shores of Yakutat Bay, their machinery and equipment coated with rust, and all their food, except for their flour and meat, spoiled by salt water.
Nevertheless, they ventured off across the glacier on a trip that few men had dared to make before – nineteen sedentary citizens from New York City whose main exercise, until this moment, had been a stroll in the country or a Sunday jaunt on a bicycle.
The setting was unearthly. The ice itself was clear as crystal, slippery as glass, and lovely to gaze upon, being navy blue in colour. But it was treacherous to traverse, its surface washboard-rough and rent by blue-black crevasses, some of them easily seen, others clogged with snow that was sometimes hard-packed and able to bear weight, but otherwise soft as feather down. Off to the distant mountains this monotonous and seemingly limitless expanse faded away, its surface broken only by colossal piles of stones deposited thousands of years before, or by stark ridges of ebony rock that rose island-fashion from the angry ocean of turbulent ice.
Rarely could the Dietz party pitch a tent because of the storms that whirled across the glacier’s face. They slept, instead, in the lee of their supplies, waking each morning beneath a two-foot blanket of snow. Fissures barred their passage, forcing them to detour for miles; and snow-blindness plagued them into rubbing their eyes so fiercely that the lashes were worn away. Even the dogs went half blind from the fearful glare.
After the first week no man could speak to his neighbour. They travelled for hours without a word, and when they stopped to rest were too weary to utter a groan, so that the only sound was the gurgling of the subterranean waters and the high whine of the gales above. In the words of Dietz himself, they very much “resembled a party of deaf mutes.”
It took them almost three months to cross the Malaspina, and in all that time they were never free of the sight of the hummocky ice stretching in endless expanse into the storm. On those days when the sun’s pale halo pierced the haze, they could see in the distance the sharp peaks of the St. Elias Range, the tallest mountains on the continent. Between these massive pinnacles the glacier squeezed like toothpaste, the ice crushed together to form hillocks between which ran deep and jagged fissures. These thin canyons in the ice claimed three of the party before the mountains were reached. Dietz’s brother-in-law was the first to go: he, his four dogs, and his sled containing the party’s most valuable provisions simply vanished into the pit. A second man, who went insane from snow-blindness and dropped far behind, was also lost with his team and his provisions. By the time the third man fell out of sight the party was reduced to subsisting on bacon, beans, and coffee: there was nothing else left.
After three months the men who had started out were unrecognizable. Some had lost twenty-five pounds, and their sunken faces were matted by unkempt beards. They left the ice-field behind and plunged into a different world, struggling through a precipitous mountain terrain as wild as a jungle, where dense groves of alders forced them to hack a trail out of the forest, where the brambles were almost impenetrable and the ground so thick with decayed vegetation that it made passage as difficult as wading through deep snow. Incredibly, they had managed to drag across the glacier an eight-hundred-pound motor, but they were forced to abandon it in the forests.
Before they reached the headwaters of the Tanana, another man had died of fever. In September, with winter coming on, they were obliged to halt. Now they knew that they were trapped in unknown country until spring. Hastily they built themselves a hovel of logs.
They were all partially insane by this time, acting “like a pack of animals.” The boredom was so maddening that three of the party, casting aside all caution, insisted on attempting to reach Dawson overland. They took some provisions, pushed off into the wilderness, and were never seen again. The remainder sat in the makeshift cabin, huddled together for warmth. They had nothing to do but wait, and read, over and over again by the firelight, the single Bible that was their only book. They read it so assiduously that their eyes became affected as badly as if by snow-blindness.
Although the fire was never allowed to die out, the interior of the shack was so cold that ice formed within two feet of the fireplace. They lay in their sleeping-bags, like grubs in cocoons, for twenty hours at a time, emerging only once a day to cook an inadequate meal, often eating their meat raw to save fire, and letting the hours and the days and the months slip by, so that no man knew the date; repeating poems and songs and hymns over and over again to relieve the boredom; and confessing, each one, details of his past life merely to make conversation – details “that could not have been wrung from him by the most severe third-degree methods under ordinary conditions.” They lay so long on their backs that they became sore and rheumatic, while their beards ran a foot in length; and still the winter dragged on while they recited their family genealogies, committed tables of weights and measures to memory, and carved up the cabin walls into grotesque shapes to allay the monotony.
Yet none of these privations was enough to destroy their urge to look for gold. On the contrary, the need to find it became an obsession, for without it the whole ghastly nightmare lost its meaning. In vain the mineralogist in the party explained that it was useless to seek fortune in this frozen jungle; when spring came they must needs sink a shaft, and with their ebbing strength construct a windlass and go through the pantomime of mining. They found nothing but sterile gravel, but even this did not entirely deter them. Three of the party set off on an expedition to the base of the distant mountains, still seeking the will-o’-the-wisp of gold. And here an avalanche buried them forever.
Now they were nine. Their only desire was escape, but no man wished to recross the fearful glacier. When the warm weather arrived they decided to follow instead the pathway of the Tanana River. Before they could set out, another man died – of scurvy – and they were eight. On through the forests they stumbled, the spring blizzards numbing them until they had to club each other with their fists to restore circulation. Their clothes were in tatters, their socks reduced to masses of filthy wool, their moccasins worn to shreds, and their feet swathed in rags. In this condition they were discovered by a group of Indians, who sold them hair-seal coats and fur mukluks. Thus newly attired, but still half insensible, they plunged on.
And then, to their horror, they found themselves once again face to face with the Malaspina glacier. Try as they would, they had not been able to evade it. It lurked at the forest’s rim, a malevolent monster, waiting for them.
The second trek across the ice sheet was far worse than the first. With the coming of spring, the interminable expanse seemed even more of a contorted mass, splintered by the spiders’ webs of crevasses. The snow was frozen so hard that it cut like sharp sand, and one man’s feet swelled to twice their normal size before he died. The storms were so fierce that nothing could be seen farther than ten feet away, nor could any fire be built or any food cooked. The flour supply vanished after six weeks, and the men existed on raw beans and smoked fish given them by the natives they had met. When these were gone, the dogs were slaughtered and devoured. Only then did the storm clear and, in the distance, a quivering line of blue appear. It was the Pacific.
Now completely demented, the seven survivors reached the beach. They killed and ate the last of the dogs, and collapsed on the cold sands, where the U.S. revenue cutter Wolcott found them. Four were alive but uncomprehending; three others were dead in their sleeping-
bags.
There was an ironic coda to this tale. When the four survivors were brought to civilization, the Seattle Times reported that they had arrived with half a million dollars in gold dust. In fact, Alaska’s only legacy was a physical incapacity that plagued them all their lives. Two were rendered near-sighted by the glare on the ice; the other two were totally blind.
4
“Bury me here, where I failed”
The Americans who shunned the Canadian routes did so, it was said, for reasons of patriotism; but national pride, real or assumed, was not their prerogative alone. The Canadians and the British had their own sense of public spirit which dovetailed neatly with their desires to avoid the American customs officers at Dyea and Skagway. Boards of Trade in Canadian cities played upon this attitude, and the Dominion rang with chauvinistic slogans about the wisdom and economy of staying on British soil for the entire journey. Indeed, the pamphlets issued in favour of these trails were so alluring that many Americans chose them in preference to those that led through Alaska.
One such route, known as the Ashcroft Trail (and sometimes called “the Spectral Trail”), ran north for one thousand miles through the tangled interior of British Columbia. It began at the town of Ashcroft, which was reached from Vancouver, one hundred and twenty-five miles to the southwest, and then worked its way through the Fraser River country and the old Cariboo mining district. From here it followed the route of the Collins Overland Telegraph towards Teslin Lake at the headwaters of the Yukon River. There were still some faint remnants of the ancient swath cut in the black pines in 1865 by the men of Western Union, who had hoped to link Europe and America with a cable that would run across Alaska and into Russia. This astonishing project had been abandoned when the Great Eastern laid the Atlantic cable, but the stampeders could still see the rusting and twisted wire lying along the route. Rotting telegraph poles complete with insulators poked incongruously from the forests, and one native-built suspension bridge was made from bits of wire.
At least fifteen hundred men and some three thousand horses attempted this route, although only a handful reached the final goal. Before the summer of ’98 arrived, the trail was a thousand-mile rut, bare of all fodder save for poisonous weeds. Clouds of venomous flies and mosquitoes harried the pack animals as they stumbled through the black bogs, and many stampeders gave up the attempt before the Skeena River was reached. The rest pushed stubbornly northward, swimming their horses over the great olive-green river to enter a dark and desolate land where the moss dripped wraithlike from the firs, where fallen logs and slippery roots blocked the trail, where greasy slate slopes must be scaled, where the lifeless forests were empty of grass, where horses sank belly-deep in mudholes, where the rain fell ceaselessly, churning the soil into a deep jelly, and where the only vegetation seemed to be the prickly and evil devil’s clubs.
Hamlin Garland, the American novelist and short-story writer, travelled the Ashcroft Trail in ’98. Having reached the Skeena country, he reread with astonishment the literature about the route put out by the Victoria Board of Trade, and “perceived how skillfully every detail with regard to the last half of the trail had been slurred over.” Garland wrote wryly that “we had been led into a sort of sack, and the string was tied behind us.”
The route grew more eerie. Along its length, dead horses lay putrescent beneath the clumps of northern spruce from whose branches the pale moss hung in ghostly green cascades. From the hilltops the men who trudged northward could see endless waves of conifers rolling off to the horizon under the grey, drizzling skies. The forests were so dense that only an occasional patch of pale light penetrated them – on those rare days when the sun shone at all. And there was still no grass for the horses – only leaves and fireweed, skunk cabbages and Indian rhubarb, nettles and poisonweed. The names along the way told their own story: Poison Mountain, Reduction Camp, Starvation Camp and Groundhog Mountain. “As most travellers had only laid in grub for two hundred miles, many of them were glad to eat groundhog,” Norman Lee, a Chilcoten rancher wrote in his diary in August.
Lee was one of several men who attempted to drive cattle north to the Klondike along the Ashcroft Trail. He described it as “a sea of mud – such as I have never seen before.” Whenever he tried to move the animals down a slope the mud followed “after the manner of a river, a thick, pasty mud about the consistency of porridge.” By the time he reached Groundhog Mountain, Lee and his party – all of them seasoned outdoorsmen — had discarded every pound of unnecessary equipment. Shotguns, shovels, picks, tents, and even gold-pans were tossed aside to join the hedgerow of expensive litter heaped along the entire length of the trail. Lee noticed first-rate riding and stock saddles lying amid the coils of rope, the boxes of candles and matches, and the rusting mining equipment against which the limping pack animals stumbled. Three of his own saddles were added to the heap. As for his cattle, some were lame, some were dead from eating poisonous weeds, and all were reduced to bone and gristle from lack of feed. Lee confided to his diary that he could scarcely have imagined a country with no pickings at all until he travelled the Ashcroft Trail. Horses and pack animals were expiring daily from hunger, overwork, and lameness apparently caused by the mud. “It was scarcely possible to travel a hundred yards without finding dead or abandoned horses,” Lee noted. Burros, accustomed to dry, rocky country, were especially vulnerable. Lee saw one septuagenarian pack-train owner driven to the point of near madness by his donkeys’ inability to move through a swamp. He seized a heavy club and began whacking at the beasts, crying: “You appear to like it, take lots of it!” The animals stood like innocent rabbits, meekly accepting the fusillade of blows, unable to move a foot. Of that pack train of some fifty or sixty, scarcely one got through.
All along this sinister and ill-marked pathway, mingling with the Indian carvings on the trees and the alien telegraph wire and insulators, were notes of despair and defiance left by those who had gone before: rancorous attacks on the road gang that was supposed to be clearing the trail but was never seen; warnings about the conditions ahead; puzzled queries (“Where the hell are we?”); facetious replies – all scribbled onto blazes hacked in the sides of fir and spruce, birch and poplar. One recurring sign, left by men who had abandoned their lame horses without a bite of feed, read: “If my horse is fit to travel, bring him along.”
On Groundhog Mountain, Hulet Wells, a farmer’s son from Washington State, standing in the rain and mud scribbled an acridly optimistic piece of doggerel on the side of a spruce tree:
There is a land of pure delight
Where grass grows belly-high;
Where horses don’t sink out of sight;
We’ll reach it by and by.
Another blazed a hemlock, and with a knife and indelible pencil produced an eight-verse poem illustrated by cartoons and entitled “The Poor Man’s Trail,” vigorously attacking newspaper editors, swindlers, steamboat-owners, and others who had advertised this all-Canadian route to the Klondike. It followed the style of “The House That Jack Built”:
This is the grave the poor man fills,
After he died from fever and chills,
Caught while tramping the Stikine Hills,
Leaving his wife to pay the bills….
One man tried to cross the Skeena in an Indian dugout canoe with a collie dog and five pack horses swimming beside him. He lost them all in the torrent, blazed a tree with his axe, and lamented his ill-luck in a pencilled message. Then he tied what was left of his outfit in a kerchief, slung it over his shoulder, and continued on.
Another pegged a wallet to a tree with the words: “A thousand miles to nowhere.” Inside were money and a letter of farewell to a relative in Ohio. The wallet passed through many hands and was finally delivered intact.
And still, in the midst of all this suffering and frustration, these men too could not get the idea of gold out of their minds. It was the Grail that drew them on, deeper and deeper into the labyrinth of the north. Of all the sardon
ic little stories told of the Ashcroft Trail, none is more plaintive than that of the old man trudging along, all by himself, with a pack on his back, and asking querulously: “Where is the gold?” A group of Indians encountered him at Blackwater Lake, which lies between the Cariboo and the Skeena country. “Where is the gold?” he asked them, and they could not tell him. He grew angry when they inquired, instead, if he wished for food. “I’m not a bit worried,” he told them, “but I wonder how far I am from the gold diggings.” On he trudged, still asking: “Where is the gold?” When he reached the Stikine River and they told him the Klondike was another thousand miles away, he blew out his brains.
By the time they reached the Stikine, the hundreds who had managed to traverse the Ashcroft Trail were in a similar slough of despond. A few, like the old man, committed suicide. One German hanged himself from the cross-tree of his tent on the riverbank and left behind a hastily scribbled note: “Bury me here, where I failed.” Others, swallowing defeat, headed down the river to the coast and booked steamship passage home. Some there were, however, who refused to be beaten and who continued to push north. These were joined by a second force of stampeders working their way inland from the Pacific coast.
For, while one contingent was forcing a passage through the dripping forests of interior British Columbia, another was making its way along the slushy ice of the Stikine River, another of the “all-Canadian” routes. The two trails came together at the river town of Glenora, which in March of ’98 was swollen with five thousand persons.
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