Klondike

by Pierre Berton

  Sooner or later the mountains had to be faced, and in the late fall of 1898, as the land congealed under the white hand of winter, the men from the cities and the farms and the offices and the factories began to attack the barrier, dragging scows and boats up and over the divides by the process called “tracking,” which is the crudest and most exhausting form of towing. Each man, with a canvas sling over his shoulder, helped haul the boat behind him, trudging thigh-deep through the freezing waters, leaping from rock to rock in the shallow, frothing streams, or struggling along the edges through tangled willows and over shale cliffs, or crawling on hands and knees along the slimy banks. As winter set in and the snow fell and the winds shrieked down the canyons that marked the entrances to the passes, the argonauts began to wheeze and cough with bronchitis. They were seldom dry. Their legs were masses of boils because of constant immersion in the cold water. Their flesh was rubbery from incipient scurvy, for it was six months since they had enjoyed a balanced diet. Beset by shoals and savage currents, by jagged rocks and ferocious boulders, by gloomy caverns and dizzy banks, they numbly forced their way on until the ice shackled the river and all movement ceased.

  It was winter. All over the Canadian northwest, along the Edmonton trails, little settlements sprang up, from Great Slave Lake to the Arctic Circle, from the Peace River to the mountains above the Pelly. Some were mere huddles of shacks, like those that lay scattered along the approaches to the McDougall and Stony Creek passes. Some had names like Wind City, on the Wind River, a tributary of the Peel, or Shacktown and Destruction City, on the Rat. In addition there was the established trading post of Fort McPherson on the Peel, in whose vicinity scores of stampeders settled down for the long wait.

  Some seventy men were camped at Wind City and many of these suffered horribly from scurvy. When gangrene set in, as it did in one or two cases, their toes were cut off with hacksaws; and when men died – as two or three did – their bodies were stuffed down empty mine shafts, which some of them had dug in the wistful hope that there might be gold here in the land of little sticks. The others whiled away the winter’s night with chess, checkers, and euchre, with dances and with lectures on scientific and literary subjects. Wind City’s residents even enacted a code of municipal laws so that the winter might pass “pleasantly and profitably away.”

  Destruction City was situated at the start of a fierce series of rapids on the Rat which marked the ascent to McDougall Pass. Here the river bed rose so steeply – twelve hundred feet in thirty-five miles – that it was impossible to take large craft further. Men were forced to chop their boats down to manageable size and so the banks were marked by a confusion of wreckage that gave the settlement its name.

  The only way to cross the pass that fall was to travel as lightly and as swiftly as possible. A French Canadian from Ottawa, J. E. des Lauriers, was one of those who threw away almost everything he owned in order to reach the Klondike. He left his entire outfit on the banks of the Rat at Destruction City, taking only a sack of flour, a side of bacon, a rifle, and a small boat. Thus unencumbered he attained his goal. Others found it impossible to get through. Between fifty and a hundred wintered in the immediate area of Destruction City, crouching in tents or cabins or huddled in caves scooped out of the banks, surrounded by piles of goods tossed aside by those who, like des Lauriers, had abandoned the bulk of their outfits in order to get across the divide. Here was everything a man needed, except for footwear – that had all been torn to shreds on the rocks of the river. And yet, in the midst of plenty, men sickened and sometimes died because they were unable to grasp the fundamentals of nutrition. Elsie Craig, who wintered at Destruction City, kept a death roll that reflected the international character of the camp: on November 20, a man from Chicago died of scurvy; on December 13, a Frenchman died of scurvy; in early January, two Dutchmen died of scurvy. And over this doomed camp there fluttered bravely several home-made Red Ensigns and a Stars and Stripes made of flour sacking and red calico.

  Many of those who found themselves trapped in Destruction City had already spent one winter imprisoned in the North and were bitterly disillusioned. One party of thirteen people from Chicago were there because they had responded to a newspaper advertisement and paid five hundred dollars each to a charlatan with the curious name of Lambertus Warmolts, who masqueraded as a veteran of the Mackenzie country and guaranteed to deliver them to the Klondike in six weeks flat. He had decamped at Great Slave Lake with all the funds, leaving his charges stranded until spring. Rather than turn back they pushed on, so great was their desire to reach the gold-fields, and here they were rotting from scurvy on the banks of the Rat, with another winter facing them. A few of them did manage to reach Dawson in August of 1899.

  Of all those who left Edmonton in 1897 and 1898 and pursued the various routes to the Klondike, only three, as far as can be determined, found any gold at all. Indeed, many of those who trickled into Dawson, ragged and destitute, did not even bother to go out to the gold-fields but headed back to civilization a few days after arriving. William Ford Langworthy, the Cambridge law graduate who celebrated New Year’s Eve, 1897, so nostalgically on the shores of Great Slave Lake, was one of these. His diary scarcely mentions Dawson, and its later entries never refer to gold but reflect the strange lassitude that fell over those who finally succeeded in reaching the end of the Edmonton trails. To these, gold no longer meant very much; survival had taken its place. Otto Sommer, who had turned his Klondike expedition into a honeymoon trip, got no farther than Grand Rapids on the Athabasca before turning back in despair. Frank Hoffman, the veteran of Sedan and Metz, was drowned in Great Slave Lake; his wife went on without him, lost her new-born baby somewhere en route, and wintered at Shacktown. A. D. Stewart, the former Hamilton mayor who had come down the river in the Golden Hope, died by inches on the Peel, “teeth all loose and gums very sore. In pitiable condition,” as his last diary entry reads.

  Some beat the odds. Jim Wallwork, the cowboy, actually dragged his steamboat Daisy Belle over the summit from Shacktown to the Bell River, aided by thirty Indian sled dogs. The little craft finally reached the Yukon and there, unable to face the swift current, gave up the ghost. Wallwork transferred the eight-horsepower engine and the boiler to a York boat and continued upstream to Dawson. No doubt it was enough for him that he had made it, for those who set out from Edmonton to seek their fortunes counted themselves truly fortunate if they reached their goal. Others there were who never found what they were seeking – such as the two partners who were discovered in a cabin on the Porcupine River. They had come almost three thousand miles, buffeting the rapids and scaling the mountains and hacking their way through the forest; but when they were found, they were frozen rock-solid beside a stew kettle hanging over a long-dead fire. The pot contained a pair of partly cooked moccasins embedded in a cake of ice. The rest was ashes.

  Chapter Eight

  1

  The Chilkoot

  2

  Up the Golden Stairs

  3

  One of everybody

  4

  Death beneath the snows

  1

  The Chilkoot

  For many people today the entire story of the Klondike gold rush is evoked by a single scene. It shows a solid line of men, forming a human chain, hanging across the white face of a mountain rampart. Caught in the instant of a lens opening, each man, bent almost double under the weight of his burden, yet still straining upward towards the skies, seems to be frozen in an attitude of supplication. It is a spectacle that at one glance mirrors all the terror, all the hardships, and all the yearning of ’98. The Chilkoot Pass has come to be a symbol of the stampede.

  The routes to the Klondike were all deceptive. Who would have thought that this wall of glittering white, with a final slope so precipitous that no animal could cross it, would turn out to be the most effective way to reach the gold-fields? Who would have thought that, in spite of its steps of solid ice, its banshee winds, its crushing fall of snow,
and its thundering avalanches, the Chilkoot was to be the funnel through which the majority of men would attain their goal? Yet that was the way it turned out. The trail through the Chilkoot was higher than the White Pass by more than six hundred feet, and only man could defy successfully its dizzy grade. But twenty-two thousand of the men who assaulted it, each burdened by his ton of supplies, eventually found themselves on the other side.

  The gateway to the Chilkoot was another feverish little town almost identical with Skagway: a jungle of frame saloons, false-fronted hotels, log cafés, gambling-houses, stores, and real estate offices bound together by a stiff mortar of flapping tents and named Dyea after the inlet on which it rested. For all of its brief existence it was locked in a bitter struggle with its rival, Skagway, which its two newspapers, the Trail and the Press, depicted, not inaccurately, as a lawless and terrifying hellhole. Dyea, on the other hand (in the hyperbole of the Press), was “not a wild and woolly frontier town but a civilized community.”

  “We desire,” the newspaper wrote, “to call the attention of the reading public to the fact that no more orderly or peaceable city of 3,000 in population can be found in the United States.… The population of Dyea is composed of the better class and no one need feel alarmed. Property is exposed on all sides – hardly a case of theft occurring – and what few crimes that are committed are confined to a class few in number. There is less public exhibition of vice here than in the cities of the States.”

  That was not strictly true; Soapy Smith’s men operated out of Dyea as they did out of Skagway though Smith himself did not control the town. Skagway was a dead end where vice flourished because men sat in enforced idleness until the pass reopened. But Dyea, during that gold-rush year, was only a way point; the Chilkoot was open almost continually and so the stampede flowed through the town and on. Dyea existed for little more than a year. The building of the railway through the White Pass in 1898 rendered it obsolete. Until the summer of 1897 it had consisted of a single building – John J. Healy’s trading post. By midwinter, with barques, such as the Colorado, dumping as much as eight million board feet of lumber on the beach in a single day, with hotels rising almost hourly (not to mention a three-storey opera house), with men and teams working all night by moonlight and lamp, the newly established Dyea Trail was able to report that “as we go to press with our second edition, the buzz of the carpenter’s saw, the clink of the hammer, the whizz and bustle of the lumber-laden wagons, the tooting of the crowded steamers all tend to prove the healthy condition of Dyea.” And yet before another year had passed, the town lay deserted, its buildings reverting to the weeds and undergrowth that sprang up rankly along the braided mouth of the Dyea River.

  The setting in summertime was Elysian. The river wound down to the shallow inlet from the chiselled mountains through emerald clumps of grass and darker copses of evergreens, edged by tangled masses of berry bushes reflected in limpid pools. During the stampede this was quickly reduced to mush by the trampling feet of men and animals.

  As at Skagway and at Ashcroft, at Edmonton and Valdez, a liquid stream of humanity gushed through Dyea’s narrow streets day and night, so that the air was never still from animal cries and human curses. Only the natives remained silent, and, of all the thousands who attacked the Chilkoot that winter, none profited more than they. The Tlingit tribes were quickly put to work as packers: the Chilkoots, who guarded the pass; their brother Chilkats from the western arm of Lynn Canal; and the Stikines from Wrangell. Over the mountains they stolidly trudged, squat and swarthy and taciturn, a tumpline taut around their flat foreheads, a stout stick in one hand, a pack balanced upon their massive shoulders. Constant communion with the whites had made them shrewd bargainers. They worked for the highest bidder, ran their own informal union, refused to labour on Sundays (for all were strict Presbyterians), and continued to raise their fees as the fervour of the rush increased. Sometimes they would fling the pack of an employer into the snow and go to work for another who offered more money. Sometimes they would stop in the middle of the trail and strike for higher wages. They would not accept folding money, for an early prospector had cheated one of them by paying him in Confederate bills; as a result, they quickly took the gold and silver coinage out of circulation. They treated all stampeders with contempt. At a native church service which some cheechakos attended as spectators, the Tlingit minister read them a stern lecture from the pulpit for not removing their hats. “You white men should be ashamed!” he cried.

  The first arrivals at Dyea found that, as at Skagway, their outfits must be lightered from steamer to shore, where they were dumped helter-skelter on the tidal beach. When the tide rose, the scenes that followed were chaotic and often tragic. It was absolutely necessary for each man to move his gear above the high-tide mark before the salt water ruined everything. Monty Atwell, who landed at Dyea on February 22, 1898 – Washington’s birthday – wrote: “We saw grown men sit down and cry when they failed to beat the tide. Their limited amount of money had been spent to buy their stuff and get it this far. With their flour, sugar, oatmeal, baking powder, soda, salt, yeast cakes, dried potatoes and dried fruits under salt water, and without time or money to replace them, their chances of getting to the gold-fields were gone. A terrible blow to the strongest of men.” The new arrivals used dogs, horses, and even oxen to push or pull their outfits across the glistening sands. Atwell watched one old man who was unable to pack his boxed outfit on his shoulders rolling the boxes as best he could, barely keeping ahead of the oncoming waves.

  When the wharves were built, they were so icy that a man stepping from ship to dockside often slid back into the sea and had to be fished out with his clothes frozen solid. When warehouses went up, they were jammed from dawn to dusk with crowds of gesticulating men, all demanding their goods, so that the owners had sometimes to brandish six-shooters to avert a riot.

  Here, too, for a few brief months, the horse was king. Pack animals were so scarce that even the poor ones sold for six or seven hundred dollars. And although the cost of their feed ran as high as one hundred and fifty dollars a ton, each animal could earn forty dollars daily in packing fees before he collapsed. “Every horse that lands at Dyea may be considered as dead,” Robert Medill wrote home to friends in Illinois. “If one man is fortunate enough to get all his packing done another man takes the horse, and it rarely passes from his possession until death. They mostly die of starvation, as no one brings enough feed, not anticipating so much packing.”

  Sturdier animals fared better. Monty Atwell and his two partners purchased a wild Oregon ox, which had been brought to Dyea to be butchered. They named him Marc Hanna, after the notorious Republican Party boss, and employed him pulling their 5,400-pound outfit between Dyea and the foot of the pass. Marc Hanna could pull five hundred pounds easily, and though horses hauling three-hundred-pound loads often passed him on the trail, they tired more easily and the ox invariably beat them into camp. When the job was done his owners did not have the heart to butcher him but sold him for a low price to another party that promised to care for him.

  Like so many routes to the Klondike, the first few miles of the Dyea Trail were deceptively easy. A pleasant wagon road rambled along through meadow and forest, crossing and recrossing the gravelly river that meandered through copses of cottonwood, spruce, birch, and willow.

  Then, piece by piece, the telltale symbols of the stampede appeared – a litter of expendable goods thrown aside by men who had already begun to lighten their burdens. Here were trunks of every description, many of them filled with jewellery and trinkets and framed pictures that had ceased to have value for men seeking gold. Trunks were the most useless and awkward articles of all, and each stampeder soon learned that the only possible containers for his outfit were stout canvas bags fifty inches long. After every conceivable weight had been discarded, the weary Klondikers, on leaving the river, kicked off their heavy rubber boots and left them behind, as well. Two enterprising Alaskans retrieved this mount
ain of footwear and took it back to Juneau for resale to newer arrivals, so that hundreds of pairs came back over the passes time after time.

  Five miles from Dyea the trail reached Finnegan’s Point, a huddle of tents surrounding a hard core of blacksmith shop, saloon, and restaurant. Here Pat Finnegan and his two husky sons tried to charge a toll of two dollars per horse for the use of their corduroy bridge, until the mounting tide of stampeders brushed them aside. From the Point the trail led directly towards the canyon of the Dyea River, a slender crevice two miles long and fifty feet wide, cluttered with boulders, torn-up trees, and masses of tangled roots. Through the slushy thoroughfare of Canyon City the steady stream of panting men trudged on. At the far end of the canyon, in a strip of woods, a third wayside settlement sprang up, called Pleasant Camp because it came as such a relief after the gloom of the gorge. Now each man felt the tug of gravity as the grade began to rise slowly until Sheep Camp was reached at the base of the mountains. This was the last point on the trail where it was possible to cut timber or firewood; everything beyond was naked rock and boulder, sheathed during the winter in a coating of ice and smothered in a blanket of snow.