A road of pure white channel gravel winds out along the Klondike Valley towards Bonanza. But the Klondike and its tributary valleys would be unrecognizable to the men of ’98; they are choked with mountains of gravel tailings, churned up by the great dredees that for half a century have mined the creekbeds. These tailings run like miniature alps for miles; and the water, changed in its course by the dredging, finds its way between them in a thin trickle. The hills, still bare of trees, are marked by the hesitant lines of old ditches and broken flumes and the scars left by hydraulic nozzles.
Some of this ground has been worked three times – first by individual miners, next by early dredges, and later by more modern dredges. But there are no dredges left in the Klondike Valley. From Carmack’s day until the end of the mining period it yielded more than three hundred million dollars in dust and nuggets. Now, only the tailing piles, blurred by willow and alder, remain.
Here and there, where no dredge has dug, the remnants of the great stampede can still be found: rusting picks and shovels lying among the alders; the crumbling boards of ancient sluiceboxes; old wheelbarrows; cabins with their roofs fallen in from the weight of winter snows; an occasional store of photographs, old newspapers, or letters from a bygone age; and sometimes an old man working slowly away at his claim, after the fashion of the early prospectors.
The Yukon River is no longer the great artery of the north. The planes that zoom off the tarmac at the great airports of Whitehorse, Fairbanks, and Anchorage; the cars, buses, and transport trucks that roar up the Alaska Highway and its tributary roads, have made the steamboat obsolete. In all the two thousand two hundred miles of the great river, from Whitehorse to Norton Sound, every foot of it navigable, there is not a single stern-wheeler today.
The bones and machinery of the floating palaces lie scattered along the length of the river. Captain Goddard’s little boat can still be seen on a clear day beneath the waters of Lake Laberge. The little May West was sunk in the same body of water. The famous Yukoner and the Bonanza King were used as warehouses for lumber storage at Whitehorse for decades. The Weare and the Bella, the Healy and the Hamilton, the Susie and the Hannah, and many of the other vessels operated by the N.A.T. and A.C. companies are rotting at St. Michael.
Skagway has become a quiet port of a few hundred people, living on its memories. Oddly, the town’s greatest asset, from the point of view of the tourist trade, is the unseen presence of Soapy Smith. Trains rumble through the White Pass as William Moore once prophesied they would, and alongside the right of way an observant traveller can see a worn pathway which is the trail of ’98. For half a century the Chilkoot remained as silent as it was in the days of George Holt, its first explorer. The towns it fed: the Scales, Sheep Camp, and Dyea, vanished. Then, in the early 1970’s, with the trail freshly marked on both sides of the border and campgrounds established for hikers, a thin trickle of men and women once more began to cross the famous pass on a voyage of re-discovery.
Many of the old river towns along the Yukon – Selkirk, Stewart City, Big Salmon, Fortymile, Circle, and Rampart – have also disappeared from sight. A few moss-roofed cabins surrounded by a jungle undergrowth are all that is left of them; one or two are gone without a trace. And so a man in a poling-boat can drift downstream for mile after mile without seeing any sign of humankind, as in the distant days of Harper, McQuesten, Mayo, and Ladue. And were a visitor from those times dropped into the Yukon Valley today, he would find the great river unchanged by the passage of those delirious years, pursuing as always its quest for the ocean, moving like the stream of life out of its mountain cradle to its final rest in the Bering Sea – hesitantly at first and then more strongly, faltering for a moment at the Circle’s rim, then plunging confidently onward, surmounting obstacle and hindrance until its goal is reached.
Once again the land is silent, save for the sound of gurgling water. Down from the mountains the little streams tumble, plucking at the eroding rock and shale. Down through the forests the tributary creeks run, patiently fashioning the landscape. Down to the main river the water pours, bringing its tribute of rock and sand, gravel and silt. Men come and go, but the inevitable cycle of erosion continues as before, sand scouring sand, gravel grinding against gravel, boulder grating on boulder. High on the furrowed table land, deep in the clefts of the valleys, and on the headwaters of a thousand tentacle streams the inexorable process goes on. And perhaps somewhere in some untravelled corner of this wilderness, in an undiscovered nook or cranny, there is still gold.
*In August, 1971, at Lake Lindemann, I came upon a man who was trying to do just that. I suppose you could call him a hippy. He had lived for a time in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco but had tired of that life. After reading Klondike, he decided that he would attempt to duplicate exactly the feats of ’98. He went north to Juneau and worked in the mines, accumulating enough cash for a grubstake. Then, wearing home-made clothing of homespun, he carried something like a thousand pounds of equipment over the Chilkoot Pass. When I encountered him he was building a boat, preparatory to heading down the river. He had never built a boat before, but there he was, whipsawing timbers and carving semicircular ribs out of the centres of large trees. He sent me a postcard in the fall, reporting that he had got safely through the rapids and had reached Whitehorse. He intended to winter at Dawson, then float all the way to Norton Sound.
Chronology
1896
Aug. 17 George Carmack and Indian relatives stake discovery claims on Rabbit (Bonanza) Creek.
Aug. 31 Antone Stander and party stake first claims on Eldorado.
Sept. 5 First steamboat, Alice, lands at Dawson.
Sept. 7 Robert Henderson gets first news of Carmack’s strike.
Oct. 3 Louis Rhodes becomes first man to reach bed-rock on Twenty-One Above Bonanza.
1897
Jan. 21 William Ogilvie sends out news of Klondike’s riches to Ottawa.
Mar. 19 Cariboo Billy Dietering records first bench claim on French Hill.
May 14 Ice goes out in Yukon River at Dawson.
June 5 Dog-driver Jack Carr leaves for Juneau with news of Klondike strike.
June 7 Alice and Portus B. Weare leave Dawson with first (approx.) Klondike gold.
June 12 Inspector W. H. Scarth and detachment of nineteen Mounted Police reach Fort Constantine.
July 14 Excelsior arrives at San Francisco. Stampede begins.
July 15 Portland arrives at Seattle with “a ton of gold.”
July 19 Al-ki becomes first ship to leave for Alaska with stampeders aboard.
July 26 Queen becomes first ship to reach Skagway Bay.
Aug. 6 First detachment of Mounted Police reaches Skagway Bay.
Aug. 7 Miners’ meeting takes over Moore townsite, names it Skagway.
Aug. 16 Humboldt party under ex-mayor Wood of Seattle leaves San Francisco for St. Michael.
Aug. 29 Humboldt reaches St. Michael.
Sept. 4 Inspector J. D. Moodie leaves Edmonton to explore a route to the Klondike.
Sept. 9 North West Territories government dispatches T. W. Chalmers to cut a trail to the Peace River via the Swan Hills.
Sept. 11 Ten per cent royalty established on all gold mined in the Yukon.
Flood at Chilkoot Pass causes three deaths.
Sept. 20 Armed party holds up Portus B. Weare at Circle City.
Sept. 25 Bella held up.
Hansen of A.C. Company arrives back in Dawson with news that no more supplies can get through.
Sept. 27 Exodus from Dawson begins.
Oct. 8 Major J. M. Walsh, Commissioner of the Yukon, arrives at Skagway.
Oct. 13 Yukon River freezes over, trapping boats.
Oct. 29 Captain P. H. Ray ambushed during miners’ meeting at Fort Yukon.
Nov. 8 Work begins on Brackett wagon road over White Pass.
Nov. 19 N.A.T. store at Fort Yukon raided for food.
December U.S. Congress appropriates $200,000 for Yukon relief. Arc
hie Burns opens first ropeway over Chilkoot.
1898
Jan. 7 Inspector Robert Belcher and detachment of Mounted Police reach Skagway.
Jan. 31 Double killing of Andy McGrath and Deputy Marshal Rowan in Skagway.
Feb. 3 Governor Brady of Alaska petitions Washington to send troops to maintain order.
Feb. 25 First troops arrive at Skagway.
Inspector Belcher begins to collect customs at Chilkoot summit.
Mar. 8 Vigilante “Committee of 101” formed at Skagway.
Mar. 15 Second detachment of troops arrives at Dyea.
Infantrymen briefly close Skagway gaming-rooms.
April 3 Avalanche above Sheep Camp kills more than sixty stampeders.
April 22 Ice goes out in Athabasca River. Flotilla of stampeders sets off down Mackenzie water route towards Arctic.
April 24 Spanish-American War begins.
May 1 Soapy Smith’s Skagway Military Company stages mammoth parade.
May 6 Judge C. A. Sehlbrede replaces John U. Smith as United States commissioner at Skagway.
May 8 Ice goes out in Yukon River at Dawson.
May 17 W. P. Taylor starts to blaze trail from Peace River Crossing to the Pelly.
May 27 First newspaper, the Klondike Nugget, begins publication at Dawson.
May 29 Ice goes out in Upper Yukon lakes. Flotilla of seven thousand boats sets off for the Klondike.
June 8 Vanguard of Lake Bennett flotilla reaches Dawson.
June 24 Sam Steele replaces Constantine as officer in charge of Dawson City detachment, NWMP.
July 4 Soapy Smith leads Independence Day parade at Skagway.
July 8 Soapy Smith shot to death by Frank Reid at Juneau dock, Skagway.
July 9 The stampede to Dominion Creek.
July 20 Frank Reid dies of wounds.
Sept. 22 Discovery claim staked at Anvil Creek (Nome), Alaska.
Oct. 24 Inspector Moodie finally reaches Fort Selkirk.
1899
Jan. 10 The Nigger Jim stampede.
Jan. 16 Father Judge dies at St. Mary’s Hospital, Dawson.
Jan. 27 Remnants of relief expedition finally reach Dawson.
Feb. 16 First through train reaches White Pass summit.
Mar. 13 A. D. Stewart, ex-mayor of Hamilton, dies of scurvy o Peel River.
April 26 Fire destroys most of Dawson’s business district.
July 6 White Pass railway completed to Lake Bennett.
July 27 Gold found on beach at Nome, Alaska.
(approx.)
July 29 Railway completed to Whitehorse.
August Eight thousand leave Dawson for Nome.
A Note on the Revised Edition
When Klondike was completed in 1957, it did not immediately occur to me that the story of the gold rush was part of a larger saga. I intended to follow this book with another about the building of the CPR, for it seemed to me that the two stories had certain things in common: they were both sweeping tales of adventure involving the movements of large numbers of people through time and space. It was only after I had done considerable research into the railway odyssey that I began to glimpse the full dimensions of the over-all epic of the opening up of the North West. Between Confederation and World War 1, an empty subcontinent, stretching from the Great Lakes to the Alaska border, was transformed into a populous domain, carved into sophisticated political units, intersected by road, rail, and wire, surveyed, mapped, settled, fenced, cultivated, and mined. Thus was created the Canada we know today – a transcontinental nation that was only dimly glimpsed by a handful of the men who sat down together in Charlottetown in 1864.
Klondike, then, forms a chapter in that story. The decision to reset the type and make the book uniform with those that cover the earlier chapters has allowed me to revise and expand the original edition. More than ten thousand words have been added to the main body of the text, based on material not available when the book was published in 1958. These occur in the form of inserts and revisions, more than fifty of them scattered throughout the text and ranging from a single sentence or paragraph to more than a dozen pages.
The new edition contains, for example, expanded sections on the early days of Dyea and Skagway and much new material on the Ashcroft Trail; there is more on the character and reign of Soapy Smith and his gang; I have also been able to flesh out my brief references to E. A. Hegg, the leading photographer of the stampede, and have introduced one or two new figures, such as Norman Lee, the Chilcoten rancher, whose diary was made public after Klondike was published, and Stroller White, the itinerant newspaperman, whose newspaper memoirs were recently anthologized. Here and there throughout the book, I have been able to add anecdotes which seem to me to further illuminate the period. There has also been one major revision: the two sections on the Edmonton trails have been completely overhauled and expanded, thanks in large part to the meticulous researches of J. G. MacGregor, whose book, The Klondike Rush through Edmonton, published in 1970, corrected or revised many conclusions (my own among them) that had previously been held concerning the back-door route to the Klondike.
The three maps in the original edition have been replaced by more detailed charts, prepared by Henry Mindak and placed at appropriate points in the text for quick reference. As in The Great Railway volumes, I have also thought it useful to include a cast of characters, a chronology, and, where possible, source notes. The point of view, of course, has not changed. Klondike remains the story of a quest. It is an allegory as well as a history and should be read as such.
The international character of the last great gold rush has made Klondike a popular work outside of Canada. The book has not only been published in England and the United States but it has also been translated into such unexpected tongues as Hungarian, Czech, Slovene, and German. Its influence, I am happy to report, has been considerable; indeed, of all my books this is the only one that seems to me to have had any influence at all. (The Comfortable Pew, by contrast, has caused scarcely a chip in the façade of the institution it criticized.)
It is now clear that the publication of Klondike touched off a process that helped to open the eyes of Canadians, and Americans as well, to the presence in the North of a vanishing historical resource. Klondike was the first book which attempted to tell the story of the stampede as a coherent whole and with a wealth of detail. It is difficult now to recall the indifference with which the Trail of ’98 was viewed before its publication. Scarcely a soul, for instance, had been over the Chilkoot Pass for half a century. The tourist traffic to Dawson City, which had reached a peak in the twenties after Robert Service’s literary success, was declining so badly that an attempt by Canadian Pacific Airlines to restore a riverboat to active service met with financial failure. While I was working on the research in the fifties, I can recall more than one colleague (and more than one Klondiker) saying to me: “Why would you want to write a book about the Klondike? Who will buy it?”
But in the first three months after its publication ten thousand Canadians bought it – a sale that astonished both author and publisher, since it was unprecedented at the time. One of those who bought the book was Tom Patterson, who had sparked the Stratford Shakespearean Festival. After reading Klondike, Patterson decided that an attempt ought to be made to restore and preserve some of Dawson’s historical sites and that this could best be done by launching a Gold Rush Festival on the site, supported by federal funds. It was, admittedly, a bizarre idea, but it actually came to fruition in the summer of 1962. Because it “lost money” (what festival does not?), the press branded it a failure. In retrospect, it can be seen to have been an overwhelming success.
The Gold Rush Festival caused the immediate restoration of the only structure extant from stampede days – the Palace Grand Dance Hall – and of one of the historic river boats that were crumbling to dust on the ways along the Yukon. (The money was not allocated without a spirited debate in Parliament over the advisability of appropriating federal funds to recrea
te “a brothel.”) In addition, the festival also reversed the declining tourist traffic, trebling it in the festival year. The reversal has continued. More important, it helped to change official attitudes towards the historical heritage of the Yukon. Since that time other buildings in Dawson have been restored, and that work is continuing. Carmack’s Discovery Claim is one of several sites that have been marked with a suitable plaque. A second steamboat has been rebuilt in Whitehorse and is open to tourists. Most important of all, it now seems likely that the entire Trail of ’98, from Skagway and Dyea to Lake Bennett and eventually to Dawson itself, will become part of an international gold rush park.
The initial impetus for such a park came from the Americans. Plans are already well advanced to restore sections of Skagway (in fact, by 1971 board sidewalks had replaced concrete on Broadway Avenue). The trail from Dyea to the Chilkoot’s summit has been repaired and several camp grounds have been established en route. A historic research study of the area was completed late in 1970 for the National Park Service of the United States Department of the Interior. One of the major sources for this study was Klondike.
The Canadian government in 1971 commissioned a Vancouver firm to examine the area between the Chilkoot Pass and Lake Bennett and make specific recommendations for what is to be the first stage of the Canadian section of the park. I was appointed historic adviser to the group and in August, 1971, with a party of about forty persons, including both United States and Canadian park officials, I climbed the famous pass from Sheep Camp and walked over the old trail that leads down past Crater Lake, Long Lake, and Lindemann to the green waters of Bennett.
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