Jack London and the Klondike Gold Rush

by Peter Lourie

  Jack motioned to Thompson and Goodman to put up their oars so they wouldn’t catch the water and accidentally flip the boat. Meanwhile, Jack jammed the sweep oar with every ounce of his might to keep the boat from going sideways, which would mean instant death. He tried and tried to get the boat up on the ridge. Then he heard his oar crack, but luckily, it didn’t break.

  Sloper’s paddle finally did break, but, suddenly, after one last header that gulped the entire boat, the river spat them out the other side of the canyon into a giant whirlpool. The heavy boat went totally limp.

  Jack had done it, run a mile-long canyon in only three minutes, and they’d saved four days of time. The men on the rim cheered and threw their hats into the air.

  After bailing the water out of the boat, Jack ran a few miles of “normal” rapids, passing wrecks on the rocks where lives had been lost. Then the group faced a much greater danger than Miles Canyon—the Whitehorse Rapids.

  Also known as the Graveyard, these rapids had never successfully been run in previous years—everyone who had tried had drowned. Stampeders were portaging not just their supplies, but even their boats on skids of spruce logs placed side by side.

  Apparently, the most dangerous part was the very end section, called the Mane of the Horse. A long reef of violent, foamy white water threw the whole river to the right bank, then abruptly “jumped” back, rushing to the left into a giant and deadly whirlpool.

  So when everyone heard that a guy named Jack London was attempting these rapids, hundreds and hundreds came to marvel. Surely, they thought, this would be the young man’s undoing.

  Jack was in a hurry and rather proud of his good luck, so not a pound was taken from the boat. The Yukon Belle leaped clear of the water, then buried itself in the troughs of the waves until Jack completely lost control of his boat. A crosscurrent pushed the stern sideways, broadside. Sloper snapped a second paddle in the raging water. Waterlogged, the Yukon Belle then careened toward the left bank of the river, and no matter how hard Jack pushed the sweep oar (it cracked again), he could not turn the nose of the boat downstream. Everything happened at lightning speed. They hit the Mane of the Horse and went sideways into the deadly whirlpool.

  Jack realized he was actually trying to buck the whirlpool, pushing the sweep the wrong way and locking them down, so in a flash of understanding, he changed the direction of his oar, which once again made a loud cracking sound, but the vessel answered instantly, missing the rocks by a couple of inches. Sloper, in fact, had already leaped to the top of the rock, but tumbled back “like a man boarding a comet” as the boat jogged forward.

  * * *

  THAT NIGHT, THEY CAMPED at the foot of the rapids in what would become the city of Whitehorse, capital of the Yukon Territory. Jack’s reputation spread for miles. He’d run his boat through Miles Canyon and Whitehorse Rapids, fully loaded, saving eight days of hard portaging labor. And what was even more incredible is that Jack went back to run their second boat, the Belle of the Yukon, through the same canyon and rapids.

  Although it was 420 river miles to Dawson, they now had a slightly better chance of getting to the Klondike before freeze-up. Of course, it was still a frantic race against winter. On the night of September 25, the temperature dropped well below freezing. Winds and nasty weather lay ahead on Lake Laberge, one of the most dreaded parts of the river route to Dawson.

  Jack pushed onward.

  LAKE LABERGE

  A FAMOUS SCOTTISH DOG MUSHER, Allan Alexander Allan, or Scotty for short, described the next part of Jack’s journey as “a series of flats, mountains, hills, water, mud, quagmires and bogs from one end to the other.” It wasn’t just Sailor Jack’s boat-handling abilities that would get them through this part; he was also good at camping and roughing it. At eighteen, Jack had learned how to live rugged when he spent nine months crossing the country as a hobo. When Jack had returned more confident from his successful sea voyage on the sealing schooner the Sophia Sutherland, he fell into the old routine of hard work and low wages, but soon grew restless again. So he set off to cross the United States on freight trains. During his hobo adventure, he witnessed terrible poverty throughout the land. He got thrown in prison for vagrancy in Buffalo, New York, then traveled to Baltimore, Maryland; Washington, DC; and New York City, where he was horrified by the abject conditions of so many people living in slums.

  Back again in California, Jack reflected on the people he’d camped with on the tracks and the people in the city slums. This vision of a struggling America helped him see that he too was a member of the underclass, and that he might easily fall into the poverty pit if he didn’t struggle against the tide of destitution.

  So after his trip across America, he vowed to change his life. In January 1895, Jack hit the books hard. He’d dropped out of school in the eighth grade in order to earn money for his family, but he now enrolled in high school. He knew that only education could save him from a life of hard labor and toil.

  * * *

  BELOW THE WHITEHORSE RAPIDS, Jack and his group were forced by knife-cutting snow, howling winds, and darkness to grope for a campsite in a cove on thirty-mile-long, three-mile-wide Lake Laberge. They found a few sticks of driftwood for a fire, but the winds blew against them and they were forced to camp for three days. Ice formed in sheltered pools along the shores. Time after time, they tried to go out into the lake but barely got back to shore without tipping over.

  More boats tied up nearby. Jim Goodman went out to shoot a bear but got only a pheasant. This delay greatly troubled Jack. Unless they got beyond Laberge immediately, they were doomed to be stuck here, frozen in for six months to come.

  Stampeders dreaded Lake Laberge for good reason. Famous for unpredictable weather, fog, and tumultuous waves that could whip up in an instant, the lake was surrounded by a land covered in snow. Walls of rock shot down into the water, making it hard to find camping sites. The occasional wave-pounded, rocky beaches, where the rim ice had already begun to form, made for unfriendly campsites.

  Their sixth day on the lake, Jack pushed them onward. He yelled out, “This day we go through. We turn back for nothing!” Day after day, the Yukon Belle and sister boat the Belle of the Yukon had unsuccessfully fought the cresting seas, the spray turning to ice. So now they rowed for their lives and even set sails against the monster waves and fierce winter storm. They rowed as hard as they had ever rowed, hands feeling like ice, and when they finally got to the end of the lake, where the river started again, they looked back to see the water on the lake had frozen solid, locking down all river travel until late May the next year. They were the last Stampeders to make it through in 1897.

  As the Yukon narrowed and picked up speed, Jack recalled how hard it had been for him to be a student after having learned to live outdoors.

  * * *

  WHEN JACK ENTERED Oakland High School in January 1895, he wore a wrinkled dark blue suit and wool shirt. He sat at his desk looking tough, arms sprawled out in front of him, gazing around the room with an expression of haughtiness. He didn’t like high school, so he found a shortcut to university by studying for the entrance exams. After cramming two years’ worth of studies into three months—sometimes working nineteen hours a day at the books—he was accepted to the University of California at Berkeley, where he began his short career as a college student.

  College life was also not easy for Jack, partly because he was classmates with many of the wealthier members of the ruling class of California; he came from humbler beginnings. He was eager to take all the English courses the university offered. He had big plans. With his mop of curly hair and broad shoulders, he gave off the aura of a man who had done wild, adventurous things. He was known as a brawler. He boxed with other students, though many were afraid of him. He also began to speak in public on street corners about the ills of big business, and was even arrested for doing so without a license. At twenty he was developing a reputation for public speaking and often drew a crowd.

  In Febru
ary 1897, after only one semester, Jack had to withdraw from the university to help with family finances. He began to pour all his energy into his writing, hoping to make money from the stories that he crafted deep into the night. He sometimes wrote for fifteen hours straight, forgetting to eat. He wrote with confidence, expecting editors any moment to discover his genius. Instead, his manuscripts were rejected and returned to him. He could hardly pay for the stamps of his submissions.

  It was at this time that he discovered John London was not his real father and that he might be illegitimate, a bastard. Deeply disturbed by this and depressed from all his failed writing attempts, he solved his problems by heading out on another adventure: He joined the Stampede to the Klondike. If he could just strike gold, he would help his family and never have to do hard labor again. He’d be able to write for the rest of his life.

  TRIBUTARIES SPITTING ICE

  ESCAPING THE FROZEN LAKE, Jack and his partners were suddenly swept into the Thirty Mile River, which shoots out of the lake like water through a hose. Jack sat back at his sweep-oar, letting the six-mile-an-hour current carry the Yukon Belle a few miles closer to Dawson and the Klondike gold fields. Whenever they slowed, the mush ice clutched at their hull.

  What a relief it must have been to make camp that night, with Lake Laberge behind them. Jack found a good camping place in the cold dusk, but had to shovel a lot of snow away in order to pitch the tent. They’d lost sight of the Belle of the Yukon. Oh well, thought Jack, they’d meet up soon enough.

  For days, Jack and his partners worked hard to weave through ice and dodge the many rocks that could suddenly end their trip. He and his Argonauts entered a raw and vast wilderness inhabited by only a few nomadic Native tribes, some close to starvation, some suffering from tuberculosis.

  On October 3, the group started out early in a dense fog and bitter cold. They found their sister boat and proceeded in tandem. The Big Salmon River, a tributary feeding into the Yukon, was throwing out tons of slushy ice, but they were able to go forty-five miles the next day, so swift was the current. Passing Little Salmon River, which sloshed even more ice into the Yukon, they encountered a band of Native families with large rings in their noses and ears. They were trading fish, meat, and moccasins. Jack’s group bought a rabbit for fifty cents.

  The boats ran onto a sandbar. Everyone got out and pushed and pulled them back up the river. Thank God for the strength and size of Big Jim.

  The next day, the group successfully faced a dangerous but short set of rapids called Five Finger Rapids, then passed on down to Fort Selkirk, a trading post of the Hudson’s Bay Company since 1848. Jack let the men stop for a half hour to look over the many Native dwellings strung along the riverbank.

  In the main trading post was a “small stock of fancy-colored calicoes, a few guns and ammunition, moccasins, and skins, but no provisions of any kind [no riverboat had been here in two years].” Jack looked through the register on the counter, where 4,844 other Stampeders had written their names and hometowns. The storekeeper said several thousand additional Stampeders had not stopped, making perhaps a total of six thousand who had set course for Dawson by that autumn. A year later, this number would swell to forty thousand.

  As the boats set off downriver, the swift current was congested with so much ice that casual drifting was now impossible. Jack steered the boat around dangerous “sweepers,” fallen trees with massive roots still attached to the riverbank and ready to entrap anyone unlucky enough to get too close. In dense fog, Jack navigated through tons of slush ice pouring out of the wide Pelly River.

  SPLIT-UP ISLAND AT STEWART RIVER

  ON OCTOBER 8, Jim Goodman traveled out of camp and shot a lynx. Setting out on the river again, they began moving at a clip of fifty to sixty miles a day!

  Two and a half months after leaving San Francisco, and four days after leaving Selkirk, Goodman, Thompson, Sloper, and Jack (Tarwater was on the other boat) pulled the Yukon Belle ashore on a low-lying island just below the mouth of the Stewart River, seventy-five miles short of Dawson. Massive spruce trees, cottonwoods, willow, and alder covered the island. Although there were no snakes, raccoons, or possums, other game was abundant in this part of the Klondike—marten, lynx, fox, beaver, wolf, wolverine, ermine, muskrat, grizzly, coyote, moose, and caribou.

  Of the multiple islands here, the one Jack and his partners chose to spend the winter on was called Upper Island or Split-Up Island because it was a place where prospecting parties often split up to go their separate ways. A few years before, it had been a busy place, with a big mining camp nearby called Stewart City. Three hundred thousand dollars’ worth of gold had been mined here, and more than thirty abandoned cabins dotted the islands along the river.

  Jack had met so many defeated miners retreating upriver from Dawson, he and his group decided not to drift into town just yet. The dire warnings that Dawson was due for a famine were in fact coming true, and they wanted to scout this area first. Whereas all the creeks around Dawson had been staked with claims, Henderson Creek, flowing into the Yukon only a few miles from the island, was ripe for staking.

  Named after the veteran prospector Bob Henderson, the creek had few claims on it. Although Henderson himself had put in his “discovery claim” (the term used for the first claim on a creek) only months before, there was plenty of room for more claims. So much gold had been taken out of the general area in former years, Henderson sure seemed to Jack like a good bet.

  He took over one of the empty cabins on Split-Up Island, a perfect staging ground for his mining headquarters, he thought. On October 10, he went across the river to talk to an old-timer to get some pointers about the kind of country they were in. Then the Stewart froze up solid, and on the eleventh, Jim Goodman, who was the only experienced miner, scouted up Henderson (the swifter creeks were still flowing, even though some of the larger tributaries of the Yukon had frozen), and he came back with positive reports. His pan had found “good colors,” which means the creek had gold in it. He brought along some grains of gold to prove it. This was exciting news. You could hear whooping around the cabins.

  Bright and early, Jack and Jim and two other miners in the area set off for three days of prospecting along Henderson. Sloper and Thompson remained in camp baking bread and pies and sharpening their axes. Sloper built a sled for the oncoming winter.

  Like all prospectors, Jack’s first task was to locate an area of the stream that might be good for mining. He was particularly interested in a portion of the left, or north, fork of Henderson. Second, he’d literally mark or “claim” the land by erecting posts with placards on all four corners of the plot. Then he’d have to register his claim at the gold commissioner’s office in Dawson before he could start digging. Once the claim was registered, it would be protected from other miners who might want to encroach on it.

  Leaving their cabins on Split-Up Island, Jack, Big Jim, and their new buddies walked four miles along the Yukon to where the tiny Henderson flowed into the bigger river, then seven miles up the creek to where it forked. They panned as they traveled. When they got two miles up the left fork, Jack was thrilled to find gold flakes—colors layered his pan! Later he described the process in his novel Burning Daylight.

  * * *

  He … began to wash. Earth and gravel seemed to fill the pan. As he imparted to it a circular movement, the lighter, coarser particles washed out over the edge. At times he combed the surface with his fingers, raking out handfuls of gravel. The contents of the pan diminished. As it drew near to the bottom, for the purpose of fleeting and tentative examination, he gave the pan a sudden sloshing movement, emptying it of water.… Thus the yellow gold flashed up as the muddy water was flirted away. It was gold—gold-dust, coarse gold.…

  * * *

  In three days, Jack and his partners staked eight claims on Henderson’s north fork. When they got back to their cabins, Jack was euphoric. Along with Thompson and two other local prospectors, he hopped aboard the Yukon Belle for the tw
o-day journey to Dawson, where they’d all file their claims and get news of the outside world. They could collect any mail sent to them from home, and they might even get a shower in a hotel.

  The Yukon was still open for travel, but only for a few more days. For sure they’d be forced to wait in Dawson until the mighty river froze deep and solid.

  PART THREE

  OCTOBER 16–DECEMBER 2, 1897

  DAWSON

  Dawson Waterfront, 1898

  (University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections, UW 26618)

  THE CITY OF GOLD

  JACK HEARD THE HUBBUB of Dawson before he floated up to its ramshackle shanties, crude log cabins, and riverboats of all sizes and shapes that stretched for a half mile along a flat piece of swampy ground on the eastern bank of the Yukon. Gentle hills of shrub fir and birch rose behind the town, and the cold fog that rolled off the river gave the place a bleak air.

  Located where the Klondike River flows down the valley to join the Yukon, Dawson was a sea of tents in October 1897. The town had no radios, no telephones, no telegraph even. The mail sometimes wasn’t delivered for months on end. There were no sewers, just mud and raw living. Gold dust was the town’s main currency.

  At all hours, the sound of hammers rang out in the now-wintry air. Saloons and cabins went up in a matter of days.

  The population of the town was little more than four thousand when Jack got there, but would soon swell to many times that. Dawson streets ran parallel with the river. Sixty feet back from the river’s high-water mark, Main Street supported small earth-covered log dwellings and two-story log hotels, saloons, dance halls, and restaurants. All social life was concentrated in this two-block section along the riverfront. Here was the teeming hub of the place. Jack pitched his tent near the center of all the activity and remained in Dawson for six weeks as winter set its teeth upon the land.