But first young William Haskell had to get himself out of eastern seaboard inertia. In 1889, when he was twenty-two, Bill had found himself behind the counter in a big Boston dry goods store, his fists constantly clenched with sheer boredom. “What business had I, built on Vermont lines, broad, muscular and tough—dallying behind a dry-goods counter! Stuck up in a corner like a house plant when I sighed for the free open air, the winds and the storm.” For a century, restless Americans had migrated westward. Horace Greeley, founding editor of the New York Tribune, had popularized the slogan “Go west, young man!” in 1865 and, as Bill was the first to admit, “To a spirit like mine the possibilities of the great West naturally appealed.” So with thirty dollars in his pocket, he caught a transcontinental train.
Gold fever bit when Bill reached the Rockies. Sitting in a Colorado Springs bar one day, the young New Englander heard a tale about three Frenchmen who knew nothing about prospecting. They had staked a claim on a stream bed and, according to Bill’s drinking companion, “in a few days one o’ them durn’d Frenchmen picked up a nugget wuth over six thousand.” Soon everybody at the table was trading such anecdotes. Bill listened avidly to the story of “two fellers trampin’ up the coast” who had been looking for wood for their campfire and stumbled on a lump of gold. “That lump was sold afterwards in Los Angeles for two thousand seven hundred and fifty dollars!”
Over the next few days, Bill heard plenty of such tales. One of his new friends was a veteran of the 1849 California Gold Rush, the first international mass stampede to a gold field in history. The old man grew misty eyed as he recalled how news of the strike in a creek bed in northern California had flashed along the newly invented telegraph and he had found himself one of 300,000 gold seekers, or “argonauts,” who streamed into the Sacramento valley. Others reeled off litanies of later gold rushes, when they had been part of an army of prospectors that struggled north up the Cordillera and into Canadian territory. In 1871, the rich Cariboo District of British Columbia was explored; in 1874, gold fields were discovered in the Cassiar Mountains. Old-timers loved rehashing their tales of strikes in front of this fresh-faced youngster, with his patched pants and hands as big as hams. Inevitably, as the bottles continued to circulate, Bill’s buddies would start speculating about men who had kept going—into the basin of the Yukon River, up the creeks of distant rivers like the Lewes and the Stewart, named after long-dead Hudson’s Bay Company explorers. Some had returned with wild stories. Many others were never heard of again because they had perished on remote mountain passes, in raging torrents, or during the hideous cold of northern winters.
Bill Haskell listened to the veterans talk of the seductive glitter of gold, as their stiff, calloused fingers curled around shot glasses of cheap whiskey. He realized that it was not just gold that kept them prospecting. Most were like him—rootless men who had hated the idea of working for paltry wages in ill-lit offices, factories, or stores. Joining the rush west was a bid for freedom: a gesture of reckless self-preservation for loners desperate to escape the grinding conformity of the modern world. There was little in their lives besides the quest for gold. After a mid-century burst of prosperity and expansion, the early 1890s were years of profound cultural and economic instability in North America. Alongside technological miracles like the transcontinental railroad and the telephone were unemployment and grinding poverty. Money was in short supply, banks failed with dismal regularity, families were thrown out of their homes, and four million men drifted around the continent looking for work. Bill had seen the bleak headlines that filled every newspaper.
As the miners traded anecdotes among themselves, Bill’s eyes widened. “The effect of such conversation upon a tenderfoot with but a little silver in his pocket may be imagined.” Cheerful and enthusiastic, he was eager to find a quest on which to focus his energies. He did not kid himself that success was a sure thing. Despite the talk of “fabulous fortunes and sudden wealth,” none of his companions had ever struck gold themselves. There was never a mention of the thousands of prospectors who came up empty handed every time. Nevertheless, he decided to learn everything he could about gold mining, from both books and practical experience. “The next day I started with a party of a dozen others on my first rush to the goldfields.”
Experienced prospectors in the party stared thoughtfully at the mountain ranges, carefully examined loose rocks, and trickled gravel through their fingers. Bill watched, then peppered them with questions until they gruffly told him to shove off. A few had torn charts and dogeared volumes of geology in their packs, which he would borrow. It was hard work, squinting at small print by the light of a campfire, but he slowly acquired some basic knowledge. He learned that there are two ways to mine gold: lode mining (sometimes known as hard rock mining) and placer mining. Bill’s companions were not interested in lode mining, since that required teams of men using expensive, heavy equipment to extract and crush the hard rock containing a vein, or lode, of gold. Bill’s crowd consisted of placer miners, whose tools were rock picks and gold pans. (A pan was a tin basin about a foot across at the bottom, with flared sides.) They were looking for alluvial gold, released from the rock in which it had been deposited by the action of wind or water. Placer gold, lying near the surface of the earth like burst sacks of spilled treasure, just needed someone to come along and gather it up. A lone man, Bill heard, could end up with a pan full of gold entirely by his own efforts. A single man could beat the odds and become a millionaire.
As Bill learned by tedious experience, a man had to know where to look. The theory was simple enough: placer gold fields occur in mountain belts, where gold-bearing rocks have been forced upward in the ancient convulsions of the earth’s surface. Placer gold might be found along the dried-up paths of ancient waterways, or in the gravel at the edge of flowing rivers. However, there was no fixed rule about where the gold lay or why, and no reliable geological charts to help a prospector. Ancient stream beds zigzagged under running streams like a serpent wrapped around a stick. Sometimes an experienced miner could tell from instinct and experience which creek or gravel bar looked hopeful; sometimes a complete rookie might wander around and by sheer luck blunder on placer gold.
In Colorado mountain valleys, Bill watched prospectors squat in chill streams, sink a pan of gravel under a stream’s surface, and swish it around in water. Gold is heavy—nineteen times heavier than water and a lot heavier than every other mineral in a miner’s pan. Each miner prayed that a few “colors,” or gold flakes, would separate from lighter rocks such as silica, schist, and granite. The flakes would sink to the bottom of the pan; the lighter rocks would be swished out into the stream.
Panning for gold was backbreaking work and took practice. A skilled veteran could shake out more gold in a day with expert swirls than a greenhorn could collect in a week. But Bill was young, fit, and eager to learn. After about his fortieth try, he acquired the rhythm that encouraged the gold to gravitate to the pan’s bottom and the sand to spill out over the lip. He spent the next couple of years wandering over mountains, along creeks and streams, and through gulches with his pan—“an inseparable companion,” as he called it. He learned to recognize mica, galena, chalcopyrite, and gold. He taught himself to distinguish granite, sandstone, limestone, slate, serpentine, and schist, as well as talc, dolerite, dolomite, and porphyry.
From time to time, he found enough color to keep him going to the next stage: sinking a shaft through the overlay of muck, gravel, and sand toward the bedrock because the richest pans were usually closest to the bedrock. What constituted a rich pan? The rule of thumb was that with one ounce of gold worth twenty dollars, a single pan that yielded ten cents’ worth of gold showed promise. Twenty such pans, which might take a day or two to accumulate, would yield gold to the value of two dollars. It wasn’t much, but it would have taken Bill three days to earn that amount behind the counter of the Boston dry goods store.
“It was on the whole an agreeable life,” Bill later wrote. But
it was frustrating: his yields were enough to feed him but not enough to make him a rich man. Yet he had caught Prospectors’ Disease. He convinced himself that his next strike might be “the big pan-out” that would make his fortune: “Every pan of dirt is a gamble. Dame Nature is dealing the cards. Will the player make a big stake, or will he lose?”
Bill might have spent the final years of the century, and the rest of his youth, shaking pans in the Rockies were it not for an encounter in the fall of 1895. Joe Meeker, a couple of years older than Bill, was a small, dark-haired, wiry man who shared Bill’s rural background, impatience with clerking jobs, and sense of adventure. Gold was more than a dream to Joe: he was obsessed with the search for it. He had already ventured to the Far North and explored the lower reaches of the Yukon River. He described the river’s quiet beauty in summer, its ice-bound magnificence in winter, and the rumors of glittering sandbars in its tributaries. Bill could see that the North’s wild splendor and promise of hidden wealth held a strange fascination for Joe.
One night, the two men sat convivially by a campfire in the Colorado mining camp, watching the flames. Coffee was brewing in a battered enamel coffee pot; the smells of sweat and wood smoke mingled in the cooling air; overhead, stars sparkled in the clear, dark sky. Then Joe turned his face from the flames, stared intently at the broad-shouldered New Englander, and blurted out a bold suggestion. “The only place to hunt for gold now is in the upper Yukon. I believe that’s the place for us, and if we put our money together it will be enough to buy a good outfit and pay our way.” Joe explained to Bill that he had seen with his own eyes that the Yukon basin was similar to river valleys in California, Colorado, or British Columbia—rugged terrain, igneous rock formations, swift-flowing streams. But the odds of finding gold in the North, he argued, were better than in southern latitudes. Because the ground was frozen for eight months out of twelve, the gold had been locked into the permafrost for thousands of years instead of being dispersed over a large area by running water. It was waiting for them, Joe insisted, his dark eyes fierce with conviction. Yes, reaching the frozen gold in the Yukon was one hell of a challenge. But think about it, he urged his companion. The Yukon region’s placer deposits could be thicker, richer, and purer than any of the deposits found farther south. “Color” there wouldn’t be just flakes or dust—it could be whole nuggets.
Bill hesitated. He knew nothing about the North. He was barely aware that the United States had purchased the immense terrain of Alaska from Russia in 1867. He had no idea that the headwaters of the Yukon were in Canadian, rather than American, territory. But Joe’s intensity gathered force. “There’s gold there,” he insisted, “and I know it.” His own knowledge of the vast land was hazy, but who cared? The previous winter he had heard that gold had been found on the creeks flowing into the upper Yukon and that there was a string of small mining camps along the river—Rampart City, Circle City, Eagle, Forty Mile, Fort Reliance, Sixty Mile, and Fort Selkirk. He knew that living conditions were unbelievably harsh but that the Alaska Commercial Company already had trading stations in these camps. Settlements originally established by fur traders were now supplying provisions to prospectors. Joe’s year in Alaska had convinced him, as he told Bill, that the Yukon basin would be the next eldorado.
Between them, the two men could muster about $1,500. This was a substantial sum for a couple of unskilled laborers, but it was hardly enough to cover the cost of travel, food supplies, and equipment if they headed north. It seemed madness to leave behind the congeniality of the Colorado mining camps and head off into the unknown.
But as Bill stared into the fire, a vision of gold glinting in the arctic mud exploded in his imagination. He recalled other stories of the North—the flickering mystery of the northern lights, the splendor of snow-capped mountain ranges, the fluid magnificence of the caribou herds, and the savage claws of grizzly bears. Bill was a gold miner, but he was also a resourceful young man eager to see the world and marvel at its wonders. Colorado was crawling with old-timers; the Yukon was tomorrow’s country—the final frontier. What’s more, he trusted Joe. The southerner might be surly at times, but he was experienced and straight. What the hell! Bill leaned back, then turned to Joe with a grin. “I’ll go,” he announced cheerfully.
Reaching the North now consumed all Joe and Bill’s money and energy. They spent the winter of 1895-1896 in San Francisco, assembling what Joe decreed they needed for their expedition. “As our purchases were delivered, I began to get a dim realization of what Joe was preparing for,” Bill later wrote. The total outfit included not only food for a year (everything from 800 pounds of flour to 50 pounds of dried apricots, plus bacon, beans, rice, sugar, rolled oats, coffee, tea, tobacco, candles, soap, and salt) but also hardware (30 pounds of nails, two pairs of snow goggles, shovels, knives, tin plates, cooking pots), clothes (extra heavy underwear, leather-heeled wool socks, blanket-lined coats, double-breasted flannel overshirts), tents, sleeping bags, fishing lines, a medicine case, two compasses, a Yukon stove, two gold pans, and a gold scale. Bill lost count of the number of implements Joe purchased (whipsaw, crosscut saw, ripsaw, ax, long-handled shovel, spade, pick, brace and bits, chisels, hatchet, as well as 3 pounds of oakum, 5 pounds of pitch, 150 pounds of rope). He winced at the weight of it all—over one and a half tons—and gave his partner an inquiring look. “You will think it weighs five times that before you get it on the Yukon,” Joe remarked, “but it’s a mighty good outfit, and I hope we shall get it there all right.” Bill repressed his misgivings, but Joe’s next comment didn’t reassure him. “It’ll be the roughest roughing it you ever saw. But you’ve got grit, and that’s more than half.”
On March 15, 1896, the two men sailed out of San Francisco and headed up the coast. They were bound for the little port of Dyea. An uneasy mix of excitement and apprehension filled Bill: he had never been on an ocean before, or traveled so far north. A forested coast-line shrouded in fog slipped by as the vessel made its way through the cold, gray waters. Twelve days after they had waved California goodbye, the boat nosed into the Lynn Canal, a narrow inlet walled by steep, black cliffs with jagged peaks. At the head of the inlet was Dyea’s dismal beach, onto which their possessions were abruptly dumped. Bill and Joe worked against the clock, hauling their outfit out of reach of the incoming tide. Big snowflakes started to fall, and Bill found himself pitching their tent in a foot of snow. Thanks to Joe, they were better prepared than others they had met on the steamer: “There was a noticeable change in the faces of those who were less inured to hardship.” Among them were several women, clutching valises and staring helplessly at their desolate surroundings.
From the mouth of the tent, the two men looked up at the St. Elias mountain range, which they would have to cross. The wall of mountains towered above them, sheer and intimidating. Bill searched in vain on the steep, rocky, ice-covered slopes for the sign of a pass. Occasionally, the fogs and snowstorms parted and allowed him to glimpse a trail leading almost vertically up to a slight cleft among the peaks. This was the notorious Chilkoot Trail, the first and by far the toughest section of the best-known route to the gold fields. Joe saw the dismay on his partner’s face, so quickly put Bill to work. It was impossible to haul all their supplies up the mountain in one load each, so at Dyea the two men methodically divided their supplies into eight sledloads. Then they set out, each hauling a fully loaded, clumsy wooden sled. Each would have to make the teeth-gritting, face-freezing return journey four times as they ferried their goods forward. If Bill found the trail incredibly hard going, others less brawny than he found it appalling. “Those who have not tried it can hardly imagine what it is to tramp twenty-five [sic] miles, half the way pulling four hundred pounds, in an intermittent snow storm, over a road which, while smooth for Alaska, would be deemed almost impassable in New England.”
As Bill and Joe discovered, a man had to be ingenious to pitch a tent on the steep slopes of the trail.
Compared to accounts of the journey to
the gold fields written by subsequent stampeders, Bill did not dwell on its horrors in his memoirs. He had never been one to panic in the face of adversity. In fact, he enjoyed pitting his muscles against the hostile terrain as an occasional watery sun broke through black clouds and north winds screamed round his ears. He took the same kind of pleasure in the physical challenge as a young man or woman today takes in a solo round-the-world voyage or a rigorous climbing trip. He was still young enough to believe he was immortal; he didn’t see disaster or death lurking in every precipitous rock face or icy whiteout. There is a note of pride in his memoir as he looks back at the ordeal: “There was a novelty in the experience which was exhilarating, so that it did not fatigue us as much as it might otherwise have done.”
The first day was relatively easy: ten miles of gently rising bog and sand through a thinly wooded valley. Then the real climb began as the trail became an obstacle course of boulders, with few resting places. After a couple of miles of this, the trail leveled out again as it wound through a forest in which immense fir trees blocked the view of the sky. Soon the treeline was behind the two men, and mountain sheep and goats appeared occasionally in the distance. Bill kept his eyes on the ground as he gasped for air.
The men made four trips each to Sheep Camp, beyond which lay nothing but naked rock and vertiginous cliffs. Bill’s muscles already ached with the effort of hauling the cumbersome sled, but he knew the worst was still ahead. Sleds were useless on the final four miles. First came an incline of about eighteen degrees to a landmark known as Stone House because the huge boulders appeared to be in roughly symmetrical formation. Next came a steeper, twenty-five-degree climb to The Scales, where Tlingit porters would weigh bags to assess the cost of packing them up the final stretch. The last part of the ascent was a precipitous rise with an incline of almost forty-five degrees. This stretch has remained forever in the world’s memory, thanks to photos taken in 1897 by Seattle photographer Eric Hegg. The Hegg photos show a continuous thin, dark line of climbers, loaded with packs and bales, dark greatcoats stark against the snow-covered mountainside, stumbling up the ice like figures out of Dante’s Inferno. In 1896, there were never more than a handful of people on the trail, so Bill and Joe could go at their own pace. Nevertheless, those two well-muscled young men had to make the grueling climb from Sheep Camp to the summit a total of twenty leg-cramping, lung-bursting times each.
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