Alaska (76 page)

He had no real friends, and even the young fellows on the corner had begun to think of him as 'that queer older 462

man.' He was not only prepared to join the stampede to the Yukon, he was almost impelled to do so.

At that time, had Klope been a student of geography, he would have seen that he was already about as close to the Klondike gold fields as he would be if he moved to one of the other starting points like Seattle in Washington or Edmonton in Alberta.

In a straight line he was only one thousand three hundred and seventy miles from the Klondike, not much farther than to Chicago, but had he tried to negotiate that distance, he would have found himself entangled in some of the most forbidding terrain in North America. Wisely, he decided, even before he reached home, to approach the Klondike by way of Seattle.

When he sat with his parents at supper and showed them the newspaper, he did not wait for them to digest the amazing story: 'I'm heading there tomorrow.' It was indicative of the Klope family that his father replied simply: 'I could let you have a hundred and fifty,' and John said: 'Added to what I have, it'll be enough.' Mrs. Klope did not speak, but she felt it high time her son got out of the house and took steps of his own.

John never looked back. He was not able to depart, as he had first said, on the next day, but early on the day after that his father drove him to Bonners Ferry, where they learned that a train would soon be heading south to Spokane and on to Seattle.

After an awkward farewell, John said: 'You better head home, Pop. I'll be all right.'

And

off

went the elder Klope, in no way unhappy that his son was making this move.

WHEN KLOPE REACHED SEATTLE HE FOUND THE CITY IN turmoil, for the entire population seemed to be concentrated in the area around Schwabacher's Wharf, from which steamers were leaving for Alaska, and rarely since the days when nondescript craft plied the Mediterranean had any port seen such an amazing variety of seagoing vessels. There were ocean liners the equal of many crossing the Atlantic, but there were also river tugs hastily fitted out for the relatively quiet Inside Passage to Juneau and Skagway.

There were sternwheelers intended for use along the Mississippi and big, rickety side-wheelers which had been used as excursion boats on the placid waters near Seattle.

Regardless of what the individual ship looked like, all its space was taken by the time Klope reached the waterfront seeking passage to anywhere in Alaska. In two frustrating days, he found not a single berth available, and since each 463

new train from the east brought fresh hordes like himself, the problem worsened.

In his despair at being so close to gold but forestalled from grabbing for it, he asked at the store of the principal outfitters, Ross & Raglan, where he was purchasing his necessities: 'How can a man find passage to the Klondike?' and they told him: 'We have one ship,

the Alacrity,

but she's booked solid through March of next year.' The clerk, seeing his disappointment and knowing him as a man who spent money freely in buying his gear, said: 'If you go to the far end of the docks, I believe there's an old Russian ship being refitted.

I forget the name, but anybody out there will show you where she's berthed.'

'And you think she won't be sold out?' Klope asked, and the clerk said: 'I doubt it.'

When he found the Russian ship, the Romanov of Sitka, he understood why her tickets had not been at a premium, for she was one of the most extraordinary ships presuming to make the run. Hastily built as a Russian sidewheeler for use in the protected waters of southeast Alaska, she had been purchased by Boston seafarers when Russia abandoned the area in 1867 and after long service in the sealing trade had been brought to Seattle, where she had for some years plied the quieter waters of the bays and inlets. Later she had been fitted with an additional boiler that burned coal and a spasmodic propeller that operated in conjunction with the two side wheels. It thus had two completely different systems for propulsion and three instruments for shoving itself through the sea: two wooden sidewheels and a slightly bent metal propeller.

This ancient ship, leaking at many points but never enough to cause sinking, proposed to make the three-thousand-mile journey through rough open and often turbulent seas to St. Michael, the ocean port where passengers and cargo would transfer to smaller steamers for passage up the Yukon. The fare would be one hundred and five dollars for the proposed three-week run, and by the time of departure, every usable spot on the ship would be taken. During a gold rush such a statement did not carry its customary meaning; it did not mean that all berths were occupied; it meant that even sleeping room on the deck and in the cargo areas below was filled. A ship which in its most favorable days of 1860 could have carried perhaps fifty passengers would now set forth with one hundred and ninety-three.

An irony of the situation was that none of these American passengers spoke of themselves as 'heading for Alaska.' It was always 'We're off for the Klondike!' Alaska was an unknown entity, not yet acknowledged as being part of the 464

United States, and as for the Yukon, that great river which they would have to travel if they sailed in the Romanov, few had ever heard of it, and those who had, supposed it to be Canadian. John Klope, a typical passenger, was stumbling into an area about which he knew nothing.

He sailed from Seattle on 27 July 1897, expecting to reach St. Michael in three weeks, which would have been ample time for one of the big steamers, and from there to move promptly into the Yukon on a smaller boat, landing in the Klondike not later than early September. It was indicative of his attitude toward life that during this sea passage he made friends with no one. He was not an unapproachable man, and if some stranger had taken pains to make his acquaintance, he would have responded, but it was not his nature to strike up conversations, share secrets, or form partnerships.

He was John Klope, no known ancestry, no special attributes, just a tall, somewhat thin, stoop-shouldered man, clean-shaven, neat in his ways, and content to remain aloof.

The Romanov

plowed the seas with which she was familiar at a somewhat slower speed than announced; in fact, she seemed to crawl along, as if her diverse means of propulsion counteracted one another. A well-run modern steamer should have made the three-thousand-mile run in nineteen days, and several did, but the Romanov

limped along at a speed which would require at least a month. One passenger familiar with ships spread the report: 'We're making no more than ninety miles a day. If we hit bad weather, we could take five weeks.'

When she finally wheezed into St. Michael on 25 August 1897, three days ahead of prediction, Klope and the other passengers began to learn the realities of Alaskan travel, because there was no harbor waiting and certainly no wharf. The

Romanov,

like all other vessels arriving here, had to anchor about a mile offshore and wait till cumbersome barges worked their way out to unload passengers, luggage and freight.

And when these barges finally did reach land, they usually stopped some yards from the shore, so that passengers had to wade to safety; women were sometimes carried on the backs of men who acted as informal stevedores.

Ashore, the people of the Romanov encountered a predicament which beset even the newcomers from better ships: there were no riverboats available for the long journey up the Yukon, and it seemed likely that none would arrive on their downward journey in time to make another trip up before the freezing of the river.

'Impossible!' some of the Romanov passengers stormed, but when they talked with officials they learned that the

465

mournful situation was true: 'The Yukon is no ordinary river. It flows north of the Arctic Circle, you know. And it freezes at different times at different places.'

'But not in September!'

'Especially in September, in some places. And if it freezes anywhere, it halts all traffic . . . obviously.'

'When does it thaw in spring?'

'May, if we're lucky. More likely June. Last year, early July.'

'My God, it's only open . . . what? Three months?'

'Three and a half, if we're lucky.'

'How often are you lucky?'

'Not very often.'

Now an icy blast seemed to play upon the horde of gold seekers stranded at St. Michael.

The weather was still comfortably warm, but threatening ice seemed to be moving closer, and when Klope heard that the Romanov

was heading straight back to Seattle lest it be trapped in arctic ice drifting down into the Bering Sea, he asked: 'You mean, the whole sea out there freezes?' and the locals said: 'Sure does. If a captain ain't spry, he can get trapped maybe in September and certain in October.'

'What's he do?'

'Well, if he's lucky, he stays pinned there for nine months, right offshore where we can see him. If he's unlucky, ice keeps coming at him, crushes his ship and turns it into kindling, like over there.' And when, along the bleak, treeless shore, Klope saw the remnants of various large ships which had been destroyed by the impersonal, pounding ice, he became obsessed with a determination to get out of St. Michael and up the Yukon before the ice trapped him, too, but he found not a single riverboat available for the trip; three departed while he searched, but since each was crammed with men standing along the rails, not another passenger could be accommodated.

When it looked as if the Romanov people would be stranded in St. Michael, a town of less than two hundred, mostly Eskimo, Klope heard of a certain Captain Grimm, a boat owner familiar with the Yukon, who had a disabled craft which he was willing to put into the water if a boatload of passengers would pay in advance so that he might in turn pay for boiler repairs which his old sternwheeler simply had to have before it could move a foot.

At first Klope was doubtful about such a transaction, for he suspected that the name Grimm depicted the captain's character: He's probably just another banker wearing a different suit, but when no alternative appeared, he was forced 466

to consider Grimm's offer. As usual, he found it difficult to discuss anything with anybody, but fortunately, there were other would-be passengers willing to assume that chore, and an outgoing young man from California with mining experience moved through the small community asking pertinent questions, then reporting to the stranded gold seekers: 'Everybody says Grimm has a good reputation. And he really does need money. His boat can't sail unless it has a working boiler.'

With this provisional information, the passengers encouraged the miner, whom everyone called California, to pursue his investigations, and this time he returned with exciting assurances: 'They say Grimm's about the best captain sailing the Yukon. Knows every twist and turn. And they say that when you're on the Yukon, the twists and especially the turns become important.'

No vote was taken, but by general acclaim the castaways agreed to provide Captain Grimm with the funds he needed, and Klope was assigned to see that the money was spent only on repairs. He helped the three skilled Eskimos employed by Grimm, and in sixteen days they completed a job of extensive overhaul. On 13 September the river steamer

Jos. Parker,

Captain Grimm, pulled out of St. Michael with sixty-three fully paid passengers when it would ordinarily have carried thirty-two. Baggage and stores were so plentiful that temporary wooden sides had to be erected around the foredeck, and atop this cargo half the men would sleep.

From St. Michael to the mouth of the Yukon was seventy miles over the open Bering Sea, and night fell and the next dawn arrived before the little craft reached the amazing delta of the Yukon, where Klope learned that no real mouth of the great river existed; there were some forty mouths emptying into the sea over a distance of almost a hundred miles. 'The trick,' said Captain Grimm as he maneuvered his boat, 'is to find the right one,' and the passengers stood amazed as he picked his way through this tangle of swampland and tributaries and dead-end channels. At last he came upon the one channel in these parts that would enable him to move upstream toward the gold fields.

The Yukon had several peculiarities. It rose far to the south in mountains less than thirty miles from access to the Inside Passage, but instead of joining the sea there, it chose to travel one thousand nine hundred and seventy-nine miles before entering the icy waters of the Bering Sea. It started north like all the other great rivers of the arcticOb, Yenisei, Lena and Kolyma in Siberia, and Mackenzie, greatest of all, in Canadabut unlike them, it did not empty into the Arctic 467

Ocean or its subsidiaries, for after crossing the Arctic Circle at Fort Yukon, it seemed to grow afraid of the frozen north. Turning sharply westward, it fled the arctic and wandered sometimes almost aimlessly toward the Bering Sea.

A major peculiarity was that for much of its distance it was a braided river that is, it broke into many strands which meandered here and there, so that at some points there was not one Yukon but twenty, or even thirty and only a good ship captain or an Indian long familiar with the river could pick his way in and out. The chance that a stranger could navigate the Yukon when it became braided was minimal.

It was this formidable river that Captain Grimm in his Jos. Parker proposed to battle, always against the current, for thirteen hundred and fifty-five increasingly cold miles. Since the Parker

could make about eighty miles a day, if it could take aboard enough cords of wood along the way, the trip should require some seventeen days, but when the little boat reached Nulato, where the Russians had prospered, they ran into a peculiar difficulty which warned the passengers that their journey was sure to be prolonged.

As the Parker

drew to shore where the old palisade had stood, Captain Grimm saw to his satisfaction that some nineteen cords of neatly cut wood, 4x4x8, awaited him, enough, as he told passengers nearby 'to get us to Chicago if the Yukon ran that way . . . which one of these days it might ... if it took it into its head.'