Alaska (87 page)

'We'll carry it,' Buck said, and the Indians predicted: 'You be sorry!'

Because this was not yet the sharp incline, Buck proposed that he try to carry sixty pounds, Tom forty and Missy thirty, and in that disposition they started out. Eight miles on level ground with no pack would have been a smart task, but over this rocky trail with its insistent upward grade it became a torment. Nevertheless, because they were eager and in good shape, they made two round trips that day. At sunset Buck was back at his figuring: 'One hundred and thirty pounds a trip between us.

I don't think we can make more than two trips a day. To move three tons . . .' His face grew ashen: 'That's more than three weeks. Hotel bills and all, maybe we better get some Indians,' and when Missy set herself to the 526

task, she found another team, husky young men, who would portage the lot to Sheep Camp for one hundred dollars. After that day's toil, Buck voiced no objection.

Five days later, when they were safe at the Scales, with their gear beside them waiting to be weighed, elevations became more important than distances. It was less than a mile to the summit, but when the Venns stared at that incredible ladder of twelve hundred steps carved out of ice, Tom consulted his map and informed the others: 'When we get there . . . three thousand seven hundred feet high,' and Buck shuddered: 'We've got to carry three tons to that height?'

Missy, the practical one, ignoring this talk of the terrifying climb, said: 'You know, a man could land naked at Dyea beach and outfit himself up here at seven cents on the dollar ... or maybe for nothing,' and she pointed to a vast accumulation of stuff that had been discarded: 'A man or woman staring at those steps can decide in a hurry that they don't really need a folding table or a sewing machine,' and forthwith she began to identify those things she was sure they could do without.

That night the Venns saw, in all its ugliness, a demonstration of why the leaving of unguarded treasure on the trail was possible, for there was a commotion outside and cries of 'We caught him!' and then a deep voice shouting 'We got him red-handed!'

Even those already asleep piled out of the grubby tent hotels there were eleven such places, one worse than the other to witness the drumhead trial of a vagrant named Dawkins who had committed the one unforgivable crime along the trail. Murder in hot blood was acceptable if there was even a shadowy justification; desertion of a wife was not uncommon; and the lesser wrongdoings of a frontier society were tolerated, but on the arctic frontier, where to tamper with a man's cache might mean his death, theft was unforgivable.

Trappers would leave a month's supply of food in some cabin so far removed that you might think no one could ever reach it, but during an unexpected storm some forlorn man would stagger in exhausted, find the can of matches, the carefully cut branches, the pine needles and the food, and he would be saved. He could consume the entire month's supply of food if necessary, but he must replace it. He must cut new branches, ensure that there were matches ready, and leave everything in place for the next emergency. Even if he had to double back fifty miles to replenish the cache, he was honor-bound to do so, and because many a trapper or prospector owed his life to this tradition, it was sacred. In a lawless land this was the supreme law: never violate a cache.

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Well, Dawkins had seen stacked at the edge of the Scales an extra parka that would nicely replace his worn and poorly lined affair. The parka had been neatly tied in a bundle and partly hidden in a growing pile of goods, so that no one could possibly believe it had been abandoned, but he had taken it. He had been seen and chased and caught, and now the sourdoughs in the crowd, the old-time Alaskan adventurers as opposed to the newcomer cheechakos, convened a miners' court, a fearsome affair that had become necessary because the government provided no control.

While a lantern was held close to the face of the accused, the men who had caught him stealing told their story, which Dawkins could not refute. 'Shoot him!' a grizzled sourdough cried, and several took up the cry, but a Presbyterian minister, on his way to the gold fields to try to bring a little morality to a corrupted land, protested: 'Men, a sentence like that would be excessive. Show compassion.'

'He showed none. Steal a cache, you murder a man.'

'Give me a gun,' snarled another man. 'I'll shoot him.'

The minister pleaded so earnestly that even some of the sourdoughs reconsidered, and a veteran stood before the clergyman, inches from his face, and offered a compromise: 'We'll give him thirty lashes.'

'Thank God,' the minister said, not guessing what the rest of the sentence was to be.

'But you must apply them. Or we shoot.'

Now Dawkins broke his silence, for he knew the sourdoughs meant business: 'Please, Reverend.'

So Dawkins was stripped, his hands were tied to a stake which took the place of a tree, for there were none amid the snows and a rawhide rope with a wooden handle and a big knot tied at the end was handed to the clergyman, while two sourdoughs said: 'We'll count.'

Ashen-faced, the minister accepted the improvised cat-o'- nine-tails, but recoiled: 'I can't.'

'Lash him,' a sourdough shouted, 'or I shoot.'

'Please!' Dawkins pleaded, and the trembling minister, biting his lip and closing his eyes at the crucial moment, swung the rawhide and brought the heavy knot across the man's back. Dawkins made no sound, and the watchers shouted 'Stronger!' But on the sixth lash, when the culprit's back was bleeding, the minister could see only the form of Jesus Christ being lashed by Roman soldiers on the way to Calvary, and he fell prostrate in the snow, his shoulders heaving as sobs wracked his body.

An old prospector, whose life had been saved by a cache north of the circle, snatched the rawhide, and as the solemn 528

voices counted seven . . . eight . . . nineteen . . . twenty the punishment continued, but before the twenty-first blow fell, Missy Peckham threw herself upon the old man's right arm and the beating stopped. Dawkins, who had fainted, was cut down, dressed in his own parka and revived with snow. When he could walk he was headed down the hill to Dyea and told: 'Get going.”He was seen no more.

THE VENNS SLEPT LATE NEXT DAY, FOR IT WAS SUNDAY, but at about eight Buck began to build nine bundles of gear, with the admonition: 'Today we start up the steps. Endless daylight, so we'll try for three trips.' Then he made a most sensible decision: 'Forget what anybody else is trying to carry. For us, lighter loads. Me, fifty pounds, Tom thirty-five, Missy twenty-five.' At this news Tom did some more calculating: 'Oh!

For three tons that's going to be fifty-five trips.'

'Fifty-five it'll have to be,' Buck said, but as he was about to heave Missy's onto her shoulders, men came into camp shouting: 'Avalanche! They're all dead!'

It was not a warning. It was fact. From the southern face of a mountain more than two thousand feet above the Chilkoot, a vast accumulation of snow and ice had come crashing down, burying a portion of the trail to a depth of twenty or thirty feet.

'How many trapped?' Buck shouted as he threw aside Missy's bundle and grabbed for one of the shovels.

'Mebbe a hundred,' and the messenger went shouting up and down the camp as volunteers grabbed whatever they could and rushed toward the avalanche, which was much bigger than the frightened crier had said and had engulfed even more people.

They did not all d
ie.
Cheechakos who had been on the trail only a few days, men and women alike, clawed at the snow and ice to make extraordinary rescues. Many had shovels, which were ably used, but one thoughtful man from Colorado, learned in the ways of avalanches, had brought a pole, which he used to probe through the snow till he struck something hard. Then others dug like moles where he indicated, often finding only rock but occasionally bringing to the surface someone still alive. This man and his pole saved more than a dozen.

In all, some sixty gold seekers perished that Sunday morning, but not even a disaster of such magnitude could diminish the passion with which the survivors hungered for gold or slow the incessant traffic up the mountain. Hordes from below had been set in motion, and it seemed that nothing 529

could halt them, not even crushing death. Half an hour after the cascades of snow had obliterated the path to the top, gold-savage men had tramped out a new path, looked sideways at the site of the tragedy, and plodded on.

Because the Venns had spent half a day helping with rescue work, it was late afternoon when they eased their way into the line of prospectors climbing the stairs, and once they claimed a place in that struggling chain, there was no way to rest or turn back; they were on a steep, upward pathway to hell. If a man simply had to urinate, he could step aside and do so with no one noticing, but when he struggled to reenter the chain, he might try vainly for more than an hour. On Chilkoot, no one helped anybody.

The three Venns, clinging tenaciously to their places, approached the last sixty vertical steps as dusk fell, and for one fearful moment Missy wavered and looked as if she might have to surrender her place in the line, but, gasping for breath and nearly fainting with exhaustion, she clawed her way to the summit, looked back at the swarming humans mechanically following her, and thought: My God! To do that fifty-four more times!

In that act of climbing to the top of a mountain, where goods lay stacked in hundreds of different piles, some of them fifteen feet high, the Venns and the other stampeders entered an entirely new world. Arbitrary and chaotic it was, but it was also a world where reason and law prevailed. For this lofty point represented the boundary between American Alaska and the Yukon Territory of Canada. It was a line drawn in the snow with no legal authority to justify it; actually, the American boundary should have been quite a few miles to the east, but this high pass became the permanent boundary between the two nations because some remarkably stout-hearted men said it was.

They were a contingent of the North West Mounted Police, sent out to an undefined border to establish an undefined law. Few men in North America ever served their nation or their people better than these, for when they took one look at the preposterous situation that the Americans had allowed to develop, they said simply, but with great force: 'The law is going to be what we say it is.' And this law, eminently reasonable and just, was forthwith adopted, enforced, and accepted.

Indeed, many Americans struggling up the Chilkoot Pass from the moral swamp of Skagway were gratified to find at the crest of the mountain a body of resolute men who said: 'This is the boundary. These are the laws. And you will obey both.' Like wayward children who have been running wild 530

without supervision but know inwardly that reasonable discipline is better, the cheechakos climbing over the pass embraced the law of the Mounties.

The rules as they evolved on the spot were practical: 'You cannot enter unless you bring in supplies for one year, particularly food. You must pay Canadian customs on every item you do bring in. You cannot sail down the first rough lakes and then the Yukon unless you build yourself a stable boat capable of carrying yourself and your gear. And each boat must be numbered so that we can track its successful passage to Dawson.' They justified this last demand by citing a sobering thought: 'When people went down the lakes in just anything and without proper numbering, scores drowned.'

In obedience to these rules, late on Sunday, 3 April 1898, the Venns placed their first load of goods under the protection of the Mounties, and for the first time since leaving Seattle they felt safe in doing so. But the next days in early April were shattering, for Buck's easy supposition that they could make three round trips a day was totally impractical. The ice stairs were so steep and the weights so punishing that two trips proved the maximum, and on some days the wait to get into line was so protracted that only one trip could be made, and one night Missy groaned as she crept into her sleeping bag: 'Oh God! We'll be at this all of April.”

But they strove diligently, up that icy stairway watching always for the next avalanche, taking not a single step in an upright position, always bent parallel to the earth from the waist up, legs failing, lungs collapsing, sodden eyes fixed to the ground but always vaguely aware of the man ahead, whose back was also parallel to the ground, for he too carried fifty pounds up those stairs of ice.

It was a human effort not matched in America by any of those star-led pioneers who had settled the continent. None had known a worse task than these thirty thousand who climbed the Chilkoot when the late storms of winter were still raging.

On one trip, when Missy and Tom reached the top, they found their earlier deposits under fifteen feet of sudden blizzard and could not even estimate where their vital treasures lay. In their desperation they were assisted by a handsome young sergeant of the Mounted Police, a clean-shaven, blue-eyed man from Manitoba in central Canada named Will Kirby, twenty-eight and determined to make a name for himself in the North West force. He loved the outdoors and had been both a trapper and a voyageur, one who canoed down remote rivers to explore trade possibilities.

When he saw Missy and Tom poking through the April 531

snows, searching for their buried cache, he came to their aid: 'I don't want to see you fretting over a little snow like this. Last January it was seventy feet high up here.'

'That's impossible,' Missy snapped, not eager to be patronized after her exhausting climb, but he produced a photograph of himself and two other Mounties standing then right where they were today, and no sign of habitation was visible: 'It can snow up here. Now, what kind of cache had you been building?'

Mollified by the photograph, although she suspected it was a fake, Missy indicated about where the Venn goods lay and described what they looked like, and as the three shoveled and kicked snow and probed, Sergeant Kirby told them: 'There was a man last January, during the fierce storm, he did a clever thing,' and when he described what this inventive man had done, both Missy and Tom recognized immediately that it could work again. So when they found their cache, with Kirby's help, they hastened down the mountain and told Buck what they had heard. And he cried: 'It'll work!'