Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush, 1896-1899 (10 page)

As he brought his boat around a broad curve in the river and past a rocky bluff, he could hear to his right the roar of the Thron-diuck or Klondike as it poured out from between the flat-topped hills to join the Yukon. Directly before him now, just beyond the Klondike’s mouth, rose a tapering mountain, its pointed peak naked of timber. Slashed across its flank was an immense and evil scar in the shape of a stretched moose hide, the product of slow erosion by subterranean springs spurting up from within the bowels of the hills. At its base a wedge of flat swampland covered with scrub timber bordered the riverbank for a mile and a half-unprepossessing, fetid, and mosquito-infested. It seemed an almost impossible place for settlement, yet this was to be the site of the gaudiest city in the North.

The Thron-diuck was known as the finest salmon stream in the Yukon – hence its name: an Indian word meaning “Hammer-Water” which, pronounced in the native fashion, sounded like a man in the throes of strangulation. It was so called because the Indians had hammered stakes across the shallow mouth in order to spread their nets. Henderson could smell the stench of the fish drying in the sun, and on the bank just below the river’s mouth he could see a white man moving about.

The idea of anyone fishing for a living when there was gold to be had appalled him. He later recalled his first thought: “There’s a poor devil who hasn’t struck it.”

As was his habit, he decided to share his good fortune with the fisherman, and a moment later he was up on the bank talking to George Washington Carmack, or “McCormick,” as the men at Fortymile called him.

The two men, who would later be dubbed “co-discoverers of the Klondike” and around whom so much controversy was to swirl, were opposites in almost every way. Henderson, lean and spare, with his keen, chiselled features, serious and intense, bore little resemblance to the easy-going, ever optimistic squaw man with his heavy jowls, his sleepy eyes, and his rather plump features. But they had one trait in common: an incurable restlessness had dominated their lives.

Carmack was the child of an earlier gold rush. His father had crossed the western plains in a covered wagon in ’49, heading for California, and Carmack had been born at Port Costa, across the bay from San Francisco. He had gone to work at sixteen aboard the ferryboats, shipped to Alaska as a dishwasher on a man-of-war, jumped ship at Juneau, and pushed steadily north. In 1887 William Ogilvie, the Canadian surveyor, encountered him at Dyea. By that time Carmack could speak both the Chilkoot and the Tagish dialects, and was exerting considerable influence over the Stick Indians from the interior or “Stick” country. At a time and place when every man was a prospector, Carmack appeared to be a misfit. He alone of all men did not want gold. Instead he wanted to be an Indian in a land where the natives were generally scorned by the white man and the word “Siwash” was a term of opprobrium. His wife Kate, a member of the Tagish tribe, was the daughter of a chief, and it was Carmack’s ambition to be chief himself. (Among the Tagishes, descent is through the chief’s sister.) He worked with the other Indians as a packer on the Chilkoot Pass, and by the time he moved into the interior with his wife and her two brothers he had three or four half-breed children. He had grown an Indian-type moustache that drooped over his lips in Oriental style, and when anybody said to him: “George, you’re getting more like a Siwash every day,” he took it as a compliment. He did not in the least mind his nicknames “Stick George” and “Siwash George,” for he considered himself a true Siwash and he was proud of it.

While other men scrabbled and mucked in the smoky shafts of Fortymile and Birch Creek, Siwash George was slipping up and down the river with his Indian comrades. His temperament, which was indolent and easy-going, matched that of the natives, who were a different breed from the fiercely competitive and ambitious Tlingit tribes of the coast. When it suited Carmack, he bragged of gold discoveries he had made. It was certainly true that he had discovered a seam of coal on the Yukon River, but nobody took him seriously as a prospector, including Carmack himself. In the words of a Mounted Police sergeant at Fortymile, he was a man “who would never allow himself to be beaten and always tried to present his fortunes in the best possible light.” The men at Fortymile summed him up more tersely with a new nickname. They called him “Lying George.”

Yet he was no wastrel. He had an organ, of all things, in his cabin near Five Finger Rapids on the Yukon, and a library which included such journals as
Scientific American
and
Review of Reviews
. He liked to discourse on scientific topics, and occasionally, as on Christmas Eve in 1888, he wrote sad, sentimental poetry. (“A whisper comes from the tall old spruce, And my soul from pain is free: For I know when they kneel together to-night, They’ll all be praying for me.”)

He was also something of a mystic. In May of 1896 he was sitting on the bank of the Yukon near the ruins of old Fort Selkirk, and here, if one is to believe his later recollections, he had a premonition. He stared into the blazing sunset and came to the conclusion that something unusual was about to take place in his life. On a whim he took his only coin, a silver dollar, from his pocket and threw it in the air. If it came down heads, he told himself, he would go back up the river; but if it showed tails, he would go downstream to test whatever fate had in store for him. Tails it was, and Carmack loaded his boat and started to drift the two-hundred-odd miles to Fortymile.

That night he had an extravagant and vivid dream in which he saw himself seated on the banks of a stream watching grayling shoot the rapids. Suddenly the fish scattered in fright and two enormous king salmon shot upstream and came to a dead stop in front of him. In place of scales they were armoured in gold nuggets and their eyes were twenty-dollar goldpieces. It reveals a great deal about Carmack that he took this as a sign that he should go fishing; prospecting never entered his head. He determined to catch salmon on the Thron-diuck and sell it for dog-feed; and so here he was, with his catch hanging to dry under a small birch lean-to, when Henderson encountered him.

His Tagish friends had joined him at the Klondike’s mouth: Skookum Jim, a giant of a man, supremely handsome with his high cheek-bones, his eagle’s nose, and his fiery black eyes – straight as a gun-barrel, powerfully built, and known as the best hunter and trapper on the river; Tagish Charley, lean and lithe as a panther and, in Carmack’s phrase, “alert as a weasel;” the silent, plump Kate with her straight black hair; and Carmack’s daughter, known as Graphie Gracey because no white man could pronounce her real name.
^*
It was this group that Henderson approached with news of the strike at Gold Bottom. Carmack later set down his version of the conversation, which does not differ substantially from Henderson’s briefer account:

“Hello, Bob! Where in the world did you drop from and where do you think you’re going?”

“Just came down from Ogilvie; I’m going up the Klondike.”

“What’s the idea, Bob?”

“There’s been a prospect found in a small creek that heads up against the Dome. I think it empties into the Klondike about fifteen miles up and I’m looking for a better way to get there than going over the mountains from the Indian River.”

“Got any kind of a prospect?”

“We don’t know yet. We can get a prospect on the surface. When I left, the boys were running up an open cut to get to bedrock.”

“What are the chances to locate up there? Everything staked?”

Henderson glanced over at the two Indians who were standing near by. Then he uttered the phrase that probably cost him a fortune.

“There’s a chance for you, George, but I don’t want any damn Siwashes staking on that creek.”

He pushed his boat into the water and headed up the Klondike. But his final remark rankled.

“What’s matter dat white man?” Skookum Jim asked, speaking in Chinook, the pidgin tongue of the traders that prevailed on the river. “Him killet Inchen moose, Inchen caribou, ketchet gold Inchen country, no liket Inchen staket claim, wha for, no good.”

“Never mind, Jim,” said Carmack lightly. “This is a big country. We’ll go and find a creek of our own.”

And, as it turned out, it was to be as simple as that.

2

The
exculpation of
Lying George

Carmack did not immediately follow Henderson’s suggestion to go upriver and stake at Gold Bottom. He was less interested in gold than he was in logs, which he hoped to chop on Rabbit Creek, a tributary of the Klondike, and float down to the mill at Fortymile for twenty-five dollars a thousand feet. Skookum Jim had already reconnoitred the creek and in passing had panned out some colours, for, just as Carmack wished to be an Indian, Jim longed to be a white man – in other words, a prospector. He differed from the others in his tribe in that he displayed the white man’s kind of ambition. He had, in fact, earned his nickname of Skookum (meaning “husky”) by his feat of packing the record load of one hundred and fifty-six pounds of bacon across the Chilkoot Pass. In vain he tried to interest Carmack in the prospects along Rabbit Creek; the squaw man was not intrigued.

It was as much Carmack’s restless nature as his desire for fortune that took him and the Indians to the site of Henderson’s strike some days after the meeting at the Klondike’s mouth. They did not follow the river but decided to strike up the valley of Rabbit Creek, which led to the high ridge separating the Klondike and Indian watersheds. The ridge led to the head of Gold Bottom.

They poled up the Klondike for two miles, left their boat in a backwater, shouldered their packs, and began to trudge through the wet mosses and black muck and the great clumps of grass “nigger-heads” that marked the mouth of the Rabbit. As they went they prospected, dipping their pans into the clear water which rippled in the sunlight over sands white with quartz. As Carmack sat on his haunches, twirling the gold-pan, he began to recite Hamlet’s soliloquy, “To be or not to be,” for he felt that all prospecting was a gamble.

“Wa for you talket dat cultus wa wa?” Tagish Charley asked him. “I no see um gold.”

“That’s all right, Charley,” Carmack told him. “I makum Boston man’s medicine.”

He raised the pan with its residue of black sand.

“Spit in it, boys, for good luck.”

They spat, and then Carmack panned out the sand and raised the pan to show a tiny streak of colour.

On they trudged, stopping occasionally to pan again, finding minute pieces of gold, wondering whether or not to stake. They came to a fork in the frothing creek where another branch bubbled in from the south, and here they paused momentarily. At that instant they were standing, all unknowing, on the richest ground in the world. There was gold all about them, not only beneath their feet but in the very hills and benches that rose on every side. In the space of a few hundred feet there was hidden gold worth several millions of dollars. The south fork of the creek was as yet unnamed, but there could be only one name for it: Eldorado.

But they did not linger here. Instead they hiked on up the narrowing valley, flushing a brown bear from the blueberry bushes, stumbling upon Joe Ladue’s eleven-year-old campfires, panning periodically and finding a few colours in every pan, until they reached the dome that looked down over the land of the Klondike. Like Henderson, they were struck by the splendour of the scene that lay spread out before them like an intricate Persian carpet: the little streams tumbling down the flanks of the great mountain, the hills crimson, purple, and emerald-green in the warm August sunlight (for already the early frosts were tinting trees and shrubs), the cranberry and salmonberry bushes forming a foreground fringe to the natural tapestry.

Below, in the narrow gorge of Gold Bottom Creek, a pale pillar of smoke marked Henderson’s camp.

“Well, boys,” said Carmack, “we’ve got this far; let’s go down and see what they’ve got.”

Skookum Jim demurred; Henderson’s remarks about Siwashes still rankled. But in the end the trio clambered down the gorge to the camp where Henderson and his three companions were washing out gold from an open cut.

Exactly what happened between Carmack and Henderson has long been in dispute. Carmack later insisted that he urged Henderson to come over to Rabbit Creek and stake a claim. Henderson always swore that it was he who urged Carmack to prospect Rabbit – and if he found anything to let Henderson know.

Two facts are fairly clear. First, Carmack did promise Henderson that if he found anything worth while on Rabbit he would send word back; Henderson offered to compensate him for his trouble if the occasion arose. Second, the Indians tried to purchase some tobacco from Henderson and Henderson refused, possibly because he was short of supplies but more likely because of his attitude towards Indians, since it was against his code to refuse a fellow prospector anything. This action was to cost him dearly.

Carmack tried the prospects at Gold Bottom, but did not stake, and the trio headed back over the mountain almost immediately. The way was hard. They struggled over fallen trees and devil’s clubs, a peculiarly offensive thorn, and they forced their way through interlaced underbrush, brier roses, and raspberry bushes. On the far side of the mountain they floundered into a niggerhead swamp that marked the headwaters of Rabbit Creek, and here they had to hop from clump to clump on their slippery moccasins or sink to their thighs in the glacial ooze. Hordes of gnats and mosquitoes rose about them as they stumbled on, unable to swat the insects for fear of losing balance.

Thus they came wearily to the fork of Rabbit Creek once more, and pressed on for about half a mile before making camp for the night. It was August 16, the eve of a memorable day that is still celebrated as a festive holiday in the Yukon Territory.

Who found the nugget that started it all? Again, the record is blurred. Years afterward Carmack insisted it was he who happened upon the protruding rim of bed-rock from which he pulled a thumb-sized chunk of gold. But Skookum Jim and Tagish Charley always claimed that Carmack was stretched out asleep under a birch tree when Jim, having shot a moose, was cleaning a dish-pan in the creek and made the find.