Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush, 1896-1899 (2 page)
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Authors: Pierre Berton
2. The swarming sands of Skagway
4. Only a coal miner’s daughter
4. “Bury me here, where I failed”
6. The road to Destruction City
5. Shoot-out at the Juneau dock
2. The San Francisco of the North
3. The false fronts of Front Street
7. Tales of conspicuous wealth
2. The legacy of the gold rush
Maps
The Yukon River before the Gold Rush
The Ashcroft and Stikine Trails
Overland Route: Edmonton to Peace River
Overland Route: Peace River to Yukon
Drawn by Henry Mindak
To my father
,
who crossed his Chilkoot in 1898
,
and to my sons
,
who have yet to cross theirs
Preface to the Revised Edition
When the first through passenger train of the Canadian Pacific Railway set off for the new terminus of Vancouver in June of 1886, Canada ceased to be merely a geographical expression. Bound together at last by John A. Macdonald’s “iron link,” the country could expect the speedy fulfilment of his national dream – the creation of a populous and prosperous North West from the empty prairie lands that had been given up a generation before by the Hudson’s Bay Company.
But in the decade that followed, that vision was scarcely fulfilled. In the heady construction days of the early eighties, a western boom of unprecedented proportions seemed to be in the making; unhappily, over-optimism, wild speculation, drought, crop failure, and depression brought a swift decline in immigration figures. The bubble burst; and though the settlers continued to trickle in, the wave of newcomers that had been expected to follow the driving of the steel did not appear.
Suddenly, in 1897, the news from the Klondike burst upon the continent and everything was changed. The transition was instantaneous – there is no other word for it. The
CPR
trains were jammed with passengers heading west to invade the North through Prince Albert, Edmonton, Ashcroft, or Vancouver. Within a year, the interior of British Columbia, the Peace River country, and the entire Mackenzie and Yukon watersheds were speckled with thousands of men and pack animals. For the first time, really, the Canadian north was seen to be something more than frozen wasteland: a chain of mineral discoveries, reaching into modern times, was touched off by the Klondike fever. Every western Canadian community from Winnipeg to Victoria was affected permanently by the boom. Vancouver doubled in size almost overnight; Edmonton’s population trebled. The depression, whose catalyst had been the silver panic of 1893, came to an end. It was replaced by an ebullient era of optimism and prosperity. New transcontinental railways were mooted and eventually constructed. A
CPR
contractor’s son, Clifford Sifton, who had just been named Minister of Immigration in the Laurier cabinet, launched his historic propaganda campaign to fill up the empty spaces on the plains. In the North West, a new boom was in the making.
The Klondike story, then, forms a gaudy interlude between the two epic tales of post-Confederation western development — the building of the railway and the mass settlement of the plains. Since the author expects to tell the latter story in a subsequent volume, this expanded and revised edition of a fifteen-year-old work has been redesigned to conform to his two histories of the railway construction period,
The National Dream
and
The Last Spike
.
Because the stampede to the Klondike straddled the international border, it provides a unique opportunity to compare the mores and customs of two neighbouring nationalities. Here was the most concentrated mass movement of American citizens onto Canadian soil in all our history. In the space of fewer than eighteen months, some fifty thousand men and women – brought up with the social, legal, and political traditions of the United States – found themselves living temporarily under a foreign flag, obeying, however reluctantly, foreign regulations, and encountering a foreign bureaucracy and officialdom. In Dawson, and indeed almost everywhere save on the all-Canadian trails, the Americans outnumbered the Canadians by at least five to one.
It has often been said (usually by Americans) that there is no great difference between those who live south of the forty-ninth parallel and those of us who live on the Canadian side; but the Klondike experience supplies a good deal of evidence to support the theory that our history and our geography have helped to make us a distinct people – not better and not worse – but different in style, background, attitude, and temperament from our neighbours.
Our national character has not been tempered in the crucible of violence, and our attitudes during the stampede underline this historic truth. In all the Americas ours is the only country that did not separate violently from its European parents. We remained loyal and obedient, safe and relatively dispassionate, and we welcomed to our shores those other loyalists who opted for the status quo. If this lack of revolutionary passion has given us a reasonably tranquil history, it has also, no doubt, contributed to our well-known lack of daring. It is almost a Canadian axiom that we would rather be safe than sorry; alas, we are sometimes sorry that we are so safe.
Happily, we have had very little bloodshed in our history. Our rare insurrections have been fought on tiny stages blown up out of all proportion by the horrifying fact that they have occurred at all. Lynchings are foreign to us and so is gangsterism. The concept of barroom shoot-outs and duels in the sun have no part in our tradition either, possibly because we have had so few barrooms and so little sun. (It is awkward to reach efficiently for a six-gun while wearing a parka and two pairs of mittens.) When sudden, unreasoning violence does occur, as it did when Pierre Laporte was murdered in October, 1970, we tend to over-react. That was, after all, our first political assassination in more than a century and only the second in our history.
If Canadians are a moderate people, as the whiskey advertisements used to say, it is also because of the presence at our back door of a vast and brooding wilderness. The Klondike was and is a part of a wilderness experience that we all share. For the Americans who rushed north in 1897 and 1898, it was a last frontier; for them there were no more wilderness worlds to conquer or even to know. But the frontier is with us still and it shapes us in its own fashion. The experience of naked rock and brooding forest, of slate-coloured lakes and empty valleys, of skeletal birches and gaunt pines, of the wolf’s haunting howl and the loon’s ghostly call is one that is still shared by a majority of Canadians but only a minority of Americans. There are few of us who do not live within a few hours’ drive of nature. It has bestowed upon us what one American observer, William Henry Chamberlain, has called “a sensation of tranquillity.” The North, still almost as empty as it was in the days before the great stampede, hangs over the country like an immense backdrop, providing, in the words of André Siegfried, “a window out onto the infinite.” A great Canadian editor, Arthur Irwin, once summed it up in a single sentence to a group of Americans. “Nearly every Canadian,” he said, “at some time in his life has felt a shiver of awe and loneliness which comes to a man when he stands alone in the face of untamed nature; and that is why we are a sober and essentially religious people.”
We have been lucky with our history. The American frontier was wrested violently from the Indians and that violence continued until the frontier was tamed. Our own experience came later. The Hudson’s Bay Company, which held the hinterland in thrall for generations, and the Canadian Shield, which retarded the settlement of the plains in the days before the railroad, have been seen as drawbacks to progress. And yet this tardy exploitation of the North West is one of the reasons why we have no Wild West tradition. There was a time when we might have welcomed a more violent kind of frontier mythology, but that time is past.
Every television addict knows that the two mythologies differ markedly. The Americans elected their lawmen – county sheriffs and town marshals – whose gun-slinging exploits helped forge their western legends. Summary justice by groups of vigilantes or hastily deputized posses was part of that legend. If the American frontier was not as violent as the media suggest, it was certainly violent compared with the Canadian frontier. There were no boot hills or hanging trees in our North West, and the idea that a community could take the law into its own hands or that a policeman might be elected by popular suffrage did not enter the heads of a people whose roots were stubbornly colonial and loyalist and whose heritage did not include anything as inflammatory as a Boston Tea Party. A variety of incidents on the Klondike trails bears this out, but the Klondike stampede was not the first occasion when the two traditions clashed on the soil of British North America.
In 1858, a newspaper report reaching California of the discovery of gold on the Fraser River caused an almost immediate stampede of some thirty thousand Americans to what was then the sparsely populated Hudson’s Bay Company domain of New Caledonia. Almost instantly, all the institutions of the American mining camp were established on British soil: the gambling-houses, the sure-thing games, the dance halls and saloons, the crooked trading posts, and, above all, the quasi-legal institution of the “miners’ meeting,” which, though it embodied all the grassroots democracy of a Swiss canton, had helped to give the California camps their reputation for lawlessness. All the ingredients, then, were present for frontier violence. Indian revolution was not beyond the realm of possibility. And there was the clear danger that the territory itself might come under American sovereignty, as Oregon had when Yankee settlers poured in.