Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush, 1896-1899 (24 page)

When the
Willamette
left Tacoma on August 7 there were seventy-five hundred people pressed together on the dock to wish her Godspeed, an ocean of struggling humanity who waited for hours for the ship to get under way. The voyage that followed was seared into the minds of passengers and crew for the remainder of their lives. The
Willamette
was an old coal-carrier converted into service by the Pacific Coast Steamship Company. Rough berths for the passengers had been thrown together by carpenters and, as in many similar vessels, were designed to be ripped apart at Skagway and sold as dressed lumber for three hundred dollars a thousand feet. As nobody had bothered to sweep the coal dust from the vessel, the passengers were soon grimy with it. The ship carried eight hundred men, women, and children, three hundred horses, and so much hay that the bales had to be stacked on deck, where the piles cut off the forward view from the bridge. Since the company had built eating facilities for only sixty-five, the meals went into nine or ten sittings, with one man sliding in behind another as soon as the first had finished. The food was sickening, the surroundings filthy, and the floor sprinkled with shavings to hide the refuse. Beef was hung on two sides of the dining-room, so that no one could get to one side of the table without rubbing against raw meat. The passengers were quartered under the rough plank decks upon which the horses were tethered, and the excretions of these animals leaked through the cracks in the boards onto the sleeping men. Most of the passengers tried to stay up above decks because of the unbearable stench below. Here for much of the voyage they stood drenched in the driving rain, since there were chairs and shelter for only a third. Second-class passengers were even worse off. The hold where they were quartered was, in the words of one witness, “a veritable beehive [where] the atmosphere resembled that of a dungeon in Afghanistan.”

Few of the ships plying the coastal waters bothered with safety precautions. The steamer
Bristol
steamed out of Victoria early in August with six hundred horses jammed in two-foot-wide stalls and rough bunks filling every available cranny. She was so badly and heavily loaded that a few miles out of port she almost turned turtle and was forced to creep back to harbour to readjust her topload. In her wake she towed a frail stern-wheeler, but this craft was so un-seaworthy that the captain cut her adrift off Vancouver Island – an action that touched off a series of lawsuits and recriminations.

There were many similar mishaps, some ludicrous, some tragic. The
Nancy G.
, billed as “a fine schooner in tow of a powerful ocean tug,” started off for Dyea twenty days behind schedule and sank on her return voyage. Neither captain nor pilot aboard the
Whitelaw
had been in Alaskan waters before. This ship foundered in the Lynn Canal, and although her passengers were saved, they lost everything they owned in the fire that followed the wreck. The
Clara Nevada
, ignoring the laws against booking passengers when the cargo contained dynamite, blew sky-high between Skagway and Juneau with the loss of all sixty-five souls, except for the inevitable dog that survived. The
City of Mexico
struck West Devil’s Rock off Sitka and was sunk, though her passengers and crew were saved. The
Corona
struck a reef at the Skeena’s mouth and sank, a total loss. The
Laurada
, attempting to tow two old river steamers to St. Michael, was driven ashore at Sitka in the teeth of a gale. The barque
Helen W. Almy
, an old South Seas trader, was wrecked on the Alaskan coast. The
Queen
broke her steering gear in Wrangell Narrows and threatened to keel over, causing such a panic that one woman tried to kill the captain with a pistol and had to be handcuffed. The
Pakshan’s
decks were piled so high the pilot could not see and smashed the steamer upon a rock. The sailing-schooner
Hera
lay becalmed two months off Vancouver Island, her crew and passengers almost starving to death when food supplies ran low. The barque
Canada
, loaded with lumber, horses, and freight, ran onto the rocks a few miles south of Dyea; all the horses had to be shot, but the passengers were rescued by a passing ship. That same week another barque,
Tidal Wave
, was wrecked, the steamer
Oregon
all but foundered on a sand-bar near Treadwell, while the passengers on the
Cleveland
, having been lost for four days (although within hailing distance of Skagway) and out of water for sixty hours, were reduced to making coffee from brine.

The
Blakely
, a square-rigged brigantine condemned by the U.S. government two years before, was chartered by four Klondike syndicates from Connecticut, New York, Texas, and Minnesota, although she had been rotting on the Tacoma beach for twenty-four months. The trip that followed was a nightmare, the leaky hull groaning and creaking, the pumps working continuously, the captain refusing to take charge until he had consumed the entire supply of whiskey. The ship survived a storm so fierce that one seaman was flung overboard by the wind, and one passenger died of starvation because he was too seasick to eat. The cargo, badly loaded, shifted to one side and threatened to capsize the vessel; the passengers had to fight to get it back into position to restore equilibrium. Conditions were so bad that many of the dogs died in their crates. After more than a month at sea, the old vessel, waterlogged and coated in a thick jacket of ice, was finally beached at Yakutat on the south coast of Alaska, where her rueful passengers found that all of their machinery, equipment, and food had been ruined by sea water. But their subsequent trials on the Malaspina glacier made the trip up the coast seem like a pleasant Sunday outing.

The strangest voyage of all, however, was the one made by the
Eliza Anderson
. Her bizarre odyssey was the epitome of all the crazy peregrinations of that demented winter. The ship herself was the oldest vessel on the coast, an ancient side-wheeler built forty years before and long since consigned to the boneyard. She had once figured prominently in the rush to the Coeur d’Alene, but for years she had been tied up at a bank in Seattle harbour, where she did duty as a road house and gambling-hall. The news of the Klondike was but a few days old when this decrepit craft was plucked from retirement and hastily made fit for a three-thousand-mile ocean voyage to the Bering Sea. So eager were her promoters to squeeze the last ounce of profit from the expedition that duplicate tickets were sold for passage aboard her. This device so enraged her passengers that they tried to hurl her purser into the sea and were only prevented from doing so by the skipper, a redoubtable sea-dog named Tom Powers, who was not in the least fazed by hostile customers, incompetent crew members, or mediaeval equipment.

The
Anderson
seemed to lack every item necessary for a sea voyage. She had no propeller, no up-to-date boilers, no water-condensers, no steam hoisting tackle, no electric power, no refrigeration, and, incredibly, no ship’s compass. Her coal-bunkers were makeshift and totally inadequate, a factor that almost proved her undoing.

She was the flagship of a weird flotilla of five vessels that set out from Seattle on August 10 to the cheers of five thousand well-wishers. The limping side-wheeler led off the pack, her decks jammed with the familiar paraphernalia of the stampede: tables and chairs, collapsible silk tents and collapsible canvas beds, sleeping-bags, tin and granite pots, pans, cups, dishes, and stoves, patent gold-rockers, assorted sleds of curious shape and odd construction, and mounds of clothing and provisions. Close behind, puffing furiously, came the tiny ocean-going tug
Richard Holyoke
. She had three queer craft in tow. The first was a coal barge of romantic origin: a former Russian man-o’-war, the
Politofsky
, built in Sitka a year before the Alaskan Purchase, once the flagship and pride of the Russian Pacific fleet but long since shorn of her superstructure and now a hulk – weather-beaten, derelict, and black with coal dust. The second looked at first glance like a replica of Noah’s Ark. This was the
W. K. Merwyn
, a seventeen-year-old stern-wheeler which had been used as a hay-and-grain carrier but was now intended for Yukon River traffic. It was planned to abandon the
Anderson
at St. Michael and transfer the passengers to the
Merwyn
for the river trip to the Klondike. Her smokestack and paddle-wheel had been removed for safety and stowed on her main deck, and the entire steamboat was now encased in a wooden jacket from stem to stern. Inside this grotesque craft, boxed like rats in a cage, were sixteen passengers, the overflow from the
Anderson
. All that kept the
Merwyn
on a steady keel was a cargo of tinned goods and supplies, which, lashed to the main deck, acted as a sort of counterweight. The final craft in the flotilla, also towed behind the tug, and looking oddly out of place among its ungainly neighbours, was a sleek pleasure yacht, the
Bryant
. This was owned by an adventurous Seattle clubman named John Hansen, whose brother was the town’s leading jeweller. Hansen had tried to book passage aboard the
Anderson
, but even the duplicate tickets had been sold. He persuaded three business friends to come along with him and hooked his yacht behind the
Holyoke
.

The
Anderson’s
first mishap occurred at the coal port of Comox on Vancouver Island where she stopped to take on fuel. The seamen were so inexperienced that they loaded the coal unequally into the bunkers. As a result the ship listed dangerously to starboard and her rudder went out of action, whereupon she drifted broadside into the three-masted clipper
Glory of the Seas
, shattering a large section of her side-wheel paddle-box.

This and other mishaps kept the alarmed passengers in a continual uproar, and there were repeated demands for the vessel to turn back. Captain Powers refused all of them with disdain, roaring that he would sail the
Anderson
to St. Michael “come hell or high water,” two eventualities that both seemed imminent. By the time the
Anderson
and her sister vessels had reached Kodiak, the port on Kodiak Island off the south coast of Alaska, five passengers were ready to give up. They fled the ship, and no amount of exhortation could lure them back on board.

The
Anderson
struck out for Dutch Harbor, the bleak port on the island of Unalaska at the very tip of the Alaskan peninsula where the Aleutian Islands have their beginning. Soon she was wallowing in a raging storm, her engines straining to keep her on course. At this crucial moment the ship ran out of coal. The lazier members of the crew had hidden half the coal sacks at Kodiak so that nobody would notice that they had not loaded the full amount. The escorting tug and coal barge had vanished into the driving rain, and the
Anderson
was foundering. The passengers were routed out to tear the wooden bunkers apart and use the heavy planks for fuel. When these had been consumed, the large wooden water tanks were ripped asunder and flung into the furnace. The ship’s furniture followed, and finally the stateroom partitions, until the
Anderson
was little more than a hollow shell tossing fitfully in the North Pacific.

The passengers by this time were all writing farewell notes and stuffing them into bottles in the accepted tradition of the romantic novels, and there were plenty of bottles for the purpose, since most of the whiskey on board had been consumed in an attempt to bolster waning spirits. By the time the storm reached its height, the life rafts and boats had been swept overboard, the vessel was out of control, and the captain gave the order to abandon ship. Then fate intervened in an extraordinary fashion.

The rescue was in keeping with the general eccentricity of the expedition. A six-foot stranger with a wild mop of greyish-white hair, a hawk nose, and a flowing white beard, dressed in oilskins and rubber boots, appeared suddenly out of the storm, strode into the pilothouse, seized the wheel, got the vessel under control, and steered her into a quiet cove on Kodiak Island, where she was anchored, protected from the raging winds. This done, the mystery man vanished as suddenly as he had appeared. To the terrified and overwrought passengers he must have seemed to be a god or demon from another world, but actually he was a stowaway, a Norwegian recluse who lived on the island with his brother and was trying to get free passage to Unalaska (a fact which did not emerge until a subsequent investigation by the U.S. Navy).

Safe in harbour, but far from her destination and completely out of fuel, the
Anderson
now experienced a second fantastic piece of luck. The passengers happened upon an abandoned cannery loaded with coal. Refuelled, the ancient side-wheeler staggered along the coast of the peninsula towards the tundra of Unalaska. As she stumbled into Dutch Harbor she swivelled sideways, smashing into the docks with what was by now a familiar splintering of woodwork. The ship and passengers were still shuddering from this blow when a pipe in the boiler room burst, sending great clouds of scalding steam in all directions.

None of this in the least deterred the captain, who roared he would sail on for St. Michael, but the numbed passengers had had quite enough. Twenty-eight of them immediately booked passage for home. The remainder, still intent on getting to the gold-fields, chartered the whaling-schooner
Baranof
to take them the seven hundred and fifty miles across the Bering Sea to their destination. The whaler deposited them on the bare mud shores of the old Russian port, where, to the surprise of all, the rest of the flotilla was awaiting them. Here each man breathed an understandable sigh of relief. Most of them no doubt expected that the worst part of the long journey was over and that the remainder of the trip up the Yukon River to Dawson would be swift and gentle. Few realized that the Klondike was seventeen hundred miles and, for them, ten months away. For these people, as for the tens of thousands struggling at the foot of the Chilkoot and White passes, and across the hummocky glaciers of southern Alaska, and up the soggy, tangled interior of southern British Columbia, and down the long, weary stretches of the Mackenzie, the adventure and the hardships, the triumphs and the heartbreaks of the great stampede had only just begun.