Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush, 1896-1899 (25 page)

Chapter Five

1
Captain Billy’s last stand

2
The swarming sands of Skagway

3
The dead horse trail

4
Hell on earth

5
The human serpent

1

Captain Billy’s last stand

For threescore years and ten the life of Captain William Moore had been crammed with enough adventure and melodrama to fill a dozen paperbacks. Now, at the age of seventy-four, the white-bearded mail-carrier was enthusiastically contemplating the most exhausting enterprise of his career. He was determined to build a boom town at the head of Skagway Bay.

Long before Carmack’s strike, Moore was convinced that there would be a gold rush to the Yukon and that the main body of stampeders would pour through the narrow funnel which he had discovered in the Coast Mountains and named the White Pass. He had staked out a townsite on the edge of the glistening tidal flats, in the shadow of the chalk-white peaks, and now, in the dying days of July 1897, he was waiting.

This was the same old man who, the previous winter, had trotted through seven hundred miles of hitherto impassable wilderness to carry Ogilvie’s first report of the Klondike to civilization. Moore’s whole career had conditioned him for this kind of trek. He had been born in Germany in 1822 and by the age of seven was sailing aboard schooners in the North Sea. He was hardly out of his teens before he had reached New Orleans and was operating a towboat service on the lower Mississippi. He fought in the Mexican War and then for the next half-century followed gold – to California, Peru, the Queen Charlotte Islands of British Columbia, back to California again, and then on to the Fraser, the Cariboo, and the Cassiars. He was the kind of man who would try anything. He had on one occasion transported camels, of all creatures, up the Fraser River in his steamboat
The Flying Dutchman
, the most colourful of the British Columbia stern-wheelers.

When he headed for Alaska in 1887, the captain had reached his lowest ebb. His five steamboats had earned him a fortune in the Cassiar stampede, but now, with the rush at an end, he was bankrupt, his fleet and his mansion in Victoria auctioned off to satisfy his creditors. His sons had already left for Alaska, and one had sent back word about a mysterious pass in the mountains, not far from the precipitous Chilkoot, which was said to be low enough to allow pack animals through. The old man’s imagination was excited by this tale, and, following the instincts of a lifetime, he once again set his face north.

Under the direction of William Ogilvie, Moore sought out and surveyed the pass with the help of Carmack’s Indian friend Skookum Jim, and named it after Sir Thomas White, the Canadian Minister of the Interior. It was forty-five miles long – ten miles longer than the Dyea trail across the Chilkoot but more than six hundred feet lower – a zigzagging, roller-coasting, switchbacking route through hill and canyon, mountain and valley, suitable in good conditions for travel by pack horse, ox, mule, dog, or goat. Moore saw its possibilities at once. As Ogilvie later recalled, “Every night during the two months he remained with us, he would picture the tons of yellow dust yet to be found in the Yukon Valley. He decided then and there that Skagway would be the entry point to the golden fields … and the White Pass would reverberate with the rumble of railway trains carrying supplies.” He had no doubt about the future of the area. His son Bernard told a pioneer banquet in Skagway in 1904 that from the very outset “my father would tell me and numerous other people in Juneau and elsewhere how he pictured to himself the future of this place. He never tired of predicting how roads would be built through here; of a little city built here; of steamers on the upper Yukon; and of large steamers, loaded with freight and passengers docking at the waterfront.” All of this came to pass.

In 1888 Moore built a cabin at the foot of the pass, where the Skagway River rushes eagerly from the mountains to spend itself on the wooded flat at the head of Skagway Bay. The name is derived from an Indian word, “Skagus” – the home of the North Wind – and here at his front door was a setting of unequalled majesty. The bay forms the northern tip of the great Lynn Canal, a limpid fiord which runs for ninety miles, straight as a stiletto, to pierce the throat of the Alaskan peninsula at the point where it joins the body of the continent. In its glassy waters the sharp-peaked mountains with their tumbling cataracts and swirling glaciers are mirrored with perfect fidelity.

In these idyllic surroundings Moore was virtually a monarch, for the only other cabin in the district was the trading post established by John J. Healy on the neighbouring Dyea Inlet, three miles to the west. But on July 26, 1897, when the first gold-rush steamer anchored in the bay and dumped its load of kicking horses, yelping dogs, and scrambling men into the shallow waters, Moore’s idyll ended.

They poured ashore like an invading horde, these first arrivals, and they paid as little attention to the protesting old steamboat captain as if he had been one of the trees that were now slashed down to make room for their tents and shacks. They heaped their goods on the beach, tethered their animals in the forest, then burned, hacked, and gouged away at Moore’s sylvan sanctum until the rough semblance of a town began to emerge. Ship after ship spewed its human cargo onto the beach, until by early August there were enough newcomers to set up a local government and choose a committee to lay out the town properly with sixty-foot streets and neatly parcelled lots fifty by a hundred feet. Frank Reid, a gimlet-eyed ex-school-teacher and Indian-fighter, was appointed town surveyor, and a commissioner was assigned to take a five-dollar registry fee from everybody who wished to locate on the land. Rule by committee, as Skagway was to learn, did not always mean rule by justice. In vain Moore protested that the land was his; nobody listened. It was the practice of the hastily assembled “miners’ courts” to march upon those buildings that failed to conform to the new street pattern and demolish them out of hand; and though this summary action was often resisted by men with guns and axes, the community invariably got its way.

The crowning ignominy came when it was discovered that Moore’s own home lay in the middle of one of the newly surveyed thoroughfares. He was ordered to move. When he angrily refused, another committee was elected to move him anyway, and Moore looked out one day to find it on his threshold with peevees and handspikes. The old man grabbed a crowbar and, while his wife stood sobbing in the doorway, slugged the man nearest to him, ripping off his trousers with the first swing. The crowd dispersed, but Moore knew that the game was up. He moved, but still refused to give in. He applied to the courts for redress and hung on stubbornly while the litigation dragged on for four years. In the meantime he shrewdly realized a fortune from a mile-long wharf which he had built out over the tidal flats so that the boats could dock properly. In the end he won his court action and was awarded twenty-five per cent of the assessed value of all the lots within the original townsite.

Thus did the indestructible Moore end his days in Skagway, a wealthy man long after the great rush abated; few of those who trampled across his front yard during those first wild days met the same reward.

2

The
swarming
sands
of
Skagway

The town of Skagway was conceived in lawlessness and nurtured in anarchy. The pattern was set early in August when a Frenchman was caught stealing from a cache on the White Pass trail. Again a committee was elected to deal with the offence, and deal with it they did, lashing their prisoner to a pole before his tent and, as he screamed for mercy, pumping him full of bullets. For three days his bloody cadaver hung suspended as an object lesson in summary justice.

As the fresh fall snow powdered the mountains and the winds began to howl down through the pass and across the shining tidal flats, the ships continued to pour in until the long bay was speckled with hundreds of craft, ranging from great, grimy freighters to slim Peterborough canoes. Snub-nosed scows, creaking with excessive loads, shuttled from boat to beach and back again, or from Skagway to Dyea, three miles away, picking their way between the thrashing forms of goats, dogs, mules, and oxen left to fend for themselves in the cold waters. Each incoming cargo ship was forced to anchor a mile offshore and to dump men, outfits, and animals into the shallow sea. Horses were swung from the decks in special boxes whose bottoms opened up, plunging the terrified and kicking creatures into the water. Trunks and packing-cases were dropped unceremoniously into waiting scows (where they were often smashed to kindling) and then cast helter-skelter onto the gravelly beach (where they were often lost or stolen). There were no stevedores; these had all deserted to the gold-fields. Captains struggled to preserve their crews, on the one hand, and to placate their passengers, on the other. The master of the
Bristol
narrowly escaped with his life when he refused to pay the exorbitant lighterage fees to move cargoes to the beach and was brought to heel only when a committee of eighty passengers – the inevitable committee – threatened to chain him hand and foot and heave him overboard.

All the world had suddenly heard of Skagway. A San Francisco newspaper tried to get John Muir to write a series of articles from the new town, but the great naturalist, who had known the land when it was silent and empty, was repelled by the suggestion. He likened the spectacle on Skagway Bay to that of “a nest of ants taken into a strange country and stirred up by a stick.”

The beach had truly become a human ant-hill, a confused
mêlée
of swearing men and neighing horses, of rasping saws and sputtering campfires, of creaking wagons and yelping dogs – a jungle of tents and sheet-iron stoves and upturned boats scattered between the mountainous piles of goods and hay.

Atop these sprawling heaps, knee deep in flour sacks and frying-pans, perspiring men bawled out the names on every outfit and tossed them down to the waiting owners. The most far-sighted of the stampeders had organized themselves into landing committees to rope off areas and to guard their stacks of provisions at gun point, but none was able to cope with the problems posed by international geography. Skagway, being on the narrow neck of the Panhandle, formed an American bridge into Canadian territory which lay on the far slopes of the Coast Mountains. Those outfits that had been purchased in Victoria or Vancouver could not be opened in Skagway, but had to be escorted across the pass in bond, and the escorts fed and paid ten dollars daily by the luckless owners. On the other hand, those outfits purchased in the United States were charged duty by the Canadian customs men on the border. Every man, then, had to pay some sort of tribute to one government or the other.

Night and day, the beach was never still, for rubber-booted men in constantly shifting streams were forever dragging their outfits across the tidal ooze in an effort to get above the high-water line. The extreme rise and fall showed a difference of thirty feet, and the on-rushing waters advanced at such a speed that many returning to their stacks of provisions found that they had been totally submerged in the salt water.

Above the beach, in the forested flatland, the town of Skagway was still taking shape, a shifting and ever changing
mélange
of shacks and tents, crammed with men frantic to get over the trail and into the Klondike before freeze-up. The main street was nothing more than a single rut of black mud down which a river of men and animals ceaselessly flowed, but it bore the proud name of Broadway, and four makeshift saloons, the Pack Train, Bonanza, Grotto, and Nugget, lent it a tinsel air. Along its ragged route were campsites renting at ten dollars a week; a blacksmith’s shop where it cost five dollars to have a single horseshoe hammered on; a doctor’s tent serving as a drugstore; and a restaurant which advertised its wares on an old pair of trousers slung from a line with the single word
MEALS
daubed upon the seat.

“Restaurants” by the score sprang weedlike from the gumbo of the streets, flourished briefly in tattered tents or board shacks, and vanished. Many of these were operated by men with “icicle feet,” whose only desire was to flee the enclave of Skagway and whose slender bill of fare consisted entirely of the half-ton of grub they had brought north at such expense and hardship. As soon as they raised the return fare to Seattle they sold out or closed up and were gone. A notable exception was the Pack Train Restaurant, opened in the fall of 1897 by Anton Stanish and Leo Ceovich. It began in a tent, moved to more permanent quarters (which it shared with the Pack Train Saloon, under separate ownership), and in twelve years never once closed its doors, developing an international reputation for prompt service, good food, and an ingenious cuisine. This, in the words of one steady customer, ran the gamut from salmon bellies stewed in champagne to eggs sizzled in beer: “There was no telling what a customer might order after a gruelling pack trip to the Summit, a big winning in one of the gambling houses, or a hard night on the dance floor.”

Through this mish-mash of hovels and tree stumps moved a farrago of preposterous contraptions which the owners prayed would lighten the burden of the days to come, but which in most cases only increased it. Two men moved by, pushing pedal-less bicycles on which frames had been mounted suitable for carrying two hundred pounds of goods. A covey of stampeders laboured up the pass dragging little carts mounted on buggy wheels. Another party slushed through the mud striving to maintain the balance of an enormous single wheel around which a platform had been built. And threaded in between these grotesque devices were three thousand pack horses, loaded to the breaking-point. Panic was already mirrored in their eyes, but their agony had only begun.