Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush, 1896-1899 (26 page)

3

The dead horse trail

Of all the routes to the Klondike, the Skagway trail across the White Pass, more than any other, brought out the worst in men. None who survived ever forgot it, and most who remembered it did so with a sense of shame and remorse. It looked so easy: a jaunt through the rolling hills on horseback, not much more. And yet the men who travelled it were seized by a kind of delirium that drove them to the pit of brutality. Like drug addicts, they understood their dementia but could not control it. There was only one comfort – everyone was suffering from the same condition.

Frank Thomas of Plymouth, Indiana, expressed this feeling when he wrote a letter home from Skagway in the early fall of 1897:

“I am a few days older than when I left … and a great deal wiser. I have been working like a slave since I came here trying to get over the trail and am not over yet, and furthermore do not think I will be in time to get down the Yukon this winter. Since I came in we have lost our mule and one horse on this accursed trail.… This is the most discouraging work I ever did.… There are thousands of people here … all mad and crazy just like us.… I am undoubtedly a crazy fool for being here in this God-forsaken country but I have the consolation of seeing thousands of other men in all stages of life, rich and poor, wise and foolish, here in the same plight as I.”

The trail on which Thomas found himself was a forty-five-mile switchback that plunged through bog and mire, over boulder and shale, skirted cliffsides, crossed and recrossed rivers, leap-frogged mountains, and followed canyon, valley, summit, and slope until it ended on the crescent beaches of Lake Bennett, where the Yukon River has its beginning.

Unlike the Dyea trail that led directly to the base of the Chilkoot and then spanned the mountain barrier in a single leap, the Skagway trail straddled a series of obstacles. Its beginnings were deceptive – an attractive wagon road that led for several miles over flat timber- and swampland. Then began the series of precipitous hills, each hill separated by the almost continuous mire of the soggy riverbed, which had to be zigzagged by the narrow pathway.

First there was Devil’s Hill, around whose slippery slate cliffs the path, scarcely two feet wide, wound like a corkscrew and where a single misstep by a badly loaded horse could mean death a sheer five hundred feet below.

Next there was Porcupine Hill, a roller-coaster ride where the wretched animals must pick their way between ten-foot boulders.

Then came Summit Hill, a thousand-foot climb, where liquid mud streamed down in rivulets, where sharp rocks tore at horses’ feet and flanks, where slabs of granite barred the way and yawning mudholes swallowed the floundering animals, packs and all.

The summit marked the border between Canada and Alaska, but it was not the end. The slender trail skirted a network of tiny lakes and then hurdled Turtle Mountain, another thousand-foot obstacle, before descending into the Tutshi Valley. One more mountain pass blocked the way before Lake Bennett was finally achieved.

Of the five thousand men and women who attempted to cross the White Pass in the fall of ’97, only the tiniest handful reached their goal in time to navigate the Yukon River before freeze-up. One man who succeeded compared the slow movement over the pass with that of an army in retreat, those in the forefront struggling on against hopeless odds, followed by a line of stragglers moving forward like a beaten rabble. On the coastal side of the divide an incessant grey drizzle shut out all sunlight, producing streams of gumbo that acted as a sort of mucilage for the hopeless tangle of men and animals, tents, feed, and supplies. As the trail was not wide enough to allow two animals to pass, time and again all movement ground to a stop. Fires sputtered and smouldered in the misty half-light while shivering men, haggard, dazed, and forlorn, hovered over them, waiting for the human chain to resume its slow movement across the dark hills.

During these tedious delays the wretched horses for miles back had to stand, often for hours, with crushing loads pressing down upon their backs because no one would chance unloading them in case movement might suddenly resume. An animal might remain loaded for twenty-four hours, his only respite being the tightening of the pack girths, and this was one reason why scarcely a single horse survived of the three thousand that were used to cross the White Pass in ’97.

Here was the enduring shame of the Skagway trail. Many of these doomed beasts were ready for the glue factory when they were bought at Victoria or Seattle at outlandish prices, while others had never been broken or felt the weight of a pack. Few of the men who stampeded to the Klondike had ever handled animals before, hence it was not unusual for two partners to spend an entire day trying to load a single horse. By the time they reached the summit, horses that had fetched two hundred dollars in Skagway were not worth twenty cents, for the Klondikers felt impelled to get across the mountains at any cost – and the cost always included an animal’s life.

A quarter of a mile from the Canadian border, each owner performed a grisly rite. He carefully unloaded his pack animal and then smoothed a blanket over its back to conceal the running sores that most horses suffered at the hands of amateurs. The Mounted Police would shoot a sore or injured horse on sight if he was brought across the line into Canada.

The macabre scenes on the trail that autumn and winter were seared into the memories of most of the men who witnessed them, so that fifty years later, when subsequent horrors had been blurred by the fog of time, these ghastly moments were as sharply etched as if they had occurred the week before. Samuel H. Graves, who was to play a leading role in the building of the railway over the White Pass, would never forget the day he passed a horse that had broken its leg a few minutes before at a point where the trail squeezed between two huge boulders. The horse’s pack had been removed, and someone had knocked it on the head with an axe; then traffic was resumed directly across the still warm body. When Graves returned that evening there was not a vestige of the carcass left, save for the head on one side of the trail and the tail on the other. The beast had literally been ground into the earth by the human machine.

A veteran horseman, Major J. M. Walsh, one of the most famous officers of the original North West Mounted Police, now retired and on his way to the Klondike as Commissioner of the Yukon, crossed the trail that fall with a government party and was horrified at the spectacle. To Clifford Sifton, Canadian Minister of the Interior, he wrote that “such a scene of havoc and destruction … can scarcely be imagined. Thousands of pack-horses lie dead along the way, sometimes in bunches under the cliffs, with pack-saddles and packs where they have fallen from the rock above, sometimes in tangled masses filling the mudholes and furnishing the only footing for our poor pack animals on the march – often, I regret to say, exhausted but still alive, a fact we are unaware of until after the miserable wretches turn beneath the hoofs of our cavalcade. The eyeless sockets of the pack animals everywhere account for the myriads of ravens along the road. The inhumanity which this trail has been witness to, the heartbreak and suffering which so many have undergone, cannot be imagined. They certainly cannot be described.”

T. Dufferin Pattullo, Walsh’s secretary, who later became Premier of the province of British Columbia, was one of several stampeders who reported that the tortured animals were actually trying to commit suicide rather than negotiate the trail. To his dying day Pattullo insisted that he saw an ox trying to fling itself over a cliff. Tappan Adney, correspondent for
Harper’s Illustrated Weekly
, reported a similar incident: a horse had walked over the edge of Porcupine Hill, and every man who witnessed the incident swore it was suicide.

In the crowd that fall was a sensitive young ex-sailor, his pack crammed with books – Darwin, Marx, Milton – and he, too, was to describe the ordeal of the horses on the White Pass.

“The horses died like mosquitoes in the first frost and from Skagway to Bennett they rotted in heaps,” Jack London wrote. “They died at the rocks, they were poisoned at the summit, and they starved at the lakes; they fell off the trail, what there was of it, and they went through it; in the river they drowned under their loads or were smashed to pieces against the boulders; they snapped their legs in the crevices and broke their backs falling backwards with their packs; in the sloughs they sank from fright or smothered in the slime; and they were disembowelled in the bogs where the corduroy logs turned end up in the mud; men shot them, worked them to death and when they were gone, went back to the beach and bought more. Some did not bother to shoot them, stripping the saddles off and the shoes and leaving them where they fell. Their hearts turned to stone – those which did not break – and they became beasts, the men on the Dead Horse Trail.”

Within a month the trail was almost impassable, and by September all movement had come to a standstill. Sylvester Scovel of the New York
World
, in a colourful gesture, offered several thousand dollars on behalf of his paper to dynamite the pass so that the stampede could resume. Scovel had come with his bride to Skagway, in a dashing costume complete with guitar – high leather boots, tight corduroys, white sombrero, and fancy buckskin shirt – but this final piece of flamboyance was too much for his paper, which refused to go along with the scheme and recalled him to New York. He had, in the meantime, spent some money widening a section of the trail and hiring a guard of twelve men at fifty dollars a day to barricade it against intruders. “Any man crossing the barrier dies!” the leader would shout, but with the press of three thousand behind it, the barrier did not last long.

By this time it was obvious to all that no one else was going to reach the Klondike until spring. Thousands were already in retreat and vainly trying to sell their outfits, which were to be seen strewn along the right of way for more than forty miles. The tidal flats of Skagway were black with a thousand horses, “For Sale” signs on their backs, blood streaming down their lacerated thighs. And everywhere a pall of despondency hung like a shroud over the multitude. Hal Hoffman of the Chicago
Tribune
happened upon one huge strapping gold-seeker in a red shirt, seated on a rock, a picture of despair; he could not get his goods across the first ridge, his money was gone, his adventure was at an end, and he was sobbing his heart out.

Men had been willing to pay any sum to reach Lake Bennett. Scores had given fifty cents apiece simply to use a log that one enterprising stampeder had flung over a stream. One packer, who landed in Skagway without a dollar, made three hundred thousand in transport fees before he blew out his brains. But, as these argonauts were to learn over and over again, money alone was not enough to take them to the Klondike.

Finally the trail was closed to all, and George Brackett, an ex-mayor of Minneapolis who had lost his fortune in the panic of ’93, began to construct a wagon road along the mountainsides. When it was completed, the stampeders who followed in the winter were glad to pay tolls to use it, but each one who passed that way was haunted in some fashion by the ghosts of the pack animals that had died that fall. One winter evening a nineteen-year-old named Stanley Scearce, whose father raised thoroughbreds in the blue grass of Kentucky, was camped on the edge of Porcupine Hill. He had started an evening fire and set a kettle of beans to boil on it, and then, as the snow began to melt, he saw to his horror the outlines of a dead horse emerging beneath the glowing coals.

4

Hell on
earth

All this while, Skagway was growing, and, strangely, its growth was due in large part to the very impassability of the trail because so many were forced back from the mountains to remain in the town. Dyea, three miles away, remained an impermanent community because the Chilkoot Pass was seldom closed.

By midwinter there were five thousand in Skagway, and many of these were without the means to move forward or back. The town had its first minister, who held services in a bare hall, and its first newspaper, the Skagway
News
(“nearest newspaper to the goldfields”), and its first murder. George Buchanan, an Englishman who had been appointed manager of the Skagway Townsite Company, found himself frustrated in love by a lady restaurant-keeper and so shot her and killed himself, providing the Seattle
Post-Intelligencer’s
correspondent with an opportunity to display his purplest style: