Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush, 1896-1899 (29 page)

For every man who found the strength to press on, there was at least one who turned back. Some grew deathly ill on rotten horseflesh fed to them in the little cafés that sprang up along the way; others suffered the agonies of pneumonia or grippe or spinal meningitis. On one black night there were seventeen deaths from meningitis, and Goddard, the steamboat man, recalled hearing victims in neighbouring tents screaming with the pain in the nape of the neck that is a characteristic of the disease. Their cries would last for three or four hours, and then, suddenly, they would cry no more.

So the leaderless rabble swarmed forward – leaderless except for the small band of North West Mounted Police who officially took possession of the summit in February, 1898, on orders from the Canadian government. Nobody had paid much attention to the boundary until 1897, but now it was in dispute, the Canadians insisting that it lay close to the seashore, the Americans attempting to push it back to the headwaters of the Yukon. But the Mounties, using an old international principle that possession is nine points of the law, established a custom-house on the razor’s edge of the divide. Here, where firewood and cabin logs had to be hauled uphill for twelve miles, where winds howled ceaselessly and the snow seemed to fall day and night, the twenty policemen endured conditions so terrible that no stampeder lingered longer than necessary. The Mounties suffered privations that damaged their health; Strickland, the inspector in charge, worked through a long siege of bronchitis until his superior, the legendary Sam Steele, heard about it. Steele, too, was racked by the same disease as a result of wading waist-deep in icy water and then working in his wet clothes, but he defied his doctor, scaled the pass, ordered Strickland off duty, and carried on himself.

Here, from his perch on the very summit of the mountain wall, high above forest and river, far from the tinny cacophony of Skagway, Steele, the iron man, could gaze down, godlike, on the insect figures striving to reach his eyrie – on the whimpering horses and the cursing men, and on the women bent double beneath man-sized loads. It was a scene that was almost mediaeval in its fervour and in its allegory, and it was enacted against a massive backdrop: the cloud-plumed mountains in the foreground, the rolling hills in the middle distance, and far below – as if in another world – the bright sheen of the ocean and the tiny outlines of shuttling boats disgorging, endlessly, more human cargo, and, glittering wetly in the pale sun, the flats of Skagway, where William Moore had once reigned as a lonely monarch.

And hanging over the whole, like an encompassing pall, the sickly-sweet stench of carrion, drifting with the wind.

Chapter Six

1
Starvation winter

2
Revolt on the Yukon

3
A dollar a waltz

4
Only a coal miner’s daughter …

5
Greenhorns triumphant

6
The Saint of Dawson

1

Starvation winter

Those few hundred souls who slipped through the passes in the fall of 1897 and reached the Yukon River were borne swiftly on the crest of the current towards the Klondike, secure in the knowledge that they had won the race for the gold-fields. They had held the lead while others faltered, because they travelled light, ignoring all advice to encumber themselves with a year’s provisions. They had money; they were prepared to make more money; with money you could buy anything.

But as their boats slid past the fog-shrouded banks amid the cakes of floating ice, faint but disquieting cries reached their ears:

“There’s no grub in Dawson. If you haven’t an outfit, for God’s sake turn back!”

The caribou were fleeing the country in thundering herds, swimming the rivers in clusters so close to the drifting boats that the newcomers could almost reach out and touch their horns. In the skies the geese in ragged V’s were winging south. Only men, it seemed, were moving north into a dying land.

They stopped for supplies at Fort Selkirk, Arthur Harper’s old post, and were baffled to find that the morose and silent trader, J. J. Pitts, had nothing to sell them except condensed milk at a dollar a tin. In vain they proffered bank-notes; no steamer had touched this point since 1895, and their money was useless. It was a tiny intimation of what was to come.

Joaquin Miller, the grey-bearded “Poet of the Sierras,” had made a fetish of travelling light. When he stepped off his barge at Dawson’s waterfront he happened to pull a lone onion from his pocket. To his astonishment, an onlooker instantly offered him a dollar for it. When Miller refused, the offer was increased at once to five. The significance of this incident escaped the poet, who had eyes only for the gold that was pouring from the creeks, for, like the other stampeders, he confused it with wealth.

“No,” he wrote firmly, “there will be no starvation. The men who doubt supplies will get here, where gold is waiting by the ton, miscalculate American energy. As for the gold here, I can only say, as the Queen of Sheba said to Solomon: ‘Behold, the half was not told to me!’ ”

Constantine of the Mounted Police viewed the situation with foreboding. As early as August 11 he had written bluntly to Ottawa that “the outlook for grub is not assuring for the number of people here – about four thousand crazy or lazy men, chiefly American miners and toughs from the coast towns.”

The trading companies, too, began to measure the shortage of food against the new glut of people with growing dismay. Both the A.C. and the N.A.T. proceeded to dole out supplies in small amounts as men in queues fifty deep lined up in front of the warehouses pleading for a chance to buy. The company clerks admitted one man at a time, locked the door behind him as they would the door of a vault, sold him a few days’ supplies, and sent him on his way. A man could have half a million dollars in gold – as many did – and still be able to purchase only a few pounds of beans, but it was some time before the newcomers could understand this. They found it hard to comprehend a situation in which gold by itself was worthless.

As more and more boats drifted in with the ice, an air of panic began to settle over the Yukon Valley, like the cold fog that rose from the Klondike’s mouth. Somewhere downriver there were five steamboats bound for Dawson with cargoes of food, but there was no sign of them. What had happened? In September, Captain J. E. Hansen, the Alaska Commercial Company’s assistant superintendent, decided to head downstream to find out.

Some three hundred and fifty miles below Dawson, near the old Hudson’s Bay post of Fort Yukon, in the shallow and desolate maze of the Yukon flats, he found the lost steamers marooned in the low water. He knew now, for certain, that Dawson faced famine, and so started back up the river at breakneck speed to warn the town of its danger.

This trip was almost the end of Hansen. His Indian companions deserted him, and for four days and five nights he was isolated on an island in mid-river with neither axe nor bedding. Picked up at last by a passing boat, he commandeered a birchbark canoe and pushed on through the ice as fast as he could force his boatmen, poling and tracking along the banks and changing Indians every few dozen miles as they dropped from fatigue.

He set a record for speed. On September 26 two natives on the hills above Dawson spotted his canoe, and a cry rippled across the town:

“A boat! A boat from the north!”

Four thousand men and women, aflame with excitement and hope, streamed down upon the waterfront in the belief that a steamer laden with provisions had arrived, and then, when the little birchbark canoe rounded the bluff, drew in their collective breath in bitter disappointment, “like the sighing of the wind,” as one later recorded.

A deadly calm settled on the crowd. The canoe touched shore and Hansen’s tall figure leaped from it, his blond hair tangled by the wind, his aquiline face haggard and blue with cold. He raised his hand for silence and in a loud, nervous voice cried out:

“Men of Dawson! There will be no riverboats here until spring. My Indians and I have poled three hundred and fifty miles up the river to tell you this. I advise all of you who are out of provisions or who haven’t enough to carry you through the winter to make a dash for the Outside. There is no time to lose! There are some supplies at Fort Yukon that the
Hamilton
brought. Whichever way you go, up the river or down the river, it’s hazardous – but you must make the try.”

A silence, pregnant with horror, greeted these words. Most of Hansen’s listeners had risked everything to reach the Klondike in the first wave, and now it seemed that they had won the race only to lose the prize. As they stood, wordless, on the riverbank, a variety of subhuman sounds seeped into their consciousness and accentuated the general mood of gloom and despair: the hoarse screaming of the ravens wheeling above in the dismal skies, the grinding and snapping of the ice cakes that poured past in a relentless stream, the mournful howling of the husky dogs tethered to cabins all across the town.

The mood changed. A murmur rippled through the crowd; there were screams of consternation, and one or two people actually fainted. Then the mob broke up into smaller mobs of gesticulating men and women, who gathered on street corners and in saloons, threatening to seize the warehouses, fighting occasionally with their fists, shouting, bartering, trading, pleading. The restaurants closed as the news spread to the gulches and the miners poured in from Eldorado and Bonanza. For hundreds there was no sleep that night as partners pooled what they owned and drew lots to decide who would stay and who would flee. Within a few hours fifty open boats had pushed off for Fort Yukon, three hundred and fifty miles down the river, and another hundred were preparing to go.

And those who had been frantic to reach the Klondike were just as frantic to leave it now. Stampeders who had used their wits and their physical resources to hurdle the mountains and breast the river expended the same energies in a scramble to retreat the way they had come.

The most desperate expedition was that headed by Thomas McGee of San Francisco, who commandeered the rickety steamboat
Kieukik
, intending to sail it as far up the river as Fort Selkirk and then make his way overland to the Lynn Canal. So often did the machinery break down on the shuddering little craft that after a week the fifteen freezing passengers aboard the vessel found they had moved only thirty-five miles. The boat, its hull ripped open, was abandoned and a fresh start made in Indian canoes. So nerve-racking was this trip that the native guide succumbed to a weakness rare among his kind: he broke down and wept. But the party did reach the Lynn Canal, after forty days, and stumbled into Skagway, half-starved and frostbitten. The
City of Seattle
was in port at the time, and as her gold-hungry passengers disembarked and began their headlong race for the passes, they noted, momentarily and without comprehension, the odd spectacle of McGee and his fellows clambering gratefully aboard to book passage for home.

While this exodus up the Yukon was under way, the P
ortus B. Weare
and the
Bella
from St. Michael were gingerly navigating the Yukon flats. Stripped of their barges and half their cargo, they inched their way across the shoals and steamed triumphantly into the deeper waters of the main river, only to face a human hazard a few miles farther on: at Circle City each in turn was subjected to one of the most decorous armed hold-ups in the history of piracy.

Some hundred and eighty miners had returned to the old camp when the first flush of the Klondike receded, and these had watched in growing frustration as boat after boat passed them by on the way up to Dawson. When the
Weare
arrived on September 20, they decided to take the law into their own hands. A committee of six climbed aboard and offered to pay the company’s price for enough provisions to last the winter. When Ely Weare, the president, refused, fifty men with rifles and shotguns emerged from the bushes and drew a bead on the boat. With the ship’s crew at bay, the miners quietly began to unload the cargo, checking it carefully and paying for it as it was removed. When the
Weare
left the following morning, she was thirty tons lighter.

A similar scene was enacted on September 25 when the
Bella
arrived. Her portly and peppery captain, E. D. Dixon, an old Mississippi hand, grew almost apoplectic with rage as the insurgents swarmed aboard. Captain Patrick Henry Ray of the Eighth Infantry, U.S. Army, a passenger aboard the steamboat, shouldered his way to the forefront and tried to reason with the miners, who were already unloading the cargo while the fuming captain shouted and cursed and spat tobacco juice upon the deck. Ray had been sent north by the U.S. government to investigate the possibilities of relieving destitute miners; but now he was forced to tell the very men he had come to succour that their action was unlawful.

“There’s no law or any person in authority to whom we can appeal,” the chairman of the miners’ committee retorted, and since this was only too true, Ray yielded. The government had failed to place any officials in Circle City, whose only law was the law of the miners’ meeting. Although Dixon continued to roar that he would not leave a single pound of supplies at Circle, the
Bella
left the town twenty-five tons lighter. Save for the unregenerate Dixon, it was difficult to tell the victims from the hold-up men. As Ray later wrote in his report to Washington, “The feature that was most prominent when the
Bella
was held up was the cheerfulness and alacrity with which all the employees of the company, from the agent down, facilitated the work of the miners – and their expressions of approval.”

There was a sequel of sorts to this incident. The following spring, when the steamer
Rideout
docked at Fortymile with two hundred dance-hall queens aboard, the miners, emboldened by the example of Circle City, quietly stole one of the girls for their private use.