Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush, 1896-1899 (30 page)

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Revolt on the Yukon

The Yukon Valley was aflame with colour that September. The birches and the aspens turned to fiery yellow-orange, while the buck-brush on the hilltops changed to deep crimson-purple. Then, as the month reached its end, the world went grey as the leaves fell away and the ashen trunks stood naked to the autumn winds. In the mornings the hillsides were powdered with a talcum coating of frost, and the pale sun, rising only briefly, seemed to have lost its warmth.

In the lifeless forests the scuttling hare shed its protective brown and turned as white as the first fresh snow; the ptarmigan followed suit, and the darting weasel. Here and there a nodding grizzly, bloated by feasts of blueberry and salmon, sought out the darkness of a mountain cave and relapsed into his long coma. The songbirds were long since gone; only the plump chickadees remained, and the grey juncos, and the white little snow buntings.

As the sun vanished, and the surface soil froze solid, holding its moisture locked within it, the mountain streams dropped to thin trickles and ceased to feed the mother river. Along the margin of the Yukon, shore ice formed, extending for thirty feet out into the stream; and as the river, starved of nourishment, began to drop, this ice was left to project unsupported from the high banks. Chunk by chunk it broke off and toppled into the current until the waters were thick with it.

In Dawson, men took to the hills to search for Arctic hare, while others, sitting on the banks, tried to catch grayling through holes chopped in the shore ice. A few men even ventured towards the distant mountains in an attempt to capture big game.

In front of the town the rustling mass of ice slipped by like an endless chain. Then, on the night of September 28, to the surprise of all, the
Weare
, her twin black smoke-stacks puffing furiously, steamed into Dawson through the floating ice mass. The effect was shattering. Guns were fired and bonfires lit, while cheers resounded from the thousands who greeted her.

As the
Weare’s
whistled pierced the gloom and her gangplank was lowered onto the frozen and crowded bank, John J. Healy shouldered his way through the impatient throng and fairly raced aboard his company’s ship. Ely Weare, the son of his old Mississippi crony and now the president of the N.A.T., greeted him with enthusiasm. Healy, in his crusty way, brushed this welcome aside and demanded to know how much cargo was on board. Weare answered, not without a certain pride, that the ship was loaded with all the whiskey and hardware that could be floated across the Yukon flats.

These words drove Healy into a fury, for he had given direct orders, as general manager, to load the boats with food and clothing only. Blinded by rage and frustration, he seized Weare by the throat and might have choked him to death had not his assistant, an amateur boxer, separated the two men.

Two days later the
Bella
arrived with an equally limited and disappointing cargo, and Constantine, who came up from the Fortymile headquarters aboard her, realized that one thousand persons would have to be evacuated from Dawson. They could not get far, as the river would shortly be frozen solid and all water travel come to an end for the season, but with luck they might reach Fort Yukon, Alaska, some three hundred and fifty miles downriver from Dawson – eighty-six miles past Circle City. It was near this old Hudson’s Bay post on the Yukon flats that the steamboats loaded with provisions were stranded. Accordingly, Constantine posted a notice on Front Street:

 … For those who have not laid in a winter’s supply to remain longer is to court death from starvation, or at least the certainty of sickness from scurvy and other troubles. Starvation now stares everyone in the face who is hoping and waiting for outside relief.…

The Collector of Customs and the Gold Commissioner addressed street-corner meetings, urging people to escape, while Hansen of the A.C. Company, nervous and alarmed, ran up and down Front Street from group to group, calling out: “Go! Go! Flee for your lives!”

Only John J. Healy remained calm in the face of the panic. The tough old frontiersman refused to be panicked. Hansen, he said contemptuously, was a hysterical cheechako. There was food enough for all in Dawson, he insisted, and he urged all to stay.

“There will be no starvation,” Healy kept saying, to Hansen’s annoyance. “Some may go hungry, but no one will starve. If there
is
starvation, it will not be until spring.”

In spite of this, Healy permitted those who wished to leave aboard the
Weare
to take passage to Fort Yukon for a nominal fifty dollars. (“There’s nothing at Fort Yukon,” he warned them.) Constantine, meanwhile, determined to speed the departure of scores more by allowing them free passage on the
Bella
and five days’ allowance of food. One hundred and sixty took advantage of this offer; but when the steamboat was ready to leave at four p.m. on October 1, it was found that forty had taken the food and vanished. Many of those who did go on board did so under fictitious names. They did not wish the ignominy of this retreat to reach the ears of their friends Outside.

They crowded up the gangplank like defeated soldiers, the raw north wind plucking at their greatcoats, the leaden and wintry sky hanging over them like a pall. Here was a doctor who had abandoned a growing practice in Chicago to seek greener fields in the north; he was one of three skilled physicians forced out of town. Here was a watchmaker who had arrived with three thousand dollars’ worth of jewellery but with no provisions, and was leaving with his wares unsold. Here was a feeble creature of seventy who had scraped five hundred dollars together from his friends and relatives to invest in this last great adventure. “I’d rather starve or freeze to death among strangers than die of humiliation and a broken heart at home,” he had cried when the first epidemic of Klondicitis spread across the country. Now he was among strangers, starving and freezing. Here was a bank clerk from Boston who had left for the Klondike to begin a career as a businessman – his career at an end before it had truly begun. Here were half a dozen midwestern farmers who had hoped to garner enough gold from the Klondike to pay the interest on the mortgages that they had been forced to increase in order to secure the means to go north. Sitting morosely on their blankets on the deck or in the messrooms or on top of the cordwood stacked in the hold, they listened to the ice blocks grinding against the hull, which had been sheathed in an eighteen-inch strip of steel for protection.

Out into the channel the little
Bella
chugged, leaving behind a forlorn huddle of townspeople who watched this last link with civilization drift stern first in the direction of Fortymile, her rudder jammed in the ice so that the pilot could not correctly head her downstream. Slowly, like a cork in a bathtub, she rotated until the rudder was repaired.

For forty miles she kept her course until the suction pipe feeding the boiler became clogged with ice. Then, out of steam, she was driven ashore and tied up. The passengers cramming every corner slept uneasily in their light blankets or munched on their scanty supplies of hardtack and bacon while her captain and crew fought to get her under way once more.

For another forty miles the resolute Dixon forced his vessel downriver in an unequal battle with the ice. Again she ran out of steam, and again he got her under way. The ice jammed her rudder and she floated broadside towards the mouth of the Fortymile. He forced her into the shore, where the ice formed a solid prison around her. But now a rare and almost miraculous natural phenomenon came to his aid: a warm chinook wind, blowing through the mountains from the distant coast, melted the ice in the main stream. Dixon was able to clear a channel out to the river and continue on his way. The thaw lasted for twelve hours, and then the ice returned with new fury, driving the little steamboat before it into a bank. But Dixon repaired her and chugged on. A few hours later the ice drove the ship onto a sand-bar. She clung to it for two days and nights while the ice poured down at five miles an hour, pounding with terrifying force against her hull, until one enormous block, striking the paddlewheel, smashed a blade and jarred the vessel from stem to stern. But Dixon spat tobacco, dislodged his ship, and finally brought her limping into Circle City. He bore the river no grudge, for he loved her almost as if she were a woman, and would brook no criticism of her. To him she was “one of the prettiest rivers under the sun,” and when he died five years later it was at the helm of his steamboat, as she unloaded cargo at Circle City, with the tawny Yukon hissing around him.

While Dixon was battling the river, the
Weare
, having reached Circle, was facing a second bout of armed violence. Her captain had refused to proceed farther, and the passengers, many of them drunk, were talking of seizing the boat by force. Ray, the infantry officer, who was still in town, quietly went about securing arms and ammunition to defend the ship’s stores, if necessary with his life. On October 10 the captain of the
Weare
, whose own state of intoxication now matched that of the passengers, announced that if the boat could be cut free of the ice he would continue for eighty-six miles farther to Fort Yukon, where supplies could be had for the winter. At this news, one hundred men set to work hacking away at the ice that fettered the vessel, working themselves into a state of fury because the captain, in spite of his promises, gave no further sign of connecting up the engines. Only the armed presence of Ray prevented a mutiny.

It was at this point that the chinook wind cleared the river of ice. The N.A.T. Company supplied three boats with a capacity of sixty men and provisions for four days, and at eight a.m. on October 12 this small flotilla sailed off and was soon joined by more and more boats fleeing from Dawson. Indeed, the channel, miraculously clear for the moment, was alive with craft of every description, each straining to reach the source of supplies as they had once strained to reach the source of riches. They could not know – and had they known, would not have believed – that at this same moment other boats, farther down the river, were fighting against time and weather, trying to reach the Klondike before freeze-up. In the same week in which one set of passengers fought with the captain of the
Weare
at Circle City to take them away from the Klondike, another set of passengers battled with the captain of the tiny
St. Michael
, also at Circle City, trying to force him to take them on to the Klondike.

Ray’s boat was at the centre of the scattered fleet attempting to reach Fort Yukon from Circle. The captain was certain there would be violence when hundreds of hungry men landed, and he was determined to prevent bloodshed if he could.

For twelve hours the river remained clear, and then, as the swift dusk of evening descended and the aurora glowed greenly in the sky, the men in the boats could hear once more the distant roar of ice in motion. An Indian in Ray’s boat called out that the river was freezing, and the men steeled themselves for the onslaught, as an army, listening to the rumble of cannon in the distance, waits for an enemy attack.

In inky blackness there followed a macabre scene. The water rose, the current seemed to increase in speed, the boats strove vainly to reach the shore until – roaring and crashing, rending and tearing – the ice descended upon them. Ray and his companions, fighting the current in their whirling craft, found themselves caught in a gorge formed by masses of ice piling high on either side of them as the river froze inward from both shores. Each member of Ray’s crew battled desperately to keep the boat on an even keel, their oars and rudder smashed by the repeated blows of the blocks that bore down upon them. Then, almost in an instant, the frothing waters seemed to solidify above them, around them, and beneath them, until Ray’s boat was borne upward by the freezing action, as if by unseen hands.

Thus they remained, locked in the ice, until morning. In the dawn’s pale light Ray spotted five other boats caught in the pack, some of them smashed to kindling. From shore to shore the river now presented an appalling sight: the entire channel as far as the eye could see was clogged with enormous up-ended cakes jammed and frozen together in a solid, unmoving mass.

Across these misshapen hummocks the shipwrecked men made their way until they reached an island in mid-river. Here some hundred and fifty people were gathered. Fort Yukon lay sixty-five miles away, and Ray, taking command, led the party in a weary and exhausting trek through the snow, with only meagre rations and scant bedding.

He arrived on October 25 to find an armed revolution in the making. There was really little he could do about it. To his dismay, he now learned there were far fewer supplies at Fort Yukon than had been made out. Alone in Alaska — save for his subordinate, Richardson – with no legal machinery of any kind and no constabulary, the officer had only his own powers of persuasion to use against the desperate and hungry men who were already arming and planning to seize the two trading companies’ caches.

Ray had never felt himself so impotent. All his life he had been an Army man, used to taking and giving orders, a commanding figure with his fierce black Irish brows, his great beak of a nose, and his formidable waxed mustachios. He had served in the ranks throughout the Civil War and then, commissioned, had been placed in charge of the International Polar Expedition to Point Barrow on Alaska’s northern tip. In his late fifties and approaching retirement age (he would rise to brigadier general), he felt that he knew the Army and that he knew the North. But never in his career was he to come up against as frustrating a situation as the one in which he now found himself.

On October 29, four days after arriving at Fort Yukon, he was ambushed by a party of twenty-two armed men who planned to hold up the N.A.T. cache. Ray could only bargain, as he had at Circle City. He promised to feed all destitute men at government expense if they would work cutting wood at five dollars a cord in payment; those who had money he would allow to purchase minimum outfits. This offer prevented bloodshed, but Ray realized it was a bad bargain, and the sense of frustration that marked these days in Fort Yukon can be seen in the reports he prepared for Washington. He knew quite well that at least thirty who proclaimed themselves destitute were lying. In the end, they even refused to cut wood for him, and again there was nothing he could do. It was, as he later reported, a straight case of premeditated robbery. On November 19 the N.A.T. store, which he had saved from a sacking, was looted anyway, and six thousand dollars in gold dust stolen. “The tide of lawlessness is rising rapidly all along the river,” Ray wrote. Yet he was powerless to deal with the lawbreakers; there was not a single U.S. official qualified to administer an oath within one thousand miles. Ray discovered that one of the “destitute” men had taken his government relief and left for Circle City. This was too much. He ordered the man’s arrest on a charge of obtaining supplies under false pretences, but once again he was frustrated. The miners at Circle broke open the temporary jail in which the prisoner was held and released him. He sold his outfit at public auction, gambled away the proceeds at a faro game, and headed back upstream for Dawson, figuratively thumbing his nose at Patrick Henry Ray, the officer without a command, the leader without authority.