Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush, 1896-1899 (33 page)

And he suffered bitter disappointments. His church was scarcely completed, after months of careful work, before fire destroyed it utterly – on the morning of Trinity Sunday. Everything was reduced to ashes: the altar which he had carved so painstakingly himself with a common penknife, and the hand-hewn furniture – even the vestments for the choir. Without complaint, the priest began once again the herculean task of rebuilding from the ground up. In this he was aided by an immediate collection taken up by the Protestants and Catholics alike and by a substantial donation from Big Alex McDonald, a devout Scots Catholic, who volunteered to pay for the chapel. One of the features of the church, when it was rebuilt, was that the priest refused to collect a penny of pew rent, or to take up collections at any of his services – a sobering decision in a community where on every other occasion gold was tossed to the winds.

The townspeople helped him to raise the thirty-five thousand dollars needed to complete the hospital. Women roamed through the mining areas, passing the hat; others held bazaars and dances night after night. And, in return, Judge took into his hospital all who required aid. By March there were forty-five scurvy cases alone, jamming the wards and even the hallways.

By this time, tales of Dawson’s famine had seeped to the Outside. Captain Ray, indeed, had sent a special messenger out by dog-team to tell the world about the Klondike’s plight, and various chambers of commerce in the Pacific coast cities, fearful that the bad news would ruin the spring trade, bombarded Congress with petitions for Yukon relief. Congress responded in December, 1897, by voting an appropriation of two hundred thousand dollars for the purchase of a reindeer herd, which Washington naively believed could be shipped north in time, as meat to assuage Dawson City’s hunger. Thus was unfolded another tortured chapter in the Odyssey of the gold rush.

The reindeer herd, five hundred and thirty-nine strong, was purchased in Norway, shipped to New York, shuttled across the continent by train to Seattle, and then taken north by steamer to Haines Mission, at the end of the Dalton Trail on the Lynn Canal. The herdsmen, specially trained for the job, included forty-three Laplanders, ten Finns, and fifteen Norwegians. They were a hardy lot. One had crossed Greenland with Nansen a dozen years before and had been awarded a medal by King Oscar for the exploit. Another bore the proud title of world’s most northerly mail-carrier. But none had experienced anything like the trek upon which they now embarked.

It was May, 1898, before the reindeer reached Haines. Nine months later they were still struggling along the trail towards Dawson, and by this time a series of mishaps had decimated the herd. The swamps, the mountains, the snowfields and glaciers, the canyons and fallen trees which they had to traverse caused them to die by the scores, like the horses on the Skagway trail. Wolves killed several; the Indians shot more; some strangled themselves on their harness. But these were minor mishaps. Most of the animals succumbed to a more ironic fate. In the early stages of the trek, dozens collapsed from lack of reindeer moss, their staple diet, and from then on there was never really enough to eat. As the months wore on and the very dogs dropped in their tracks from hunger, the herders were reduced to picking up raw beans spilled on the trail by the gold-seekers ahead of them and stuffing them, filthy and frozen, into their mouths.

“Do you think there is any hell worse than this one?” one of the Lapp drivers asked Hedley E. Redmyer, the Norwegian-American in charge of the expedition.

“No,” replied Redmyer, “I think this is all the hell I want.”

And so, after a trek of seven hundred and fifty miles, the expedition staggered into Dawson City – to the amusement of the townspeople. The date was January 27, 1899, and the herd, which had been a year in transit, was now reduced to one hundred and fourteen animals, about one fifth of its original size. In that Starvation Winter the real victims of starvation had been the wretched reindeer themselves, and the greatest paradox, in that season of paradoxes, was that in the end it was the Klondike Relief Expedition itself that required relief.

Chapter Seven

1
The trails of Ninety-eight

2
Rich man’s route

3
Frozen highways

4
“Bury me here, where I failed”

5
Overland from Edmonton

6
The road to Destruction City

1

The trails of
Ninety-eight

On New Year’s Eve 1897, six young Englishmen sat at midnight supper in the moss-chinked cabin on the shores of Great Slave Lake in the Northwest Territories of Canada. They had hoarded three quarters of a bottle of whiskey to see the old year out, enough to allow each of them a single swallow; and now, as the unaccustomed liquor burned their throats, they slowly became aware of the incongruity of their position. If anyone had told them six months before that the New Year would find them imprisoned by winter on the shores of a frozen inland sea as big as Belgium, nine hundred miles north of the nearest town, with the grey-green conifer forest stretching endlessly around them, they would have thought him mad. Yet here they were, unable to advance or retreat until spring, with another two thousand miles of hard travel facing them.

The whiskey gone and the New Year properly launched, each man returned to his separate shack and to bed; but one of them, a Cambridge University law graduate named William Ford Langworthy, paused long enough to scribble some reflective notes in his diary.

“I wonder whether Dolly and the others are at St. Moritz dancing the old year out as we did in 1897?” he wrote. “This world is a farce – what a difference between this New Year and my last. At St. Moritz last year and now
here, –
of all places in the world this is the last I thought I’d be in on New Year’s Day. I wonder where I shall be this time next year – and in what condition – shall we have found gold? or blank? … I did not imagine how lonely one can feel until today, when about six thousand miles from home and friends. I hope to goodness we ‘strike it rich’ within a couple of years.…”

All over the northwest corner of the continent, in an unexplored wilderness area almost a million and a half square miles in size – half as big again as the subcontinent of India – thousands of others were thinking similar thoughts. A scenic artist from Boston, for example, found himself trapped for nine months in an Eskimo village of beehive huts on the upper delta of the Yukon River. A policeman from New York City found himself dragging a sled-load of provisions and machinery across the creaking surface of the terrible Malaspina glacier on the southern underbelly of Alaska. A schoolmaster from Edinburgh found himself living on wild berries on the banks of the frozen Nisutlin River in the southwest corner of the Yukon Territory. A Methodist preacher from Farnellville, Ohio, found himself with his wife and daughter and a scarecrow of a horse on the summit of Laurier Pass in the heart of the northern Rockies. A ventriloquist from Chicago found himself in a huddle of tents on the banks of the Rat River in the tundra country north of the Arctic Circle.

The complete implausibility of each man’s situation made the most absurd incidents, the most unexpected scenes, appear commonplace. The gold-rush trails were marked by various episodes which have a tinge of madness to them. There was, for instance, the little circus that wended its way north towards the Klondike along the Ashcroft trail through the wild interior of British Columbia – a circus complete with tightrope dancer, music box, striped marquee, performing dogs, and a beautiful black horse with a white star on its forehead which was lost in the olive-green flood of the cold Skeena. And there were the four young English aristocrats who built a log cabin on the Kowak River along the Arctic Circle five hundred miles northeast of Dawson, named it Quality Hill, and trained an Eskimo as a valet to black their mukluks and serve them coffee and cigars while they lay abed till noon, amusing themselves by shooting at stray mice and at knotholes in the log walls until their castle in the wilderness resembled a Swiss cheese.

As the white fog of winter settled over the north, the stampede ground to a halt. From the Cariboo to the Arctic, from the Mackenzie to the Bering Sea, from the Rockies to the Pacific, thousands of William Langworthys sat huddled in lonely cabins awaiting spring. Major J. M. Walsh, the ex-Mountie appointed Commissioner of the newly created Yukon Territory, could not reach Dawson and fidgeted the winter out at the mouth of the Big Salmon River. Jack London could not reach it either, and wintered on the Stewart River, where his cabin became a mecca for miners, who listened open-mouthed as he told stories memorized from the classics. Nor could Rex Beach reach Dawson; he wintered at Minook Creek several hundred miles downriver from the town. Here he encountered a pessimistic newspaperman who told him: “There’s no drama up here, no comedy, no warmth. Life is as pale and as cold as the snow. Back in ’49 there was something to write about, but we’ll never read any great stories about Alaska and the Klondike. This country is too drab and dreary.” Most men in that winter would have agreed; there seemed to be little drama in that chilly vigil. Only when they talked or wrote about it years later did it begin to take on a romantic aura. Then they told each other over glasses of beer or snifters of brandy, or at meetings of sourdoughs organized to recall old times, that it was an experience they would not have forfeited for all the world’s lost gold.

There was no single trail of ’98; there were dozens. The stampeders advanced on the Klondike like a great army executing a giant pincer movement, and those who took part in it poured in from every point of the compass.

The main force, planning a frontal assault, was concentrated in the teeming ant-hills of the White and Chilkoot passes. Far to the west, small platoons and companies were making minor flanking movements over the pitted glaciers that sprawl across the mountainous southern coastline of Alaska. But the great left arm of the pincer, several battalions strong, was advancing up the Yukon from the Bering Sea by steamboat.

A central column was forcing its way northward through the heart of British Columbia, following the route of a forgotten trail cut out by the Western Union Telegraph Company many decades before in an attempt to link Siberia with the United States by cable. This column was joined by a second, moving by steamboat, dog-team, and foot up the Stikine River from the Pacific coast and heading for Teslin Lake on the headwaters of the Yukon.

The great right arm of the pincer, at least a brigade in strength, was launched from Edmonton. From this point it fanned out into companies, platoons, and sections, trickling through the Peace River country, struggling through canyons and rapids of the Liard, pouring down the Mackenzie to the Arctic Circle, and filtering over the continental backbone at a dozen different points, almost to the edge of the Arctic Ocean itself.

Thus, in that strangest of all winters, the once empty northwest was swarming with stampeders. There were stampeders at Dutch Harbor on the Aleutian Islands of Alaska, and there were stampeders at Fort Chipewyan on Lake Athabasca, more than two thousand miles to the east. There were stampeders at Old Crow on the Porcupine River, two hundred and fifty miles due north of Dawson City, and there were stampeders on Disenchantment Bay, which lies three hundred miles due south. There were stampeders dragging their sleighs up the Gravel River, where the Canol pipeline was built during World War 11; there were stampeders moving up Jack Dalton’s trail, which now forms a spur of the Alaska Highway; and there were stampeders deep in the South Nahanni Valley with its caves and its canyons.

They were everywhere. Relics of their passing remain here and there in the form of a crumbling cabin or a rotting grave-marker on a silent riverbank or in a lonely forest. But their great legacy was less tangible and more enduring. In a very real sense they broke down the barrier of the frontier and opened up the northwest.

2

Rich man’s route

The rich man’s route was the all-water route, and to anyone with money it seemed the easiest route of all. It was a long way round: three thousand miles from Seattle to St. Michael, and seventeen hundred more upstream to Dawson City; but in theory no one needed to walk a foot of the distance: it was a boat ride all the way.

Yet those who chose to buy their way around the left flank forgot or never understood the brevity of the navigation season on the Yukon River. Eighteen hundred stampeders took the all-water route in the fall of 1897, but only forty-three reached the Klondike before winter and, of these, thirty-five had to turn back because in the last frantic moments they had flung their outfits aside and could not replace them in Dawson.