Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush, 1896-1899 (35 page)

This great gulf, almost one thousand miles wide, bordered on the west by the thin finger of the Aleutian island chain and on the east by the island-studded coast of North America, is encircled by some of the finest scenery on the continent. Here are massive alpine battlements topped by sprawling glaciers; canyons and valleys glutted by moving rivers of rumpled ice; and peaks that belittle all others on the continent. But, as the stampeders were to discover, the very nature of this scenery, awesome in its beauty, made entry into the interior almost impossible.

There are three main indentations in the Gulf of Alaska: on the west lies Cook Inlet, at whose head the modern city of Anchorage now stands; in the centre, Prince William Sound, one of whose fiords leads to the present town of Valdez; on the extreme east, Yakutat Bay, where the huge Malaspina glacier flows down to the sea.

The majority of those boats seeking the ail-American route went to Prince William Sound and the port of Valdez. Here a great icefield barred the way between the coastal strip and the interior, but, once this brooding mass was crossed, a series of valleys took the stampeders to the Copper River. This river, in its turn, pointed the way across a mountain divide to the majestic Tanana. The Tanana led to the Yukon, and, as every man knew, the Yukon led to the end of the rainbow.

Some thirty-five hundred men and women attempted to cross the Valdez glacier in 1897–98. They began to arrive early in the fall, but the wet snow, six feet deep, made travel impossible. The real movement began in February when the Pacific Steam Whaling Company entered the passenger trade and the first of its steamers headed for Valdez with six hundred passengers lured on by tales of “nuggets big as birds’ eggs” in the land beyond the glacier – and with the usual agglomeration of horses, mules, burros, and dogs. The weather was so wicked in the gulf that most of these animals had to be shot before the ship landed. The mules were useless anyway, because their small feet broke through the crust of snow on the trail. But range horses from Montana and Wyoming which had sold for fifteen dollars in Seattle now brought as much as five hundred.

The new arrivals saw that they must drag their sleds and supplies across three hundred yards of coarse sand and six miles of snow-covered flatland before the lip of the glacier was reached. The ice then rose in a series of benches so steep that a block-and-tackle was required to hoist goods over them. The glacier itself, glittering and flashing like a sapphire in the sunlight, rose upward towards the mountain parapet until it reached one mile into the sky. To the men from the industrial cities it must have seemed like a nightmare. The slope to the summit was twenty miles in length. A nine-mile descent led to the interior lakes and streams and then to the Copper River.

Except for a group of U.S. Army explorers, the men who faced this monstrous glacial cone were novices. They wandered out onto the chill white breast of the ice sheet with a dauntlessness born of ignorance, and the rabble followed sheeplike in their wake. The wavering trail they established led over the most difficult section of all.

Once caught on the glistening expanse of creaking ice, the stampeders began to suffer the tortures of snow-blindness. Their eyes seemed filled with red-hot sand, and the white world around them changed to quivering crimson. The ailment struck when they least expected it, for it was not commonly known that when the sun was behind the fleecy clouds the resulting diffusion of its rays could do more harm than any direct glare.

There were other torments, mental as well as physical: the eternal strain of crawling across the slippery ice on steel creepers, the loss of sleep brought on by the need to move only at night when the crust was firm enough to bear a man’s weight, the constant nausea at having to eat raw or half-cooked food, the fierce glacial reflection that turned faces lobster-red. Quarrels sprang up as swiftly as the squalls that whirled about the summit. Men who found themselves burdened by a snow-blind partner often dissolved the union in the middle of the trail. An old glacier expert, Captain W. R. Abercrombie of the 2nd U.S. Infantry, wryly watched hundreds of co-operative companies break up and wrote to the War Department that “friends of long years’ standing became the most bitter of enemies.”

Here, as elsewhere, outfits were divided with an eye to meticulous exactitude that often bordered on the farcical. There were the three partners, for instance, who broke a small grindstone into three equal pieces, and there was another trio who, in order to split up two pairs of oars, each took one oar and then destroyed the fourth so that none should have it.

The great body of argonauts crossed the ice between March and June of 1898. Few had progressed beyond the summit by mid-April, and fewer knew where to go when they reached it. At the end of April a four-day blizzard blanketed the ice with five feet of snow. On May 1 the snow turned to rain, and avalanches began to hurtle down the sides of the ice sheet, burying men and equipment. One heavy slide buried more than two dozen persons; they were located by their muffled cries under twenty-five feet of snow, and all but two were saved. Their goods were never recovered.

By this time the constant thawing and freezing had rendered the glacier impassable in the daylight hours. By nine p.m. it was just stiff enough to bear a man’s weight, and by one a.m. it would take a horse. All the dark night the eighteen-inch trail was thick with people – those on foot arguing and quarrelling constantly with those on horseback, for each interfered with the movement of the other.

By June’s end, water was pouring from the face of the glacier in a steady cascade. Men were trapped for days on the ice, unable to advance or retreat, and forced to abandon all they owned. Warm moist air pouring in through the funnel of Port Valdez from the Sound struck air blowing through the pass and, rising rapidly, fell to the ground as snow, sleet, and rain. A dense white fog steamed from the surface, turning bacon and ham into masses of mould and sacks of sugar into sticky tubes of syrup. The effect was indescribably weird and, to the newcomers, terrifying. The ghostly, fog-shrouded ice sheet, sprawling down from the hidden mountains, would crack like a pistol shot as it settled. The vibrations rumbling down through the valley caused men to halt in their tracks and horses to wheel and snort in terror. After the tremors, and with a deafening roar, thousands of tons of ice torn from one of the hundreds of smaller glaciers fringing the mountains would crash down onto the main body, while bits and pieces would bound off the canyon walls in a series of overlapping echoes that took minutes to die to a whisper in the valleys far below.

In the final ascent to the peak of the glacier, the slope was one in five, so that after twenty yards of movement the energy of even the strongest was taxed. The wind whistled down upon them with hurricane force through the pass, bringing with it gusts of swirling sleet and snow which froze on man and beast as fast as it struck them, coating all in spectral armour.

By August the glacier was impassable. Only one man dared to traverse its slushy, steaming face: Abercrombie, the Army captain, managed to cross it once more after twenty-nine hours of continuous toil without rest or shelter. On the far side, in the valley of the Kluteena, he found the remnants of the mob building their boats and pushing off down the river, still intent on reaching the Klondike.

The first three miles of the Kluteena were deceptively gentle, but the rest was horror. The unsuspecting boatmen rounded a bend and came face to face with chaos. Roaring like a wounded animal, the river plunged down in leaps and bounds over sand-bar and boulder for twenty-five miles, taking the luckless stampeders with it. Drift piles blocked the main channel, and snags like skeleton fingers reached out from bank and river bottom to pluck at the whirling craft. The entire strip of rapids was strewn with wrecked boats, provisions, clothing, and equipment. On June 1 one observer counted thirty-six rafts wrecked and abandoned in the first few miles of the fast water. One man in four was wrecked and ruined on the Kluteena and left to wander aimlessly along its banks without food, spare clothes, or shelter. Some made one or two trips successfully, shuttling their goods downstream, then were wrecked on the next attempt. On seeing the rapids, hundreds lost all stomach for the Klondike. They turned back forever, using any excuse that came to mind: a sick wife, urgent business at home, a suddenly developing illness.

J. J. Rafferty, a government guide who explored the interior routes from Valdez, summed up the situation in May of 1898 when he wrote: “Men who had faced the storms of the glaciers for weeks, living on cold victuals, overcoming obstacles that would discourage any but the most determined, men who would never have thought of turning back, weakened at the rapids.”

Of more than three thousand who had landed at Valdez, only two hundred successfully defied the Kluteena. By October these had reached the Copper River and were engaged in an upstream struggle with poling-boat and tow-line. The route, long and weary, led to the Mentasta Pass, the high point of land, which overlooked a wilderness empire of scraggly spruce and birch. Standing on this height of land, a man could see the great blue valley of the Tanana in the distance. Beyond that, somewhere, lay the headwaters of the Fortymile. Beyond the Fortymile lay the Klondike. But it is doubtful if one half of one per cent of all who crossed the Valdez glacier that year ever achieved this final objective.

The great majority turned back before another winter set in, fearful that their retreat across the ice might be cut off by melting snow. Thoroughly demoralized, they blundered back in squads of ten or twenty, cursing transportation companies and government alike. Each had arrived firm in the faith that he could pan a fortune and be home in time to eat Christmas dinner with his family: each tasted the bitterness of disappointment. In this ragtag-and-bobtail crew were two strapping young Virginians, weak from illness brought on by gorging themselves on uncooked beans. They still clung to a bundle of heavy canvas grain sacks, each of several bushels’ capacity, which they had brought north with them. The sacks had been intended as Containers for the nuggets they expected to find, lying like apples in an orchard, on the shores of Alaska’s rivers.

At Valdez the mail was piling up, for there was nowhere farther for it to go. The newly appointed postmaster, inundated by floods of letters and parcels, deserted his post and fled back to civilization. In August the government began to issue rations to more than three hundred who had expected to find gold by the bushel but had lost everything in the Kluteena rapids. The whaling company that had incited them on was compelled now to carry fivescore home again free of charge; another one hundred and eighty-five paid second-class fares to Seattle or Juneau. The Christian Endeavour Society built a relief station on the glacier to pick up those men who were too exhausted to return safely, for by this time some were tumbling into open crevasses and being rescued only at great risk. (It took five hours of unceasing work to pull one from a forty-foot fissure.) Snow-slides and high winds often rendered the trail impassable. On November 7 a guide was lifted clear of the ice and carried several yards by the gale. A week later a party on the summit was forced by the storm to claw a cave in the snow with their snowshoes, where they crouched for four days and nights, living on meat capsules.

As the winter of 1898–99 progressed, men began to go mad on the ice. All seemed obsessed by a singular hallucination – a glacial demon who haunted the crevasses. One rawboned Swede related to Captain Abercrombie in detail how this monster had strangled his son. He described a small, heavily built, active-looking creature who sprang from a crevasse and onto the boy’s shoulders with such a grasp that he killed him.

“During the recital of this tale,” Abercrombie reported, “the old man’s eyes would glaze and he would go through all the actions to illustrate how he fought off the imaginary demon. When I heard this story there were some ten or twelve other men in the cabin and at the time it would not have been safe to dispute the theory of the existence of this demon on the Valdez Glacier, as every man in there firmly believed it to be a reality.”

By the spring of 1899 the community at Port Valdez presented a pitiful sight. All winter long, men had died one by one of scurvy – often wrongly diagnosed as gangrene and therefore wrongly treated. It was, and is, a hideous disease, confused in the Middle Ages with leprosy, which it resembles. The blood turns thin, so that the whole body appears bruised, and lassitude creeps through the system. The heart beats swiftly and erratically, and the breath comes in gasps. The legs go lame, the joints ache, the face becomes puffy, the flesh turns soft and pliable as dough, the skin becomes dry and harsh and mottled red, blue, and black. The gums swell and bleed, the teeth rattle in the head and eventually drop out. The breath becomes a stench, the face turns yellow or leaden, and the eyes sink into the skull until the victim, a living skeleton, expires. No wonder that when Abercrombie returned to Valdez in April, 1899, the quartermaster’s agent ran towards him sobbing: “My God, captain, it has been clear hell! I tell you the early days in Montana were not a marker to what I’ve gone through this winter! It was awful!”

The Army man could not recognize the people he had known the year before; they looked like scarecrow figures from a Bosch painting, with hair hanging like string to the shoulders, faces masked in matted beards, each man scabrous and frostbitten. Demoralized and wasted, they staggered about in fading mackinaw suits stripped to rags, their footwear fashioned from the tops of rubber boots attached to strips of gunny-sacking. All winter long they had existed sardine-fashion, jammed twenty to a cabin in a twelve-by-fifteen space where wet and steaming clothing hung from the rafters emitting a poisonous stench that sickened even the healthiest.

These were the dregs of the proud expeditions that almost two years before had arrived to conquer the glacier and dig the Klondike’s gold. In Valdez alone the taxpayers of the United States had spent three million, seven hundred thousand dollars vainly trying to establish an all-American route to the interior of Alaska.