Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush, 1896-1899 (36 page)

Two similar all-American trails proved equally abortive. One led inland from Cook Inlet, some distance west of the Valdez area. Lieutenant J. C. Castner of the 4th Infantry had the ill-luck to lead a military expedition through this so-called trail up the valley of the Matanuska and over the divide to the Tanana. By the time they reached the Tanana Valley, Castner and his men were near starvation, their clothing in tatters, their feet torn and bleeding. Castner wrote that “my men often said it would be impossible to make others understand what we suffered those days. No tongue or pen could do the case justice.” At this point the party was spending its days hip-deep in freezing water trying to navigate the rapids, and its nights lying so close to the campfire that the clothing was scorched from the men’s backs. Running sores covered every man’s feet by the time they achieved their objective.

Yet this seems like a pleasant Sunday outing compared with the hardships endured by those who crossed the great Malaspina glacier at the head of Yakutat Bay near the southern border of the Yukon Territory. Into this tortured land of enormous ice masses, treacherous canyons and crevasses, unexplored precipices, and mountains four miles high, a few parties dared to trespass.

Here was an unreal world of shimmering ice, a veritable meeting-place of glaciers, which hung by the dozens from the breastwork of the mountains. They dropped to the sea in crystalline scarps three hundred feet high, from whose coruscating faces great bergs broke off and toppled into the creamy waters. At one point on Disenchantment Bay, which forms a finger of Yakutat, these shining ice cliffs ran for seven miles. And there were other glaciers, of every variety and conformation: some like white ribbons coiling between thousand-foot crags; some like hidden tongues, concealed behind tusks of rock; some like earrings, pendant one thousand feet above the surface of the ocean; some like marble waterfalls dropping from ledge to ledge; some, grey and lifeless, retreating towards the mountain balustrade; some, active and greenly alive advancing upon the sea.

But all these variant creatures of a dying ice age were dwarfed by the mighty Malaspina, the father of glaciers, whose children, in fact, they were. Down from the mountains it poured in an immense fan shape, an icy desert fifteen hundred square miles in size – the largest piedmont glacier on the continent, its six tentacles squeezing back into the black valleys that lay between the crags of the St. Elias Mountains.

It is not known how many crossed the glacier in the stampede winter, but there are records of four parties, about one hundred men in all, who were landed at its edge by the ill-fated and condemned brigantine
Blakely
in the spring of 1898. Forty-one of these died trying to reach the Klondike, and many more were incapacitated for life. They came from Connecticut, Texas, Minnesota, and New York, and they took various routes across the ice, some heading for the Tanana, others striking directly north into the area now crossed by the Alaska Highway, towards Dawson City. All who survived rued the day they had ever heard the word “Klondike.”

The worst experience of which there is a record was that of the party of Arthur Arnold Dietz, a God-fearing young man who advertised in the New York
Herald
in January, 1898, for a partner or two to form a mining company. By February he had recruited eighteen from the scores who replied, and the full group met faithfully each Sunday to plan the trip and familiarize themselves with Arctic conditions. They were a fair cross-section of Klondike stampeders, moderately well educated, middle-class white-collar workers, mainly: a doctor, a policeman, a mineralogist, a tinsmith, an engineer, a clerk, and so on. In April they found themselves dumped on the shores of Yakutat Bay, their machinery and equipment coated with rust, and all their food, except for their flour and meat, spoiled by salt water.

Nevertheless, they ventured off across the glacier on a trip that few men had dared to make before – nineteen sedentary citizens from New York City whose main exercise, until this moment, had been a stroll in the country or a Sunday jaunt on a bicycle.

The setting was unearthly. The ice itself was clear as crystal, slippery as glass, and lovely to gaze upon, being navy blue in colour. But it was treacherous to traverse, its surface washboard-rough and rent by blue-black crevasses, some of them easily seen, others clogged with snow that was sometimes hard-packed and able to bear weight, but otherwise soft as feather down. Off to the distant mountains this monotonous and seemingly limitless expanse faded away, its surface broken only by colossal piles of stones deposited thousands of years before, or by stark ridges of ebony rock that rose island-fashion from the angry ocean of turbulent ice.

Rarely could the Dietz party pitch a tent because of the storms that whirled across the glacier’s face. They slept, instead, in the lee of their supplies, waking each morning beneath a two-foot blanket of snow. Fissures barred their passage, forcing them to detour for miles; and snow-blindness plagued them into rubbing their eyes so fiercely that the lashes were worn away. Even the dogs went half blind from the fearful glare.

After the first week no man could speak to his neighbour. They travelled for hours without a word, and when they stopped to rest were too weary to utter a groan, so that the only sound was the gurgling of the subterranean waters and the high whine of the gales above. In the words of Dietz himself, they very much “resembled a party of deaf mutes.”

It took them almost three months to cross the Malaspina, and in all that time they were never free of the sight of the hummocky ice stretching in endless expanse into the storm. On those days when the sun’s pale halo pierced the haze, they could see in the distance the sharp peaks of the St. Elias Range, the tallest mountains on the continent. Between these massive pinnacles the glacier squeezed like toothpaste, the ice crushed together to form hillocks between which ran deep and jagged fissures. These thin canyons in the ice claimed three of the party before the mountains were reached. Dietz’s brother-in-law was the first to go: he, his four dogs, and his sled containing the party’s most valuable provisions simply vanished into the pit. A second man, who went insane from snow-blindness and dropped far behind, was also lost with his team and his provisions. By the time the third man fell out of sight the party was reduced to subsisting on bacon, beans, and coffee: there was nothing else left.

After three months the men who had started out were unrecognizable. Some had lost twenty-five pounds, and their sunken faces were matted by unkempt beards. They left the ice-field behind and plunged into a different world, struggling through a precipitous mountain terrain as wild as a jungle, where dense groves of alders forced them to hack a trail out of the forest, where the brambles were almost impenetrable and the ground so thick with decayed vegetation that it made passage as difficult as wading through deep snow. Incredibly, they had managed to drag across the glacier an eight-hundred-pound motor, but they were forced to abandon it in the forests.

Before they reached the headwaters of the Tanana, another man had died of fever. In September, with winter coming on, they were obliged to halt. Now they knew that they were trapped in unknown country until spring. Hastily they built themselves a hovel of logs.

They were all partially insane by this time, acting “like a pack of animals.” The boredom was so maddening that three of the party, casting aside all caution, insisted on attempting to reach Dawson overland. They took some provisions, pushed off into the wilderness, and were never seen again. The remainder sat in the makeshift cabin, huddled together for warmth. They had nothing to do but wait, and read, over and over again by the firelight, the single Bible that was their only book. They read it so assiduously that their eyes became affected as badly as if by snow-blindness.

Although the fire was never allowed to die out, the interior of the shack was so cold that ice formed within two feet of the fireplace. They lay in their sleeping-bags, like grubs in cocoons, for twenty hours at a time, emerging only once a day to cook an inadequate meal, often eating their meat raw to save fire, and letting the hours and the days and the months slip by, so that no man knew the date; repeating poems and songs and hymns over and over again to relieve the boredom; and confessing, each one, details of his past life merely to make conversation – details “that could not have been wrung from him by the most severe third-degree methods under ordinary conditions.” They lay so long on their backs that they became sore and rheumatic, while their beards ran a foot in length; and still the winter dragged on while they recited their family genealogies, committed tables of weights and measures to memory, and carved up the cabin walls into grotesque shapes to allay the monotony.

Yet none of these privations was enough to destroy their urge to look for gold. On the contrary, the need to find it became an obsession, for without it the whole ghastly nightmare lost its meaning. In vain the mineralogist in the party explained that it was useless to seek fortune in this frozen jungle; when spring came they must needs sink a shaft, and with their ebbing strength construct a windlass and go through the pantomime of mining. They found nothing but sterile gravel, but even this did not entirely deter them. Three of the party set off on an expedition to the base of the distant mountains, still seeking the will-o’-the-wisp of gold. And here an avalanche buried them forever.

Now they were nine. Their only desire was escape, but no man wished to recross the fearful glacier. When the warm weather arrived they decided to follow instead the pathway of the Tanana River. Before they could set out, another man died – of scurvy – and they were eight. On through the forests they stumbled, the spring blizzards numbing them until they had to club each other with their fists to restore circulation. Their clothes were in tatters, their socks reduced to masses of filthy wool, their moccasins worn to shreds, and their feet swathed in rags. In this condition they were discovered by a group of Indians, who sold them hair-seal coats and fur mukluks. Thus newly attired, but still half insensible, they plunged on.

And then, to their horror, they found themselves once again face to face with the Malaspina glacier. Try as they would, they had not been able to evade it. It lurked at the forest’s rim, a malevolent monster, waiting for them.

The second trek across the ice sheet was far worse than the first. With the coming of spring, the interminable expanse seemed even more of a contorted mass, splintered by the spiders’ webs of crevasses. The snow was frozen so hard that it cut like sharp sand, and one man’s feet swelled to twice their normal size before he died. The storms were so fierce that nothing could be seen farther than ten feet away, nor could any fire be built or any food cooked. The flour supply vanished after six weeks, and the men existed on raw beans and smoked fish given them by the natives they had met. When these were gone, the dogs were slaughtered and devoured. Only then did the storm clear and, in the distance, a quivering line of blue appear. It was the Pacific.

Now completely demented, the seven survivors reached the beach. They killed and ate the last of the dogs, and collapsed on the cold sands, where the U.S. revenue cutter
Wolcott
found them. Four were alive but uncomprehending; three others were dead in their sleeping-bags.

There was an ironic coda to this tale. When the four survivors were brought to civilization, the Seattle
Times
reported that they had arrived with half a million dollars in gold dust. In fact, Alaska’s only legacy was a physical incapacity that plagued them all their lives. Two were rendered near-sighted by the glare on the ice; the other two were totally blind.

4

“Bury me here, where I failed”

The Americans who shunned the Canadian routes did so, it was said, for reasons of patriotism; but national pride, real or assumed, was not their prerogative alone. The Canadians and the British had their own sense of public spirit which dovetailed neatly with their desires to avoid the American customs officers at Dyea and Skagway. Boards of Trade in Canadian cities played upon this attitude, and the Dominion rang with chauvinistic slogans about the wisdom and economy of staying on British soil for the entire journey. Indeed, the pamphlets issued in favour of these trails were so alluring that many Americans chose them in preference to those that led through Alaska.

One such route, known as the Ashcroft Trail (and sometimes called “the Spectral Trail”), ran north for one thousand miles through the tangled interior of British Columbia. It began at the town of Ashcroft, which was reached from Vancouver, one hundred and twenty-five miles to the southwest, and then worked its way through the Fraser River country and the old Cariboo mining district. From here it followed the route of the Collins Overland Telegraph towards Teslin Lake at the headwaters of the Yukon River. There were still some faint remnants of the ancient swath cut in the black pines in 1865 by the men of Western Union, who had hoped to link Europe and America with a cable that would run across Alaska and into Russia. This astonishing project had been abandoned when the
Great Eastern
laid the Atlantic cable, but the stampeders could still see the rusting and twisted wire lying along the route. Rotting telegraph poles complete with insulators poked incongruously from the forests, and one native-built suspension bridge was made from bits of wire.