Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush, 1896-1899 (37 page)

At least fifteen hundred men and some three thousand horses attempted this route, although only a handful reached the final goal. Before the summer of ’98 arrived, the trail was a thousand-mile rut, bare of all fodder save for poisonous weeds. Clouds of venomous flies and mosquitoes harried the pack animals as they stumbled through the black bogs, and many stampeders gave up the attempt before the Skeena River was reached. The rest pushed stubbornly northward, swimming their horses over the great olive-green river to enter a dark and desolate land where the moss dripped wraithlike from the firs, where fallen logs and slippery roots blocked the trail, where greasy slate slopes must be scaled, where the lifeless forests were empty of grass, where horses sank belly-deep in mudholes, where the rain fell ceaselessly, churning the soil into a deep jelly, and where the only vegetation seemed to be the prickly and evil devil’s clubs.

Hamlin Garland, the American novelist and short-story writer, travelled the Ashcroft Trail in ’98. Having reached the Skeena country, he reread with astonishment the literature about the route put out by the Victoria Board of Trade, and “perceived how skillfully every detail with regard to the last half of the trail had been slurred over.” Garland wrote wryly that “we had been led into a sort of sack, and the string was tied behind us.”

The route grew more eerie. Along its length, dead horses lay putrescent beneath the clumps of northern spruce from whose branches the pale moss hung in ghostly green cascades. From the hilltops the men who trudged northward could see endless waves of conifers rolling off to the horizon under the grey, drizzling skies. The forests were so dense that only an occasional patch of pale light penetrated them – on those rare days when the sun shone at all. And there was still no grass for the horses – only leaves and fireweed, skunk cabbages and Indian rhubarb, nettles and poisonweed. The names along the way told their own story: Poison Mountain, Reduction Camp, Starvation Camp and Groundhog Mountain. “As most travellers had only laid in grub for two hundred miles, many of them were glad to eat groundhog,” Norman Lee, a Chilcoten rancher wrote in his diary in August.

Lee was one of several men who attempted to drive cattle north to the Klondike along the Ashcroft Trail. He described it as “a sea of mud – such as I have never seen before.” Whenever he tried to move the animals down a slope the mud followed “after the manner of a river, a thick, pasty mud about the consistency of porridge.” By the time he reached Groundhog Mountain, Lee and his party – all of them seasoned outdoorsmen — had discarded every pound of unnecessary equipment. Shotguns, shovels, picks, tents, and even gold-pans were tossed aside to join the hedgerow of expensive litter heaped along the entire length of the trail. Lee noticed first-rate riding and stock saddles lying amid the coils of rope, the boxes of candles and matches, and the rusting mining equipment against which the limping pack animals stumbled. Three of his own saddles were added to the heap. As for his cattle, some were lame, some were dead from eating poisonous weeds, and all were reduced to bone and gristle from lack of feed. Lee confided to his diary that he could scarcely have imagined a country with no pickings at all until he travelled the Ashcroft Trail. Horses and pack animals were expiring daily from hunger, overwork, and lameness apparently caused by the mud. “It was scarcely possible to travel a hundred yards without finding dead or abandoned horses,” Lee noted. Burros, accustomed to dry, rocky country, were especially vulnerable. Lee saw one septuagenarian pack-train owner driven to the point of near madness by his donkeys’ inability to move through a swamp. He seized a heavy club and began whacking at the beasts, crying: “You appear to like it, take lots of it!” The animals stood like innocent rabbits, meekly accepting the fusillade of blows, unable to move a foot. Of that pack train of some fifty or sixty, scarcely one got through.

All along this sinister and ill-marked pathway, mingling with the Indian carvings on the trees and the alien telegraph wire and insulators, were notes of despair and defiance left by those who had gone before: rancorous attacks on the road gang that was supposed to be clearing the trail but was never seen; warnings about the conditions ahead; puzzled queries (“Where the hell are we?”); facetious replies – all scribbled onto blazes hacked in the sides of fir and spruce, birch and poplar. One recurring sign, left by men who had abandoned their lame horses without a bite of feed, read: “If my horse is fit to travel, bring him along.”

On Groundhog Mountain, Hulet Wells, a farmer’s son from Washington State, standing in the rain and mud scribbled an acridly optimistic piece of doggerel on the side of a spruce tree:

There is a land of pure delight
Where grass grows belly-high;
Where horses don’t sink out of sight;
We’ll reach it by and by
.

Another blazed a hemlock, and with a knife and indelible pencil produced an eight-verse poem illustrated by cartoons and entitled “The Poor Man’s Trail,” vigorously attacking newspaper editors, swindlers, steamboat-owners, and others who had advertised this all-Canadian route to the Klondike. It followed the style of “The House That Jack Built”:

This is the grave the poor man fills
,
After he died from fever and chills
,
Caught while tramping the Stikine Hills
,
Leaving his wife to pay the bills…
.

One man tried to cross the Skeena in an Indian dugout canoe with a collie dog and five pack horses swimming beside him. He lost them all in the torrent, blazed a tree with his axe, and lamented his ill-luck in a pencilled message. Then he tied what was left of his outfit in a kerchief, slung it over his shoulder, and continued on.

Another pegged a wallet to a tree with the words: “A thousand miles to nowhere.” Inside were money and a letter of farewell to a relative in Ohio. The wallet passed through many hands and was finally delivered intact.

And still, in the midst of all this suffering and frustration, these men too could not get the idea of gold out of their minds. It was the Grail that drew them on, deeper and deeper into the labyrinth of the north. Of all the sardonic little stories told of the Ashcroft Trail, none is more plaintive than that of the old man trudging along, all by himself, with a pack on his back, and asking querulously: “Where is the gold?” A group of Indians encountered him at Blackwater Lake, which lies between the Cariboo and the Skeena country. “Where is the gold?” he asked them, and they could not tell him. He grew angry when they inquired, instead, if he wished for food. “I’m not a bit worried,” he told them, “but I wonder how far I am from the gold diggings.” On he trudged, still asking: “Where is the gold?” When he reached the Stikine River and they told him the Klondike was another thousand miles away, he blew out his brains.

By the time they reached the Stikine, the hundreds who had managed to traverse the Ashcroft Trail were in a similar slough of despond. A few, like the old man, committed suicide. One German hanged himself from the cross-tree of his tent on the riverbank and left behind a hastily scribbled note: “Bury me here, where I failed.” Others, swallowing defeat, headed down the river to the coast and booked steamship passage home. Some there were, however, who refused to be beaten and who continued to push north. These were joined by a second force of stampeders working their way inland from the Pacific coast.

For, while one contingent was forcing a passage through the dripping forests of interior British Columbia, another was making its way along the slushy ice of the Stikine River, another of the “all-Canadian” routes. The two trails came together at the river town of Glenora, which in March of ’98 was swollen with five thousand persons.

The Stikine Trail had been heavily advertised by the merchants of Victoria and Vancouver as the only practical route to the Klondike. According to one pamphlet published by the British Columbia Board of Trade, the trail “avoids the danger and hardships on the passes and the Whitehorse and other rapids.” Another advantage was that “the prospector on leaving the steamer finds himself in the heart of a gold country practically unexplored.” The Canadian Minister of the Interior, Clifford Sifton, investigated the route in the autumn of 1897 and personally put his stamp of approval on it, for he believed that the Stikine, which leads through the narrow isthmus of the Alaskan Panhandle, could be used to circumnavigate the U.S. customs. Sifton had already been deluged by the merchants of the Canadian coastal towns locked in a desperate tug of war with their Seattle rivals for the Klondike trade, and so he determined upon a wagon road, railway, and steamboat line along the Stikine route. On January 26, 1898, he signed a tentative contract with the two famous railway-building partners Sir William Mackenzie and Sir Donald Mann, who promised to construct a railroad from Telegraph Creek at the head of navigation on the Stikine to Teslin Lake, about one hundred and fifty miles distant, and to put a fleet of steamboats on the river itself. In return, the company would enjoy a five-year monopoly in the area and receive almost four million acres of land in alternate lots along the right of way. Surveys were made, material delivered, twelve miles of grade actually built, and thousands of tickets sold on the route, but the Teslin railway remained a dream. The Canadian Senate could not stomach the land grant and refused to pass the appropriation. Thousands ascended the river to find no railroad, and a trail so rutted and lacking in forage that few horses could negotiate it.

All winter and all spring they dragged their sleds up the frozen Stikine. Near the mouth, like a bright, festering sore, was the Alaskan city of Wrangell, whose lurid history went back to the days of the Cassiar rush and the German hurdy-gurdy girls. After a lull of a generation, it was reviving.

Woe to the stampeder who paused at Wrangell! Soapy Smith’s confidence men, the overflow from Skagway, were waiting for him with their fake information offices and their phony poker games. Robberies were frequent, and guns popped in the streets at night. Women cavorted nude for high fees in the dance halls, and even the sanctity of the courtroom was not immune from gunplay. In February a whiskey dealer on trial for illicit sales took umbrage at the evidence of a prosecution witness, drew his revolver, and shot him as he testified.

Those scenes of chaos which marked all the jumping-off spots for the Klondike – the tents springing up in clusters, the snow-covered mountains of goods, the swirling, yapping sled-dogs, the brawling and shouting men – were repeated all along the broad mouth of the Stikine. The wet slush that coated the river like soft plaster made travel impossible until about two a.m., when men took advantage of the crust that formed in the cool of the night. As spring advanced and the slush increased, goods began to be discarded, so that this trail, like all the others, was soon littered with the paraphernalia of the stampede. The going became so difficult that it sometimes took a week to move nine miles. It was backbreaking work. “Imagine pulling a hand sleigh loaded with grub through a foot or more of slush, temperature of said slush being at freezing point, often up to the middle in ice water, and a keen Northeast wind rushing down the river to meet you,” one man wrote. By April the surface was so treacherous that men began to break through the ice and drown in the freezing waters. “A man would be driving his team with all his worldly possessions on a sleigh. Without any warning, team, sleigh and load would drop through the rotten ice, and the man would be left. Sometimes the man dropped through and the team stayed behind.” When the river opened, seventeen steamboats went into service, but the shallow water kept many of these stuck fast on the shoals and sand-bars.

At Glenora the mail was piling up, as it was at Valdez and Edmonton and Dawson City. The postmaster, almost driven out of his mind by the unaccustomed flood, attempted to solve the situation by burning several sacks of letters and parcels, and, as a result, had to be spirited out of town in a native dugout before the infuriated stampeders could lynch him.

For a good many men, Glenora marked the end of the trail. One ambitiously equipped party had set out from Fargo, North Dakota, with the idea of establishing a combined freighting, mining, and merchandising business in the Klondike. To this end they purchased a thirty-by-sixty-foot tent, enough supplies to provision a general store, and a sizable herd of horses. The expedition split into two parties, one group taking the tent and provisions by boat to Wrangell and then up the Stikine to Glenora and the remainder going overland from Ashcroft with the horses. But the animals were all lost in the swamps of the Spectral Trail, and when the overlanders arrived in Glenora they found the rest of the expedition trapped there by winter. With no hope of reaching the gold-fields, they had set up the big tent, whipsawed some lumber for shelves, used the sawdust as floor covering, and were busily selling off the stock to hungry stampeders. No doubt they prospered, for prices were prohibitively high at Glenora, though not as high as they were farther along the trail where salt, which sold in Victoria for half a cent a pound, actually went as high as sixty cents.

It was here that the Reverend John Pringle began to build a notable reputation as a two-fisted mining camp missionary. Pringle had been sent north by the Presbyterian Church of Canada to minister to the Klondike area. He came up the Stikine Trail and as soon, as he reached Glenora began to make plans to hold a Sunday service. The only suitable place turned out to be a local saloon; that did not bother Pringle, who set off at once down Glenora’s muddy streets, inviting everyone he met to attend the service. His attention, however, was soon distracted by the sight of a man kicking a dog.

“Don’t kick that dog,” said Pringle.

“I’ll kick you,” the dog’s owner replied. He was a newcomer who had arrived by riverboat and immediately bought himself a dog, a sled, and a harness with the idea of mushing north, though he clearly knew nothing about handling animals.