Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush, 1896-1899 (38 page)

“Kick me if you dare,” replied Pringle, “but don’t kick the dog.” Then, as his adversary backed off, he patted the dog on the head and gave the newcomer a lesson in training a sled dog to harness. As a result of this incident Pringle’s barroom chapel was jammed the following Sunday. He went on to the Klondike to become one of the best-loved missionaries in the Yukon.

A few miles farther up the Stikine was a second frenzied community – the one-time trading post of Telegraph Creek, a former way-point on the abortive line to Russia. From here a wagon road was supposed to lead overland to Teslin Lake, one hundred and fifty-six miles distant, but the road was largely non-existent. By spring the whole country was a great marsh, and half of those who had come this far began to turn back. The rest pushed on, and the route to Teslin became black with people and animals of all descriptions: goats, harnessed like dogs, which munched on the bushes as they went by and thus saved their owners the trouble of feeding them … dogs with haversacks strapped to their backs like pack animals … weird conveyances based on the wheel-and-axle principle that jerked over rut and hillock before collapsing … a cow hitched to a sled by a man who milked it every night … a cow and Jersey bull yoked together as a team … a man from Los Angeles hauling in the traces like an animal, with his fourteen-year-old son straining barefoot beside him and a boy of ten pushing behind … a Mountie’s widow with a loaded derringer seeking, not gold, but the man who slew her husband … an Idaho lumberman and his wife, wearing a short skirt and high rubber boots and singing in a clear soprano as she trudged along … a double murder on the trail – one man axed to death, another shot, a third in full flight northward behind a pure-white horse with the police in hot pursuit … a veteran of the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company singing Gilbert and Sullivan in a high tenor … piles of useless equipment strewn along the wayside – sacks of sugar, discarded clothing, the wreckage of broken sleds … and, at one spot, a heap of dogfood five feet high, piled like cord wood and abandoned…

 … And in the midst of all this hurly-burly, the most outlandish sight of all: two hundred and three uniformed soldiers in scarlet jackets and white helmets marching as best they could in close order, with the help of Hudson’s Bay packers and mules, trudging in step through mudholes and over rocks and stumps, performing barrack-square evolutions, spearing fish with their bayonets, and dragging their Maxim guns along with them. This was the Yukon Field Force, made up of officers and men from the Royal Canadian Rifles, the Royal Canadian Dragoons, and the Royal Canadian Artillery, and sent north to reinforce the Mounted Police by a government which feared that the influx of foreigners might cause an insurrection that could wrench the North from Canada.

5

Overland from Edmonton

While thousands were trying to reach the Klondike over glaciers, mountain passes, river routes, and swamps, the merchants of Edmonton were doing their utmost to convince the world that their city was the gateway to the only practicable trails of ’98. In point of fact, as hundreds were to discover, some of these trails were among the most impracticable. Sam Steele of the Mounted Police thought it “incomprehensible that sane men” would attempt any of the overland routes from Edmonton, and fifty-seven years later one of those who tried it echoed his words. E. L. Cole, a bank cashier from Pelican Rapids, Minnesota, wrote in 1955: “…    as I think of it now, I can’t imagine how sane men could have chosen the Edmonton route to the gold-fields.”

But at the time, to hundreds of Canadians and Britons and to many Americans as well this appeared to be the sensible way to go. Edmonton advertised that it was “the back door to the Yukon,” and the maps and pamphlets its merchants distributed made the trip sound like child’s play, for they proclaimed that there was a good trail all the way, no matter which of several alternative routes was chosen. To all inquiries, the Board of Trade replied that “the trail was good all winter” and that “the Klondike could be reached with horses in ninety days.”

There was, in fact, scarcely a trail at all, but, as Winnipeg’s great editor, John W. Dafoe, was to write some time later, to doubt the practicability of the Edmonton trail “was regarded as a species of treason.” Patriotism and good business made Canadians believe in it, and they had the word of Arthur Heming, a noted woodsman and outdoor illustrator, who called it “the inside track” and said that the Klondike could be reached from Edmonton in six weeks by canoe or dog-team.

“All you need is a good constitution, some experience in boating and camping and one hundred and fifty dollars,” Heming wrote, adding that if the stampeders “are lucky enough to make their pile in the Klondike, they can come back by dog-sled in the winter.”

These hasty words were published in the Hamilton
Spectator
and widely reprinted. Because of them, dozens were to lose their lives, including a former mayor of Hamilton, who set out with a party Heming organized (but did not accompany) and died slowly of scurvy in March, 1899, in a hastily built cabin on the Peel River far above the Arctic Circle.

Heming himself had never been over the track he extolled. He knew of it only through the reports of the Hudson’s Bay Company, which had used the various overland routes to the Yukon for decades. But Heming neglected to consider that the traders travelled light in canoes and with dog-teams piloted by relays of Indians and voyageurs, that they carried little equipment but used letters of credit on various Hudson’s Bay posts to keep them supplied. Between these hardy woodsmen and the amateurs, dragging their sleds and their tons of goods, there was little parallel.

A good deal of confusion about the back-door route sprang from the fact that there was no single trail leading from Edmonton to the gold-fields. The all-inclusive term “Edmonton Route” managed to suggest a well-travelled, carefully marked pathway leading from the banks of the North Saskatchewan to the Klondike’s mouth. Actually the country to the north and to the west was a bewildering tangle of branching trails, none of them well-defined, and so the permutations and combinations of routes out of Edmonton were almost numberless.

Those critics such as John Dafoe, who later attacked the so-called Edmonton Route, generally referred to the various trails that led overland to the Yukon by way of the Peace River country and the Liard River. The distance to Dawson by this overland route was roughly fifteen hundred miles. The other main trunk route, known as the “water route,” led down the Mackenzie River and branched off at various points to cross the divide that separates the Yukon and Mackenzie valleys. The distance to Dawson by these routes was about twenty-five hundred miles. But here, as elsewhere, lump-sum distances were deceptive. The longer route proved passable for almost two thirds of the men and women who attempted it, while the overland route was simply appalling. It has been estimated that 766 men, nine women, and four thousand horses set out for the Klondike by one or other of the overland trails; of these only one hundred and sixty men finally reached the rainbow’s end. No woman was able to complete the journey and every horse died en route.

Many of the stampeders that set out from Edmonton spent two winters on the trail. Dr. Kristian Falkenburg, a Seattle dentist, for instance, arrived in Edmonton at the very start of the rush in September, 1897. He did not reach the Klondike until July, 1899, by which time Dawson was already fading away. A sign on a tree on one of the overland trails was a measure of its hardship. It read: “Hell can’t be worse than this trail. I’ll chance it.” The man who scribbled those words killed himself in despair.

In 1897 Edmonton was a small agricultural village of about twelve hundred persons. It consisted of a steamboat dock, some log booms, two sawmills, a brick plant, the remains of the Hudson’s Bay Company fort, and a five-block business section straggling along Jasper Avenue with a hotel at one end and a trading post at the other. Upon this backwater the gold rush burst like a cyclone. Suddenly thousands of men appeared, jamming the streets. The flats along the North Saskatchewan blossomed with tents. Sleds loaded with provisions clogged the thoroughfares. And the zaniest pieces of equipment since the days of the Ark were trundled through town. Indeed, there actually was an ark, a curious boat of galvanized iron intended for use in all seasons, with a keel for river travel and runners for snow. And there was a forty-foot-long cigar-shaped “boatsled” with a wheel beneath it which did duty as a rudder in the water, since the contrivance was supposed to be amphibious. And there was a contraption built like a lawn-mower, with a sixteen-foot axle projecting from either side, the interior loaded with supplies, the exterior covered in sheet steel.

A man known as Texas Smith arrived with a device designed to cross muskeg, snow, mud, and mountain; its wheels were wooden wine barrels, and it was topped off with a sleeping platform. Smith called it “The Duck” and set off resolutely across the rolling prairie, but after the first mile the hoops came loose from the barrels, and after three or four miles the entire contrivance collapsed.

George Glover of Chicago arrived with an ambitious steam sleigh, complete with locomotive and cars loaded with freight, which was supposed to go through mountain passes and traverse gorges and canyons by means of its huge driving-wheel – a four-hundred-pound steel drum with projecting spikes for traction. Glover christened it I
Will
, and a crowd gathered to watch it set off for the Klondike. Black smoke belched from its funnels and steam hissed from its boiler, but as the wheels started to turn, the whole machine began to shudder and groan. With each turn of the driving-wheel the device clawed itself deeper and deeper into the earth, hurling up clouds of snow and flinging pieces of frozen mud into the faces of the panicky spectators. Thus, firmly embedded in the soil, the I
Will
just wouldn’t. Manpower, it turned out, was the only successful means of locomotion on the Edmonton trails.

The stampeders were as picturesque as the machines they brought with them. They ranged all the way from “Steamboat” Wilson, the much-travelled former mayor of Kalgoorlie, Australia, to an Irish peer, Viscount Avonmore, swiftly dubbed Lord “Have One More” by the natives. He arrived with a group of compatriots, most of them old British army cronies, a gaggle of servants and grooms, a hundred horses, and ten thousand pounds of supplies ranging from tinned turkey to folding tables. Legend has it that the outfit also included a hundredweight of toilet tissue and seventy-five cases of vintage champagne. The wine, it is said, was allowed to freeze and so had to be auctioned off on the main street at twenty-five cents a case. Successful bidders took the good bottles, knocked off their heads, and drank them dry on the spot.

The Avonmore expedition died an early death owing to a series of varying mishaps. One of the party, a Captain Alleyne, died of pneumonia contracted in twenty-two-below weather and was buried with full military honours. Another, a Dr. Hoops, sprained an ankle and had scarcely recovered when he stumbled across a sleigh and cracked his ribs. Colonel Le Quesne fell off a sled and broke his arm while another colonel, Jeffreys, was kicked by a horse and suffered a fractured shoulder blade. A Captain Powell, who froze his feet, went out to Vancouver and died there. Captain O’Brien, who assumed command of the group, tried to arrest a colleague on charges of embezzlement but was himself haled into court for common assault. Like so many other parties that took the overland route from Edmonton to the Yukon, this one was riven by squabbles and dissension and finally split up. None of its members reached the gold-fields.

The general direction of the pack-horse trails led northwest to the Rockies where the Peace River rises, then north to the foaming Liard and across the continental divide to the headwaters of the muddy Pelly, one of the Yukon’s largest tributaries. Most of those travelling these routes took two years’ supplies with them, carried on the backs of eight to ten animals.

There were several ways of reaching the Peace River country from Edmonton. The most southerly route, which several parties attempted in 1897, led directly across bush and muskeg, through swamps and over deadfalls, by way of Lac Ste Anne, modern Whitecourt, and Grande Prairie to Fort St. John, one of several jumping-off points for the North. Its most significant section was called “Dog Eating Prairie” because for decades starving Indians had been forced to eat their animals there.