Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush, 1896-1899 (41 page)

Chapter Eight

1
The Chilkoot

2
Up the Golden Stairs

3
One of everybody

4
Death beneath the snows

1

The Chilkoot

For many people today the entire story of the Klondike gold rush is evoked by a single scene. It shows a solid line of men, forming a human chain, hanging across the white face of a mountain rampart. Caught in the instant of a lens opening, each man, bent almost double under the weight of his burden, yet still straining upward towards the skies, seems to be frozen in an attitude of supplication. It is a spectacle that at one glance mirrors all the terror, all the hardships, and all the yearning of ’98. The Chilkoot Pass has come to be a symbol of the stampede.

The routes to the Klondike were all deceptive. Who would have thought that this wall of glittering white, with a final slope so precipitous that no animal could cross it, would turn out to be the most effective way to reach the gold-fields? Who would have thought that, in spite of its steps of solid ice, its banshee winds, its crushing fall of snow, and its thundering avalanches, the Chilkoot was to be the funnel through which the majority of men would attain their goal? Yet that was the way it turned out. The trail through the Chilkoot was higher than the White Pass by more than six hundred feet, and only man could defy successfully its dizzy grade. But twenty-two thousand of the men who assaulted it, each burdened by his ton of supplies, eventually found themselves on the other side.

The gateway to the Chilkoot was another feverish little town almost identical with Skagway: a jungle of frame saloons, false-fronted hotels, log cafés, gambling-houses, stores, and real estate offices bound together by a stiff mortar of flapping tents and named Dyea after the inlet on which it rested. For all of its brief existence it was locked in a bitter struggle with its rival, Skagway, which its two newspapers, the
Trail
and the
Press
, depicted, not inaccurately, as a lawless and terrifying hellhole. Dyea, on the other hand (in the hyperbole of the
Press)
, was “not a wild and woolly frontier town but a civilized community.”

“We desire,” the newspaper wrote, “to call the attention of the reading public to the fact that no more orderly or peaceable city of 3,000 in population can be found in the United States.… The population of Dyea is composed of the better class and no one need feel alarmed. Property is exposed on all sides – hardly a case of theft occurring – and what few crimes that are committed are confined to a class few in number. There is less public exhibition of vice here than in the cities of the States.”

That was not strictly true; Soapy Smith’s men operated out of Dyea as they did out of Skagway though Smith himself did not control the town. Skagway was a dead end where vice flourished because men sat in enforced idleness until the pass reopened. But Dyea, during that gold-rush year, was only a way point; the Chilkoot was open almost continually and so the stampede flowed through the town and on. Dyea existed for little more than a year. The building of the railway through the White Pass in 1898 rendered it obsolete. Until the summer of 1897 it had consisted of a single building – John J. Healy’s trading post. By midwinter, with barques, such as the
Colorado
, dumping as much as eight million board feet of lumber on the beach in a single day, with hotels rising almost hourly (not to mention a three-storey opera house), with men and teams working all night by moonlight and lamp, the newly established Dyea
Trail
was able to report that “as we go to press with our second edition, the buzz of the carpenter’s saw, the clink of the hammer, the whizz and bustle of the lumber-laden wagons, the tooting of the crowded steamers all tend to prove the healthy condition of Dyea.” And yet before another year had passed, the town lay deserted, its buildings reverting to the weeds and undergrowth that sprang up rankly along the braided mouth of the Dyea River.

The setting in summertime was Elysian. The river wound down to the shallow inlet from the chiselled mountains through emerald clumps of grass and darker copses of evergreens, edged by tangled masses of berry bushes reflected in limpid pools. During the stampede this was quickly reduced to mush by the trampling feet of men and animals.

As at Skagway and at Ashcroft, at Edmonton and Valdez, a liquid stream of humanity gushed through Dyea’s narrow streets day and night, so that the air was never still from animal cries and human curses. Only the natives remained silent, and, of all the thousands who attacked the Chilkoot that winter, none profited more than they. The Tlingit tribes were quickly put to work as packers: the Chilkoots, who guarded the pass; their brother Chilkats from the western arm of Lynn Canal; and the Stikines from Wrangell. Over the mountains they stolidly trudged, squat and swarthy and taciturn, a tumpline taut around their flat foreheads, a stout stick in one hand, a pack balanced upon their massive shoulders. Constant communion with the whites had made them shrewd bargainers. They worked for the highest bidder, ran their own informal union, refused to labour on Sundays (for all were strict Presbyterians), and continued to raise their fees as the fervour of the rush increased. Sometimes they would fling the pack of an employer into the snow and go to work for another who offered more money. Sometimes they would stop in the middle of the trail and strike for higher wages. They would not accept folding money, for an early prospector had cheated one of them by paying him in Confederate bills; as a result, they quickly took the gold and silver coinage out of circulation. They treated all stampeders with contempt. At a native church service which some cheechakos attended as spectators, the Tlingit minister read them a stern lecture from the pulpit for not removing their hats. “You white men should be ashamed!” he cried.

The first arrivals at Dyea found that, as at Skagway, their outfits must be lightered from steamer to shore, where they were dumped helter-skelter on the tidal beach. When the tide rose, the scenes that followed were chaotic and often tragic. It was absolutely necessary for each man to move his gear above the high-tide mark before the salt water ruined everything. Monty Atwell, who landed at Dyea on February 22, 1898 – Washington’s birthday – wrote: “We saw grown men sit down and cry when they failed to beat the tide. Their limited amount of money had been spent to buy their stuff and get it this far. With their flour, sugar, oatmeal, baking powder, soda, salt, yeast cakes, dried potatoes and dried fruits under salt water, and without time or money to replace them, their chances of getting to the gold-fields were gone. A terrible blow to the strongest of men.” The new arrivals used dogs, horses, and even oxen to push or pull their outfits across the glistening sands. Atwell watched one old man who was unable to pack his boxed outfit on his shoulders rolling the boxes as best he could, barely keeping ahead of the oncoming waves.

When the wharves were built, they were so icy that a man stepping from ship to dockside often slid back into the sea and had to be fished out with his clothes frozen solid. When warehouses went up, they were jammed from dawn to dusk with crowds of gesticulating men, all demanding their goods, so that the owners had sometimes to brandish six-shooters to avert a riot.

Here, too, for a few brief months, the horse was king. Pack animals were so scarce that even the poor ones sold for six or seven hundred dollars. And although the cost of their feed ran as high as one hundred and fifty dollars a ton, each animal could earn forty dollars daily in packing fees before he collapsed. “Every horse that lands at Dyea may be considered as dead,” Robert Medill wrote home to friends in Illinois. “If one man is fortunate enough to get all his packing done another man takes the horse, and it rarely passes from his possession until death. They mostly die of starvation, as no one brings enough feed, not anticipating so much packing.”

Sturdier animals fared better. Monty Atwell and his two partners purchased a wild Oregon ox, which had been brought to Dyea to be butchered. They named him Marc Hanna, after the notorious Republican Party boss, and employed him pulling their 5,400-pound outfit between Dyea and the foot of the pass. Marc Hanna could pull five hundred pounds easily, and though horses hauling three-hundred-pound loads often passed him on the trail, they tired more easily and the ox invariably beat them into camp. When the job was done his owners did not have the heart to butcher him but sold him for a low price to another party that promised to care for him.

Like so many routes to the Klondike, the first few miles of the Dyea Trail were deceptively easy. A pleasant wagon road rambled along through meadow and forest, crossing and recrossing the gravelly river that meandered through copses of cottonwood, spruce, birch, and willow.

Then, piece by piece, the telltale symbols of the stampede appeared – a litter of expendable goods thrown aside by men who had already begun to lighten their burdens. Here were trunks of every description, many of them filled with jewellery and trinkets and framed pictures that had ceased to have value for men seeking gold. Trunks were the most useless and awkward articles of all, and each stampeder soon learned that the only possible containers for his outfit were stout canvas bags fifty inches long. After every conceivable weight had been discarded, the weary Klondikers, on leaving the river, kicked off their heavy rubber boots and left them behind, as well. Two enterprising Alaskans retrieved this mountain of footwear and took it back to Juneau for resale to newer arrivals, so that hundreds of pairs came back over the passes time after time.

Five miles from Dyea the trail reached Finnegan’s Point, a huddle of tents surrounding a hard core of blacksmith shop, saloon, and restaurant. Here Pat Finnegan and his two husky sons tried to charge a toll of two dollars per horse for the use of their corduroy bridge, until the mounting tide of stampeders brushed them aside. From the Point the trail led directly towards the canyon of the Dyea River, a slender crevice two miles long and fifty feet wide, cluttered with boulders, torn-up trees, and masses of tangled roots. Through the slushy thoroughfare of Canyon City the steady stream of panting men trudged on. At the far end of the canyon, in a strip of woods, a third wayside settlement sprang up, called Pleasant Camp because it came as such a relief after the gloom of the gorge. Now each man felt the tug of gravity as the grade began to rise slowly until Sheep Camp was reached at the base of the mountains. This was the last point on the trail where it was possible to cut timber or firewood; everything beyond was naked rock and boulder, sheathed during the winter in a coating of ice and smothered in a blanket of snow.

The camp lay in a deep basin which seemed to have been scooped by a giant paw out of the encircling mountains. In one of these a small notch could be glimpsed; this was the Chilkoot. Sheep Camp was so named because it had once served as headquarters for hunters seeking mountain sheep, and the stampeders, gazing up at the barrier of encircling white, might well feel that these were the only creatures who could cling to the slippery precipice. On most days the peaks were shrouded in a gloomy fog, but when the sun was out and the sky clear, the pale light glinted on the evil masses of glaciers which hung from the rim of the mountain wall. The summit was only four miles distant, but it was a long way up – thirty-five hundred feet above the town of Dyea.

From the vantage point of Sheep the new arrival could see, spread in front of him and above him, a vast human panorama framed by the snow-grimed hovels of the camp and set against the alabaster backdrop of the sharp-edged peaks. The once-immaculate slopes were spattered by the flyspeck figures of men, and the newcomer, already smarting under the tug of his pack, could view the dimensions of the task that faced him. Within a few days he would be another midge on the mountain inclines, reduced to a cipher by the despotism of the crags above.