Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush, 1896-1899 (43 page)

Wallace’s tramway did not open until the spring of 1898, but it made it possible for a man’s goods to be transported aerially all the way from Canyon City to the summit of the pass. Its copper steel cable, supported by towering tripods anchored in concrete, was originally dragged up, a coil at a time, on the backs of mules and men. There were fourteen miles of it, with only one splice. At the time the tramway was built, it had the longest single span in the world, twenty-two hundred feet from one support to the next. Steam engines at each end supplied the power, and men struggling along the trail could gaze up and see carloads of goods hurtling through the snow-filled air eighteen hundred feet above them. The cars, each loaded with three hundred pounds, were dispatched at the rate of one a minute, day and night, so that by spring freight was being dumped on the summit of the pass at the rate of nine tons an hour.

3

One of
everybody

On top of the pass a silent city took shape. The “buildings” were towering piles of freight; the “streets” the spaces left between. The blizzard that rarely ceased covered the goods soon after they were dropped, making it necessary for the owners to leave poles or long-handled shovels marking their property. Even these were ineffectual, for almost seventy feet of snow fell on the summit of the Chilkoot that winter, and before spring two “cities” of goods had been buried and could not be retrieved until the thaw.

The pass at this point was a trench one hundred yards wide, through which a spray of snow whirled. On either side the mountains rose for another five hundred feet, their tops masked by clouds and blowing snow. Occasionally the weather cleared, and then, for a few brief moments, a watcher on the summit could look back towards Dyea, thirty-five hundred feet below, or forward towards Lake Lindemann, twelve hundred feet below, and see the unending line of men merging with the horizons. Then the storm would close in again and nothing would be visible for more than ten feet.

The piles of freight provided the only shelter on the summit. Firewood was priced at a dollar a pound to cover the cost of hauling it seven miles by sled from the timberline on the Canadian side. Those who could afford to paid two dollars and fifty cents for a stale doughnut and a cup of weak coffee (five times the price of a three-course meal in Seattle), gulped it down, and were away, for no one wished to tarry. Only the North West Mounted Police held fast to their post. The presence of these men in their huge buffalo coats with the brass buttons of the Force marked the summit as the international border. The first Canadian post had been established farther inland at Tagish Lake, but when the United States failed to take possession of the headwater lakes, the Canadian government placed the Mounties on the mountaintops. It was this summary action that, in the end, established the much contested border at this spot. The sight of a tattered Union Jack fluttering in the storm, and the blurred outlines of a sentry with a Maxim gun, always on duty, was the first indication the stampeders had that they had reached Canadian territory.

Here, every man was required to pay duty on the outfit he had hauled across from the Alaskan side. The prices ranged from three-quarters of a cent on a pound of corn syrup to sixty cents for a barrel of flour. Many an American resented having to pay such prices. One man, whose total duty came to four dollars and ninety cents, paid up with a five-dollar bill and demanded change. The policeman in charge had none.

“Well,” came the reply, “you’d better cough it up; you can’t rob me more than the law allows.”

The Mountie went to some trouble to borrow the necessary ten-cent piece but then walked outside and asked to inspect the traveller’s outfit.

“As you were so particular about that ten cents, suppose you open it up,” he said. “It’s just possible you may have been overcharged. There may possibly be another ten cents due to you and, combining that with a nickel, you can buy a cup of coffee on the trail.”

In the end the luckless stampeder paid more than twenty additional dollars for goods he had not declared. He had no choice: when he tried to protest he was told that if he did not pay, his goods would be confiscated and he himself would be sent back into American territory.

In spite of the Mounties’ general reputation for honesty, a few stampeders insisted there was graft at the customs house. One writer, P. Bernard, told the Dyea
Trail
that after he had paid duty of $20.40 he was asked for an additional five dollars “for sinkerage.” As he handed over the money he asked what sinkerage was.

“For this,” said the customs collector, dropping the bill into his pocket.

Others were high in their praise of the good sense of the police at the summit. Captain Jack Crawford, the noted “poet scout” of the western plains, moved two tons of goods over the pass under difficult conditions. He hired packers to take his outfit to the summit while he followed on horseback. He managed to ride as far as the Scales, at which point his horse broke through the snow and rolled over on him, causing some injuries. It was so cold by this time that everyone had fled from the area of the pass for shelter; even the tramways had stopped operating because of the severity of the storm. But Crawford was so worried about his supplies, on which no duty had been paid, that he hoisted his bedding on his back and made the climb through the whirling snow, in spite of the protests of his comrades. When he reached the customs house he discovered that it was empty; the storm was so fierce that all business had ceased and the broker’s office was covered by twelve feet of snow. The Mounted Police invited him in for a roast beef dinner and told him that because he was so well known they had let his goods go through with the packers on credit. Crawford was elated. He exclaimed: “I would not have missed seeing the Chilkoot summit and climbing it, and sliding down again to its base, for a thousand dollars.” He told the press that “the Canadian officials are neither strict or offensive and not one party in five hundred had their outfits closely examined. If a man has common sense he need have no trouble with the customs officers.”

At night, when the summit was silent and empty, when the climbers had retreated to Sheep Camp on the south or moved on down to Crater Lake on the north, the police held their ground in a tiny hovel perched in the shadow of the overpowering mountains on the rim of the precipice. So thickly did the snow come down on cabin and tents (six feet in a single night, sometimes) that Inspector Bobby Belcher, the officer in charge, had to post a sentry to shovel it away as it fell, to prevent the sleeping men from smothering to death. One storm raged for two months, stopping almost all movement on the trail, but still the police clung to their post, their hut dripping like a shower bath as the snow was melted by its warmth, while the supplies, the blankets, the documents, and the records were slowly coated with a creeping fur of mildew.

On one occasion the detachment was driven from its post by the shrieking gale. The Mounties retreated into the lee of the mountains, pitching their tents on the ice of Crater Lake, a cupful of frozen water in an old volcanic hollow just below the peak of the pass. Here in a below-zero blizzard they crouched while the water rose six inches above the ice, soaking their bedding. Unable to move their tents in the storm, they pulled their sleds inside and slept on top of them. Then, when the wind abated, they returned to their perch on the mountain.

The police checked twenty-two thousand men across the pass that winter – Scots and Canadians, Yanks and Greeks, Swedes and Australians, Japanese and Kanakas. And there were women, too: stocky soubrettes heading for the dance halls of Dawson, their charms concealed beneath their heavy clothing … lithe Indian girls who carried seventy-five pounds on their backs and scaled peaks more nimbly than some of the cheechakos … an old German woman, almost seventy, in a full dress and a lace apron … and, on the lower slopes, a middle-aged woman, all alone, who tugged a hand sled onto which a glowing stove was fastened, so that whenever she stopped she was able to warm her hands and enjoy a hot meal. Jack Crawford, trudging back to the summit from Lake Lindemann, met “a handsome girl, straight as an arrow, blue eyes, curly blonde hair, dressed in boy’s clothes – blue shirt, no coat, with a belt with a .44 Colt pistol strapped around her waist.” Her brother walked ahead of her, carrying a guitar.

Mixed in among the real gold-seekers were fake stampeders sent up from Skagway by Soapy Smith to fleece the argonauts. These confidence men mingled with the endless line of plodding figures, tugging sleds behind them or carrying authentic-looking packs that seemed to be bulging with Klondike gear. Actually the packs were stuffed with feathers, hay, or shavings, while the sleds were specially built dummies designed for fast travelling and a quick getaway. The canvas lashed down over them concealed a hollow shell from which protruded the occasional axe-handle, at the proper angle, to preserve a bona fide effect.

It was difficult for many of the weary climbers to resist the blandishments of Smith’s gang along the trail. The con men built fires for them to warm themselves by, and put up tents to keep out the piercing winds, and constructed seats or ledges for the tired packers to rest on, with shelves at the back so that a gold-seeker could ease the weight of his pack from his shoulders. To a physically demoralized man toiling up the straight and narrow path of the Chilkoot, such temptations could not but appear inviting. On a single mile of trail one observer counted four shell games in operation, each surrounded by an eager knot of players.

As each man, with his ragged beard and sunken eyes, looked as sinister as the next, the devil himself could have moved among them without remark; and if his minions had any distinguishment, it was that – being well fed and unburdened – they appeared slightly less villainous than the shaggy, red-eyed men upon whom they preyed. Old Man Tripp, the saintly looking sinner, was here in his element, working with a younger colleague, Frank Brown, nicknamed “Blue Jay.” One would carry a cane which unfolded into a three-legged support, and the other a book which opened into a counter twelve by eighteen inches across. Thus equipped with the traditional con man’s “tripe and keister,” Tripp ran the game while Blue Jay acted as shill. Tripp could slip a rubber pea out from under the shells so deftly that no one could tell it was gone. As it was impossible for anybody but Blue Jay to win at the game, the two men made daily clean-ups equal in size to those of some of the Eldorado kings. One Skagway pioneer wrote that, as Soapy’s men never lifted a shell for less than twenty dollars, it was not uncommon for the gang to realize two thousand dollars in the space of a day.

Every variety of the human species had a representative on the pass that year. On one hand there was an English nobleman, fastidiously dressed in tweeds, with a valet who, in the late fall, fed him morsels of food while he reclined beneath a net to protect his skin from insects. On the other, there was Wilson Mizner, wit,
bon vivant
, and gambler, who was later to become famous as a Broadway playwright and as the owner of Hollywood’s Brown Derby restaurant. Mizner, scarcely old enough to vote, was the son of an aristocratic Californian family, a towering figure of a man who had already, by his own account, been a pimp and an opium-smoker, as well as a crooner in the bar-rooms of the Barbary Coast. Mizner’s ton of goods on the Chilkoot included certain luxuries; his main item of baggage was a dance-hall girl from San Francisco named Rena Fargo.

Like Soapy Smith and his men, Mizner was not so much interested in finding a gold mine as he was in finding a man who had already found a gold mine. Many of those who crossed the pass with him had the same idea, although their methods were more legitimate. A newsboy struggled up the slopes with a sackful of old newspapers which he hoped to sell at high prices to miners starved for information. Another managed to lug a grindstone over the summit; it had occurred to him that by spring most of the picks in the Klondike would need sharpening. Frank Cushing of Buffalo took ten thousand bottles of mosquito lotion across the slopes. He had bought them for twenty cents each and hoped to sell them in Dawson for ten dollars to the insect-maddened prospectors.

Some showed a profit long before they reached the gold-fields. One woman brought a banjo over the pass and paid her way by giving impromptu concerts as she went along. She wore a man’s tweed coat and heavy pants, but made one small concession to her femininity by carrying, under one arm, a fancy mirror.

Arizona Charlie Meadows planned to arrive in the Klondike with a fortune. He carried a portable bar with him which he set up on every possible occasion, raising the price of the drinks in direct ratio to the height of the trail. At Canyon City, for instance, Arizona Charlie served whiskey for twenty-five cents a shot, but at Sheep Camp the price was doubled, and by the time the Scales were reached every drink cost seventy-five cents. The price, no doubt, would have risen to a dollar at the summit, but a sudden flood was the finish of Charlie’s outfit. This did not deter him, for he was an old western scout and sharpshooter inured to vicissitudes, whose family had been wiped out by Apaches and who had himself fought hand to hand with Geronimo. A veteran of both the Buffalo Bill and the Pawnee Bill wild-west shows, he picked up loose change whenever he needed it by shooting the spots off a playing-card at thirty feet.

The singleness of purpose with which these men and women flung themselves at the mountain, time and time again, would have astonished a dispassionate observer. It was as if each was pulled by invisible strings from whose insistent tug he could not free himself. The worst hardships, the most racking personal tragedies often failed to dampen the fanaticism which impelled each one. A man lay on the trail for all of one day, in agony from a broken leg, while hundreds passed him by, unseeing, their eyes fixed firmly on the road ahead, almost as if each was wearing blinkers. At last a professional packer, Tom Linville, who had carried heavier loads and walked farther than any of them that day, happened by, and picked up the sufferer and trudged uncomplaining all the way to Dyea with his hundred-and-eighty-pound burden.