Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush, 1896-1899 (45 page)

One other person enjoyed the dubious benefits of the Sheep Camp slide, besides the merchants of Skagway. An enterprising newspaperman named Bert Collyer, who had a working arrangement with the Hearst press, gathered a full account of the tragedy and chartered the steamer
Ning Chow
for Victoria. A wild race ensued, for a rival news bulletin had been placed aboard the
Al-ki
, eleven hours earlier. The
Ning Chow
caught and passed her rival in Wrangell Narrows only to discover that a copy of the bulletin had been transferred to the swifter
Amur
. With volunteers breaking coal for the
Ning Chow’s
stokers and the
Amur
belching flame six feet high from her stack, the race continued until Seymour Narrows was reached. Here Collyer won the day. His ship passed the
Amur
, and he landed at Victoria ahead of his rivals only to discover the wires were down. Immediately he chartered a launch for Port Angeles on the U.S. mainland, and in this way scored a notable scoop in the San Francisco
Examiner
. He returned north at once and continued his newspaper career in the Klondike. Later in life he ran
Collyer’s Weekly
, a sporting journal, and made his reputation as a champion handicapper.

Some of the bodies of the victims of the slide were buried in a little hollow in the mountains not far from the scene of the disaster, and even as the services were held, the long line of men resumed its inexorable grind across the mountains. The sun increased its arc as the days lengthened, the snow grew softer and started to slide in lacy cataracts from the high peaks, the wild flowers soon spattered the mountainside, while the sedges and the grasses began slowly to creep over the debris of the previous winter’s rush. The hollow where the bodies rested became a lake, and when summer arrived the last stragglers following in the wake of the main wave of stampeders came upon the grisly spectacle of dozens of bloated corpses floating about on the surface of the water. Thus was the epitaph to the story of the Chilkoot written. The following winter a railway was pushed through the neighbouring White Pass, and the mountains that had resounded to the groans and the shouts of thousands were as silent as the graves of those who had perished beneath the snows.

Chapter Nine

1
Rage in the sawpits

2
The Lion of the Yukon

3
The outlandish armada

4
Split-Up City

1

Rage in the sawpits

All winter the twin lines of humanity flowed through the two gaps in the Coast Mountains until by the spring of 1898 the shores of the slender mountain lakes feeding the Yukon’s headwaters were clotted with people. The two trails from Dyea and Skagway, running almost parallel, ended at adjoining lakes: the Dyea Trail at Lake Lindemann and the Skagway Trail at larger Lake Bennett, a few miles below. A boulder-filled canyon connected the two, and those who portaged past it could not fail to read a lesson from the grave of John A. Matthews, a twenty-six-year-old Idaho farmer who had come this way the previous June. Twice Matthews had attempted to navigate the canyon, and twice he had foundered with his entire outfit. “My God,” he cried out in despair after the second mishap, “what will become of Jane and the babies?” And he pulled a pistol from his pocket and put a bullet through his brains.

On reaching Lindemann from the Chilkoot, thousands came to a halt and proceeded at once to build their boats along its shores. Thousands more, fearful of making the spring boat trip through these rapids that had driven a fellow man to despair, kept moving over the ice until they reached Lake Bennett. And still more, eager to be in the very forefront of the flotilla that was to sweep down these lakes and out into the Yukon, pushed ever farther on, until by spring more than thirty thousand men were strung out for sixty miles, from Lindemann to Tagish, hard at work building a fleet of more than seven thousand boats.

On Bennett’s snow-covered shores the greatest tent city in the world was springing up. They encircled the lake in a white cloud: the bell tents and the pup tents, the square tents and the round tents, the dog tents and the Army tents, the tiny canvas lean-tos and the huge circus marquees, some of them brand-new, and some soiled, patched, and tattered by the winter storms. There were tents for hot baths and tents for haircuts, tents for mining agents and tents for real estate men; there were tent hotels, tent saloons, tent cafés, tent bakeries, tent post offices, tent casinos, and tent chapels. In between the tents was heaped the familiar paraphernalia of the stampede: sleds stacked vertically against mounds of supplies; crates of food and tinned goods; furniture, sheet-iron stoves, mining equipment, and tethered animals – oxen, pigs, goats, and chickens. And everywhere, occupying every flat place along the beach, sandwiched between the tents and the shacks and the supplies, were half-built boats and mounting piles of logs and lumber. Indeed, from the hills above, the lakeshore had the appearance of a vast lumberyard. Planks were stacked like cordwood in towering heaps, or up-ended in wigwam shapes, or strewn haphazardly like toothpicks among the rocks and stumps. Boats by the thousands, of every size, shape, and description, lay bottom-up in various stages of construction, most of them still in skeletal form with their gaunt ribs visible.

A few years earlier this sinuous lake, one of the most beautiful in all of the north, had been as silent as the tomb, but now the frosted mountains that enclosed it looked down upon a fevered and incredible spectacle. As spring crept closer, the rumble of avalanches mingled with the screech of the new sawmills, the crash of toppling timber, the rasp of saw and plane, the pounding of mallets, the incessant tap-tapping of a thousand hammers, the shrill altercations of embittered partners, the neighing of horses, the bleating of goats, and the howling of malemutes. Down the long mountain corridor through which the lake wound, the echoes of this dissonance resounded, rising in intensity as the days grew longer and as new hordes descended from the mountains to join the sweating multitude along the shoreline. The very surface of the lake seemed to vibrate as sleds propelled by great square sails swept by in the teeth of the alpine gales, and dog-teams darted hither and thither across the slushy surface.

And now a stranger, plucked from familiar surroundings and dropped here without warning, might easily imagine himself in another world among a race of inhuman and half-savage creatures, for the boat-builders on the shores of Lake Bennett bore little resemblance to the clean-cut youths who had set off so lightly with their brand-new outfits the previous autumn. These were the men who had conquered the mountains; each had learned something from the ordeal. They had grown tattered beards to protect their faces from the elements, and they had smeared their skin with charcoal to prevent blistering sunburn, and they had fashioned slitted masks of wood to protect their eyes from snow-glare. The stiff new mining costumes in which they had been proudly, if awkwardly, photographed clung to them like a second skin, worn and faded, and patched neatly in a dozen places by unaccustomed hands. Almost all had lost weight; gaunt and paunchless now, with their coal-black, whiskered faces and their primitive eye-shields, they presented a weird and fearsome sight.

Their ordeal was not yet over. Facing each one was the supreme test of the stampede – the whipsawing of green logs into dressed lumber. Next to tracking upstream, whipsawing was the cruellest toil of all, because its effects were mental as well as physical. All along the lakeshore the raised platforms known as “sawpits” became crucibles in which tempers boiled, sputtered, and exploded. Friendships that had withstood the strain of the terrible climb over the mountains snapped under the psychological tension of the jag-toothed whipsaw.

To produce the rough-dressed planks, the peeled logs were laid on top of scaffoldings (called sawpits) and a line was chalked down the sides. One man stood upon the platform and held the six-foot saw vertically against the end of the log while his partner beneath grasped the lower handle. Together they were supposed to guide it along the line for the full length of the log, but it demanded a superhuman faith for each to believe the other was doing his full share of the work.

The cutting was done on the downward stroke only. The man above guided the saw and pulled it up; and then the man below, watching the chalk line on the log, hauled it down again, letting its great hooked teeth bite into the green lumber. As he did this, he received a shower of sawdust in his eyes, and while he swore in his rage at the man above, he himself received a bitter tongue-lashing for hanging on too tightly.

This back-breaking work played out the strongest after a few hours and caused the end of hundreds of comradeships. No story of broken friendship is more heart-breaking than that of two bank clerks who came over the Chilkoot Pass that winter. They had been friends from childhood, had gone to school together and worked side by side in the same bank as youths. They became so inseparable that, rather than be parted from each other, they married sisters. Yet the whipsawing turned them into enemies so insensate that when they decided to divide their outfits, they insisted on cutting everything exactly in half. So bitter and obdurate was their enmity that, rather than divide twenty sacks of flour into two piles of ten sacks each, they persisted in sawing every sack in two. Then each set off with his twenty broken halves, the flour spilling away from the torn and useless containers.

2

The Lion of the Yukon

Down from his eyrie in the mountains to control the feverish throng on the lakes came Samuel Benfield Steele, the Mounted Police superintendent who was slowly gaining his reputation as “the Lion of the Yukon.” Steele’s entire career as well as his family heritage had fitted him perfectly for the job of controlling the swelling rabble preparing to assault the Klondike. His kinsmen for three generations had served king and country and helped make history in the trouble spots of Empire. One had been with Wolfe at the capture of Quebec. One had been with Nelson at Trafalgar. A third had died of wounds and exhaustion after Waterloo. Another had been the tallest soldier in the British army of occupation in Paris following Napoleon’s final overthrow. Steele’s father had been the midshipman who, from the decks of the British ship
Leopard
, fired the broadside that touched off the famous
Chesapeake
affair of 1807. Steele himself had been a militiaman since the age of fifteen, when he had done his part in repulsing the raids of the Fenians across the Upper Canadian border. As one of the original North West Mounted Policemen he had helped negotiate with Sitting Bull after the Custer massacre, policed the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway, and led the pursuit of Big Bear during the Saskatchewan Rebellion. If ever a man was the prototype of the legendary Hollywood Mountie, it was he. His very name had a ring to it that was to make “Steele of the Mounted” a catchphrase. James Oliver Curwood borrowed it as a book title; and Steele’s own character, thinly disguised, appears in various novels about the gold rush.

He was a big man of magnificent physique, tall, powerful, deepchested, and massive-shouldered, “erect as a pine tree and limber as a cat,” as a colleague once described him. He ran the stampede like a military manoeuvre, and it was due largely to his efforts, and those of his men, that there were so few tragedies along those routes the Mounties policed.

Because of Steele’s iron rule, the knavery practised in Skagway was unknown on the Canadian side of the mountains, and it was said, truthfully, that a miner could lay a sack of nuggets on the trail and return in two weeks to find it untouched. One day a man sent up to manage one of the Dawson banks confided to Steele that he was afraid for the safety of the bank-notes entrusted to his care, whereupon the policeman took the package and shoved it carelessly under his own bunk, where, he assured the uneasy banker, it would be quite safe.

On rare occasions one or another of Soapy Smith’s Skagway gang tried without success to cross the border and operate in Canadian territory. A member of the gang walked into the police post on the White Pass summit in the early spring and asked what was needed to enter the Canadian Yukon. The constable on duty replied that a year’s outfit was required.

“Well, supposing I don’t want to comply with your regulations,” the con man said. “Suppose I decide to shoot my way into the country – what then?”

The constable opened a drawer in his desk, pulled out a pistol, and laid it down.

“There’s a gun,” he said. “Go ahead and start shooting. That’s the easiest way to find out what will happen.”

The visitor retreated to Skagway.

One evening in May, Steele himself was sitting in his headquarters cabin on Lake Bennett when he heard two shots ring out.

“Sergeant,” Steele snapped, “go out and see what that was and report.”

The sergeant returned to say that an American claimed to have been cleaning his gun when it went off accidentally. He added that he thought it was one of Soapy Smith’s men.

“Arrest him, lock him up, and go through his things,” Steele ordered.

The police quickly found a complete thimblerig outfit and some marked monte cards. One of the detachment identified him as a member of the Smith gang.

The culprit was very indignant. “I’m an American citizen,” he told Steele. “I’ll have you know you can’t lock up a United States citizen and get away with it. My God, sir! The Secretary of State himself shall hear about it!”

“Well,” said Steele, “seeing you’re an American citizen, I’ll be very lenient. I’ll confiscate everything you have and give you half an hour to leave town.”

The man’s jaw dropped, but before he could say a word the sergeant rapped out a “Right wheel” and he was marched from the room and straight up the trail twenty-two miles to the summit with a redcoat at his heels all the way telling him to “step lively.”