Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush, 1896-1899 (47 page)

When the Mountie arrived, the banks along the canyon and the rapids presented a picture of indescribable chaos. At the head of the gorge was a disordered throng of men, some erecting tents, others sitting glumly on the bank staring at the frothing waters, and all trying to decide whether to attempt the canyon or whether once more to shoulder their packs and shuttle their ton of goods around it. Five miles away at the far end was another dishevelled and demoralized mass of people. Many had lost their entire outfits, others had lost portions; large numbers were crying and wringing their hands in despair while their goods and chattels, stretched across the shattered bottoms of their upturned boats, lay drying in the summer sun. Thomas Lippy of Eldorado was one of these; his scow had been shattered in the rapids, which were no respecters of wealth.

Through the mob the policeman’s giant and strangely comforting figure made its way. They gathered about him like errant children, and when he had their attention Steele spoke:

“There are many of your countrymen who have said that the Mounted Police make the laws as they go along, and I am going to do so now, for your own good. Therefore the directions that I give shall be carried out strictly, and they are these: Corporal Dixon, who thoroughly understands this work, will be in charge here and be responsible to me for the proper management of the passage of the canyon and the rapids. No women or children will be taken in the boats; if they are strong enough to come to the Klondike, they can walk the five miles of grassy bank to the foot of the White Horse, and there is no danger for them here. No boat will be permitted to go through the canyon until the corporal is satisfied that it has sufficient freeboard to enable it to ride the waves in safety. No boat will be allowed to pass with human beings in it unless it is steered by competent men, and of that the corporal will be judge.…”

Steele announced a fine of one hundred dollars for anyone who broke these rules, and as a result of his strict measures the wrecks in the canyon virtually ceased. Meanwhile, an enterprising young man named Norman Macaulay was building a tramway with wooden rails and horse-drawn cars around the rapids. When it was completed, he made a small fortune charging twenty-five dollars to take a boat and outfit beyond the fast water. The Yukon River had become as safe as a millpond. In all that vast army of thirty thousand that floated down to Dawson that year, only twenty-three were drowned, thanks to the ministrations of the Mounties who shepherded the stampeders from checkpoint to checkpoint all along the way.

By mid-June small steamers were being convoyed through the gorge. Captain Goddard, having assembled one of the little steamboats that he and his wife brought across the mountains, determined to take it through under its own power. His passengers included two singing sisters named Polly and Lottie Oatley, who were later to make their names in Dawson, and Coatless Curly Munro, Harry Ash’s partner, who had been sent out the previous fall to bring in a bevy of beauties for the Northern Saloon. Goddard ordered his passengers ashore and then sent the snub-nosed steamer into the teeth of the combers. In the heart of the canyon, soaking wet from the waves that crashed into the pilothouse, the wiry little captain looked back over his shoulder and saw to his astonishment that Munro, who was as curious as he was coatless, had sneaked back on board, lashed himself to the ship with a three-inch line, and was boldly riding out the passage.

The swift journey down the Yukon to Dawson now took on all the elements of a race. Two large boats contained the personnel, equipment, and hard cash of two leading Canadian banks – the Bank of Commerce and the Bank of British North America – and each was eager to be the first to obtain the bulk of the mining business. Two more contained the printing-presses and staffs of two would-be Klondike newspapers, one of them to be named the
Klondike Nugget
, the other the
Midnight Sun
. The
Sun
published along the way under various names; the
Nugget’s
bright-eyed proprietor, a bundle of nervous energy named Gene Allen, had left his own boat and press far in the rear, racing on over the ice by dog-team in an effort to be in town, even without equipment, before his rivals. A variety of other boats contained perishables and luxuries which the owners hoped to sell at sky-high prices to the starving and isolated camp. Thirty or forty were loaded with eggs; several more with recent newspapers; one contained fifteen hundred pairs of boots, another was stocked with tinned milk, and a third carried a case of live chickens which the owner had managed to pack intact across the Chilkoot. One man had a scow-load of cats and kittens, a cargo that puzzled most of the stampeders. Signor R. J. Gandolfo, an Italian fruit merchant, had sixteen thousand pounds of candy, oranges, lemons, bananas, and cucumbers. H. L. Miller had a milking cow aboard a barge and was determined that it should be the first in Dawson. Mike Bartlett, a famous packer on the Chilkoot, moved his entire outfit downriver aboard a series of scows fifty feet long, each laden with twenty tons of grain and provisions.

E. A. Hegg, the Swedish-born photographer from Bellingham Bay, Washington, who had moved his portable darkroom across the passes on a goat-drawn sled, was now in the forefront of the race. Hegg travelled in a poling boat which bore the legend
VIEWS OF THE KLONDIKE ROUTE
. He had photographed the weary climb up the Chilkoot and the tent town of Bennett. He had photographed the flotilla as it set off across the lake. He had photographed the scenes at the canyon and the rapids. Now, as the river broadened and the armada began to come apart, he continued to record the sweep and grandeur of the stampede: a raft crammed with men and animals moored in an eddy, a flag dropping from its mast; a stern-wheeler being guided through Five Finger Rapids by a scow; and the serene face of the river, still shining brightly at midnight when the sun had dipped briefly below the placid hills. Such photographs would make Hegg immortal, but in July of 1898, his floating darkroom was just another dot on the muddy surface of the Yukon.

Below the rapids, for hundreds of miles, the swift-flowing waters were speckled with boats. There were half a dozen to be seen around every bend, from Bennett to Dawson City. In the broad, terraced valley of the Yukon, once so silent, empty, and unknown, a man was never free of the sight of his fellows. All along the banks were camped the Stick Indians, dirty, ragged, and sick-looking, smoking salmon and offering to buy or sell everything and anything from those who floated by. They traded like Arabs, and the cry “How muchee? How muchee?” rang through the low blue hills.

The early spring flowers had given way in June to bluebells and lupins, which ran in violet drifts across the high tableland. The perfume of brier rose was carried across the valleys by the hot summer breezes. Among the rocks and mosses the wild fruit was ripening – clusters of currants, scarlet and glossy black, acres of raspberries and cranberries, and, in the open headland, the creeping vines of blueberries. But by midsummer much of this lotus land lay under a pall of yellow smoke, for the stampeders had left their campfires smouldering, and these touched off raging blazes in the tinder-dry woods until it seemed as if the entire countryside was aflame.

The boats, on leaving the rapids, whisked down that section of the Yukon river system which is called the Lewes, and then, after checking in at the Lake Laberge police post, holsted their sails once more to let the wind sweep them down thirty miles of ice-choked water. The lake, in its turn, led into the twisting Thirtymile, a swift, clear stream of beautiful blue, but so treacherous that it was lined with wrecks for all of its brief length; on July 8 the remains of nineteen boats were counted on a single rock in the main channel.

There were no further obstacles of importance. Five Finger Rapids looked formidable, but few found them really troublesome. Here the river took the shape of an outstretched hand, pointing towards the gold-fields, the five fingers of water frothing between four knuckles of conglomerate rock. The Mounties, who were on the spot as usual to counsel and to caution, warned each boat to follow the right-hand channel, where a swift whirlpool appeared to dash the craft against the rock but at the last moment spun each one about and into the clear. There were few who had time to notice the small cabin perched on the left bank of the river, but some of those who tarried could still discern the name G. W. Carmack on the door.

As the main fleet slipped down the river it was joined, or preceded, by smaller flotillas. Men frozen in for the winter along the upper Yukon were on the move, and, indeed, in the very vanguard of the race. Some had made boats out of their sleds, and one youth was seen sitting on his Yukon sled with his dogs around him, having lashed two logs to the sides to serve as floats. A contingent of about one hundred and fifty boats moved directly behind the crumbling ice, long before the upper lakes gave way. These included the government party under the new Commissioner of the Yukon, J. M. Walsh, the fifty-four-year-old ex-Mountie who had been frozen in at Big Salmon all winter and who was now heading for Dawson post-haste to take over his duties as virtual dictator of the Klondike district.

Other boats poured down from the Teslin River loaded with men who had successfully negotiated the Stikine and Ashcroft trails, while some others slipped down the Pelly and the Stewart, bringing a remnant of the stampeders who had come overland from British Columbia and Edmonton. Like the rivers that fed the Yukon, these small human tributaries nourished the main stream of the stampede.

Twilight and darkness had been banished by the sun, which dropped below the horizon shortly before midnight, to rise again around two o’clock each morning. At the peak of the day the temperature rose to the nineties, and the merciless light beat harshly on the blistered faces of the boatmen. In the steaming forests, mosquitoes, gnats, and blackflies buzzed and hummed in clouds as thick as wood smoke, driving the newcomers to a state of near-dementia. Without the protective covering of a fine-meshed net, sleep was impossible. The mosquitoes were so fat that they seemed more like blowflies, and if a man as much as opened his mouth, he sucked in a horde of insects.

Now the tensions which had subsided momentarily on the calm lakes sprang up again, and bitter feuds arose once more between comrades who had survived previous estrangements. It was as if, with the goal in sight at last, each man was intent on casting off his friends and seeking his fortune in splendid isolation. George T. Moir, a young telegrapher from Stratford, Ontario, who passed down the river with the main flotilla, summed up the situation when he wrote that “brother fought brother and father fought son, and the spirit of forbearance and forgiveness was not known on the trail of land and water into Dawson.”

A man sitting in a boat and watching the banks roll past him like a moving scrollwork could watch in fascination the little human scenes which, like brief tableaux, illuminated and punctuated this final chapter in the movement north:

- Two men caught on the rocks in the middle of the Thirtymile River and, oblivious of their surroundings, fighting with their fists in white-hot anger;

- Two more, on a lonely beach not far from the mouth of the Teslin, solemnly sawing their boat down the middle;

- Ten men at Big Salmon dividing everything up ten ways onto ten blankets, including an enormous scow, which was torn up to build ten smaller scows so that each could go his separate way in peace.

Once again the Mounties were called in to arbitrate these disputes. Two men tried to divide up a single skillet and, this being impossible, were at each other’s throats until a policeman arrived and solved the situation by tossing the implement into the river, to the satisfaction of both. Sometimes, however, arbitration was out of the question. Inspector Cortlandt Starnes listened for an entire day while six ministers of the gospel, who had formed themselves into a mining company, tried to unform themselves again. The policeman finally threw up his hands in despair and reported that each of the reverend gentlemen had accused all the other reverend gentlemen of telling un-Christian falsehoods.

The names along the river attested to the bitterness which was engendered in these last few miles before the gold-fields. There were a Split-Up Island and a Split-Up City on the Yukon that summer. The former was at the mouth of the Pelly, and here boat after boat put ashore to allow partners to divide up their goods and find new partners. There were so many men on this island that they picked a “mayor,” a man from Worcester, Massachusetts. He wore a red oilcloth heart sewed into the seat of his pants as a mark of good will, so that he could be identified as adjudicator when he stepped between two angry associates tearing up a tent or cleaving a stove in two.

Split-Up City lay at the mouth of the Stewart River, where the Yukon splays out into a confusing tangle of channels and islands and where a boat can be lost for hours or even days. The selection of the wrong channel led to endless recriminations, and the halves of boats lying all along this section of the river were mute evidence of a common disenchantment.

From this point it was only a few hours’ run to the Klondike. Eagerly the stampeders pushed on, travelling without sleep during nights as bright as the days, the tension rising as the miles ticked by until every man was taut as a watch-spring. Each boat kept close to the right bank in case, by error, it should be swept right past the city, for no one knew quite where the city was.

Then at last each in turn swung around a rocky bluff and saw spread before him a sight he would remember all his life. Roaring into the Yukon from the right was the Klondike River, of which he had heard so much. Beyond the river rose a tapering mountain with the great scar of a slide slashed across its face. And at its feet, spilling into the surrounding hills and along the swampy flats and between the trees and across the junction of the two rivers, were thousands of tents, shacks, cabins, caches, warehouses, half-erected hotels, false-faced saloons, screeching sawmills, markets, shops, and houses of pleasure. Here, in the midst of the encroaching wilderness, a thousand miles from nowhere, was a burgeoning metropolis. It seemed a little unreal, shimmering in the June heat, bathed in a halo of sunlight, blurred slightly at the edges by the mists that steamed from the marshes. The stampeders caught their breath, half expecting the whole phantom community to vanish as in a dream. This was the goal they had set themselves; this was the finish of the long trail north; this was where the rainbow had its end. They turned their boats towards the shore – a shore already thickly hedged by scores of other craft – and they debarked, still in a daze, yet inwardly exultant at having, after long vicissitude and much remorse and no little disillusion, set foot upon the threshold of the golden city.