Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush, 1896-1899 (5 page)

Nor was he ever to find time, for the great company, driven from Fort Yukon by the Americans and from Fort Selkirk by the Chilkoot Indians, packed up and retreated behind the rampart of the Mackenzie Mountains. There were others, nonetheless, who had the time and the burning inclination to look for gold. Alaska was purchased by the United States from Russia in 1867, and there were many who saw the new territory not only as a virgin land to conquer but also as a wilderness to which a man could flee. The newly acquired frontier was shaped like a kitchen pot: a long strip of coastal land, aptly named “the Panhandle,” attached to the main body of the peninsula, bordered the Pacific territories of British Columbia. In 1880, at a point midway down this Panhandle, hardrock gold was discovered and the mining town of Juneau sprang up. And to Juneau came the wanderers and the adventurers, the Indian-fighters and the frontiersmen, men from all over the American West who could not sit still. Juneau, in its turn, served as a springboard to Alaska and the Canadian Yukon. Thus was completed a northward osmosis that had been going on since the rush to California, a kind of capillary action that saw restless men with pans and picks slowly inching their way along the mountain backbone of North America from the Sierras to the Stikines, up through Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, and Idaho, leaving behind names like Leadville, Pike’s Peak, Virginia City, Cripple Creek, Creede, and Tombstone; up through the wrinkled hide of British Columbia, through the sombre canyons of the Fraser and the rolling grasslands of the Cariboo to the snow-fields of the Cassiars, at the threshold of the sub-Arctic.

The prospectors came first in twos and threes with little more than a rucksack, a gold-pan, a short-stemmed shovel, and a phial of mercury, living on beans and tea and bacon – men fleeing ahead of civilization. Whenever they struck it rich a circus parade of camp-followers crowded in upon them, saloon-keepers and hurdy-gurdy girls, tinhorn gamblers and three-card monte men, road agents, prostitutes, vigilantes, and tenderfeet. Sylvan valleys became industrial bees’ nests, meadows were transformed into brawling shack towns; the sighing of the wind and the roaring of the river were drowned by the tuneless scraping of dance-hall violins and the crash of butchered timber, until it came time to move on to the next divide and to seek new valleys beyond unnamed mountains. And so, like the forward patrols of a mighty army, the first prospectors reached the last frontier and began, in the seventies and eighties, to infiltrate the Yukon Valley.

The Yukon is unique among rivers in that it rises fifteen miles from the Pacific Ocean and then meanders for more than two thousand miles across the face of the North, seeking that same salt Pacific water. Starting as a trickle in the mountain snow-fields that feed the green alpine lakes, it pushes insistently through barriers of basalt and conglomerate on its long northwestern quest. On it flows, now confidently, now hesitantly, until it attains the rim of the Arctic. Here it falters, as if unsure of itself, vacillates momentarily on the Circle’s edge, changes its mind, turns in its tracks, and, with newfound assurance, plunges southwestward, defying every obstacle until, with the goal in sight, it spreads itself wide in a mighty delta and spends itself at last on the cold waters of Norton Sound across from the easternmost tip of Siberia. It seems an awkward, roundabout way for water to travel, but without the odd tilting of the interior plateau, which produces this phenomenon, without the long and seemingly aimless coil of the great river, there would be no highway into the heart of Alaska.

So with the river, so with the men who sought her gold. They too arrived by circuitous routes, sometimes with faltering pace, sometimes with cocksure step, on a quest that often seemed as fruitless as the river’s but which, in the final assessment, was crowned with unexpected fulfilment.

They crept in upon it from three sides, these first gold-seekers:

In 1873 Arthur Harper came in from the interior of northern Canada travelling north and west from the Peace and Mackenzie river valleys in a wide flanking movement.

In 1878 George Holt pushed directly in from the seacoast through the Chilkoot Pass, the only known gap in the armoured underbelly of Alaska.

In 1882 Ed Schieffelin went round to the Bering Sea opposite Siberia and moved up the long water highway of the Yukon River itself.

Harper was the first of this trio, an Irishman with a square face, shrewd eyes, and a great beard that later turned snow-white and gave him the look of a frontier patriarch. Gold had drawn him north on the stampedes to the Fraser and the Cariboo in the fifties and sixties. Here, staring at his Arrowsmith’s map of British North America, Harper asked himself why, if the run of gold stretched from Mexico to British Columbia, it should not continue north beyond the horizon. Beyond the horizon he went, with five gallons of strong rum and five cronies, pushing down the Peace River in canoes hacked out of cottonwood poplar trunks, following the line of the mountains on their great northward curve across the Arctic Circle and into Alaska. Twenty-five years later thousands would follow in his wake, on the same vain errand.

For two thousand miles Harper and his companions paddled and prospected, tracking their boats across the mountain divides, until at last, in 1873, they reached the Yukon River at its mid-point, where it curves across the Circle. For the next quarter-century the river was Harper’s highway; he roamed it, seeking the will-o’-the-wisp in every tributary stream, testing the gravels, panning the sand-bars, always hoping to find the treasure, yet never succeeding. The gold was under his nose, but he missed it. He explored four rivers that later yielded fortunes – the Stewart, the Fortymile, the Tanana, and the Klondike – but he did not make the longed-for discovery. When he died, in 1897, it was too late. The stampede had started and there was gold to be had by the shovelful, but Arthur Harper was an old man by then, worn out from tuberculosis, slowly expiring in the Arizona sunlight.

Nor did George Holt, the first man through the coastal mountains, find gold on the Yukon, though he sought it as fiercely as Harper. He is a vague and shadowy figure, scarcely more than a name in the early annals of Alaska, but he is remembered for a remarkable feat: he was the first white man to penetrate the massive wall of scalloped peaks that seals off the Yukon Valley from the North Pacific Ocean. These mountains were guarded by three thousand Indian sentinels, and how he got past them no man knows.

In the alpine rampart that Holt conquered, the shrieking winds had chiselled a tiny notch. It could be reached only after a thousand-foot climb up a thirty-five-degree slope strewn with immense boulders and caked, for eight months out of twelve, with solid ice. Glaciers of bottle green overhung it like prodigious icicles ready to burst at summer’s end; avalanches thundered from the mountains in the spring; and in the winter the snow fell so thickly that it could reach a depth of seventy feet. This forbidding gap was called the Chilkoot Pass, and Holt was the first white man to set eyes upon it. Because it was the gateway to the Yukon Valley, the Chilkoot Indians guarded it with a jealousy bordering on fanaticism.

They were men of immense cunning and avarice, these Indians – squat and sturdy and heavy-shouldered and able to lug a two-hundred-pound pack across the mountains without rest. They were a crude, cruel race with Mongolian features and drooping Fu Manchu moustaches, who existed on a diet of dried salmon, a pungent concoction that one explorer described as tasting like a cross between Limburger cheese and walrus hide. They reserved for themselves all trade with the “Stick” Indians of the interior, whom they held in virtual bondage; and they had even driven the powerful Hudson’s Bay Company from the upper river by burning Robert Campbell’s Fort Selkirk in 1852.

Yet Holt somehow ran the gantlet of this tribe, scaled the pass, and penetrated into that dark land where the Yukon had its beginning. In 1878 he emerged with two small nuggets which an Indian from Alaska had given him, and his tales, embroidered by his own imagination, excited the interest of the men at Sitka, the Panhandle capital, which was teeming with the backwash of the Cassiar rush. Twenty prospectors, protected by a U.S. gunboat, debarked at Dyea Inlet not far from the foot of the Chilkoot, and here, after firing a few blank rounds from a Gatling gun, they convinced Chief Hole-in-the-Face that the pass should be opened.

In this summary fashion was the dam broken; each year, from 1880 onward, the trickle of men crossing the divide increased. The Indians did not suffer by this invasion, for they charged a fee to pack the white man’s outfits across the mountains, and they always exacted what the traffic would bear, so that by the time of the Klondike stampede the price had reached a dollar a pound. Thus, without ever sinking a pan into the creekbeds of the Yukon, the canny Chilkoots became rich men.

Holt, having breached one barrier, moved west to wilder land and tried to add to his exploits by invading the copper country of the Chettyna. The Indians there had three murders to their credit when Holt tried to slip through. Poor Holt made the fourth.

Meanwhile, those who had followed in his wake had begun to find the flour gold that lay in the sand-bars of the Yukon, and rumours of these discoveries filtered down through the Rocky Mountain mining camps of the western United States until in 1882 the stories reached the ears of a gaunt scarecrow of a prospector named Ed Schieffelin.

This was no penniless gold-seeker. In the Apache country of Arizona, Schieffelin had discovered a mountain of silver and founded the town of Tombstone, where Wyatt Earp had already completed his bloody tryst with the Clanton brothers at the O.K. Corral. He was worth one million dollars, but his appearance belied his wealth, for his beard and his glossy black hair hung long and ringleted and his grey ghost-eyes had the faraway look of the longtime prospector. He had panned gold as a toddler in Oregon and had run off at the age of twelve to join a stampede, and in the ensuing generation had been in almost every boom camp in the West. Now he was intent on repeating his Arizona success in Alaska. He, too, had studied the maps and arrived at an enchanting theory: a great mineral belt, he thought, must girdle the world from Cape Horn to Asia and down through the continental divide of North America to the Andes. Somewhere in Alaska this golden highway should cross the Yukon Valley, and Schieffelin meant to find it. The spring of 1883 found him and a small party at St. Michael, the old Russian port on the Bering Sea just north of the Yukon’s mouth, aboard a tiny steamboat especially built to penetrate the hinterland.

The expedition puffed slowly around the coast of Norton Sound and into the maze of the great delta, where the channels fanned out for sixty-five miles and the banks were grey with alluvial silt; where long-legged cranes stalked the marshes; where the islands had never been counted; where a man could lose himself forever in half a hundred twisting channels. At this point they were more than two thousand miles from the Chilkoot Pass, which Holt had crossed five years before.

Out into the river proper the little boat chugged – into a land of terraced valleys, sleeping glaciers, and high clay banks pocked by swallows’ nests and bright with brier rose and bluebell. Here was an empty domain of legend and mystery. In London, globes of the world were still being issued showing the Yukon River flowing north into the Arctic Ocean instead of west into the Bering Sea. And there were stories told – and believed – of prehistoric mammoths that roamed the hills with jets of live steam issuing from their nostrils, and of immense bears that prowled the mountain peaks in endless circles because their limbs were longer on one side than on the other.

To Schieffelin, the broad Yukon seemed to wind on endlessly, tawny and cold, gnawing through walls of granite and wriggling past mountain ranges, spilling out over miles of flatland at one point, trapped between black pillars of basalt at another. Occasionally a pinpoint of civilization broke the monotony of the grey-green forestland – the old Russian missions at Andreifski, Holy Cross, and Nulato, or the solitary totemic figures on the riverbank that marked the Indian graves. For a thousand miles the steamer struggled against the current, penetrating deeper and deeper into unknown country, past Burning Mountain, a perpetually smoking seam of coal; past the Palisades, fortress-like cliffs of rock that guard the Tanana’s mouth; and finally into the brooding hills known as the Lower Ramparts, where the river channels were gathered into a single rustling gorge.

Here, poking about among the mosses and the rocks, Schieffelin found some specks of gold and was convinced that he had stumbled upon the mineral belt he believed encircled the earth. But already there was frost in the air, and the prospector, accustomed to the fierce Arizona sun, became discouraged by the bleakness of the Arctic summer. He concluded that mining could never pay along the Yukon, and he retraced his course without exploring the remainder of the long waterway, which drifted back for another thousand miles to the gateway of the Chilkoot. And so, as it had eluded Harper and Holt, the gold of the Yukon eluded the gaunt Schieffelin, who for all the remainder of his life never ceased to prospect and was, indeed, still seeking a new mine when he died of a heart attack in front of his cabin in the forests of Oregon. The year, by then, was 1897, and the world was buzzing with tales of a fortune to be found in that inhospitable land he had dismissed as frozen waste.