Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush, 1896-1899 (69 page)

Half a dozen cities owe their growth to the gold rush. Tacoma, Portland, Victoria, and San Francisco all felt its impact. Vancouver’s population almost doubled during the stampede period. Edmonton sprang from a hamlet of twelve hundred to a flourishing town of four thousand. The greatest effect was felt in Seattle; in 1899 alone, twelve hundred new houses mushroomed up in the city, and the merchants, who before the rush had sold goods worth an annual three hundred thousand, now found that their direct interest in outfitting amounted to ten million.

There were some subtler side-effects. In the United States the output of Klondike and later of Alaska gold from Nome produced the same results that Bryan had hoped for in his advocacy of free silver. It meant the end of the depression as much as it meant the eclipse of the Bryanites. North of the border, the transcontinental rail traffic that the Klondike inspired became an important factor in the great western Canadian boom that ran unfettered for more than a decade.

The real legacy of the stampede is less tangible, however, for it has to do with the shaping of human character. Sprinkled across the continent were thousands of men stamped indelibly with the Klondike experience. One such was Norman Lee, the thirty-six-year-old Chilcoten rancher who tried to drive two hundred head of cattle north to the Klondike along the Ashcroft Trail. Fighting mud, poisonous weed, and starvation, Lee and his wranglers somehow managed to get most of their beef to Teslin Lake. By then the animals were not much more than skin and bone, but Lee determined to push forward. He built two scows, butchered his meat, and sailed off down the long corridor of the lake, with a fresh breeze carrying him north. Three days later a storm came up, both scows were wrecked, the beef was lost, and Lee, who had operated a prosperous ranching business in British Columbia, was destitute. He sold everything he had, including his only overcoat, to raise enough money to buy provisions for the long journey back. And off he went, dragging his sleigh behind him – retracing the same dismal route through the ghost-towns of Glenora and Telegraph Creek and then down the slushy Stikine to Wrangell. By the time he reached Vancouver, after three months of hard travel, all he had left in the world was a dog, a blanket roll, and a dollar; but he did not seem particularly concerned with his plight. After the Klondike experience, there was very little that would faze Norman Lee. He started afresh again in the Chilcoten, and when he died at the age of seventy-nine – a prosperous rancher and merchant – he had become a legend in his own time.

It is not surprising that an extraordinary number of public figures in the last half-century have had a Klondike background. The Mayor of San Francisco during the earthquake was a Klondiker, and so, for seven terms, was the senior senator from Nevada. During the 1930’s a Speaker of the Canadian House of Commons was a veteran of ’98; so was the Premier of British Columbia. During the Great War, Joe Boyle, the sparring-partner of Frank Slavin, enriched by mining concessions, personally recruited and equipped a machinegun battalion of Klondike pioneers. They became the most heavily decorated group of combatants in the Canadian Army; more than sixty per cent received medals for bravery.

The Klondike experience had taught all these men that they were capable of a kind of achievement they had never dreamed possible. It was this, perhaps more than anything else, that set them apart from their fellows. In the years that followed, they tended to run their lives as if they were scaling a perpetual Chilkoot, secure in the knowledge that any obstacle, real or imagined, can be conquered by a determined man. For each had come to realize that the great stampede, with all its searchings and its yearnings, with all its bitter surprises, its thorny impediments, and its unexpected fulfilments, was, in a way, a rough approximation to life itself.

3

River of
ghosts

In Dawson City the weeds grow rankly along the rotting wooden sidewalks. The willows and the aspens, the currant bushes and the bearberries have encroached upon the town, blurring its edges and hiding the rusting mining machinery that lies in heaps in some of the vacant lots. From the hills above, the checkerboard pattern of streets and avenues, laid out so neatly in the days of Ladue, can still be discerned; but there are great ragged gaps in the town now where buildings have been burned down, or been torn down, or simply fallen down.

There are about five hundred people living here today.

Lousetown has vanished and so has West Dawson, on the far side of the river; no vestige of them remains.

A few false-fronted buildings, empty now, still stand on Front Street. One or two of them go back as far as 1900. It is doubtful if a single one remains from the climactic days of 1898. There have been too many fires.

Around the corner, on King, only a few steps from the spot where the Oatley Sisters danced and Nigger Jim Daugherty ran the Pavilion, there stood until 1962 a reeling cadaver of a building whose former splendour could be seen dimly in the ornately carved pillars, the intricate cornices, and the rococo lines of its entranceway. It was propped up on one side by beams because the permafrost on which it rested had caused it to lean drunkenly to the east. A sign identified it as “The Nugget Dance Hall,” but this was a modern title designed to attract the tourists who drove into Dawson from a spur of the Alaska Highway. This old and broken structure was really Arizona Charlie’s famous Palace Grand, the only noteworthy landmark that had survived from the stampede days. In 1962, it was restored to its former splendour and it is today a major tourist attraction.

A road of pure white channel gravel winds out along the Klondike Valley towards Bonanza. But the Klondike and its tributary valleys would be unrecognizable to the men of ’98; they are choked with mountains of gravel tailings, churned up by the great dredees that for half a century have mined the creekbeds. These tailings run like miniature alps for miles; and the water, changed in its course by the dredging, finds its way between them in a thin trickle. The hills, still bare of trees, are marked by the hesitant lines of old ditches and broken flumes and the scars left by hydraulic nozzles.

Some of this ground has been worked three times – first by individual miners, next by early dredges, and later by more modern dredges. But there are no dredges left in the Klondike Valley. From Carmack’s day until the end of the mining period it yielded more than three hundred million dollars in dust and nuggets. Now, only the tailing piles, blurred by willow and alder, remain.

Here and there, where no dredge has dug, the remnants of the great stampede can still be found: rusting picks and shovels lying among the alders; the crumbling boards of ancient sluiceboxes; old wheelbarrows; cabins with their roofs fallen in from the weight of winter snows; an occasional store of photographs, old newspapers, or letters from a bygone age; and sometimes an old man working slowly away at his claim, after the fashion of the early prospectors.

The Yukon River is no longer the great artery of the north. The planes that zoom off the tarmac at the great airports of Whitehorse, Fairbanks, and Anchorage; the cars, buses, and transport trucks that roar up the Alaska Highway and its tributary roads, have made the steamboat obsolete. In all the two thousand two hundred miles of the great river, from Whitehorse to Norton Sound, every foot of it navigable, there is not a single stern-wheeler today.

The bones and machinery of the floating palaces lie scattered along the length of the river. Captain Goddard’s little boat can still be seen on a clear day beneath the waters of Lake Laberge. The little
May West
was sunk in the same body of water. The famous
Yukoner
and the
Bonanza King
were used as warehouses for lumber storage at Whitehorse for decades. The
Weare
and the
Bella
, the
Healy
and the
Hamilton
, the
Susie
and the
Hannah
, and many of the other vessels operated by the N.A.T. and A.C. companies are rotting at St. Michael.

Skagway has become a quiet port of a few hundred people, living on its memories. Oddly, the town’s greatest asset, from the point of view of the tourist trade, is the unseen presence of Soapy Smith. Trains rumble through the White Pass as William Moore once prophesied they would, and alongside the right of way an observant traveller can see a worn pathway which is the trail of ’98. For half a century the Chilkoot remained as silent as it was in the days of George Holt, its first explorer. The towns it fed: the Scales, Sheep Camp, and Dyea, vanished. Then, in the early 1970’s, with the trail freshly marked on both sides of the border and campgrounds established for hikers, a thin trickle of men and women once more began to cross the famous pass on a voyage of re-discovery.

Many of the old river towns along the Yukon – Selkirk, Stewart City, Big Salmon, Fortymile, Circle, and Rampart – have also disappeared from sight. A few moss-roofed cabins surrounded by a jungle undergrowth are all that is left of them; one or two are gone without a trace. And so a man in a poling-boat can drift downstream for mile after mile without seeing any sign of humankind, as in the distant days of Harper, McQuesten, Mayo, and Ladue. And were a visitor from those times dropped into the Yukon Valley today, he would find the great river unchanged by the passage of those delirious years, pursuing as always its quest for the ocean, moving like the stream of life out of its mountain cradle to its final rest in the Bering Sea – hesitantly at first and then more strongly, faltering for a moment at the Circle’s rim, then plunging confidently onward, surmounting obstacle and hindrance until its goal is reached.

Once again the land is silent, save for the sound of gurgling water. Down from the mountains the little streams tumble, plucking at the eroding rock and shale. Down through the forests the tributary creeks run, patiently fashioning the landscape. Down to the main river the water pours, bringing its tribute of rock and sand, gravel and silt. Men come and go, but the inevitable cycle of erosion continues as before, sand scouring sand, gravel grinding against gravel, boulder grating on boulder. High on the furrowed table land, deep in the clefts of the valleys, and on the headwaters of a thousand tentacle streams the inexorable process goes on. And perhaps somewhere in some untravelled corner of this wilderness, in an undiscovered nook or cranny, there is still gold.

*In August, 1971, at Lake Lindemann, I came upon a man who was trying to do just that. I suppose you could call him a hippy. He had lived for a time in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco but had tired of that life. After reading
Klondike
, he decided that he would attempt to duplicate exactly the feats of ’98. He went north to Juneau and worked in the mines, accumulating enough cash for a grubstake. Then, wearing home-made clothing of homespun, he carried something like a thousand pounds of equipment over the Chilkoot Pass. When I encountered him he was building a boat, preparatory to heading down the river. He had never built a boat before, but there he was, whipsawing timbers and carving semicircular ribs out of the centres of large trees. He sent me a postcard in the fall, reporting that he had got safely through the rapids and had reached Whitehorse. He intended to winter at Dawson, then float all the way to Norton Sound.

Chronology