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Title: In the Klondyke
Author: Frederick Palmer
Release date: August 18, 2026 [eBook #79395]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: C. Scribner's sons, 1899
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/79395
Credits: Alan, Peter Becker and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IN THE KLONDYKE ***
[Illustration: The Chilkoot Pass.]
IN THE KLONDYKE
INCLUDING AN ACCOUNT OF
A WINTER’S JOURNEY TO DAWSON
BY
FREDERICK PALMER
_ILLUSTRATED_
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
NEW YORK 1899
COPYRIGHT, 1899, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
TROW DIRECTORY
PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY
NEW YORK
CONTENTS
I. THE START FROM DYEA
Choosing Comrades--Jack Beltz and his Dogs--Fritz Gamble--From
Sheep Camp to the Summit--Packing over the Chilkoot Pass--The
Halt at Lake Linderman--A Night in a Sleeping Bag--Coasting
down the Frozen Yukon--Half Way to Dawson _Page 1_
II. ON THE TRAIL
Personalities--The Forebears of Jack and Fritz--Good Camp Manners--Dog
Individuality--Dude--The Team of Huskies--Wayfarers
at Five Fingers--Fort Selkirk and Pelly--The Thanksgiving
Turkey that Did Not Get to Dawson--A Diet of Flapjacks--Suburbs
of the Klondyke Capital--The Passing of the Trail _Page 36_
III. DAWSON
Social Aspects of Dawson--Cornering the Tinned Food Market--Cheechawkos
and Old-Timers in the Early Days _Page 61_
IV. THE FIRST DISCOVERIES
The Beginning of Mining in Alaska--Forty Mile Creek--Canadian
and American Deposits--The Largest Log-Cabin Town in the
World--Life of the First Adventurers--The Superfluity of
Six-Shooters--Leaving the Latch-Strings Out--The Way of the
Transgressors--Indian Charley and his Nugget _Page 66_
V. MINERS AND MINING
Reaping the Gold Harvest--Thawing and Sluicing--Miners and their
Theories--The Dome--Expensive Timber--Empty Pockets but
Dollars in the Dumps--The First Millionnaires--Color in the Pan--Once
a Prospector Always a Prospector--Figuring Fortunes--Capitalists
in Demand--The Forty Happy Kings on Eldorado _Page 85_
VI. SOME KLONDYKE TYPES
The Fool and his Lucky Friends--More Theorizers--Joe Staley and
Billy Deddering--French Gulch Bench--Good Fortune that
was Deserved--Neighbors and Twins--No Cure for the Gold
Fever _Page 111_
VII. GETTING ACQUAINTED
Mr. and Mrs. “Meenach” and their Menage--The Juvenile Mining
Company, Limited--Voss--The Arch-Deacon--A Sour-Dough
Stiff--A Dalmatian and a Turk--Siawash George and his Steam-Engine--Miss
Mulrooney at The Forks--The Price of a “Square”
with Trimmings _Page 126_
VIII. ARCTIC TRAITS
Daily Life in Dawson--Renting a Cabin--Circumventing the Huskies--Joey
Boureau and his Restaurant--The Faro Dealer’s Wife and
her Bakery--The Laundryman and his Claim--Jack Beltz’s
Schemes--A Pair of Dreamers _Page 153_
IX. PILGRIMS’ TRAILS AND TRIALS
Itineraries--Alleged Unimportance of Experience--The Case of Father
Stanley--Press Agents and Primers of Wealth--The Secretary of
the Seattle Chamber of Commerce his own Convert--Pardners
and Promoters--Outfits--Home Comforts for an Arctic
Climate--Heterogeneous Boat Loads--The Nancy G--Tragedies of the
Passes _Page 163_
X. PROFITS AND LOSSES
Newspapers as Profit-Winners--Hearing about Dewey--A Drop in
Eggs--Market Items--Lemons against Scurvy--The Mercury at
110 Degrees--An Averted Moving Day--Industrious Scavengers--The
Klondyke Itself--Aspects of Summer--Bandanna Hats and
Pink Lemonade--A Restaurant Trust--The Grasshoppers and
the Ants--Disillusions _Page 181_
XI. GOVERNMENT
The Canadian Policy in the Yukon Province--Taxes and Fees--The
Gold Commissioner’s Office--Conflicts between Territorial and
Dominion Governments--Timber Grants--The Value of the
Mounted Police--The Newly Rich at Dawson--The Order of
the Yukon Pioneers--Mrs. Constantine _Page 200_
XII. DOWN THE YUKON AND HOME
Good-By to Dawson--The Extinction of the Unfit--Steamboating to
St. Michaels--Mosquitoes and Sandbars--Pilgrims by the All-Water
Route--Behring Sea--Civilization Once More _Page 212_
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
The Chilkoot Pass _Frontispiece_
FACING
PAGE
“Packing” Timber 8
Pilgrims Resting on the Chilkoot 8
A Halt 14
Guiding the Team 18
Borrowing a Hint from Ice-Boats--Just Above White Horse Rapids 22
Over the Bench Ice of Thirty Mile River 26
Crossing a Brook 32
In Camp--The Dogs’ Porridge 40
The First Boats 54
A Typical Pilgrims’ Boat 66
Yukon Indians 78
On the Creeks 88
A Flume on Bonanza Creek 102
Cleaning Up 108
Shovelling a Clean-Up into a Gold Pan 108
The Discoverers of French Gulch Bench at Work 124
Pardners and Twins for Forty Years 124
Miss Mulrooney of The Forks 142
Jack Beltz 156
“The Huskies” 156
On the Pass 164
Caches of Pilgrims’ Outfits at the Summit 172
Bargaining for a Newly Arrived Boat-Load, Dawson 182
In the Camps of the Cheechawkos 188
A Yukon Steamer 198
The Main Street of Dawson 208
A Dawson Good-By 214
IN THE KLONDYKE
I
THE START FROM DYEA
CHOOSING COMRADES--JACK BELTZ AND HIS DOGS--FRITZ GAMBLE--FROM SHEEP
CAMP TO THE SUMMIT--PACKING OVER THE CHILKOOT PASS--THE HALT AT
LAKE LINDERMAN--A NIGHT IN A SLEEPING BAG--COASTING DOWN THE FROZEN
YUKON--HALF WAY TO DAWSON.
Originally, I had intended to accompany our Government expedition for
the relief of the miners of the Klondyke, which was in part mobilized
at Dyea when I arrived there late in February. As it never went any
farther, for the good reason that Dawson had been rescued from famine
by the migration of a portion of its population, I was left to my own
resources. Wholesome fatigue and clean camps on the snow were better
than the hospitality of a mushroom town built of rough boards and
tar-paper; a little adventure was better than watching for two months
the thousands of pilgrims of fortune in the desperate and monotonous
labor of putting their outfits over the passes; and I determined,
rather than to wait with them for the opening of navigation, to
undertake with dogs and sleds of my own the untried journey of six
hundred miles over the ice-fields of the Lewes lakes and the ice-packs
of the Yukon River which the Government expedition had contemplated.
Whoever was to go with me must be companionable, industrious, and
loyal, lest in pitching a tent in a storm, when limbs ached from the
strain of the day’s tramp, an unruly temper might lead to the crisis of
blows or separation. In turn, I must work as hard as he; for we could
not afford to carry food for a stomach that nourished idle hands.
Precisely the right kind of comrade, equipped with experience, I had
hoped would be forthcoming from among the men who had violated the
traditions of the early communities of gold-seekers in regard to winter
travel. Some members of this hardy little army were almost daily
arriving in Dyea. But their dogs were worn out, and they themselves
were inclined to laugh at my suggestion, more particularly at my money.
Having pointed out the greater difficulties of ingress than of egress,
they asked, with a touch of sarcasm, if I thought that they had made
the journey out from Dawson for the purpose of immediately retracing
their steps.
Meanwhile, adventurous spirits but lately arrived from Seattle or San
Francisco came to offer their services with all the self-confidence
characteristic of a floating population. The references of some
were belied by their demeanor, and the demeanor of others by their
references. All were further belied by their dogs--Newfoundlands,
setters, and what not--which had received a few days’ training for
market purposes in Seattle. In consequence, I was almost despairing,
when I was accosted by a powerfully built, blond-haired, blue-eyed
fellow who impressed his personality upon me at once.
“I hear you’re lookin’ for a dog-puncher,” he said, awkwardly. “My
name’s Jack Beltz. I’ve been a cowboy, and done a good many other
things in the West, and now I’m up against it with the crowd in Alaska.
I think I could do what you want”--and then with sudden fervor, “but
come around and look at the dogs! If the dogs are no good, you don’t
want me, that’s sure.”
“Any further references?”
“Well,” after a moment’s thought, “there’s Bangs, up at the Miner’s
Rest. He knowed me when I was on a ranch in Nebrasky. Dunno what he’ll
say. You can ask him, though. Anyhow, I’d be obliged if you’d see the
dogs ’fore you make a decision.”
He waited outside the Miner’s Rest while I spoke with Bangs.
“Jack Beltz!” exclaimed Bangs. “Well, Jack Beltz’s a fool when it comes
to hosses and dawgs. He thinks they can talk. But Jack Beltz’ll stick
to a thing that’s hard--he don’t like things that ain’t--till he comes
out of it or goes down with it, and all the mules in the army couldn’t
make him mad.”
Then I followed Jack to a woodpile in the outskirts of the town,
where five fat and sleek huskies awoke at his approach, and at his
command lined up like so many soldiers, wagging their bushy tails over
their backs and watching his every movement with their sharp eyes.
From their mothers, who were native Indian dogs, they had inherited
their affection for man, however poor the specimen, and from their
fathers, who were full-blooded wolves of the forest, their strength and
endurance.
In an hour after I had met him I had engaged Jack Beltz on the strength
of the fat on his dogs’ ribs, of his blue eyes, and of Bangs’s candid
recommendation. Placing my theoretical knowledge of the needs of an
arctic climate against his experience as a frontiersman, we quickly
made out a list of the supplies which were to be packed on our sleds,
minimizing everything in weight and bulk as far as we dared, but being
very careful to consider that while we might go hungry the dogs must
not. In all, we took eleven hundred pounds, four hundred of food and
bedding for ourselves and seven hundred of food for the dogs.
Chance made the choice of a third member of the party, whose assistance
was necessary, as happy as the choice of its second. This big fellow,
over six feet in height, was Frederick Gamble, known to his friends as
Fritz, who had given up a career as an artist and had already spent one
unprofitable season with a pick and a pack in the Cassiar district. No
pilgrim accustomed to good living ever accepted a diet of bacon and
beans with better philosophy.
It was already the 18th of March. If, as the old-timers said, the Yukon
became impassable by the 20th of April, we had little time to spare.
There was much in our surroundings on the day of our departure to lend
credence to their opinion. The sun, at midday, which turned the blue
of the little glaciers over our heads into a red, united with the wind
blowing from the ocean to thaw the snow on the mountain sides. In the
many places where the winter trail had been worn down to the sand of
the flats which the Dyea River overflows in the freshets of spring,
the pilgrims had to turn off to the still intact but spongy ice of the
winding little stream of the autumn and winter to find a better track
for their sleds.
Canyon City, where the comparatively level stretch of eight miles of
the flats is at an end and the real ascent of eight miles to the summit
of the Pass begins, had grown into a little village with three saloons
since I had last visited it, only two weeks before. Here the river is a
thundering cataract in spring, dashing through a narrow gorge of rocks
which rise to a height of from twenty to a hundred feet. The sled road
of trodden snow with a basis of ice had become so mushy that the men
who panted forward, dragging their sleds and asking with their eyes,
if not with their tongues, for a hand to help them out of ruts, were
wondering whether they would not be forced to take to the summer trail
running over the wall of the canyon on the morrow.
Beyond the canyon was a community of thousands of tents, Sheeps Camp,
a halfway station in the work of transportation from Dyea to the
Summit if not in the number of miles. It had doubled if not trebled in
population since I had last seen it, which meant that the bulk of the
pilgrims had their outfits this far on their journey. I slept here, the
guest of some friends who had an excellent bed of fir boughs. Before I
was up I knew that the day on the Summit was fair by the tramping of
the packers and the howls of the dogs in the main path, or street, of
the “town.” At this time, most of the days on the Summit were fair,
and it behooved the pilgrims to make the most of them. In midwinter
it often happened that intense cold and a fierce storm of fine snow,
resembling a blizzard in the Dakotas, made the Summit impassable.
The series of steep ascents leading from Sheep Camp to the base of the
final, long, and much steeper ascent, called as a whole by the pilgrims
the Summit, was a struggling line of men and dogs, drawing sleds, and
of horses with packs. Oaths and howls were so numerous that no one oath
or howl came to the ear distinctly. You heard only noise, as you hear
an uproar of individual shouts at a national convention. In the early
days the pioneers had given to the little plateau at the base of the
final ascent the name of the Scales, because at this point they were
wont to balance their packs and readjust them for the last grim effort.
Beyond this neither horse nor mule could carry nor dog could draw a
load. The more supple animal man took his place.
If you would see the Pass, of which so much was written when so little
was known of the Klondyke itself, you have only to imagine a broad
incline at an angle of nearly forty-five degrees, seven hundred feet
in height, running between two snowy peaks at its summit, with men in
the foreground bending under the weight of heavy packs, and gradually
growing smaller as they ascend, until, finally, they seem like ants
dangerously near toppling over with their loads, though, to your relief
and amazement, crawling off the white blanket into the sky.
[Illustration: Pilgrims Resting on the Chilkoot.]
[Illustration: “Packing” Timber.]
In the hard, well-packed snow, steps had been cut, making it a case of
walking up-stairs rather than of climbing. At intervals, more welcome
than the chairs on the landings of an apartment house which has no
elevator, seats had been cut. Men stepping out of the slow-moving line
found rest in these. It was not “game” to groan, but purple faces and
lungs gasping for more power for bodies quivering with excess of strain
told of misery that was felt if not expressed. When a man did break
down he collapsed utterly, and sometimes he wept.
Fifty pounds was the usual weight of a pack for all who did not take
pride in exhibiting their brute strength. These, and the professional
packers who bore the outfits of pilgrims who could afford this luxury,
often labored under a hundred pounds or more. The hero of the day was
an Indian. He took up a barrel weighing three hundred and fifty pounds.
A Swede who crawled up on his hands and knees with three six-by-four
timbers strapped on his back shared honors with him, however. The
descent to the Scales was delightfully simple. You sat down and
tobogganed, using your heels as a brake, without any unpleasant
results if you had well-riveted overalls.
On the crest were piled hundreds of pilgrims’ outfits, separated one
from another by narrow paths, making the whole seem like a city in
miniature. Buried under the seventy feet of snow which had fallen
during the winter were two other such cities, which their owners hoped
to recover in the summer. Beyond floated a large British flag over
the little block-house where the British Northwest Mounted Police had
established themselves to collect customs and to see that no one not
having a special permit entered Canadian territory with less than a
year’s supply of food.
Jack labored for two hours in bringing up the dogs with the empty
sleds, while our goods came on the backs of the ants, who charged three
cents a pound for the service. Aside from the five huskies hitched to
a large basket-sled, we had two St. Bernards, “Patsy” and “Tim,” who
were born in the country, and duly christened and acclimatized there.
With “Patsy” and “Tim,” and my hand on the “gee-pole” by which the sled
was guided, I went under fire for the first time in descending the
inland side of the pass. Man and sled were put _hors de combat_ again
and again, while the dogs, who managed to keep erect, looked back on
me with professional disgust. I wanted to blame my misfortunes to my
moccasins, but Jack wore moccasins as well and maintained his footing
easily. Fortunately for the novice there are three small lakes--at the
time they were three fields of snow--in the nine miles from the Summit
to Linderman, and he could take advantage of the respite when he was
trotting across these to think out, in the hard-and-fast civilized
manner, how to avoid his frequent loss of equilibrium.
We spent the night “at home” with Jack in his own camp on the shore
of Lake Linderman. Jack and his “pardner” Cliff had been among the
pilgrims who had attempted to reach Dawson in the same summer that the
news of the great “strike” was received by the outside world. The ice
formed in the lakes and rivers before they could build their boats,
and there had been nothing to do but to wait eight months until the
ice was gone. Once he had bought a team of dogs, however, Jack became
enamoured of making the journey now at last before him. On the other
hand nothing apparently had disturbed the patience of Cliff, who was a
broad-shouldered giant, over six feet in height. The pair had first met
in Seattle, formed an alliance “for dust or bust,” as Cliff said, and
had thought more of each other “every minute ever since.” Cliff was to
stay at Linderman now, but their alliance was resumed later in Dawson,
when Jack, Fritz, and I dissolved partnership.
While we were putting our outfits straight and Jack was writing a
letter--from his sighs I concluded that it was to his best girl--Cliff
cooked flapjacks and fried bacon, sang snatches of what had been the
latest popular songs when he left Colorado, and talked to his favorite
dog, a Great Dane, who was as scarred as a veteran.
“Think you’re going to be slighted, don’t you, Maje?” he rambled
on. “Froze off your ears already, ain’t you? ’Tain’t no country for
short-haired dogs, is it? Don’t want to lose your tail, too. No, sir.
You’re going to sleep in the tent same’s ever, and if they don’t like
it I’ll tell you ‘sickum,’ and they won’t be with us long.”
Major curled up at Cliff’s feet as usual that night. Inasmuch as he had
a snow-bath whenever he was caught in a storm, he was more agreeable
than many human beings whose bodies had not touched water for months.
In a day we had passed over the only portion of our journey on land,
and we were henceforth, as Jack put it gayly, to proceed downhill with
the current of the river at the rate of eight inches to the mile,
which is fast enough as currents go, but rather poor coasting. The
course of the Yukon through the heart of Alaska is in a semicircle,
with one end at the coast and the other end as near to the coast as
the head-waters of a stream can be, unless it flows on the level. Once
he has reached the lakes, the prospector may float for 2,600 miles to
Bering Sea, and but for this one of the two friendly deeds of nature in
Alaska--the other is abundant firewood--it is questionable if the gold
in the Klondyke would have been discovered in our generation. De Soto’s
exploring party would have had a similar advantage if the Mississippi
had risen within thirty-two miles of Cape Hatteras, and they would have
needed it if the valley of the Mississippi had been like the valley of
the Yukon.
In harnessing our dogs at dawn, as we looked out across Lake Linderman
from Jack’s camp, the only color in sight in the vast expanse of
white was the needle-like fir-trees, cropping through the snow on the
mountain-sides, and the outlines of a few pilgrims in advance of the
main body, already astir, dragging their sleds on to Lake Bennett,
where, with whipsaws, hammers, nails, oakum, and pitch, was to be built
out of the forests the unique and variegated flotilla which was to
line the river-banks in front of Dawson in May and June. Jack snapped
the long lash of his whip, shook the “gee-pole” to free the runners,
cried “Mush!”--a Saxon contraction of the “_Marchons!_” brought into
the country along with many other words by the French Canadians--and
seven gallant four-footed comrades and three figures in parkees looking
like hooded night-shirts began in earnest their journey over the trail
hardened by the pilgrims’ footsteps. By the wayside we passed caches
of waterproof bags, one of them at either end of a pilgrim’s route of
daily toil in moving his outfit forward by relays, his own ambition
making him undergo longer hours and greater strain than he, a free
citizen (U. S. A.), would have endured for any other master.
[Illustration: A Halt.]
Linderman is only four miles long, and we were soon on Bennett,
where the afternoon brought, in sharp contrast to the keen atmosphere
of the morning, a blowing storm of moist snow which wet us to the skin.
When Jack halted the dogs for our first and our worst camp, whose only
consolation was a water-hole that had been made by some pilgrim, they
set up a howl of knowing delight.
With the snow up to my waist I cut firewood out of the abundance
of dead timber, and then cut green spruce-boughs, which, when laid
tufts upward on the snow that was packed down as a floor for our
seven-by-seven tent, made a soft bed. Then I went for a pail of water
and brought in my sleeping-bag, and my work was done. The air had
cleared suddenly, and the weather had turned so cold that my parkee
had frozen as stiff as a board. I pulled it off, substituted dry
moccasins and socks for my wet ones, left the rest of my clothes to be
dried by the warmth of my body, and then, huddling myself up with my
sleeping-bag as a seat, I watched my comrades finishing their allotted
tasks.
Fritz, who had been chosen cook, was sitting with one leg on either
side of the little sheet-iron stove, smoking a cigarette and making
flapjacks. Outside, by the light of the crackling blaze, I could see
Jack stirring something in a pan over a roaring fire with a big ladle
that he had whittled out of a sapling. Weirdly presiding over this
operation, their bodies in shadow and their wolf-noses thrust forward
with epicurean relish, were the huskies. Jack fed them only once a day,
but then all that they could eat of tallow, bacon, cornmeal, and rice,
thoroughly boiled in the form of a porridge. When he took the pan off
the fire he put it, safely covered, in the snow to cool, while the dogs
mounted guard over it, glaring at one another; and then he came to sit
on his own bed, and together we ate by the light of a candle hanging
by a piece of wire from the top of the tent. As I had my granite-ware
plate filled with beans the second time and took my fourth flapjack--a
flapjack an inch thick and seven inches in diameter--a twinkle came
into Jack’s eyes.
“I like to see a man in earnest,” he said.
Then he relighted his pipe and went back to his dogs. Having filled a
two-quart tin pan for each of them, with the ardor of a child he heaped
more timber on the dying fire, and, turning his back to the cheerful
glow, began a technical conversation on the state of the trail with
sleek old Dude, the leader of the team.
Later, when he returned to the tent, the dogs were so many balls of
fur, their noses snuggled under their bushy tails. If two feet of snow
had fallen during the night it would not have disturbed the serenity of
their slumbers, and in the morning at the call to harness they would
have dug their way out and shaken themselves ready for duty. Jack
explained, as he pulled off his moccasins, that they had eaten only
half their usual rations. Having been treated to beefsteak in Dyea by
their generous owner, they rather resented marching fare; but they
would come down to it as soon as they felt the pangs of hunger, he
added.
“Are you tired?” I asked him.
“Me? No,” he drawled.
He filled up the stove--he must always have a fire of some kind
going--and, leaning back on his robe, his hands behind his head,
he looked up at the top of the tent dreamily. He was still in this
attitude when I crawled into my sleeping-bag and quickly fell asleep.
The sleeping-bag did well enough for that night, but I soon repented
of it. With no opportunity for airing it properly, it soon collected
moisture and became as uncomfortable as a coating of ice. After I had
been kept awake for a night by the colder weather that followed the
storm, I ripped it open and used the furs as a robe, which, with the
assistance of a heavy blanket, kept me as warm as toast, though, when I
awoke, there was a glacial path through the space I had left open for
breathing. The wonder to me was that Jack did not freeze his nose--it
was a large nose--for he always slept with his head completely outside
of his coverings, his beard becoming as white with ice as that of
Father Christmas.
“Blister me if I want to smother!” was his explanation.
The first one to awake in the morning crawled half-way out of his
robe, and, dexterously leaning over, put the coffee-pot on the stove
and made the fire out of the kindlings which were always ready. To
dress was to put on your footwear, which had been drying--if it had
not been burning--before the stove. Then the robes and blankets were
rolled up and strapped to serve as seats for breakfast, and you stepped
outside into the invigorating air and did what you might in the way of
cleanliness. For my part, I washed my hands in the snow, using soap
liberally, with astonishingly efficacious results. After breakfast we
had to pack all the things that we had unpacked the night before back
on the sleds and lash them.
[Illustration: Guiding the Team.]
On the Lewes lakes, and the streams which join them in a chain, one
day was quite like another, with the exception of a single event of
importance to ourselves. At daybreak we were on the level trail, now
trotting and then walking, until our stomachs cried a halt. On three
occasions we had luncheon in the tents of pilgrims who, not having been
able to bring their supplies over the pass in the rush of the previous
autumn before winter was at hand, were making for the foot of Lake Le
Barge to take advantage of the three weeks by which the clearing of
the ice in the river precedes the clearing of the ice in the lakes.
While his partner was dragging his sled, one of our hosts was suffering
in his tent the torture of snow-blindness as the penalty of having
gone for a day without glasses. Another host, an old Dane from San
Francisco, had no companion, not even a dog.
“Sometime I do get mad,” he said, “when the sled pull so hard, and I
say, ‘Yohn, you are a big fool to start for Klondyke when you are
sixty-nine.’ But we do not like to gif up. Nefer do we get so old we
tank it too late to make a fortune. If a man know as he would drop dead
on top of the Pass, I tank a man go on to see the t’ing out. I make a
fortune t’ree time, and efery time I haf many pad lucks--yes, very many
pad lucks. Sometime I get lonely, and then I say, ‘Yohn, there is your
wife, there is your shildren; it is Sunday dinner, and you are home
with a pile of gold.’”
How we relished the one rapidly diminishing ham that we had brought
with us for our first luncheons, followed by the perfect relaxation
which comes with good digestion and physical fatigue, glorified by
a pipe, before we arose and turned our steps toward the brown line
of sled-track which stretched out over the expanse of white until
growing darkness made it dim, and Jack began to look out for the first
favorable place for a camp!
At this time it was reported that a great “strike” of $2.50 to the
pan had been made on Walsh Creek, a tributary of the Yukon near Big
Salmon. The rumor afterwards turned out to be an exaggeration--only
thirty cents a pan being the amount actually found, which had grown as
it travelled up the lakes. Many of the pilgrims, among them ourselves,
who already had their year’s supply of food over the Pass, and some
who had not but were able to elude the police, leaving their caches in
charge of friends, put a tent, half a side of bacon, a few quarts of
flour, and a few quarts of beans on a sled behind a lean house-dog, and
hastened toward Walsh Creek without regard to fatigue or exposure. A
sallow and swarthy Quixote who had not made even this provision for his
stomach and none for his back except a small blanket, called upon us
one morning when we were at breakfast. Before he asked for something to
eat he introduced himself as a Cuban who had been a cook in New York,
but had concluded to be a cook no more now that fortunes were to be had
for a little hard travelling.
“You see, gents,” he further explained, assuming a serene air of
fellowship, “I’ve been walking at night so’s to get past the police
stations. They won’t let a feller by when he ain’t got any grub. If I
carried grub I’d be too late for the strike, mebbe.”
“But you’ll observe, I’m thinkin’,” Jack suggested, “that hotels are
few and far between in this region.”
“Oh, I’ll manage to get on somehow. There’s a lot of luck in this world
if you dodge about so it’ll hit you. I didn’t know where I’d get my
breakfast, but I’ve got it, that’s sure.”
He wished us much happiness, put his blanket on his back, and walked
on as unconcernedly as if he had a whole baggage train at his heels.
But this was not until he had suggested with the aplomb of the Bowery
that we would do well to take him on as a “pardner.” What became of
him I do not know. Possibly his body lies among a pile of driftwood on
some sandbar in the river. On the other hand, I should not be surprised
to see him one day on Broadway, a huge diamond in his shirt bosom and
a blond lady on his arm, or to read an account of him in a newspaper
under the head of “From Cook to Millionaire.”
[Illustration: Borrowing a Hint from Ice-Boats--Just Above White Horse
Rapids.]
The Walsh Creek digression caused two weeks’ delay at a time when
we felt the need of every day to complete our journey, and I accept
the awkward responsibility for it. At White Horse Canyon we were
offered the hospitality of a large cabin with a kitchen in one end and
bunk-room in the other, occupied by some workmen engaged in building
a tramway around the rapids. Jack suggested that we stop here for a
day because the dogs needed rest, he said, but really on my account, I
think. I had contracted a bad cough, and my legs ached like two great
teeth. In the afternoon I lay down on the cook’s bunk, and toward
evening Fritz started down the trail to a distant camp to find a doctor
who had turned pilgrim of fortune. Meanwhile Jake, the cook, dosed me
with tea made of sage that he had gathered on the mountain-side.
“Your pulse is up to a hundred and ten,” the doctor said; “but all that
you’ve got is a plain, old-fashioned case of measles. You must have
caught them in Dyea, and you’ve greatly exaggerated them by physical
strain.”
My comrades put up a tent in another cabin which still wanted doors
and windows, thus ensuring a soft light for the protection of my eyes,
which the doctor feared might be affected. They nailed some saplings
together for a bedstead, and were so ingenious in many ways, so kind in
keeping the temperature the same night and day, and in attending to my
wants generally, that I felt like a king in his private hospital. Jake
came in every day to make sure that I was taking the doses of sage-tea
that he sent in morning, noon, and night; while the big workmen came
in to hint that I must not let Jake have his own way too much. And I
lay on my back and thought of two things--strawberries and pineapples.
I would have given all my wealth for either--but not a five-cent piece
for a pear.
My convalescence was not so dull as I sat on a bench in the kitchen,
learning, under Jake’s tutelage, how to cook oatmeal properly, how to
bake bread and to make good pies out of dried apples, and listening
to him expound his ideas of the world. He was a great cynic. If you
believed in one thing, he was sure to believe in another. One of his
favorite remarks with which he baited me was that “everybody is out
for the stuff; there ain’t no honor nowadays; and you don’t catch me
missin’ no dollars.” His boarders excused him by saying, “Any cook
that’s been in a minin’-camp or a lumber-camp is always a blisterin’
crank.” On the morning of my departure I held out a bill to Jake in
partial remuneration for what he had done for me. He stirred the
contents of his pot this way and that, viciously, without replying. I
protested, and then he growled:
“Gwan! What d’ye take me for?”
As I waved him a good-by he called out:
“Young feller, you’re all right, but you won’t argue.”
In two days we were at the foot of Lake Le Barge, and on the second
of these we had travelled thirty-five miles, which made the dogs very
unfit for service on the day following.
So all of another two days’ hard work was required to go from the
foot of Le Barge to the junction of the Hootalinqua over a portion of
the Yukon known from its length as Thirty Mile River, and certainly
worthy of some distinction on account of other characteristics. Many
more boats of the pilgrims’ flotilla were wrecked in the spring on its
hidden rocks than in the White Horse Rapids, which, I may add, have
received undue celebrity. If an average temperature of thirty degrees
below zero continues for several weeks, the current may freeze over,
but rarely is there more than bench ice along the shores; and this,
owing to the increasingly moderate weather and the falling water, was
fast breaking away in huge cakes, which fell into the stream with a
splash. Over that which remained, slippery, sometimes sloping toward
the river at a considerable angle, and often only a foot or two in
breadth, we must make our way. When there was no footing below the
sled, we attached one end of a rope to it, wrapped the other end around
our waists, and if one of us slipped and fell in the soft snow of the
steep hill-side above, luckily the others maintained their hold and
were able to prevent both sleds and dogs from going into the river and
putting an end to our little expedition there and then.
There was only one accident, and that not alarming. Fritz thought that
he did not need our help to bring the St. Bernards over a place that
the big sled had safely crossed with Jack’s back and mine against it
and with the heavy steel prongs strapped to the heels of our boots
dug into the ice. We heard a cry of “Hurry up! This is cold!” and
looked around to see Fritz standing in a shallow eddy up to his waist,
his parkee blown up about his head like a veritable balloon, while
he braced himself against the sled. “I had to jump in to save our
bedding,” he said. We hurried on the faster so that he might keep his
blood in circulation, and he merely took the trouble to change his
socks when we made a camp on a fairly comfortable ice-cake, after
having assured ourselves that it would not float away with us during
the night.
[Illustration: Over the Bench Ice of Thirty-Mile River.]
Near the Hootalinqua the current slackens, and we crossed where the
stream was completely frozen over. Above us was a great jam of cakes
that had floated down, some of which rumbled under our feet, came out
in an open place below, and then went on to form another jam. A few
minutes later there was a boom and our bridge moved downstream with
the noise of a medley of bass drums. At noon on this day the sun had
made the trail so soft that we sank into it up to our knees. We halted
a little later, determined to start at one o’clock in the morning and
take advantage of the crust frozen during the night; and we had what
seemed at the time the good fortune to put up in a cabin which had
been abandoned by the mounted police. Having had an early dinner, we
were thinking of bed at six o’clock when two ragged men, their faces
blackened by cooking over camp-fires, came in. They sat down, and when
they had eaten with the heartiness of famished beings some things that
we had left on the table, one of them, whom his companion called “the
Doctor,” became explanatory:
“You mustn’t mind our appetites,” he said. “We’ve just come from
Dawson. My pardner there, Yukon Bill, hain’t been out of the country
for eight years. Go easy there, Bill! Your manners are bad.”
“Shut up!” roared Bill, looking as wild as a hungry lynx.
“Oh, he ain’t as crazy as Jim,” continued the Doctor. “Jim was a sight
uglier ’n Bill, an’ you can see what Bill is. He took his share of the
bacon on his back an’ started out for himself this mornin’.”
“No packin’ fer me! We kept the dogs, you bet, by----,” put in Bill
through a mouthful.
Jim arrived three hours later. Without paying any attention to the
presence of other persons, he dropped his pack as if it were of lead,
fell down on the bench, pushed back his unkempt hair, and looked
vacantly at the stove.
“Hello, Jim, you loon!” the Doctor called out. “As long’s we’ve said
quits, I ain’t goin’ to be mean. Have one of our flapjacks!”
“Eat yer own dirt,” replied Jim. “I kin cook, an’ I’ve got just as much
right in this cabin as you have.” And Jim put a skillet with a piece
of dirty bacon in it on the stove.
“Don’t push my pan off there, you eight-footed elephant!” cried the
Doctor.
Jim lifted his skillet and turned on the Doctor. Then he set the
skillet down again with the action of one who is too tired for further
effort, and fell back onto his seat.
“You Siawash sons of the devil,” he said between his teeth, “if I ever
git my strength on the outside I’ll lick both on ye till ye bawl like
a calf.” And brushing back his hair again he added, in a protesting
voice, after a moment’s pause: “I kin do it, too!”
“Bully old Jim!” observed the Doctor.
It was plain enough that the minds of all three of our visitors,
especially Jim, had been affected by the hardships that they had
endured on their long tramp, with only snow, trees, dogs, and their own
quarrels for companionship. Most of these grim travellers whom we met
coming out from Dawson--now and then one was limping from scurvy--had
neither tent nor stove, quite inadequate robes, no dishes except
skillets and cups, and no food except bacon, flour, and beans, and not
always beans. Earlier in the winter they put up a barrier of boughs
against the wind, and slept between two great fires, kept up by the
member of the party whose night it was to watch.
At eleven o’clock the Doctor stopped talking, and we slept for half an
hour, only to be awakened by the arrival of another equally worn-out
party, and almost the last one from Dawson that we met. By the time we
were fairly asleep again these tired beings set the cabin on fire, and
Jack, in his good-natured way, put the flames out for them.
At daylight I was awakened by Fritz, who was grumbling to himself about
the audacity and the stomachs that some people must have. I arose
to see him looking into two empty pails which he had left full of
apple-sauce and beans.
“I was hungry as a dog in the night,” the Doctor explained, a little
later, “and I couldn’t help it.”
Fritz replied by looking daggers at him. Then the Doctor offered a pair
of snow-shoes to Fritz as an olive branch.
“If I thought that what you’ve eaten would make you downright sick, I’d
take ’em,” said Fritz.
“’Twon’t,” replied the Doctor, in all honesty. “Nothin’ makes me sick.”
And he gave the snow-shoes to Jack, whose eyes were twinkling in
appreciation of the conversation.
As we started out, five or six hours later than we had planned, we
resolved to eschew cabins hereafter. We had not done a half-day’s work
when a heavy wet snow set in, and the condition of the dogs compelled
us to rest.
“Wear ’em out,” said Jack, “and it’s all up, anyway. We’ll boil some
beans and lay up some sleep ahead against a freeze.”
Accordingly, dogs and men slept for thirteen hours.
So slight was the freeze at night that the sun, now rising at four
o’clock, soon thawed the crust. The Big Salmon was already open, its
current destroying the trail and leaving a field of slush with many
places too deep for passage for a distance of five or six miles, which
was as wearing on the dogs as a full day’s journey under ordinary
circumstances. We only hoped that the Big Salmon was alone in its
enmity to our plans, for once the ice is out of the tributaries, the
ice in the Yukon cannot last long. It seemed to be imperative that,
in order to take full advantage of the slight crust which formed, we
should travel nights. We made this experiment once, starting out at 10
P.M., and once was quite enough.
The thawing snow had fallen away from the path, which was hardened by
travel from Dawson and therefore the better resisted the sun’s rays;
but when frozen it was as slippery as ice. In so far as you were able
to keep the sled from slewing on this razor’s back, that much you aided
the dogs. At intervals you walked outside the trail, plunging with
every step through the crust down to the slush underneath, while, with
body bent and arm extended with all the rigidity at your command, you
endeavored to hold the lurching “gee-pole” steady. Early in the evening
the great darkness seemed the more dense to visions strained by the
sun beating on the expanse of snow by day. With their eyes bloodshot
and almost closed with snow-blindness, the St. Bernards continually
stumbled and fell as they leaped from one side of the trail to the
other, blindly and vainly seeking a better footing. When we rested we
dug holes in the crust, and throwing ourselves prostrate, drank our
fill. At first, I tried to use a telescope drinking-cup, but soon I
regarded it as tawdry, inefficient, and unworthy of the occasion, and
followed the more robust custom of Jack, who enjoyed to the full the
pleasure of having made a convert. For one who had left White Horse
with a bad cough on the heels of the measles, such indulgence would
seem to be the height of indiscretion. But the cough was completely
gone, no room having been left for it in the development of every
muscle of my body by the handling of the “gee-pole.”
[Illustration: Crossing a Brook.]
At these times we would pay our respects with some bitterness to
the man who had made this strange and lonely trail, though in
better moments we were willing to admit that he was a pioneer and
a pathfinder. As soon as the ice would bear him, when the wind had
drifted the snow here and there and lifted the slush ice up to be
frozen into rifts, with his dogs and sleds he set his face toward
the coast, winding in and out between these rifts, back and forth
across the stream and along its banks, wherever he could find the best
footing; and all who came afterward followed in his footsteps. He was
making a path for himself and not for us, and it was to his interest,
if not to ours, to have it as crooked as the track of a snake, and on
the most crooked of rivers at that.
With the falling of the water as the winter advanced, the ice was
rent with cracks. It fell away from the shores, leaving cakes on end
and fissures. You must toil up one side of a pyramid to slide down
the other; you held your sled up literally at an angle of forty-five
degrees, and sometimes you dropped up to your hips into the fissures,
for the thin covering of snow often made them invisible even in the
daytime. Yet to step away from the trail was like stepping off a bad
corduroy road into a swamp.
In the darkness the trained eye of the master had to trust to the
halt and whine of the brave little Dude when we came to a place where
the surface water was deep or the ice had given away entirely. While
the master went ahead with a pole to make soundings, Fritz seized the
opportunity to roll a cigarette and to say in a drawl, as he sat on his
sled, resting:
“If I were in town I would call a cab.”
Jack had discarded his boots with sharp pegs--the three of us had worn
boots since it became warmer--to put on moccasins. These were soon
wet and quickly froze, giving him a sole of ice with which to walk on
ice. In utter exhaustion, once the big fellow threw himself upon his
“gee-pole” and gasped out something about not caring whether he went
any farther or not. Then he added:
“Well, we’ll outlast this trail, anyway. I guess I’ll light my pipe.”
Confessedly, I was rather glad of the incident. It is good to see
giants nod when you have nodded yourself. Only on the previous day,
over a mile of sidling trail, leaning on my sled to keep it from
upsetting, and righting it when it did upset, I had momentarily, I am
ashamed to say, turned cynic and protester.
An hour before dawn a scimeter of light shot across the heavens,
followed by broadswords, fans, daggers, waves, and streaks of light,
dancing sometimes in playful panic and again moving in a sweep of
dignity. With the aurora borealis as our candle, we passed around
Freeman’s Point, built a fire for luncheon in a cove, and enjoyed
keenly the fact that we were half way to Dawson.
II
ON THE TRAIL
PERSONALITIES--THE FORBEARS OF JACK AND FRITZ--GOOD CAMP MANNERS--DOG
INDIVIDUALITY--DUDE--THE TEAM OF HUSKIES--WAYFARERS AT FIVE
FINGERS--FORT SELKIRK AND PELLY--THE THANKSGIVING TURKEY THAT DID
NOT GET TO DAWSON--A DIET OF FLAPJACKS--SUBURBS OF THE KLONDYKE
CAPITAL--THE PASSING OF THE TRAIL.
As we moved on slowly at dawn to make a few more miles before camping,
we saw the penalty of this savage run, which human stubbornness had
insisted upon making, in the blood left on the trail by the wounded
feet of our dogs. Jack at once covered them with the moccasins which he
had brought for the purpose. It was plain enough that the continuance
of night marches was unfeasible if we desired our brave steeds to
hold out as far as Dawson. While the sled slid easier at night, the
excrescences of ice were as sharp as lances, and though the mushy
trail of mid-day made the sled harder to pull, it was like a cushion
for a wounded foot. We compromised upon a portion of both evils by
determining to start at dawn and travel as fast and as long as we
could, practically. This gave only seven or eight hours on the road as
against the twelve or more that we had originally planned, and in order
to make the most of them we made the sacrifice for the dogs’ sake of
drinking ice-water for our luncheon instead of taking the time to boil
chocolate. Fritz preferring to handle the “gee-pole,” and I preferring
to assist in keeping the equilibrium of the big sled by holding the
handles at the rear, each settled down to this as his definite labor.
We now had more time for our camps; more time for our pipes of
relaxation as we sat on our beds around Jack’s bonfires after the dogs
were fed and dinner was eaten. On one of these nights we were talking
of ambitions.
“As a boy, I wanted to drive a street-car,” said Fritz. “When I grew
older they still called me Freddy, and I made pictures for a living.
That is enough to ruin any man; and, foreseeing this, I concluded that
I’d live on flapjacks and go unwashed, and be called ‘pardner,’ or
Pete, or Bill, or make baking-powder dough, or anything, till I found
a good placer mine. Then I’m going around the world, smoking the best
brand of Turkish cigarettes, and looking at other people’s pictures.”
Jack had run away from home at the age of thirteen to the land of the
Indians that had been revealed to him in a dime novel secreted in a
haymow, and had earned his own living ever since. Meagre as was his
early education, he had picked up a surprising amount of information
from reading and from association. His eye was that of a scout; his
knowledge of birds and animals that of a naturalist; his love of
flowers that of a sentimentalist. He had varied his life as a cowboy by
many other occupations. At one time he had been a private coachman in
Omaha, just to see how it would seem.
“I was gettin’ pretty sick of the job,” he explained, “when the old
lady I drove about leaned over to me one day, confidentially. ‘I’m
goin’ to get you a fine livery to wear,’ she said. Then I realized how
low I had fallen, and that evening I was a free man again.”
He was longer on the Government survey than in any other employment,
rising until he filled a position of considerable responsibility.
Possibly it was then that he learned the ethics of camp-life; more
likely they were innate. He adhered to his own soap, his own towel, and
his own bedding, and was more observant of the small niceties of life
than are most of the men who wear the high collars that he despised. In
all of his seventeen years of wandering his greatest source of sorrow
was that he had never made enough money, according to his ideas, to
return home, though his pay had been as high as a hundred and fifty
dollars a month. He must have a few thousands, and treat the little
Pennsylvania village that was his birthplace to such extravagance as
it had never seen before. If he made a “stake” in the Klondyke, he
had planned to drive right up to the old folks’ door with his team of
huskies and a little red cart, distributing candy to the children as
the procession moved forward.
The dogs, which at first seemed to me to be only so many domesticated
wolves of like dispositions, had now assumed strong individualities.
Dude, the leader, was worthy of the name given to him, on account of
his sleek coat of thick gray fur, by the frontiersman who had instilled
into him the wisdom of the trail and soldierly spirit and obedience.
He was the sergeant-major among Yukon dogs, far from being a pup in
years and far from having lost his vigor. When called to harness in the
morning he would stretch his body, arch his neck, throw his handsome
tail over his back, deliver himself of a peculiar little wolfish whine,
and trot straight to his place. Though your old sergeant-major may feel
a little stiff when he gets out of bed, he isn’t stiff when he has his
tunic on, especially if there are any recruits about. From the moment
that Jack called “Mush!” until he called “Halt!” Dude pulled steadily.
All the others shirked at times and needed the crack of the whip to
remind them of their duty, but the traces between Dude and the dog
behind him were always taut. He had the natural dignity requisite to
his position. The other dogs attempted no familiarities with him, such
as eating out of his dish or trying to bowl him over in sport. After an
unusually hard day’s work, before lying down to rest, he would gambol a
little with them as a relaxation from the steady strain in harness, but
not in a manner of equality.
[Illustration: In Camp--The Dogs’ Porridge.]
During their conversations while the master was stirring the porridge
he asked the sergeant-major what he thought of the prospects of
reaching Dawson before the ice went out of the river, Dude replied,
on the authority of Jack’s translation:
“Don’t ask me! I can make it all right. But we ain’t certain of
anything as long as we have those house-dogs on the hind sled.”
Next to Dude was Fox, a nondescript, who remained in good flesh up to
the last. He waddled and puffed in trying to keep up when Dude trotted.
Fritz said that Fox reminded him of a fat school-girl, her cheeks
daubed with molasses candy, and two braids down her back.
Behind Fox was Jack, a pup, a mischief-maker, a rascal, and an actor.
All husky dogs are thieves. Some will take a pot off a stove by its
handle and hide it safely out of sight in the snow while they wait for
its contents to cool to their taste. Jack promised to become the most
accomplished of the clan. His wolf’s nose always told him where our
bacon was stored and his wolf’s eyes told him when his opportunity had
arrived. Once he had the meat out of his own basin of porridge eaten,
he looked up to see which dog had any left and got it before the other
dog realized what was up. He would scent an Indian camp even before
Dude, sometimes at a distance of two miles. In the traces he forgot to
pull while he looked at the ravens flying overhead or listened for
noises in the forest. Then the whip descended upon him and he would
seem very crestfallen for a moment, only to be at his old tricks and
to have his tail in the air in the next. The more he was punished for
dereliction during the day, the greater was his affection for his
master in camp. On the warmer nights when Jack slept outside of the hut
for the sake of elbow room, he would put himself on guard at the head
of the master’s bed of boughs and allow no other dog except Dude to
come near.
Dude was partial to him. He regarded Jack as a wayward but clever pup
who was sowing his wild oats, and he knew, as an old sergeant-major,
that this would make the best kind of a dog in the end. Often the
master took hold of the ne’er-do-well’s ears and shook him, saying:
“I guess I like you best, after all, Jack. That’s the way of the world.
You’re a rascal, but you’re clever.”
Next in line was Tommy, Jack’s brother. Jack enjoyed getting Tommy into
scrapes and then leaving him to get out of them the best he could.
Tommy was forever sneaking about the tent, and he was so impolitic
in his choice of his moment of action that he was usually caught
red-handed and cuffed. Though he never succeeded in stealing half as
much as Jack, he came in for a great deal more enmity from Fritz than
all the rest of the team. Jack used to approach Fritz gayly as Fritz
sat with a leg on either side of our little stove, turn his coyote’s
head to one side, cock up his ears, and assure Fritz of his friendship
for a good cook and his contempt for all such curs as Tommy. He might
go and come many times in this way before Fritz’s back was turned.
When it was, however, he seized his spoil and trotted away in the
businesslike manner of a dog who is doing an errand for his master. At
a safe distance, he neatly dodged all missiles and smiled mockingly
back at the cook. When Tommy was licked in the traces he howled for
half an hour and his tail did not ascend for the remainder of the
day. None of the other dogs would make friends with so sour a fellow.
Perhaps he was only oversensitive and introspective, and I do him
wrong. I fear, however, that he will be sent to the penitentiary at
Forty Mile for a long term one of these days.
Shorty, the end dog (wheel horse) of the husky team, was born in
Spitzbergen, where dogs are so white that when they are on a
background of snow you know of their presence only by the black spots
for their eyes and a bigger black spot for their noses. An equality in
breadth and length gave Shorty his name. Like some fat old gentlemen
whom we meet at the club, he was the more comical because he was
unconsciously so. He didn’t believe in being a martyr, and he always
carried his head so that one of his eyes was on Jack. When the master
was about to touch up Jack and Tommy, Shorty would begin suddenly to
pull very hard. His legs were so short and his body was so chunky that
if the team turned a sharp corner around a cake of ice he would often
roll over like a ball of fur; or, in trying to keep up he would slip
and fall down a fissure, hanging suspended by his collar while he
looked around at Jack, saying:
“Oh, I know I’m the snapper of the whip! What next?”
He blinked so oddly, there was such an expression of disgust in the
very way in which he lolled his tongue out, that you laughed at him as
you would at the old gentleman who finds another club member in his
favorite chair and reading his favorite paper.
Tim, the larger of the two St. Bernards, was a sober, phlegmatic dog
of noble mien, who was funny only when he ate so much porridge after a
hard day’s work that he groaned with pain.
“You needn’t look at me so reproachfully, Tim,” Jack would say, “I know
I’m to blame. But I’d feel just as mean if I didn’t feed you all you
wanted.”
The St. Bernard is too high-spirited for the work of a draught animal.
At first Patsy seemed the better dog of the two. But Patsy wore himself
out by fidgeting, and then it was his turn to soldier while Tim did his
work. Toward the last they were in such bad shape that we dared to put
only fifty pounds on their sled.
In the neighborhood of Five Fingers we met a dozen stranded pilgrims
whose desperate efforts to reach Dawson in the previous autumn had been
put to naught by the summary approach of the arctic winter when they
were within a few days of their destination. They had built cabins on
the banks of the river, wherever their boats had been inextricably
caught in a jam of ice, and settled down to the prospect of playing
checkers and fighting off scurvy for eight months, until summer came.
Of those who were unsuccessful in the battle, the most afflicted was an
old forty-niner who accepted with better grace than any of the others
a diet of spruce tea and rice, which he hoped would undo the work of
too much bacon. A few prospect holes had been sunk without any reward
except “colors,” because, as they explained, they were, in keeping with
their general ill luck, just outside of the gold belt. For selfish
as well as sentimental reasons we were glad that these unfortunate
fellows were not more numerous. We had always to tell them some of the
news, and then to leave their hospitality rather offended despite our
explanations that we could not afford to tarry with them for a day’s
rest when the trail was good.
At one of the cabins a boy of seventeen years hobbled out to the
bank to greet us. He and his uncle had left Dawson for the coast
in December, drawing their own sleds. Hardship had so affected his
uncle’s mind, as the story was told to me, that to escape from the
country had become a brutal and selfish mania with him. He forced his
nephew, even at the point of the revolver, it was said, to do all the
work of making and breaking camp. The boy was so tired one night
that he crawled under his blankets without changing his moccasins,
which had become wet by the slush snow about the fire. He awoke in the
morning with his feet frozen. When they were overtaken on the trail
by a man with a dog team, the next afternoon, the boy, goaded on by
his uncle, was plodding along on legs which were frozen stiff up to
his knees, experiencing, he said, much inconvenience but no pain.
The fellow-traveller gave him a ride behind the dogs to the nearest
cabin, where, later, a doctor on his way to the coast found amputation
necessary to save the boy’s life. As for the uncle, he delayed only a
few hours, and hastened on his journey more energetically than ever.
A little hunting had been done by the stranded pilgrims, but with no
success. We had hoped to obtain some venison from the Indians, but
though we passed many of their deserted camps between the Hootalinqua
and the Pelly, we came to only one that was occupied. Here two families
were sitting around a small fire with their backs protected on all
sides from the wind by a wall of brush about waist high. We secured a
few pounds of extremely tough steak in exchange for some corn-meal. A
small boy who looked quite like a young Jap knew a few English words
and had the gift of making comprehensible gestures. He explained that
he had heard his father’s gun go “boom!” far off on the mountain-side,
a few hours before. No chaffing could shake his confidence in his
father, whose name was Chook, as a great hunter. One boom, he told us
by signs, and the moose or caribou always tumbled over into the snow.
The temptation to wait and see if Chook would return with fresh moose
or caribou meat was great, but we resisted it. When, however, we were
at the other end of the semicircle formed by the curve of the river
beyond the camp, a cry from the bank showed us Chook, who had hastened
through the woods by a trail known to himself, bearing a fine caribou
steak and a piece of liver. With him, besides the little boy we had
seen, was an elder brother who had been out to learn the way in which
Daddy crept up quietly until he was within a few steps of his prey.
Chook wanted sugar in exchange, but we had none to spare. Finally his
obduracy was overcome and he accepted corn-meal. Long after we had
passed on, he stood watching us, and presumably he was grinning over
his bargain. We enjoyed part of the steak; Jack, the pup, stole the
rest with such finesse that we forgave him.
When we had passed one point which we recognized as a name on the
map, we looked forward from day to day, as we lessened the distance,
until we should arrive at another. In camp we compared our opinions
of how many miles we had made that day, and soon our estimates became
surprisingly accurate. After leaving Five Fingers, all our thoughts
were bent on reaching Fort Selkirk, where the Pelly, a great river of
itself, joins the Yukon. The trail for this distance was better than
for the fifty miles that had preceded it and the colder weather made
sledging better. Moreover, our new plan of shorter hours and harder
work was succeeding admirably.
Long before placer mining was thought of in Alaska or in the British
Northwest Territory, representatives of the fur companies were
stationed at Fort Selkirk. The present post is across the river from
the upper ramparts of the Yukon’s bank, whose towering walls of rock
resemble the walls of old-time forts, even to the embrasures. In a
break in the ramparts is the mouth of the Pelly, which is to the Yukon
what the Missouri is to the Mississippi.
Mr. Pettit, the trader at Selkirk, had only Indians for companions. The
aspect of this little man’s loneliness was heightened by his slight
form and his pallor, so out of place in a country where bare existence
is supposed to demand so much vigor. In summer he busied himself with
a little garden, which was an absorbing occupation because upon its
success there possibly depended immunity from the dreaded scurvy. In
winter he sat by his stove smoking when he was not sleeping. Watching
the Indians go through the ritual of the Russian Church in their
original manner, or dance around a dying fellow to keep off the evil
spirit of death, were diversions which must by this time have lost
their novelty for him. He had had nothing to sell for more than a year.
This was a great disappointment to his customers who were short of
those great requirements of aboriginal happiness, tobacco, sugar, and
gay-colored clothes.
While we were at Pelly, the Indians became excited over the arrival of
news that one of the tribe, Ulick, had shot ten caribou and two moose,
“one sleep”--or more than a day’s travel--down the river. We made
careful calculations as to how much tobacco we could spare, and kept
a sharp lookout for Ulick, whom we met with his family dragging some
of the moose back to camp. For forty-five cents’ worth of tobacco we
secured thirty pounds of steak for ourselves and the dogs. To offers of
as high as a dollar a pound for more, he merely made the reply:
“Got heap money! Want ‘baccy!’”
Your husky dog is no vegetarian. Once we realized how much additional
pulling-power our team could get out of a little fresh meat we denied
ourselves for them.
The height and the character of the mountains towering over our heads
told us that we were coming into the region of the Rockies. Every turn
of the river brought into view a panorama of low wooded islands made
in later times by a change of current; of islands that were Cyclopean
masses thrown up by chaos, and the nesting-places of eagles; of
mountains on either shore, whose strata seemed to have been kneaded and
stirred when soft as dough, and afterward, upon solidifying, to have
been rent by convulsions of the earth’s crust.
But one was too busy with the handles of the sled fully to enjoy
scenery. You only knew that the vista seemed to be frowning upon
the impudence of you and your sled and dogs breaking in upon great
solitudes. Thankfully, the weather was more in our favor and the trail
was harder, as it had been between the Big Salmon and Pelly, and not
so sliding. At times it was as smooth as a skating-rink for a few
hundred yards where it was protected from the sun by the shadow of the
mountains and the forests; again, there was glare ice, where we might
ride for a little distance, jesting merrily about private equipages and
driving-parks; and, again, we drove flocks of wild ducks away from open
places, making us regret that we had only revolvers with us. Far over
our heads against the background of the blue sky we saw great flocks
of wild swans and wild geese moving northward in stately procession,
reminding us that summer was near at hand. At 2 A.M. the thermometer
was at from 10 to 20 degrees below zero; at noon, 80 degrees above, and
the crust of dawn had become like porridge. I had one ear blistered by
the frost and the other by the sun in the same day.
But we little minded these extremes; for the trail continued to be
good, until one morning we arrived at the cluster of cabins called
Stewart City, at the mouth of the Stewart River, where we rested for a
day. Of the inmates of the cabins we bought enough rice to piece out
the rations of our dogs.
A mile out of Stewart we met Anders, of Bay City, Michigan, who was
drawing his own sled as he swung along in great strides in the company
of an elderly man who had one dog. An idea for making a fortune had
occurred to him and to carry it out he had started for Dyea at once,
regardless of the season of the year. He was “going outside” to bring
in the stock for a poultry farm which he proposed to establish on an
island near Dawson.
“Fresh eggs will bring ten dollars a dozen any time,” he said, “and a
spring chicken as much. I ain’t going to let anybody get ahead of me,
you bet. I’ve got a side of bacon and a sack of flour. I’ll sleep by
day and go without a blanket. I’ll make it to Five Fingers with my sled
and then I’ll take what’s left of my grub on my back and skin along the
shore till I get to the lakes, where I can get some more grub off the
boats that are coming in, snake a canoe somewhere, and paddle up to
Linderman.”
I saw him in Dawson two weeks after the pilgrims’ flotilla began to
arrive. The ice in the river had broken before he reached Five Fingers.
He had climbed over mountains and beaten his way through underbrush
until he sprained his ankle. Then he crawled to a ledge of rock
overlooking the stream and waited until a pilgrim in a passing boat saw
the red bandanna which he waved as a signal of distress.
“And I guess Dawson won’t have turkey for Thanksgiving this year,” he
added. “You remember the old feller that was with me? We got separated.
He couldn’t keep up with my gait. Well, our boat passed his dog running
up and down the shore howling, but we couldn’t find a sign of him. I
guess he was drowned.”
It took us six days to make the remaining seventy-five miles to
Dawson, though now our outfit, including bedding and kit-bags, did not
weigh more than two hundred pounds. The weather at night had suddenly
moderated, as if the arctic winter, after a spasmodic resistance, had
given way entirely to the tropical summer. Henceforth, it was needless
to put up our tent, and we slept and cooked entirely in the open,
drying our wet footwear by the heat of the sun in the late afternoon.
[Illustration: The First Boats.]
Starting at 2 A.M. with the first light, we plodded straight ahead
through the snow up to our knees, until the dogs gave out. We followed
the trail where we could; followed it until it led us to the flowing
river, and then we made a detour around the open place. The snow-shoes
which we had brought thus far without having once put them on, now
became invaluable in making a path by slow and arduous tramping, as
monotonous as the beating of time, but a little more tiring, I assure
you. Without the relief of the color of the dogs or of the man in front
of you upon which to rest your eyes, little red spots would dance in
the glare on the snow even through heavy green glasses. Often the rest
of the party had to wait while Jack, who never tired, went on ahead
to see if, in case we should go around this or that island, we should
be obliged to retrace our steps. Again, in little side channels where
the water was deep only in a freshet, we hitched all the dogs to one
sled at a time and they dragged it over the sandy bottom and up on the
other side, where we were likely to strike out on an old Indian trail
bare of snow, and to have to lift the sleds from side to side to avoid
saplings.
It was our boast that only once had we unpacked the sleds except to
make camp. This was at Five Fingers, where we had to carry our baggage
piece by piece up an ascent of forty feet. Even there we had sent the
dogs up with the small sled on bare ground. But now we could lift the
sleds and contents; or if the bank or ledge of rocks which we wished
to gain was very precipitate, we could slide them up on skids. Dude,
the old leader, would crawl up by himself without a whine, like a true
soldier. Jack threw the other huskies up bodily, and the clumsy St.
Bernards were pushed and pulled and coaxed up.
Just when we had to undergo the greatest physical labor, and the
greatest strain from climate, our food-supply, so astonishing had
been our appetites, had dwindled to flour and bad bacon, and we had
remaining only a pipe of tobacco apiece, which was religiously saved
for our last camp. We missed most keenly our chocolate, of which we had
eaten half a pound apiece a day. With a slab of it for luncheon, and
only two flapjacks and a slice of bacon, we were not hungry again for
five or six hours. Consume all the flapjacks and bacon that we could
without suffering from that excess of quantity which is the foe of
exercise, in three or four hours our stomachs would be calling for more.
On the afternoon of the fourth day out from Stewart, when the dogs
pulled up after one of the rushes they were never too tired to make on
scenting a camp, we looked up to see some figures standing on a pile of
logs which they were cutting for a raft of timber for a Dawson saw-mill.
“How are ye?” they called. “Goin’ to town?”
We had reached the suburbs!
“Well,” replied Jack, “we’ve been thinkin’ some of it. How far is it?”
“’Bout twenty miles. But you won’t make it. The ice is likely to go out
any minute.”
On the day following we passed still another camp of rafters, who said
that the river was open in front of Dawson. They advised us to make
camp and accompany them when navigation opened.
“We’ll be old inhabitants by that time,” said Jack.
Every creek flowing into the river was a torrent, eating up the ice
and flooding its surface. We could see that the river was rising, which
was a sure sign that its days were few. However, we were confident of
reaching our destination on the morrow, though we had to desert our
sleds, put some flapjacks and slices of bacon in our pockets, and climb
over the mountain which hid “town” from view.
Our last camp was on a wooded island where some prospector had built a
brush-house. Jack’s bonfire, especially large in honor of the occasion,
extended to this house, and we thought it rather good fun that we had
to save our bedding from the flames. But our jubilation was not unmixed
with sadness. We should not make another journey together, and we had
been good comrades, always venting our anger, when it insisted upon
expression, upon our sleds, and never blaming one another.
Our hair and beards were long and unkempt; our trousers were the color
of mahogany; but we felt strong enough to go up the side of a mountain
on the run, and we had been so near to nature that we could truly claim
her for next-door neighbor.
In the future, the numerous police stations built in the summer (1898)
will furnish food for travellers and their dogs. Already, therefore,
our journey in the manner that we made it is a thing of the past, and,
accordingly, one feels as he looks back on it a little of the pride of
the pioneer.
“We can sleep as long as we want, to-morrow,” said Fritz, pulling his
robe over him, “and we won’t care whether it is going to freeze at
night or not.”
“And we won’t have wet feet,” Jack added. “I guess it’s been twenty
days since they wasn’t sopping ’fore we’d been out two hours, and that
slush does feel rather clammy when the sun’s blisterin’ overhead.”
Ten miles in ten hours was the record of our last day’s travel, over
the worst trail we had encountered. At dusk we rounded an island, and
to our right, on a small flat across the river (which here had been
opened by the current of the Klondyke), we saw the cluster of cabins
which was the pilgrim’s Mecca. There was glare ice, however, above the
Klondyke across to the little suburb of Dawson, Klondyke City. For the
first time in many days we rode on our sleds, finishing our journey in
triumph.
“Don’t you know that it’s too late to travel on the river?” asked the
foremost man of the little crowd that came out to meet us.
“Yes,” replied Jack, “and we’ve just made up our minds to quit.”
Four days later, as if it had broken away all along the shores at
the same moment, the ice moved on toward the sea like a great white
procession, halted now and then by a jam, but not for long.
“It’s a pleasure to see that trail go by,” was Jack’s comment, as he
watched it from our cabin-door. “I only wish I might pay it back in its
own kind by tripping it up a few times.”
III
DAWSON
SOCIAL ASPECTS OF DAWSON--CORNERING THE TINNED FOOD
MARKET--CHEECHAWKOS AND OLD-TIMERS IN THE EARLY DAYS.
At this season of the year the inhabitants of Dawson were passing
out of the chrysalis of fur caps into soiled, broad-brimmed hats
resurrected from cabin-shelves; out of winter clothing generally into
what remained of their last summer’s clothing. Along the thawing bog
called the main street, littered and odorous from sanitary neglect,
were two rows of saloons and gambling-halls, with mining-brokers’
offices and the stores of shrewd speculators in food-supplies, who
always had one can of condensed milk for $2.50, one can of butter
for $5, and one pound of sugar for $1.50, and assured you that they
were the last in the country. To look out across the flat toward the
mountains was to see scattered cabins and piles of tin cans, which
at once let one into the culinary secrets of an isolated community
composed largely of men. At the restaurants, bacon and beans and coffee
cost $2.50.
For a time in the winter in fear of famine the well-to-do hoarded
food as they hoard gold in a financial panic, and the restaurants
were closed because supplies were not procurable at prices that made
catering profitable. Then, a fifty-pound sack of flour sold for as high
as $100; but at the approach of spring the little capitalists who had
planned to sell their “corners” at great profit were glad enough to
dispose of such surplus as they had beyond their own needs at a loss.
To them the departure of hundreds of mouths which otherwise would have
been fed out of Dawson’s granary was as great a disappointment as a
report that Hungary’s wheat crop would greatly exceed expectations is
to the bulls on the Chicago Exchange. All of the luxuries and many
of the necessities of life were scarce; but, withal, there was quite
enough of bacon, beans, and flour to have satisfied the appetites of
the whole community for a month after supplies arrived. According to
the philosophy of the old-timers, there is never any danger of a man’s
starving as long as he will look ahead a little. So easy is it to
sleep and so little does one eat when one is not working that he can
live on a pound of food a day, if need be, and take the remainder of
his nourishment in slumber. On the other hand, vigorous labor in winter
demands at least three pounds a day, and it is upon this basis that
estimates have always been made in the valley of the Yukon.
With a tiny can of cocoa, which I pounced upon in a store as if it were
an Elzevir in a junk-heap, and a few staples bought at extravagant
prices, we were able to prepare a superior meal in the cabin that I
had leased. But this was not until we had slept gloriously for sixteen
hours. There remained the problem of a bath, which was serious, as
the one bath-house in Dawson was closed for repairs. I solved it
legitimately, if uncomfortably, in the wooden tub which was lent to me
by a neighbor.
The saloons had only a substitute for whiskey, of home manufacture. The
dance-halls were not open. All the men whose dust and presence would
make the camp lively were at the mines--or “up the creeks,” as the
saying goes in Dawson--preparing for the “clean-up.”
In winter and in summer the trail leads up the Klondyke to the mouth
of Bonanza, three miles from Dawson, and thence up Bonanza to the
working-claims, about three miles farther on. In the spring, when the
currents are swollen, you must go over a high mountain by a path in
the soft snow. If you have a pack, this is hard work. On the way I met
a blue-faced old fellow--by his look if not by his limp he had the
scurvy--who promptly put me in my proper social status.
“Are ye a Cheechawko?” he asked.
“I don’t know, I’m sure.”
“Well, then, ye are, and the river must ’a’ broke. Any man’s a
Cheechawko until he’s been in the country when the ice goes out. In
the old days we could lick the Cheechawkos into shape; larn ’em to
leave their latch-strings out fur a passin’ stranger when they was
away from hum, and larn ’em to eat what they wanted and to use the
best blanket in a cabin, but to lug nothin’ away. Fifty thousand of
’em, they say--clerks and farmers and dudes. They’re too many fur us.
Civilization’s here, and it’s a case of locking up yer dust after
this. But, young man, ye can’t be an old-timer, never! Ye can’t be an
old-timer, ’less ye’ve lived in the camps in the old days when a man
was a man and his neighbor’s brother.”
And without giving me time to reply to his little lecture, he hobbled
on toward the hospital.
Cheechawko is the Indian word for stranger, or, more literally,
tenderfoot, which has come into general use in the Klondyke; and toward
the Cheechawko, bringing in the more penurious ways of the outside
world, along with ignorance of mining, the old-timer feels a genuine
resentment. I was glad of the opportunity to see the veterans ere the
recruits had arrived.
IV
THE FIRST DISCOVERIES
THE BEGINNING OF MINING IN ALASKA--FORTY MILE CREEK--CANADIAN AND
AMERICAN DEPOSITS--THE LARGEST LOG-CABIN TOWN IN THE WORLD--LIFE OF
THE FIRST ADVENTURERS--THE SUPERFLUITY OF SIX-SHOOTERS--LEAVING THE
LATCH-STRINGS OUT--THE WAY OF THE TRANSGRESSORS--INDIAN CHARLEY AND
HIS NUGGET.
A little history of placer mining in the Yukon valley, at this turn of
my narrative, will be of importance, I think, in making what follows
more comprehensible. It was early in the eighties, if not before, that
the first prospectors, armed with Indian tales, faith, and a “gold
pan,” packed their supplies to the shores of the Lewes lakes over the
passes which were the means of communication between the Indians of the
coast and those of the interior. They followed the ice out of the lakes
and down the river into a practically unexplored country, panning out
of the gravel at the mouth of each tributary.
[Illustration: A Typical Pilgrims’ Boat.]
At first, these and the other brave spirits who were encouraged to
follow their example arduously poled their boats back up-stream in
September, with the result of their summer’s labor, to spend the winter
in one of the towns of the quartz-mining region in southeastern Alaska
or in the Pacific Coast States. Some had three or four hundred dollars;
others, who had impatiently disregarded certain “pay” on the bars
of the tributaries and had prospected in the hope of making a great
“strike,” returned with little or nothing.
Soon they began to take in enough supplies to last them through the
winter, and to build cabins for their protection. A little settlement
sprang up on the site of the “diggings” of Forty Mile Creek. All of
the rich deposits thus far have been found not on the tributaries of
the Yukon but on the tributaries of the tributaries. (The wealth of
the far-famed Klondyke is not on the Klondyke River but on Eldorado
and Bonanza, which flow into it.) So the next progressive step was a
discovery which led to the working of the frozen ground in the valleys
of the numerous little streams tributary to Forty Mile, by stripping
off the dirt as fast as the very hot sun of the long days of the arctic
summer thawed it. This process, however, was feasible only when the
“pay-dirt” was near to the surface, and the season of activity was
still restricted to four or five months of the year.
As the prospectors moved on down the river, gradually widening the
circle of their labors and their experience, deposits considerably
richer than those of the tributaries of Forty Mile were found on
the tributaries of Birch Creek in American territory. Here, for the
first time, an innovation, which did not appeal to everybody, made
it feasible to work twelve months in the year. An energetic man sank
a shaft to bedrock with fires. Then he drifted out his “pay-dirt” in
the same manner and piled it in dumps on the surface to be sluiced out
in summer. By the autumn of 1896, when the great discovery of Bonanza
Creek was made, Circle City was said to be the largest log-cabin town
in the world, and from twenty-five hundred to three thousand white men
dwelt in the Yukon valley.
Experience in placer mining counted for little in a region where
conditions were so different from those of the Pacific Coast States.
There was no sprinkling of capitalists or mining engineers among
those robust pilgrims of the early days. Many of the hardships which
they endured are already a memory. They were cheered in their combat
with nature by no such tales as lured on the Cheechawkos of 1897-98.
The majority of them came from the frontiers of the United States;
a smaller part, generally of French descent, from the frontiers of
Canada. All were peculiarly the product of the Anglo-Saxon bent for
overcoming obstacles. Not infrequently there were fugitives from
justice, who, having the inclination and the energy to undergo great
physical trials rather than serve a term in prison, and learning a
lesson in manhood by bitter retrospection, have often become heroic
pioneers. More numerous than the inhabitants of the old centres of
civilization would suppose were those recluses who are ever seeking
lonely refuges out of touch with the advance posts of organized society.
There was no prospect, especially when no “big strikes” had been
reported, to attract the idle and the dissolute who infest similar
settlements in more hospitable countries. Relieved of the parasitic
class and being interdependent in isolation from the outside world
under the most rigorous conditions for eight months in the year, their
inhabitants, despite the “pasts” of some of them, made Circle City and
Forty Mile the most peaceable of mining camps. Captain Constantine,
of the British Northwest Mounted Police, with a few men, had plenary
powers at Forty Mile, while Circle City was nominally governed by a
United States Commissioner and a United States Marshal.
All the white women in both communities could be counted on the fingers
of two hands. Mrs. Constantine, the wives of a few missionaries and
of a few leading men, had come in on steamers up the river in summer
to join their husbands. Half a dozen half-breed women, with more or
less of the blood of Russian fur traders in their veins, composed the
demimonde of either camp. Full-blooded squaws performed the household
duties in some cabins for a civilized lord and master. But the “squaw
man” was the exception. In no part of the world where isolated white
men live among aborigines was the man who had a native mistress held in
greater disrespect than here.
As a rule, the miners did their own washing and mending. Their
amusements were card-playing and checker-playing. The climate seemed
to exercise a softening effect upon bellicose natures, and even
intoxication seldom carried quarrels beyond a dispute of words. Whoever
struck the first blow had the consensus of opinion of the camp against
him.
“We’ve got enough to do fighting Alaska,” was a saying which
sententiously expressed the general feeling, “without fighting one
another.”
To the new-comer it was hinted that a six-shooter, which fiction makes
the inseparable companion of all men in a new placer mining camp, was
a superfluity that would keep him out of trouble only when he kept it
at all times hanging on a peg in his cabin. Its weight alone was equal
to two days’ rations in a country where the prospector had to dispense
with his helpmeet, the mule or the burro, and carry his grub for a tour
on his back. Therefore, arms were never carried unless there was a
chance of meeting with game.
The essence of the “free miners’ law” was being on the “squar’,” which,
after all, is a rough equivalent of the brotherhood of man. Between
the disputants as to the ownership of a claim the “miners’ meeting”
decided which one was in the right. All offenders were brought before
the bar of their fellows. A man accused of theft, after an examination
of witnesses, was acquitted or convicted by the holding up of hands. If
guilty, he was, according to the circumstances, either warned to leave
the country for good--no slight penalty in midwinter with only the
hospitality of Indians to depend upon--or else ostracism was postponed
pending good behavior. “Miners’ meeting law” is unscientific and rarely
commendable, but here it served its purpose well because its methods
made it so seldom required.
Under the force of self-interest a universal good-will prevailed.
Whatever a miner had--perhaps the increment of a summer’s earnings
which was to pay for another year’s supplies--he kept in tomato cans on
the table of his cabin with impunity. When he went away from home on a
journey to some other creek he left his latch-string out. On the very
evening of his absence, while his cabin was occupied by another, he
was, perhaps, sleeping in someone else’s without an invitation. By the
unwritten law of the land he enjoyed whatever luxuries of food and rest
the cabin afforded; but, likewise by the unwritten law of the land, he
washed any dishes that he had used and put them and all other things
that he had disturbed back where they belonged, folded the blankets on
the bunk, cut firewood in place of that which he had burned, and laid
kindlings by the stove ready to make warmth and cheer for the owner
when he should return, cold and weary.
Cheechawkos who came down the river in the spring in their rough boats
at first, through ignorance, were often transgressors of the unwritten
laws. But so few arrived at a time that the majority were soon able
to convince them of the folly of courting trouble for themselves.
Anyone with a bad record could not obtain favors or a loan when he
needed it. After he had consumed the supplies which he had brought
into the country with him, he must rely upon the transportation
companies, established to meet the demand of the new settlements, whose
river steamers connected with ocean-going vessels at the island of
St. Michael in Norton Sound. When a man had been unfortunate in his
summer’s work, a reputation for probity would secure from the companies
a year’s outfit on a simple promise to pay. In treating generously
the real prospector who sought new fields, they only had an eye to
their own interests in the development of the country. Every canned and
preserved delicacy was included in a year’s supplies, costing from $500
to $600. Canned plum pudding was a treat for the holidays; and more
than one miner ate _pâté de foie gras_ for the first time in Circle
City or Forty Mile. These luxuries, however, were no substitutes for
fresh fruits and fresh vegetables.
The flat-bottomed river steamers continued on their course until
the ice in the river led them to seek a slough or side channel for
safety, all hands preparing to spend the winter housed up on board.
Then no more Cheechawkos’ boats could arrive, and the camps were as
completely separated from the outside world as a whaler caught in the
ice of Bering Sea. To all men, including the recluses, a “pardner” was
essential. For the recluses were recluses from civilization and not
from fellow-men of their own tastes; and no one, except a few of the
most perverse, undertook single-handed to put up a cabin or to live in
it alone.
The “town” was on the river bank at the most accessible point to the
creeks whose wealth was responsible for its existence. Its cabins
clustered around the commercial companies’ stores and the saloons. To
one side was a camp of Indians and the mission station which ministered
to their spiritual wants and, following the paths of diplomacy, to the
spiritual wants of the miners--upon request. Fuel was brought from the
hill-sides and food was taken to the cabins on the creeks by teams of
husky dogs.
When the winter settled down in serene triumph in December there was
not even the falling of snow to disturb the calm atmosphere. The fine
white particles under foot, which seemed as sharp as powdered glass to
the touch, were precipitated invisibly, like frost. They glistened on
the mountain-sides without a breath of air to stir them. In the few
hours of gray light out of the twenty-four, men welcomed the sound of
their own voices, or even the howl of their dogs, to break the silence
which was the fit companion of the dry, biting cold. At night they
forgave the still and merciless panorama of the day as they watched out
of their cabin-windows the play of the Northern Lights, in which nature
has furnished for the eyes a greater treat than is the breaking of
surf for the ears.
With the coming of spring, when the sun mounted so rapidly in the
heavens, every man had his opinion and his reasons for it as to the
exact date when the ice should go out of the Yukon. After this--the
greatest event of the year--had taken place, all eyes kept a lookout
up-stream for the first pine-colored boat that should dart around the
bend with the rapidity of the current. The Cheechawko was surrounded
by a little crowd which asked him about the result of the previous
November’s elections, or if France and Germany had gone to war as
indicated by an August paper which the community had been reading for
eight months.
As a rule, the early arrivals had been in the country before. They
knew the channels and the currents of the river, and could resist
the temptation of stopping to pan the gravel of the bars in search
of colors, for the old-timers had long since concluded that the
travel-worn particles of dust to be found at the mouths of all of the
tributaries of the Yukon which are in the so-called gold belt, were
vagrants and not the advance guard of a floating pilgrimage. They had
poled weary miles in their long boats and carried packs for wearier
ones without finding at the head-waters of the tributaries, which were
named by them and still await accurate mapping by geographers, any
original deposits. The shallow bedrock in the neighborhood of Forty
Mile put the original deposits there within reach of the summer’s sun
and the superficial investigation of the hurrying prospector, and
opened the way to the discovery of richer original deposits at Circle
City at a slightly greater depth of bedrock.
So the miners had concluded that the next great strike, following the
progress of development down the river, would be made below Circle
City. On account of an Indian’s keen glance the contrary happened, and
they retraced their footsteps to find fortunes at a depth of thirty
feet under soil whose surface they had trod before. The sharp-eyed
Indian was a brother-in-law of “Siawash George,” and “Siawash George”
was an outcast, whose nickname was given to him by his fellow white
men. The Siawashes are one of the lowest orders of the American
Indians, and the old-timers, so largely men from the Pacific Coast,
use Siawash both as a noun and as an adjective to signify contempt. One
of the first white pilgrims to cross the passes, Cormac, was now the
father of three or four half-breed children. He had planned that his
marriage to a princess of the tribe would be the stepping-stone of his
ambition to become chief of the Sticks. In the autumn of 1896 he and
his family and retainers were encamped at the mouth of the Klondyke,
gathering from the land and the water, according to aboriginal custom
but with modern riffles and hooks, their winter supply of provender.
[Illustration: Yukon Indians.]
The Klondyke is one of the best rivers in the neighborhood for fish,
much better than the Indian River, which flows into the Yukon between
thirty and forty miles above it. At the summit of the water-shed
between the Indian and the Klondyke is a great mountain, which, from
its shape, the miners have named The Dome. In the snows of its sides
six creeks have their origin, three flowing into either stream.
The longest of these is sixteen miles. They wind through beds of
black muck, ranging from fifty to two hundred and fifty yards in
breadth, which lie between steep embankments. It is presumed that
the embankments are the walls of an ancient river channel. They
are indented only by the gulches cut by tributaries which once were
mighty but now have dwindled to little torrents which flourish only
with the first warmth of spring or after a heavy rain in summer. The
great heat of June, July, and August drew out of the muck with a growth
of tropical rapidity a rank grass upon which the moose fed in peace,
fattening his sides, made lean by winter’s privations.
Here “Injun Sharley,” as he called himself, came to look for moose,
and here he found instead, as he was crossing the first tributary of
the Klondyke at a point where its bending course had dug a niche out
of the side-hill, a glistening nugget of gold. According to all of
the preconceived ideas of the placer mining prospectors, no creeks in
the region were so unpromising as these. Those few prospectors who
had tramped up this valley, finding a few colors in the shoals made
by washing the earth of the embankment, had passed them by with the
ever-ready expression of the country:
“Oh, well, you can find colors anywhere.”
If the turn of the creek had not washed one stray nugget as well as
stray colors out of a bench which no one found worth working two years
after discovery, the moose might still be feeding undisturbed in the
valleys of Eldorado and Bonanza creeks, which are now as expressive
of man’s handiwork as the rear of a row of tenement houses, and
certain unhappy newspaper correspondents would not have missed the
Spanish-American War.
There is no reason to believe that “Siawash George,” personally, had
any great confidence in the “strike.” Rather--after having staked
creek claims for himself and “Injun Sharley”--he thought it worth
advertising, when advertising was so cheap because of the expert
canoists and good pedestrians in his family. He was further assisted
in spreading the news by Joe La Due, another “squaw man,” who has been
erroneously called Father of the Klondyke, just as “Siawash George,”
and not “Injun Sharley,” has been called its discoverer. La Due staked
out a town-site on the flat which had been formed in the course of time
by the alluvial deposits of the Klondyke at its mouth. He was fond of
“booms,” and as a part of his plan of promoting his latest boom he
offered lots for five dollars apiece to all who would stake claims on
the new creeks. Neither he nor “Siawash George” had much to lose and
they might gain a great deal if shafts were sunk to bedrock with fires
after the plan that had lately come into vogue at Circle City.
When an Indian arrived at Forty Mile and then at Circle City with a
tale out of all proportion to the actual size of the nugget that “Injun
Sharley” had found, the miners received it with that garlic cynicism
which has its natural abiding-place in the unkempt beards of hardened
frontiersmen. They had become so used to strikes with no foundation
except an irresponsible imagination, as nominally to believe in nothing
that a man said about any find he had made. So they told the Indian
that he was a liar pure and simple, who had been primed by an ambitious
brother-in-law. The Indian had been told to expect this reply and was
not the least disturbed in mind by it. But no miner acts upon his
convictions in such a matter. He usually hurries off to the reported
scene of the find because, after all, “mebbe there might be somethin’
in it.” But such were the reputations of Joe La Due and Cormac that
many of the earlier pioneers refused to budge. Their superior wisdom
was as unfortunate for them as absence from the settlements was for
those at work on the creeks. The two or three hundred, lounging in the
saloons and the stores or resting in their cabins, who made for the
mouth of the Klondyke in the mood of men who are playing a joke on
themselves, became rich.
There were not enough claims on the discovery creek, Bonanza, for all
of them, so the later arrivals, just for the sake of staking something,
contemptuously staked a tributary of Bonanza, which they called in
their phrase a “pup.” Then there was naught to do but to wait until a
few of the more energetic fellows sunk holes on Bonanza. No one was
more surprised at the result than “Siawash George.” Bedrock on Bonanza
showed the richest placer dirt yet found in Alaska or the British
Northwest Territory. Those who had been in time to stake claims on
Bonanza settled down to work at once, incidentally extending their pity
to the fellows on the “pup.” The claim-owners on Eldorado, where no
shaft had been sunk, accepted the pity in good part and offered their
claims at various prices, ranging from one hundred to five hundred
dollars. Most of them were so lucky as to be unable to make a sale, and
are now worth from five hundred thousand to a million dollars apiece.
The “pup” is the richest placer mining creek in the world.
Nine months after “Injun Sharley” had brought home a nugget instead of
a moose, the outside world heard of the great discovery. Such pilgrims,
attracted by the news, as succeeded in reaching Dawson in the autumn
of 1897 found that all creeks rising on the slopes of The Dome and all
other creeks at that time proven to be worth the working, had already
been staked by the old-timers who had followed the advance guard from
Circle City and Forty Mile. Feverish stampede followed on feverish
stampede to new ground. That putting down four stakes in a creek-bed
anywhere in the region was equal to drawing a fortune from a bank
became the gospel of the hour, which received its authority from the
original attitude toward the “pup” of the men who had staked Eldorado.
A man needed only to come into a saloon with a pack on his back, and,
being tired, appear silent and mysterious, to excite the suspicion that
he had made a “strike.” “Only an affidavit” of having found “color” was
necessary to have a discovery claim recorded, and a discovery always
meant a stampede. Having received a hint from a friend, or overheard
a whispered conversation in the street, a pilgrim would rush off for
a distance of more than a day’s travel, without food or blankets,
trusting to luck to feed him and keep him warm. Death was often the
result.
Having staked the remaining creeks in a radius of from thirty to
sixty miles of Dawson, some of the new-comers rested in their cabins,
eating their winter’s supply of food. Others found employment on
the work-claims; and still others departed over the ice to escape
starvation and to thrill their neighbors at home with the information
that they owned claims. As the humor of the saloons went, there
remained for the oncoming host of May and June an expanse of unexplored
territory sufficient to keep a hundred times their number busy
prospecting for a century, but no gold at all, unless they could find
it for themselves.
V
MINERS AND MINING
REAPING THE GOLD HARVEST--THAWING AND SLUICING--MINERS AND THEIR
THEORIES--THE DOME--EXPENSIVE TIMBER--EMPTY POCKETS BUT DOLLARS IN THE
DUMPS--THE FIRST MILLIONNAIRES--COLOR IN THE PAN--ONCE A PROSPECTOR
ALWAYS A PROSPECTOR--FIGURING FORTUNES--CAPITALISTS IN DEMAND--THE
FORTY HAPPY KINGS ON ELDORADO.
It was just on the eve of harvest-time when I first visited the creeks.
In a day or two the flow of water from the gulches where the snow lay
thickest would make a head sufficient to wash the yellow grain out of
the dumps. Along the four miles of Eldorado, or its full length, and
the ten miles of working claims on Bonanza, lines of flumes and their
dependent sluice-boxes--the lumber for which had been drawn on sleds
from Dawson by husky dogs, or cut with whipsaws--formed a network
around the string of cabins occupied by claim-owners and their workmen
and around the piles of clayish-colored dirt, thawed out inch by inch
during the short winter days, which contained virgin wealth amounting
to ten million dollars. The hill-sides, once covered with timber, were
bare of all except stumps and scarred by broad streaks from top to
bottom, showing where logs for building the cabins and for feeding the
fires in the drifts had been slid down.
If you descended by the shafts beside the dumps to the drifts, you soon
comprehended that reaping the harvest, once you have a claim, is not so
easy as picking wild cranberries. It is dogged work to build fires day
after day, running the risk of suffocation and permanent injury to the
eyes by the smoke, and pulling up the dirt, bucketful after bucketful,
by means of a windlass, with the thermometer forty below zero--and the
prospect of cooking your own dinner. The rising steam from the thawing
pay-dirt of the drifts, which fills the valley with mist, adds the
discomfort of humidity to the biting cold. Though the man who turns the
windlass may have to beat his hands and dance about to keep warm, he is
never in positive danger as is his partner below, who, in returning to
relight one of the series of nicely arranged piles of wood which have
failed to ignite, is likely to be suffocated, or, barring such slips
as this or any consequent accident, is sure to suffer continually from
soreness and smarting of the eyes, if not to have them permanently
injured by the smoke.
In one spot of three or four square feet on Eldorado, the nuggets are
so thick that you can pick them out by hand as a farmer’s boy picks
potatoes out of a hill. In juxtaposition there may be as many more
square feet which are not considered worth thawing and sluicing; and
so the angles of the drifts seem like the path of a man of vacillating
mind trying to make his way to the light in darkness. From two to three
feet above the real bedrock is the false bedrock, a stratum of stone
broken into angular fragments, apparently by some great force passing
overhead. Between the two is the best paying-dirt, and occasionally
here is found, perhaps with particles of gold sticking to it, the tusk
of a mammoth who was the ruler in the valley before the days of the
moose.
In the angular fragments of the false bedrock the miners who are
fond of making out the reason of things over their cabin-fires, with
diversified reading in newspapers or even a dip in a text-book of
geology at school as basic knowledge, find support for their favorite
theory as to how the yellow particles came to their resting-place.
Gold had never been found before in such incongruous surroundings.
Therefore, they contend, it must have been borne from its point of
precipitation by some force worthy of the situation and of Alaska,
where nature has a gift for seemingly paradoxical performances done on
a Brobdingnagian scale. What else but a glacier was equal to the feat?
It had scattered wealth in its progress like some good Lady Bountiful,
crushing with its great weight the false bedrock between whose
fragments the dust had fallen by force of gravity to the true bedrock.
Another, a smaller and perforce a more confident school of thought,
holds that an ancient volcano “coughed” the dust out of the bowels of
the earth.
[Illustration: On the Creeks.]
For my part, inasmuch as the geologists themselves have come to no
certain conclusion, I hold that all the gold which has been found
in the Klondyke and Indian River districts was smelted in a great
pot in The Dome and has leaked out of its cracks. Then, as a fitting
corollary, I desire that one day an old forty-niner, as sturdy and as
fine as an old weather-beaten oak, shall discover the pot and find
a leverage strong enough to lift the cover off it; whereupon, a good
guardian, gently reserving enough of his millions to give him a certain
annuity for life, he may spend the rest in ’Frisco after the manner
of his own choosing as quickly as he can. But I am certain--such is
the irony of fate--that, instead of him, the happy man will be an
Oklahoma “boomer,” the father of several strapping daughters, who never
panned a handful of dirt before he mortgaged his all in order to buy
a Klondyker’s outfit. He will set his daughters up in the capitals of
Europe, where they will marry continental noblemen, while the whole
family will be miserable for life.
In candor, I must say that with mine as with most theories there are
facts which go to contradict it. The claims on the upper reaches of the
creeks, which have their origin on the slopes of The Dome, are much
richer than those on the lower reaches, where the dust is finer and
more travel-worn as well as more scattering. But in the head-waters
nothing has yet been found which is worth the working. So either all
the gold leaked out some time before this force that carried it ceased
to operate, or the mythical person who has charge of the pot mended
the cracks, or, possibly--and this is my hope--the fortunes which have
already been brought to light were only an overflow, the palpable
result of the chemist in charge of the vessel having misjudged its
capacity.
By the fifteenth of May the drifts were filled or partly filled with
seepage which had frozen below a depth of a few feet, where the
temperature is never above freezing. Work in them was at an end by
the first of May, when the surface earth had begun to thaw a little
at midday. Then the plane, saw, and hammer took the place of the pick
and shovel. If they had used rosewood at New York or London prices
the miners could not have built their flumes and sluice-boxes out of
more expensive material than that they had in the warping, knotty fir
boards which were condescendingly sold at $250 a thousand by the three
saw-mills in the country. Once the flumes were laid to the gulches and
to the dams in the creek itself, the sluice-boxes were properly laid
on the dumps which were to be washed first and the gates between the
two were made tight, the community was ready to reap the reward of a
winter’s toil as soon as the sun should thaw the drifts of snow on the
mountain-sides sufficiently to make a sluice-head of water.
There followed a brief period of inactivity like that between sowing
and harvest for the farmer. Every man had his opinion of how much the
output of all the creeks would be, and the estimates varied from six to
fifteen millions. Within the big world of speculation there were the
small worlds of the groups of cabins which clustered around that of the
owner of each claim on Eldorado and Bonanza. For the laymen who had
taken portions of claims to work on shares and for the claim-owners,
especially those who had employed the workers on their claims at daily
wages, it was an interval of some anxiety. They would soon know in what
measure the estimates that they had made from specimens of pay-dirt
panned out in buckets of water in their cabins during the winter would
be verified. Men who had more than a hundred thousand dollars in their
dumps possibly had not five dollars in cash in their possession.
The members of no community had ever been submitted to a greater burden
of usury. They bore it with rare good-nature. What else were they to
do? they asked. They needed money for wages, for food for their men,
and for lumber, and those in town who had money knew the value of it.
The regular rate in the winter was ten per cent. a month, and some of
the so-called millionnaires who had owned nothing except an outfit two
years before were owing as much as $25,000 on from three to six months’
time.
A spirit of optimism and good cheer prevailed. A sun bath, lounging in
a home-made chair on the stoop of a cabin (perhaps with a pair of moose
horns forming an ornamental back), was a luxury better appreciated in
the Klondyke than in a temperate clime. Sometimes a breeze, with a
faint odor of fir-trees and of the many wild flowers which spring up in
tropical luxuriance in the spring, came down the valley. Over the hills
were young birches which yielded a delicious sap for the tapping. There
was even gratitude to the tyrant windlass of the winter days in that it
had supplied exercise, given an appetite, kept the blood circulating,
and prevented the scurvy, which is to be dreaded only by the man who
lounges in his cabin, does not wash himself, does not cook his food
properly, and endeavors generally to imitate the bear. Nearly everyone
could hope, if he did not expect, that his claim or his lay would turn
out as well as he had estimated. At all events, he would have some
spending money. He knew that the early boats from Lake Le Barge would
bring in many luxuries just at the opportune moment when the “clean-up”
was about finished and he might go to “town.” He smacked his lips in
anticipation of the day when he would have all the eggs that he could
eat, regardless of their cost.
One day the sun suddenly beat down with great fierceness, which was
unabated for several days. Then the water came gushing down the flumes
in greater quantity than was needed, and the men picked up their picks
and shovels again and began peeling off the dirt on the dumps and
tossing it into the sluice-boxes. The warmth was prolonged through the
night, so that the dirt continued to thaw as fast as they could strip
it off, and on many claims--whose owners had foresight or were in luck,
as one pleases to put it--there were two shifts working all the time
except when, once or twice a day, the boxes were being “cleaned” of
the accumulation of gold and the sand which sinks with it between the
cleats. The snowdrifts were melting as if they were under a blowpipe.
Even the tiny streams of the gulches become torrents, dams had to be
opened, and some sluice-boxes floated away from their moorings. Only
too soon was the loss of the wasted energy brought home. With the
snow gone and rains and the seepage from the thawing surface the only
source of water supply, the currents dwindled until many claims had
not a single sluice-head. The claim-owners on the tributary Eldorado,
with as much dirt to wash as the main stream Bonanza, particularly
had cause to resent the prodigality of nature in expending all of its
ammunition at once. Instead of having finished their washing in June as
they had confidently expected, all through July they were measuring the
head of water from hour to hour with the care of a physician feeling a
patient’s pulse.
When the “clean-up” of a day’s shovelling was made, you might feast
your eyes on the consummation of the harvest. The water was shut off
and the cleats in the boxes were lifted and rinsed, leaving a residue
which glistened with yellow particles. Just a small stream was turned
on by the man at the water-gates, who was probably making the most
of his rest from shovelling by smoking a pipe of cut plug, and then
turned off again, or on a little more or off a little less, while the
most expert miner on the claim pushed the speckled sand-pile back and
forth with a common brush-broom until all the foreign particles had
floated off, except a sprinkling of the heavy black sand which is
invariably the companion of placer gold.
Three or four or five thousand dollars--perhaps ten or fifteen or
twenty thousand if the “clean-up” be on Eldorado--which is three or
four or five double handfuls, is put into a pan with an ordinary
fire-shovel. The sight is bound to make your blood run faster and to
color your reason with an epic enthusiasm. That little yellow pile, you
know at a glance, will stand the test of chemicals. It must also accept
the concrete responsibility for all the disappointments, sufferings,
and deaths of the pilgrims on the trail and the worries of their
friends and relatives at home. Once you have seen a “color” in the
bottom of a pan with the black sand following it around like a faithful
servant, you can never again be deceived by the glitter of any false
gods. You would know it if you saw it between cobblestones on Broadway,
or if it were no larger than a pin-head at the bottom of a trout-pool.
It is small wonder that once a man is a prospector, in good faith,
not a child of a wild stampede, he is always a prospector. There is
an heroic aspect, the more charming in contrast to the complexity of
civilization, in going from creek to creek which have no place on the
maps of geographical societies, taking a pan of dirt here and a pan of
dirt there, breathing fresh air, a zest given to your exercise by the
hope of success.
For the moment, the yellow pile makes you feel like seeking a claim of
your own and harvesting its treasure for yourself. But when you look
at the miry path along the base of the mountain by the creek-side, and
think of following it with a pack on your back until it is no more, and
a wilderness begins; of passing on over the mountains until you come
to what you consider a likely place, and thawing through thirty feet
of earth at a rate of a foot a day in the hap-hazard possibility of
finding “pay-dirt,” you conclude that the poetry of the thing can be
better appreciated by sitting on someone else’s dump.
Besides, as one who did a little prospecting on his own account and is
proud to say that he found a few “colors”--which is just what anyone
else can do in the Klondyke region--I observed that the recent arrivals
of Nestorian prospectors who took a delight in quoting to you from
Emerson when their hands were reeking with clay and their gray locks
were sticking through the crowns of old hats, do not like Alaska,
though free to admit its material opportunities. They could not be
weaned from the temperate climate and the skies of California, and were
determined to return to their old stamping-grounds, where any honest
prospector can get a grubstake from a speculative city man, and needs
nothing more to make him happy and free.
After a few days’ washing the hopes of most of the laymen were
shattered; and so far as their peace of mind was concerned, the
worst of it was that they had only their own lack of foresight to
blame. They had learned that even in the Klondyke men do not make a
practice of giving fortunes away to strangers--except to music-hall
artistes--though, as in the centres of civilization, they often
negotiated a bargain with an air of self-sacrifice which is an
assumption of as much.
Such was the attitude of many of the claim-owners below the discovery
claim on Bonanza and of a few above who had prospected their claims
well enough to have some idea of what was in them. They concluded to
let out their ground to be worked on shares, two men to each section,
which is called a lay. Many, especially those who had come in with
the little pilgrimage that reached Dawson in the autumn of ’97, were
enraptured over the chance of getting a portion of a claim on the
original creek and not far from “discovery,” at that.
The number of applications quite exceeded the number of lays to be
let, and all through the winter the laymen on Bonanza were the envy
of their fellows. The samples which they washed out in their cabins
had the peculiarity of bringing promises up to original expectations,
because the laymen had the weakness of selecting the samples from their
best dirt. When the man who was in the drift came to one of those
rare spots in the pay-streak of Lower Bonanza where he could see the
tiny particles shining in the wall of earth like golden hoar-frost,
he gleefully called out to his “pardner” at the windlass to take it
into the cabin so they could see how much it ran to the bucket. In
the evening the happy children, upon the result as a basis, quite
overestimating the amount of dirt they had in their dumps, figured
out small fortunes for themselves, spoke of the claim-owner as a good
angel, hugged their knees fondly, as if they had materialized into
dust, and saw brilliant pictures in their smoke rings.
In their letters, detailing their success to the folks at home, they
promised their wives new gowns and their daughters pianos. They were
doing so well that they felt that they could afford holidays. They fell
into the way of “knocking off” by mutual consent at noon on days when
they had to bake bread. If it was a little colder than usual in the
morning they succumbed to the temptation of making more figures and
dreaming more dreams by the fire and postponing work until the morrow.
“The gold’s in the ground; it’s ours. All we’ve got to do is to take it
out, and we’ve got to stay here two or three winters, anyway,” was the
argument with which they excused themselves. The size of their dumps
beside those excavated by employees who worked by the hour was a silent
commentary on the value of discipline.
Mid-July found them in Dawson in a mood to afford at least one
more dish of eggs, one more dinner at the restaurant before they
settled down to the economical life which their necessities required.
Occasionally they took out of their pockets, to amuse their friends,
clippings from the home paper, in which they saw themselves made out
millionnaires. They reread the letters from home which had come along
with the clippings in the first mail down the river, and confronted
deep perplexities. It was only human that they should wish that the
wife had not gone so far as actually to order the piano and the gown.
While they calculated how much they would need for their winter’s
outfit and how much they could send home--if that fund did not all go
for eggs before the problem was settled--they formulated the wording of
their replies by which they should explain the situation.
To the credit of the sex be it said that the wives of some of the
unfortunate laymen knew their husbands’ weaknesses. One optimist, who
had taken only $900 out of his claim instead of the $10,000 that he had
anticipated, received this reply from home:
“God bless you, Charlie, but we’ve made too many ten thousands without
ever getting them for me to count my chickens before they’re hatched.
I’m being as economical as I can, and telling the neighbors that I hope
you’ll make a good year’s wages, but that it’s too early to tell yet
for certain.”
Most of the laymen, if they had worked steadily for eight hours a
day--more are scarcely practicable on account of the long nights--would
have had more than the equivalent of the prevailing rate of wages.
Those who had felt themselves to be unfortunate in not getting lays and
had sought employment, because they had someone to tell them to go to
work in the morning, were in the mood of the school-boy who had studied
during the term and passed his examination as opposed to the boy who
had not. Their employers were better satisfied because their claims had
been worked with more system and thoroughness than the others, and were
more than glad to pay the interest, heavy as it was, on their borrowed
capital.
While the laymen were inclined to exaggerate the amount of their
earnings in order to decrease the discrepancy between their winter
boasts and their spring returns, the claim-owners themselves, who early
in May were serene optimists and put the total output of the country
at $15,000,000, by the end of May were dour pessimists, asserting
their unbounded faith that the total output would not be more than
$6,000,000. Early in May, you see, there was an impression that the
Government royalty of ten per cent. on the gross product of all claims
had been repealed. At the end of May, Major Walsh, the Commissioner
of the Yukon District, arrived with the positive information that the
royalty would be collected. Most of the claim-owners on Bonanza had
suffered the same disillusion as their laymen; but most of them, if
the Government had not decided that they would have to pay the royalty
on the laymen’s gold as well as on their own, would have put on a bold
front, especially as their claims were for sale.
When claim-owners met on the trail, after comparing notes as to the
number of eggs eaten at the first sitting, the invariable remark was:
“I don’t suppose you’ve heard anything about your claim being sold!”
For no one was certain whether he or some stranger owned the wealth of
his dumps. Without any property under consideration by the capitalists
of London or New York, you were a kind of social outcast. Claims
that were under options were as common as mortgages formerly were on
farms in Kansas.
[Illustration: A Flume on Bonanza Creek.]
The prospect of famine during the winter had been responsible for this.
Some enterprising fellows, who were among the first to go out over the
ice, made the best of their opportunity as connecting links between an
isolated community and civilization.
“Here you are,” they said to the claim-owners on Eldorado and Bonanza,
“paying a dollar and a quarter and a dollar and a half an hour for
labor and thawing the dirt out by inches, when capitalists, with
cheaper labor and improved appliances, can take it out for half the
money. Why, it’s a case of the old stage coach against the lightning
express. If they can block a number of claims and work ’em together,
they’ll gladly pay you on the spot more’n you can get out of your claim
the way you’re working it, and make a good thing out of it too. The
whole outside’s wild over the Klondyke. The capitalists are longing for
the chance. All that’s got to be done is to lay it before ’em. You name
your price and give me six months’ option and we’ll take ’em out and
sell ’em. What we get for ’em’s our affair. We’ll make our commission
out of the difference.”
The enthusiasts believed what they said. They assured themselves and
the claim-owners that none of the arguments which held good in other
mining camps could apply in this instance. The Klondyke was a law unto
itself in all matters of investment, they said. They put dust from each
of the claims which they were to sell in a separate bag, and this they
were to offer to the simple-minded financiers of London and New York
as a guarantee of the correctness of their several representations.
Each zealous miner being desirous that his claim should show up well on
the list, some of the promoters obtained several thousand dollars in
nuggets.
Such examples of success were not without their effect upon those who
went out over the ice at later periods. The field of all the claims
on the creeks as yet demonstrated to be valuable having been worked,
they turned their attention to those creeks which had been staked on
unfounded rumors by stampedes, and possibly were worth no more than
the beds of so many creeks in the valley of the Hudson River. They
neglected none of the details. Because it looks better to the lay eye,
they chose dust from Eldorado as examples of the product of these “wild
oat prospectors.”
The moral effect of the option craze was unfortunate in more respects
than one. Men who owned claims on stampede creeks felt that they could
afford to waste their winter in idleness in their cabins as long as
they had property in the hands of New York capitalists. They could not
escape the heresy that a claim in the Klondyke, no matter what its
location, was regarded by the outside world as a valuable piece of
property. It was especially hard for those who had not funds enough to
buy their winter’s outfit, as they inquired along the river bank, day
after day, as the boats came in, to learn finally that the promoters
to whom they had intrusted their claims had arrived on the Pacific
Coast just at the time when the Klondyke was forgotten and all public
interest was centred in another subject, and, accordingly, had enlisted
in the volunteer army.
Those promoters with small ambitions fared the best. In London
they sold a few of the cheaper claims, which, as a rule, were
disappointments to the purchasers. But sometimes it is better to be
trusting than to be wise. One young Englishman bought a claim on
Sulphur for $2,000 which would not have sold for $500 in Dawson at the
time. When he arrived to take possession of it in June, its value had
risen so rapidly on account of the later development of the creek that
he sold it for $20,000. The anxiety of the claim-owners on the new
creeks, as Sulphur, Dominion, and Hunker--all having their head-waters
on the slopes of The Dome--were called, lest the promoters had sold
their claims, was as great as that of some of the claim-owners on
Bonanza lest their claims had not been sold. Perhaps as many as thirty
claims on the new creeks had been worked to any extent during the past
winter, with such results as to increase their speculative value by
five hundred per cent.
The forty happy kings of the forty claims on Eldorado also preferred
not to sell. That “pup” returned good for evil. It heaped satire upon
the satirists who had given it its name as a joke, and continued to
surpass all expectations. The optimism which over-estimated Bonanza
under-estimated Eldorado. These forty kings, as they compared the
output with their figures, concluded, with some pride, that all born
mathematicians are inclined to be too conservative.
You could see the dust glistening in the dumps of the “pup.” The water
gurgling over the cleats in the sluice-boxes seemed to sing a merrier
song than on Bonanza. Every shovelful which it bore chuckling over the
cleats yielded up a dollar or more. It licked twice as much off rocks
that had to be lifted out of the sluice-boxes by hand because its
current was not strong enough to carry them on down to the waste pile.
At intervals, nuggets of some size were unearthed by the spade and were
tossed into a pan at one side. If you were a friend of the claim-owner
he would beg you to take your pick of the lot as a souvenir of the day.
But you would not get one worth more than ten or fifteen dollars, even
if you were greedy enough to choose it for its size rather than for its
beauty. The giants--one was found worth $600 and those worth from $50
to $100 were not infrequent--had been spied in the drifts in the winter.
A magnificent carelessness of details prevailed. A scientific miner who
had seen fortunes made in California out of a cent a pan would have
regarded the forty kings in the light of infants making a holiday with
a tack hammer and a gold watch. They could afford to laugh back at him
in return. There is some reason in their philosophy that one cannot
afford to pay men a dollar and a quarter an hour to pick up stray
pennies, and more in the philosophy that when you have a fortune you
have enough.
It was not yet in the old-timer’s nature, rapidly as his character was
changing, to squeeze the last cent out of Mother Earth, in the manner
of some hard taskmaster, when she had given to him such a bountiful
harvest. A little line of dust, like a braid of gold lace, remaining on
either side of the sluice-boxes after a day’s clean-up was dismissed
with the remark that it would “come out in the wash” next time. If the
workman who had the uncomfortable and unhealthy position--especially
when the sun was directly overhead--of standing in the dump-box, took
a few minutes’ rest, he shrugged his shoulders and said that any dust
that was lost in the meantime could be a boon to the Chinamen who,
coming humbly after the white man’s departure, would patiently take
fortunes out of the white man’s tailings--unless the capitalist should
make the valley resound with the toil of machinery manned by cheap
labor, thus cheating poor John out of what he has come to regard as the
right of his race in placer mining countries.
[Illustration: Shovelling a Clean-Up into a Gold Pan.]
[Illustration: Cleaning Up.]
There was not one strong box for the safekeeping of the daily harvest
of thousands on all of the creeks. The bags of dust were kept in the
little cellars which the miners had excavated under their cabins for
the preservation of their food. There was a joke which went the round
of the firesides during the food-panic that it would be cheaper to
fry the dust and save the hams. For the bags, made of roughly tanned
moosehide, the Indians received prices in keeping with those of other
things. They bore the owner’s name printed in ink, if ink could be
obtained; their capacity was about $5,000 each, and they were not
unlike, in their freshness as well as in their size, the dirty, worn,
brown little bags which were carried in lieu of purses. Three or four
of them were all that you cared to carry on your back. When you met
men on the trail bending as under heavy packs of slight bulk, you knew
their business. If there were many bags there might be an escort with
a rifle and there might not. Most of the claim-owners thought nothing
of sending several thousands by their employees, unaccompanied, to be
deposited in one of the Commercial Companies’ stores; but once the
“Cheechawkos” began to arrive, all sought locks for their cellar-doors.
VI
SOME KLONDYKE TYPES
THE FOOL AND HIS LUCKY FRIENDS--MORE THEORIZERS--JOE STALEY
AND BILLY DEDDERING--FRENCH GULCH BENCH--GOOD FORTUNE THAT WAS
DESERVED--NEIGHBORS AND TWINS--NO CURE FOR THE GOLD FEVER.
It was the greater world of the Klondyke that was bounded by the creek
claims. A smaller world was bounded by the hill-sides where there were
many fresh mounds of earth, suggesting that the population might be
digging their graves one by one. Graves of ambitions most of these
mounds were, in all truth. A few, readily distinguished as far as you
could see the two figures hovering over them, were the birthplaces of
the fortune which the figures were exhuming with the orthodox rocker.
The original nugget washed out of a bench and deposited where Indian
Charlie’s gaze would light on it did not lead, even indirectly, to
the discovery of the wealth of the benches. This honor belongs to a
stalwart Swede, whose race in the Klondyke is the general butt of that
fine wit of our own race which makes a mark of a foreigner’s broken
English and his efforts to understand strange manners and a strange
language. One day in the spring of 1897 he went up the slope above his
cabin near the mouth of Eldorado and began to strip off the muck as
fast as the sun thawed it. Directly his neighbors saw what he was doing
they began to compose satirical remarks against the time when he should
come down.
“Why don’t you go looking for gold up a tree?” they asked him.
“I tank gold no grow on trees,” he replied, in all candor.
“Say, did you ever hear,” they continued, as they held their sides,
“that the weight of gold makes it sink? I suppose you think the glacier
walked up on the hills and left a few millions there. The millions
didn’t roll down? Oh, no! That’s why we have to sink through thirty
feet in the creek bed to pay dirt. Better try the trees! You might find
a bear up the trees and bear meat would be worth three pennyweights a
pound in town.”
“If you don’t dig some hole you no find gold. By tam! I dig a hole if
I vant to,” he replied, as he went into his cabin.
“Well of all the fools,” they said, “it takes a Swede to beat the lot.”
Men passing on the trails stopped to look up to the point where the
“fool” was working, grew friendly in despising him, and carried the
joke to the ends of the creeks and to Dawson, where it was elaborated
over the bars.
One evening the “fool” quietly called on all of his friends among his
fellow Scandinavians, as well as upon certain Anglo-Saxons who had not
made fun of his English. They followed him up the hill and drove stakes
in the neighborhood of his prospect hole. The twinkle in his blue eye
was not unkind, though suggestive, the next morning when he showed to
the scoffers a handful of nuggets from a claim which was worth $50,000.
But scoffers accept nothing on faith. They would not believe that he
took the nugget out of the hill until they had panned some of his dirt
themselves.
“Well, of all the lucky fools,” they said, “it takes a Swede to beat
the lot! Here’s millions been lyin’ within ten rods of us for a year
and we never knowed it.”
Those who had sharpened their wits at the discoverer’s expense now
hastened to get a claim as near as possible to his, until a mile of
Bonanza on both sides of the creek was taken up, from the point where
the slopes meet the creek bed to their summit. Theories about the
habits of the glacier were qualified by the experts. Thenceforth, it
stood to reason that the breadth of no glacier of such importance would
be limited to that of a creek. The scoffers soon found themselves
saying that this had been their opinion all along, and eventually
became so imaginative as to hint that they had advised the Swede to
make the experiment.
Poetic justice attended the immediate outcome of the stampede. The
pioneer and the parasite got their fit rewards. There was less than
an acre of good pay dirt on Skookum Bench, as it was called, and this
mostly fell to the discoverer and his friends. Here and there in the
neighborhood good day’s wages could be made with a rocker, and nothing
more. Enthusiasm over bench claims languished.
“It was just like a Swede to strike the only rich bench in the whole
country the first time that he put his pick in the ground,” said the
scoffers. In their pessimistic philosophy, which exults over deserted
prospect holes, the latest strike is always bound to be the last. They
are the very ones who were the greatest optimists when they left home
to try their luck in the North against the advice of their friends.
This weakness is likely to grow on Klondykers who become too fond of
a sedentary life, unless their supply of bacon runs out and forces
action, or they awaken to a sense of their growing degradation when
they eat fresh eggs in Dawson and then see the world in bright colors
again. But long after the cynics are dead, strikes will be made in
Alaska by the class of real prospectors who cheerily face all hardships
and get out of them good digestions for anything from flapjacks to
moose gristle or even boiled willow roots.
Joe Staley and Billy Deddering, who discovered French Gulch Bench,
the richest of all the benches, the spring following the discovery of
Skookum Bench, were of the order of real prospectors. They had served
their apprenticeship in various parts of the Rockies, which are the
playground of free men from end to end.
Fond as I am of the California prospector, I am unwilling to accept the
verdict of his squint whenever he brings it to bear on a portion of
the earth’s surface, though Billy Deddering, I admit, as he understands
relative values, has reason to believe in his. But, in one sense, I
rejoice with him in his faith, inasmuch as the scoffers, who want to
make out that all success in the Klondyke comes from luck, and that
they have failed because they never had any, spun the yarn that a log
which he was shooting down the hill for a cabin knocked a nugget out of
the ground and thus became the godfather of his fortune.
Some two miles above the mouth of Eldorado, French Gulch splits the
embankment which forms the western wall of the valley of Eldorado.
Billy’s squint, when he brought it to bear on the rounded corner of the
embankment on the lower side of the gulch in something of the manner of
an old-fashioned marine covering a sail with his telescope, told him
that this was exactly the place where gold ought to be found, even if
it was not. The first hole that he sunk yielded only colors. A clerk
from London or the Eastern seaboard of the United States might have
gone back down the hill with his pick and shovel in a fit of blues and
never come up again. Billy was not in the least discouraged. He merely
readjusted his squint, and concluded:
“If ’tain’t here it must be farther up.”
So it was. In the next hole he took $187 out of his first pan on
bedrock. Joe was with him at the time, but at the request of Joe I give
all the credit for the discovery to Billy.
“It was Billy’s idea entirely,” Joe said. “He spotted the ground first.”
“What did you do,” I asked Billy, “when you struck it after all your
years of buffeting about from one camp to another?”
“Well,” he replied, “I looked around to see if anybody had seen us.”
“Nobody did see us, so far as we could make out,” Joe put in, “but they
must have noticed that we went down the hill as light as if we was
walkin’ on feathers, though we was tryin’ to look very solemn, like we
was at a funeral. When somebody asked us if we had found anything I
reckon we kind o’ started, though we was careful to say, ‘Jest a few
colors.’ But durned if the crowd wasn’t up there ’fore the few friends
we had among our neighbors had fairly got their stakes in the ground.”
“And you, Joe? What did you think of that night before you turned in?”
“Old’s I am, and long’s I’ve been knockin’ about the world, I’ve never
been married, and naturally I thought what a surprise it would be to
mother, when she got a letter sayin’ that her oldest boy was comin’
back to ’hio with a pile to pay off the mortgage and spend the rest of
his days on the old homestead.”
“And you, Billy?”
“I wished I was in ’Frisco with that hundred and eighty-seven.”
Many times I climbed the hill to have a talk with Joe and Billy.
They were a relief from the loungers and speculators in the hotel
at the Forks, who seemed to think that the business of a newspaper
correspondent was to expound the possibility of the schemes for
enlisting capital which they were promoting. It was a pleasure to look
into the good faces of Joe and Billy, and to shake their hands, caked
with clay. I sat on a stone and smoked my pipe, while Joe carried
buckets of dirt to Billy, who looked up with a smile on his round
German face, which was spattered with drops of mud that had splashed
out of the rocker when he shook it, or when he ladled water on to the
dirt with a dipper made out of a butter-can. Joe said that he didn’t
mind if the fact that he had struck it was published in the _Sydney_
(Ohio) _Journal_, but beyond that I knew he had no axes to grind, and
my highest ambition for the moment was that they should think me a
good fellow, while their greatest fear was that I was starving because
I would not go up to the tent and have a cup of coffee and a “bite to
eat” in the middle of the afternoon.
The sun was accommodating enough to thaw the dirt as fast as Billy
could rock it, and Joe could bring it a little faster than either the
sun could thaw it or Billy could rock it. This allowed Joe intervals
in which to rest, to entertain me, and to relight his pipe. I used to
offer my pouch to him, telling him that he would get more smoke if he
used tobacco.
“Couldn’t think of it. There’s nothin’ so sweet as the heel,” he would
say. “It gives me a puff, and that’s all I want.”
It was not surprising that he wondered why the supplies of tobacco
which other men had brought in with their outfits were long ago
exhausted, while he had plenty left. He protested, notwithstanding
Billy’s denials, that he filled his pipe every morning--at least,
almost every morning.
The experience of seeking with his own hands wealth direct from the
hands of Mother Nature had chiselled out the lines of his face in
distinct, unqualified characteristics, without any of the doubtful
gingerbread work which we find on faces in civilization. It was like
the weather-beaten image on some old church, careless of the storms
which make a new image streaked and mean. He and his “pardner” were
“rocking out” five hundred dollars a day; he was no man’s servant and
no man’s master, and more of a king than kings. I have gathered nuggets
on his claim as easily as I have picked up white pebbles on the beach
in boyhood.
The great difficulty is in developing such a wonderful squint as
Billy Deddering’s and in finding the exact spot where such nests of
nuggets are located. If ever there was a poor man’s claim it is the
bench claim. All you need to work it are a rocker, which costs fifteen
dollars, and your pick and shovel. A blind ditch whose frozen walls are
as tight as a porcelain bath-tub will catch the seepage from the pay
dirt, which is thawed by the sun as it is gradually exposed. So you
have all the water that you need, without too much. If the bedrock be
at some depth, you can work in winter as well as in summer. A year at
the most will suffice to take out your fortune; and you have no worry
over borrowed money, flumes, sluices, or dams.
If Billy had not already staked his bench claim rights for the Bonanza
Creek region, he and Joe would not have had to be content with a single
claim, and one of them would have got the claim just above discovered,
which was even richer, two men taking as high as a thousand dollars a
day out of it. Here was dirt richer than any on Eldorado itself, twenty
of whose forty working claims, probably containing thirty million
dollars, stretched out in a panorama before you when you looked either
up or down the creek. If one could have had a claim on the bench of the
size of the creek claims, instead of one only a hundred feet square, he
would have been more than a millionaire; and by hiring labor he could
have left the country in three months after the discovery with his
money in his pocket.
Sad to say, there was not room for all on French Gulch Bench any more
than on Eldorado. The whole extent of the pay dirt was not more than
two or three acres. It was just as large as the dip in the hill-side,
which, according to the theory of Billy, caught and held the gold when
it was travelling, while all that passed over the rim went on down to
the creek bed below, leaving only an occasional color in its track.
But I disagree with Billy. I think that all is accounted for by the
giant keeper of the pot in The Dome having thrown out a handful of the
overflow across the hills. This makes the presence of wash-gravel,
which is absent, unnecessary, and reconciles itself to the presence of
nuggets in rotten mica shist, which is the most inexcusable of all the
paradoxes in Alaska, the old prospectors say.
Aside from Billy and Joe, I came to know some of their fortunate
neighbors. Dan Saunders probably had the best claim of all. He was at
the hotel at the Forks one day, and in his cups when a man offered
in the bar-room to sell a claim on French Gulch Bench for a hundred
dollars. The Forks is the Stock Exchange of the creeks, and at that
moment, on account of some rumor, the opinion ruled that the bench had
been salted. The claim-owner believed it. Dan said he would give fifty
down and the first fifty out of the claim, and the offer was accepted.
The morning after, when Dan’s wit was not so brilliant, but his
reasoning faculties had improved, he went up to look at his elephant.
He came down a week later and tried to spend the two or three thousand
dollars he had taken out in the meantime. He could dispose of only part
of it, and returned to his claim in despair, somewhat disgusted with
city life.
Burke, who owned the claim next to Saunders, was a type of the runaway
boys from the East who have turned up in the Klondyke after having
served an apprenticeship in the West. This one reaped among the harvest
of his wild oats the largest nugget that was taken out of French Gulch
Bench. It was the shape of an oblong pancake, without any quartz in it,
and worth $210. When I met him in Dawson one morning, he was gleeful
over the joke he had played on the old folks at home. For the first
time in five years he had written to them. They had as good reasons to
suppose that he was dead as that he was in the Klondyke.
“Won’t their eyes pop and won’t they have something to tell the
neighbors when they find out that their worthless Tom is comin’ home
with fifty thousand cold!”
That same day I dined with Joe Staley at the foremost restaurant in
town. When we had eaten fresh eggs and other luxuries which had just
been brought in from the “outside,” as he pushed his plate away from
him he shook his head dubiously:
“I dunno as I’ll be so happy as I thought, when I settle down among
the cows and chickens,” he mused. “This grub don’t taste the way I
thought ’twould. Darned if I don’t like the beans and bacon that I have
up at the claim better, and I’ll be glad to be back carryin’ dirt to
the rocker for Billy to-morrow. They say once the gold fever’s in a
fellow’s bones it sticks like the rheumatiz, and I believe it. I reckon
it’s the only thing I’ll be satisfied with in this life. But I won’t
prospect in this godless region. I’ll go back to Californy.”
On my way to see Joe and Billy I often stopped for a chat with Ned and
Fred Beck, who were sinking a shaft to bedrock at the base of French
Gulch Bench hill. These twin brothers had been “pardners” for forty
years. They had the vigor which comes from living among the Rockies.
Their faces, framed in white beards, were fresh and smiling. The
archaic furnace which they had constructed for sharpening their
tools, if not their age and personal resemblance, would have attracted
attention.
[Illustration: The Discoverers of French Gulch Bench at Work.]
[Illustration: Pardners and Twins for Forty Years.]
“Have you never quarrelled?” I asked.
“Oh, yes, lots of times,” said Fred, “and agreed on quits lots of
times, too. After Ned’s had a drink or two he always gets cranky and
wants to start out for himself.”
“Not much crankier’n you do,” Ned put in.
“That’s right,” Fred assented. “But when we’re sober we make it up
again and are ashamed of ourselves. We may be twins, but we’re just
fitted for each other.”
“That’s right, too,” Fred assented.
VII
GETTING ACQUAINTED
MR. AND MRS. “MEENACH” AND THEIR MENAGE--THE JUVENILE MINING COMPANY,
LIMITED--VOSS--THE ARCH-DEACON--A SOUR-DOUGH STIFF--A DALMATIAN AND
A TURK--SIAWASH GEORGE AND HIS STEAM-ENGINE--MISS MULROONEY AT THE
FORKS--THE PRICE OF A “SQUARE” WITH TRIMMINGS.
One day, if the quartz claims which have been staked should fulfil the
hopes of their owners, the Klondyke will become a place of managers and
workmen, of stamp mills and chemical processes. To-day, there is very
little to say about the working of the mines, which is as simple as
building a fire, digging a well and doing the week’s wash, but much to
say about my friends and acquaintances there, who came from the ends
of the earth and represented most of its employments. Without knowing
individuals, the pilgrimage of the Cheechawkos would have meant no
more to me than a motley procession seen from a balcony. Those leading
citizens and well-known characters whom I met, under the guidance of
Captain Hansen in a round of the town on the evening after my arrival,
are worthy of a chapter by themselves. If I had taken advantage of all
the letters of introduction to claim-owners that they gave me I think
that I should have been three weeks in travelling the length of Bonanza.
In return for hospitality that did not stand upon formality but laid
its hand on my shoulder and insisted, I could offer nothing except the
news from the “outside,” the bad news that there was no escape from the
royalty. I registered a vow that if I were to make the journey over
the ice again I would find room among my supplies for one more article
of luxury, or else forego the privilege of introductions. I saw in my
dreams the smiles with which my hosts would have greeted the offer of a
good cigar, until I had the conscience of a highway robber.
“Don’t forget to call on Meenach!” said Captain Hansen. “He’s the
luckiest man in the country without exception. He doesn’t have to
darn his own socks and cook his own bacon and beans and you’ll know
him because he’s sleek and fat and clean-shaven. I walk up the creek
when I can get the time just for the privilege of poking my head in
at Meenach’s door. To a poor devil of a Klondyker it’s a peep into
paradise.”
It was not enough that the fortunate Meenach should have his wife; he
had also his little boy of six and his two little girls, one of four
and the other of two years, with him. After he wrote to Mrs. Meenach
that he had killed his lion, she came on to him; and she brought with
her such thing as sheets, tablecloths, and pillows, and a regulation
cooking-stove. He never dared to compute just how much the stove had
cost him, preferring not to have his enjoyment of the luxury allayed.
The mere expense of bringing it up from Dawson would have bought two or
three good ones at home.
To the miners the most wonderful feature of the Meenach cabin was the
carpet on the floor. Some of them wanted to take off their boots before
entering, and one suggested that if he were younger he would walk in on
his hands.
“If you don’t mind,” he added, “I’ll sit with my back to the sheets on
the bed. It’s too much at a time. I want to drift into this easy like.”
“Folks who live in castles may be bothered by having too many rooms to
care for,” said Mrs. Meenach, “but not I, in my cabin. I could put the
children to bed with one hand, stir something on the stove with the
other, and set the table with the third, if I had it. It’s no trouble
to go to the market in the morning. All our fresh vegetables are in
tin cans in the cache just outside the door. Oh, yes, there is much
to be thankful for if I look at it in the right light. We kept our
condensed cream, our canned asparagus and our canned peas all winter
without being frozen. Then, please heaven, something green grows in
this country. I have a little cranberry sauce from the poor cranberries
on the hill-side, and I agree with the children that it is ‘gooder’n’
anything I ever tasted. If I could get a fresh cabbage I think I should
eat it all without waiting to put salt on it. Now I live from day to
day on the hopes of the eggs which are expected in on the first boats.”
Thus she chatted while she warmed the tinned roast mutton in the
frying-pan, boiled the evaporated potatoes and the tinned sweet corn.
“I’m not going to say that dinner, such as it is, is ready,” she said,
“because, in the Klondyke, that is quite superfluous.”
It is good when you have eaten beans for a month off a tin plate
balanced upon your knee, to look upon a clean table-cloth again, to
sit by the window of a cabin in blissful certainty that your journey
is at an end, and have a good and gentle woman pour you a cup of tea.
I remember the meal as a banquet, not a dinner. After it was over, the
lord and master and I smoked our pipes until the little ones’ heads
began to nod, when I went into the cabin of one of his laymen to roll
up in my blanket.
The children had reason to think that they were the only children in
the world and to be as proud as princes. But Mrs. Meenach’s fears lest
they should be spoiled by the adulation of the miners were equally vain
with her fears about their health. The extent of their illnesses was a
day’s indisposition on the part of the baby. Swathed in furs and scarfs
until only their noses were visible and their limbs were as stiff as
a doll baby’s, they might go out to play with their sleds for a few
moments at a time. Listening to the cries of the dog-drivers and the
howls of their steeds, which had turned their mother’s nerves on edge,
had been as good as the kuh-chuk-chuk-chuk of a railroad locomotive
to them. The miners, with frost-encrusted beards, were so many Father
Christmases who rarely forgot to bring a present of a nugget when they
came.
With the coming of spring, an old Californian took the baby in his arms
while the brother and sister followed at his heels up the hill-side to
his bench claim. He showed them to a log, where they sat very gravely
while he unfolded to them a mighty scheme. In return for three kisses
apiece, one to be delivered when the bargain was struck and two when
the goods were delivered, he agreed to build for them a small rocker,
so that they could start a Mining Company (Limited) on their own
account.
Their dividends were large until one of the laymen found out that they
were using the best portions of his dumps. Then the total income fell
to a dollar a day, which the boy explained was due to laxness on the
part of the president--his elder sister--and gross negligence on the
part of the assistant manager--the baby--who insisted upon turning the
gold pan bottom side up at critical moments. Their father played the
part of the unskilled laborer, and sometimes when he was ordered to
work he said, “In a minute!” an excuse which had to be accepted. The
time came when the old Californian could no longer keep his joke to
himself.
“Meenach, seems to me I ’member tellin’ the youngsters that you’d carry
water for ’em to work the rocker with,” he chuckled.
It was by a diversion from my programme that I spent the next night
with Voss. His name was not on my list, and I had never heard of it
until I drifted into his cabin. I was attracted by his speech, which
sounded a little unnatural in a community where expressions are
intended to convey a meaning and not to subserve the rules of grammar.
Despite his education, Voss was an old-timer among old-timers, greeting
them all by their first names. The most ferocious of them, out of whose
mouths an oath rolled with the ease and deliberation of their tobacco
smoke, regarded him as a personal friend.
“He looks stuck up, but he ain’t stuck up,” they said. “He’s clean all
the way down and all the way through and game as a grizzly bear, and we
know. We’ve followed him on the trail.”
The sincere fellowship which he felt for them in return belongs to
that philosophy which makes of the young men of old but impoverished
families, good and cheerful prospectors, ranchers, and cowboys. Not
in fancy--which misled so many poor souls among the Cheechawkos--but
in fact, they prefer the independent life of a mining camp to working
for a salary in a city; prefer washing their own dishes and rising
at 3 A.M., and harnessing the dogs to start on the trail to going to
an office every morning and leaving it every afternoon at a certain
hour. By all the manners that stamp the man, Voss was a child of
civilization, and such a child as was equal to carrying out his
determination not to return to it until he was master in his own right
of the little luxuries that keep the taste of ashes out of the mouth.
Often he spoke of these, then ran his hands into the pockets of his
overalls, took a pull at his pipe, and looked at his dumps with an
anticipation as keen as that of some naval captain of Drake’s day in
sight of the chalk cliffs of England, after years in foreign countries
on rations of hard biscuit.
“But even before I carry out my plans of travel,” he said, “I shall buy
a ranch, where I shall have a home with no other habitations in sight;
where I shall have a good saddle-horse waiting for me, whenever I shall
grow tired of town. Once you have become accustomed to the silence of
the plains, the mountains, and the trail, mere country houses will not
satisfy you--something gets into the blood.”
“You all catch it, I see,” I interrupted. “Joe Staley says it’s like
rheumatiz’ and it gets not into the blood but into the bones.”
“Yes, bones--blood and bones, both!” was the reply.
He had four retainers, who lived in his cabin: the boy, the Archdeacon,
Jim, and Grouse, the fox-terrier. The boy was sixteen or seventeen. He
had gone to the Klondyke, against his parents’ wishes, to find himself
nonplussed by the necessity of a food supply for the winter months.
Voss put him on his feet. The Archdeacon was of the Established Church
and a graduate of Oxford. He did not seem to be, but he must have been,
older than the boy, for he was gray and the father of three children.
Shortly after he was ordained archdeacon the something had “got into”
his blood and bones, and he vacillated between the church and travel
until his meanderings brought the promise of a brilliant career to the
guardianship of a flock of Indians, halfway around the world. He baked
the best bread that I ate in the Klondyke. Though he accepted praise on
that score as quietly as he did everything else, I could see that it
pleased him--better, perhaps, than the praise of a bishop. In getting
breakfast, which he had taken upon himself as one of his tasks, his
slippered feet moved about so softly that you were not awakened until
his voice called you at the right moment.
“It is good to see many kinds of men and to do many things,” he
volunteered, as he lifted a flapjack from the skillet to my plate.
“When all the world was going to the Klondyke, I had to join the
throng. I got a lay on Bonanza and put some men to work on it. But,
unfortunately, I had no food for myself. Mr. Voss”--the Archdeacon
never omitted the Mister--“asked me to come and live with him through
the winter. What a pity it is that there isn’t such a good fellow as
Mr. Voss to take care of every unfortunate fellow like me!”
Jim, in the language of the Klondyke, was a “sour-dough stiff,” and
he was certainly an unhappy man. A “sour-dough stiff” will, under no
circumstances, eat baking-powder bread. This eccentricity, developed
in the later years of a prospector’s life, generates others which are
its natural companions. He thinks that baking powder in the smallest
quantity is poisonous, and, therefore, is as finicky and miserable
as any other man who becomes a victim of dyspepsia through forever
thinking of some means to avoid it.
In addressing his employer Jim uttered the word “Voss” in a harsh
voice, as if calling attention to its nudity and implying that he would
not subvert his rights as a free man by using “Mister,” though he were
to hang for it. He was the first to rise in the morning and he always
prepared his own breakfast.
“Some folks don’t like my cookin’, an’ I don’t like some folks’
cookin’, either,” he explained.
On some occasions, when he felt a little lazy, he would condescend to
eat at the table with the others, but with an expression of martyrdom
on his thin, old face. Voss told me that Jim would probably confide to
me at the first opportunity how grossly the claim was mismanaged, and
so he did. Voss forgave his eccentricities partly because they amused
him and his friends, and partly because Jim was an expert in saving
fine gold from floating down to the waste pile.
Jim’s contempt for the Alaskan miner’s knowledge of sluicing was
pleasant to hear unless you had to hear it often. He had a miniature
sluice for treating the residue which contains the lighter particles.
It were better to step on the hem of your wife’s skirt on the way to
the theatre than to lay your hands on this fine gold machine, as he
called it. Whether or not it was worth the time that Jim had spent in
building it, was a grave question with Voss.
In making the “clean-up” Jim was the general in charge of the field.
The best-natured men on the claim were selected to assist him, and
even their patience sometimes gave out. Voss himself, accompanied by
the fox-terrier, who was general superintendent of the claim, winter
and summer, used to take up his station at the water gate. He did not
always interpret Jim’s orders satisfactorily, and I overheard this
grumbling complaint:
“A man can’t play with a dog an’ pay ’tention to business at the same
time.”
Everybody about the claim except Jim was the slave of the fox-terrier’s
moods. In New York or London you could have bought Grouse for five
dollars. Voss was offered $200 for him by another claim owner, but
would as soon have parted with his claim. I knew of only one other
terrier in the Klondyke. He was a companion, deserving the affix of
bull, of a doggy-looking man who walked up and down the river front of
Dawson. He was usually limping on three legs, but not infrequently on
two. He seemed to realize his position as the sole representative of
civilized dogdom among thousands of savages, and he no more thought of
surrender than a Roman prefect. The boast of his master that he could
whip any two or three of the huskies was well founded. Even when he was
attacked by a dozen he gave more wounds than he received, retreating
with the dignity of one who belongs to a ruling race.
Provincial as Voss’s claim was in its isolation from the world, its
surroundings were cosmopolitan enough. Among his employees, aside from
Germans, Swedes, and French-Canadians, were a Dalmatian and a Turk. The
Turk was a good workman. When he had made his “stake” he was going to
buy a fig orchard in southern California.
On the day that I visited the discovery claim of Siawash George,
which is only a short distance beyond Voss’s, several Cheechawkos were
panning some gravel at the very point where Indian Charlie had found
the famous nugget. They did not wash out a single color, and passed
on in disgust to do more prospecting on ground whose stakes--for the
most part fallen down--had been driven so long ago that the weather had
washed off the writing on their four hewn sides. Siawash George had
expended several thousand dollars in buying and bringing an old boiler
and engine up to his claim from Forty Mile. Owing to a fatal defect in
its pumping gear it would not supply half a sluice-head of water or do
the work of a small dam; but the noise of its puffing and his ability
to hire an engineer to superintend it at $15 a day greatly amused a
mind which had become aboriginal from family associations.
Money playing an important part in the politics of Alaska as well as in
other countries, poor George had acquired a fortune only to find that
it was two-edged and might be an obstacle, as well as instrumental, in
the fulfilment of his royal ambition. On a fatal day he had brought
from Dawson to his wife some little brown things in a box which was
lettered in gilt. She had found them so superior to plain brown sugar
that they had opened a new world to her. She gave over her rights to
a throne to dream of the day when she should take passage on a Yukon
steamer to the land where shops were filled with chocolate bonbons.
Joe Powers was a near neighbor of Siawash George. As both had squaw
wives there was a bond of union between them, and they visited back and
forth a great deal. Joe could not read or write, I was told, but his
good fellowship shone out of his ever-grinning face.
“Some of the boys I knowed down in Circle and Forty Mile that’s struck
it big,” he told me in confidence, “is going into s’ciety when they get
on the outside. But I ain’t. How I would look in s’ciety, wouldn’t I?
The rest of the boys are about on the same pattern, too, I guess, only
they can’t see it when they look into a pool of water. I’m thankful
I know them dodgers on the outside are too clever for me. I’ll buy a
fruit farm in Californy. Nobody can beat me out o’ that.”
However dangerous a little learning may be to some of the old-timers,
one does not envy them their dust, spend it how they will. It is
fitting that they who bore the brunt of the robust business of
pioneering should occupy the cabins of the masters on the Eldorado and
the Bonanza claims. Graduates of colleges and universities, who work
for them with pick and shovel for a dollar an hour, arrived on the
scene after the great strikes, and must take the consequences.
It is scarcely half a mile from Siawash George’s to the cluster of
cabins at the mouth of Eldorado; and Eldorado flows into Bonanza about
midway of its working claims, making of The Forks, as the confluence
of the two streams is called, the hub of a wheel with three spokes.
When Miss Mulrooney came up to The Forks in the autumn of 1897 she
appreciated the mathematical advantage of the situation at once, and
acted upon her perception with such decision that the news of her
wonderful undertaking went up and down the creeks that very day.
“Boys,” said the heralds to the scoffers, “there’s a new woman up to
The Forks with a bit of an Irish brogue and the tongue of a lawyer,
that’s goin’ to show us old moss-backs how to get rich. Hanged if she
ain’t got so much money to lose that she’s goin’ to build a two-story
hotel bigger’n any in Dawson right up here on the creeks.”
“Strange things was to be expected from the Cheechawkos once the news
of a strike got into the newspapers all over the States,” said the
scoffers; while the saloon-keepers, being specialists on the subject,
apprehended with professional disdain that Miss Mulrooney might as well
start a hotel at the head of the Stewart or at the North Pole.
The next instalment of news related that Miss Mulrooney was up on the
hill-side superintending the labors of the one lone mule surviving of
those brought down the river on rafts in the summer, which she had
hired for $20 a day to drag logs to the site of her building. That
class of women who are too common in the Klondyke are not given to this
sort of thing; and, moreover, they wear bloomers, while Miss Mulrooney
wore long skirts. A new woman deserved punishment for such folly, but
a good woman who wore long skirts was entitled to the friendly advice
which one of the leading claim-owners undertook to supply.
[Illustration: Miss Mulrooney of The Forks.]
“I’ve been in the country some time,” he told Miss Mulrooney, “and
I don’t mind telling you for your own interest that Dawson’s the
place, not The Forks, for a hotel.”
“Now, that’s kind of you,” assented Miss Mulrooney. “And may I ask if
you would like something to drink?”
“Er-r-r, well,” stuttered the Committee of One, as he tried to get his
bearings, “well, I admit I sometimes do, like the most of the boys--but
I didn’t know as you’d be mentionin’ that.”
“Oh, I’m not, and I’m not likely to,” with a toss of her head, “when
I know there’s no chance of your accepting. Of course, if you or any
of the other boys was hungry or thirsty you wouldn’t think of buying a
drink or a meal up here. You’d walk sixteen miles to Dawson and back
for it, wouldn’t you? And the boys going over the divide to Dominion
or Sulphur when they break the journey at The Forks would hang up in a
tree over night before they’d sleep in a hotel, wouldn’t they, now?”
A light burst upon the Committee of One.
“You’ll pass, Miss Mulrooney, you’ll pass,” he said. “You kin take care
o’ yourself all right. With that head of yours, you’ll own the Klondyke
by the time you’ve been in the country as long as I have.”
And the word that Miss Mulrooney was all right was passed along the
line. Every man on the creeks looked forward to the date of the opening
of her hotel. A democratic community could not confer titles, but it
might call her Miss Mulrooney of the Forks, and thus she will be known
for all time among Klondykers.
Meanwhile, she expected that every day would be the lone mule’s last.
There was neither hay nor oats in the country. As the story was told
to me, he held body and soul together on birch bark and willow sprouts
until the final log was dragged to the foundations, and then promptly
expired.
“He had nothing to live on,” as Miss Mulrooney expressed it, “and
nothing to live for, and I’m thinkin’ the poor fellow was so slow
because he just knew that his interest in the enterprise was all that
kept him up; and, like the rest of us, he wanted to postpone the last
hour as long as he could.”
The third night after the hotel was opened the Committee of One,
himself, had to sleep on the floor because the bunks were all taken.
Nothing could have served Miss Mulrooney better than the food-panic
of midwinter. She had bought a full supply before everyone began to
hoard whatever beans or flour or whiskey he could get. All but two of
the restaurants in Dawson had to close their doors. The two exceptions
on fête days gave butter and apple sauce along with bacon, beans, and
coffee. Their owners grew to regard Miss Mulrooney as their animate
consciences whose voice was that of every miner who ate a meal in
Dawson when he was down from the creeks.
“I don’t mind paying double,” said the Committee of One, to a Dawson
waiter, “s’long’s I get suthin to eat. Just bring that dinner over
again. Then I’ll have only half a square meal for $5, not to mention
that no fixin’s go with it. Miss Mulrooney charges $3.50 for a square,
but she gives you canned beef, canned mutton, and ham, and fixin’s, and
keeps askin’ you if you won’t have more and you keep acceptin’ till you
have to send for a drink ’fore you’re strong enough to get up from the
table. Jumpin’ John Rogers! How you fellers must suffer when you pass
out a bean and a rind and think of what a woman is doin’ up there to
The Forks!”
If you want to reach a man’s heart through his stomach in a
scurvy-stricken country, feed him, if it is the best you have, with
sauce made of dried apples. Miss Mulrooney kept a great bowlful
of this on her table. The transient ate of its contents with the
ravenousness of the thirsty traveller drinking from a spring of cold
water. No sooner was it emptied--I know by actual observation of a
quart of apple-sauce having been eaten by two persons--than it was
filled again by the cook, rapid if rough in his movements, who picked
it up and put it down as if it were a red-hot ingot.
The ground floor of the hotel was divided into the bar-room and
the dining-room. Cards were permitted, but no gaming-tables were
maintained. Upstairs was a tier of bunks running along the wall, with a
passageway between them. The blankets seemed cleaner than elsewhere--no
hotel had sheets--and the bunks had curtains. Either a nice sense of
individuality or sheer fatigue restrained the guests from removing
their socks, and I have known miners who were over-tired by a long
tramp not to remove their boots. They had enough respect for Miss
Mulrooney to hang the soles of them over the edge of the bunk, however,
though, if in their dreams they should participate in a stampede to
some new creek, their good intentions were sadly belied. The sole
occupant of a lower bunk, which was supposed to accommodate two in case
of necessity, might be awakened at any hour by a nudge, and:
“Pardner, sorry to trouble you, but I guess you’ll have to move over a
bit to make room for me.”
In winter the curse of a Klondyke cabin, banked with snow, chinked with
moss and dirt to the last crack and knothole, is lack of ventilation.
In summer, when there is no night and no two men quite agree on their
hours of sleep or hours for travelling, it was as good as reading a
local newspaper to try to sleep at Miss Mulrooney’s. The widening
cracks between boards of fir (put into the floors and partitions while
yet green) never permitted the slightest details of conversation
over the card-table or over the bar to be inaudible, except during
unavoidable and scarcely welcome intervals when you heard the tramping
and scuffling of heavy boots. I could discern the direction the
traveller was going upon entering the dining-room door; whether he was
coming up stairs to bed, or was going to call out to the cook for a
“squar” or “half a dozen eggs.”
Andrew, a quiet, soft-voiced, obliging young man, who wore a white
shirt and was solicitous about keeping his tie straight, had charge of
the bar. According to all the traditions of new placer mining camps he
was as much out of place as the average bartender would be in a chair
of moral philosophy. He was so essentially lacking in combativeness
that no one ever thought of picking a quarrel with him. Luck and
whiskey, however, despite the Northwest Mounted Police, will generate
in miners a surplus energy which they are inclined to expend upon
furniture if not upon one another. Miss Mulrooney did not depend for
purposes of pacification upon a huge St. Bernard who was always at her
side when he was not drawing her upon her sled up and down the creeks
in winter, but rather upon her blarney. She knew when, where, and just
how much to apply.
“I always appeal to their best instincts,” she said. “It’s easy to lead
and hard to drive. That’s what you men don’t understand. You try to
drive.”
I saw her theory put to the test of practice. A giant who was so well
on in his cups that he could scarcely walk, concluded, only half an
hour after he had finished one, that he wanted another meal. When it
was placed before him he seemed to think that the cook was trying to
hurt his feelings by making him eat twice, and with an oath he threw
a dish of stew on the floor. Miss Mulrooney happened to be passing
through the room at the time. She stepped over to him and told him in
her pleasantest tone that accidents would happen.
“Accident?” he asked, dazedly.
“Of course,” she said. “I know you’re too much of a gentleman to do
such a thing purposely.”
“Coursh! Coursh it was!” he kept repeating, as he dropped down on to
his knees and tried to scrape the stew up into a little pile, despite
her protests.
Then out of the maze of his crippled memory another horror presented
itself suddenly and prompted him to arise.
“Miss Mulrooney,” he asked, his face very red, “did you hear me swear?”
“A little one--a slip,” she replied.
He told her that it was only a real lady who would put so liberal
a construction on what he called a breach of “ettykit.” Fearful,
nevertheless, that she might secretly think ill of him, he followed
her about the hotel with apologies and dripping hands while he kept
repeating how a poor devil might be a little weak, so rarely did a good
bench claim fall to a poor devil’s lot, until the inner workings of his
conscience culminated in a full confession that the plate had not been
broken by accident but intentionally. She forgave him even this, and
then he went up-stairs and to sleep.
“What I want to do is to make money, you may be sure,” Miss Mulrooney
would say if you persuaded her to tell you her story. “I was born in
Scranton, Pennsylvania. I had to earn my own living before I was out
of short skirts, and I kept on doing a little better from one thing
to another, till I was stewardess of a steamer on the Pacific Coast.
There’s nothing like being a stewardess to develop your wits when
you’re just a bit too independent for the job and you have to give the
passengers as good as they send when they’re sassy. I remember an old
Englishman who expected me to black his boots. I told him I wouldn’t,
and I told him if he put ’em outside his door again I’d be thinkin’ he
was wantin’ ice-water and turn a pitcherful into ’em. He went to the
captain. The captain was a Scotchman and he didn’t believe in puttin’
on airs; and when the captain sent for me and I went to the captain’s
room I found the old gentleman there. Before we came out I had him
laughin’, and I’d never blacked his boots, either. But runnin’ errands
doesn’t suit me. I started for the Klondyke as soon as I heard of it,
and like the rest I’m going back either rich or broke.”
The last time I saw Miss Mulrooney she was in Dawson searching for a
good location for a hotel which was to have sheets and be positively
palatial. Three weeks later, so I am told, it was completed.
Once her first venture succeeded, she had begun to speculate in
mining properties. Her position at The Forks gave her exceptional
opportunities for inside information, and she was a “pardner” of a
dozen leading citizens in as many enterprises.
“If you ever go to Chicago or New York,” I suggested to her, “the
women’s clubs will be making a heroine of you as an example of what
their sex can do.”
“Not if I know it,” she replied. “They won’t, I’m thinkin’, if they
hear I sold whiskey. Besides, there’s nothin’ new about me. I’m
old-fashioned.”
Without abusing a much-abused word, I think that Miss Mulrooney may
be called a remarkable woman, more particularly as her own opinion of
herself is quite the contrary.
VIII
ARCTIC TRAITS
DAILY LIFE IN DAWSON--RENTING A CABIN--CIRCUMVENTING THE HUSKIES--JOEY
BOUREAU AND HIS RESTAURANT--THE FARO DEALER’S WIFE AND HER BAKERY--THE
LAUNDRYMAN AND HIS CLAIM--JACK BELTZ’S SCHEMES--A PAIR OF DREAMERS.
It depends upon the season of the year whether the town-site of Dawson
is liquid, mushy, or as flinty as frozen ground can be. At one time
in the summer of 1898 most of it was under water. Two weeks later,
the Yukon having fallen some sixteen feet, this same town-site was
at a respectable height above the level of the stream. The smaller
sandbar on the opposite side of the mouth of the Klondyke, which, out
of respect to the cabins which cover an area of six or seven acres,
has been called Klondyke City, is without the surface layer of muck
which held sewage as in a sponge under the noses of the residents of
Dawson. The good nature of the fellow, known as “Dud,” who keeps the
sole saloon and hotel at Klondyke City, was as largely responsible for
our choice of abode as the healthfulness of the location. Empty cabins
were scarce. “Dud” said he had one to rent. When I asked him the price,
I offended him.
“You walk right in and stay till I tell you to get out,” he said. “But
if you go shakin’ your dust in my face I won’t let you have it at all.”
So we stood our sleds up beside the door, set up our little Yukon
stove, threw our blankets on the floor, and were at home. The comfort
of my daily existence I felt to be great compared with a bunk in a
bunk-house for $2.50 a night, or a room with cloth partitions over a
bar for $10 a night.
Fritz, who liked movement and life, went over to town to live in
the cabin of a friend, leaving Jack and me to do our own cooking or
to eat at the restaurant when we were of idle mind. The dogs also
patronized the restaurant without standing on ceremony. “Jack” carried
off almost the last ham in the camp, having lifted it from a nail
with the unostentatiousness of an expert thief. The proprietors of
the restaurant would not listen to reimbursement. They explained that
anybody who had been in the country for six years and let a husky dog
get the better of him deserved to be mulcted. It is out of deference to
the husky dog that the miner builds little caches, set on poles, for
storing food, which make the town look like a Bornese village, whose
inhabitants have deserted their old homes to live in cabins.
The proprietors of the restaurant, in my opinion, were well worth
knowing. Joey Boureau--undeniably French-Canadian, but forever
repeating that he was a citizen of the United States--was almost as
dark as a Moor, with the torso of a Turkish wrestler. He yielded
neither to excess nor fatigue, blustered at times, never cared
for to-morrow, and was possessed of a ready wit. His blague had a
counterpart in the blarney of his partner, Tim, undeniably Irish
American and proud of it. This pair had been inseparable for the many
years that they had sought gold with the pick and in all the ways of
camp life. Upon the scales at the end of the oilcloth-covered dining
table they weighed out $2.50 worth of dust out of your bag whenever you
ate off their board. Whichever one happened to be in did the cooking,
and if both were in, one told stories to amuse the guests and acted as
cashier.
But both were seldom there. One was usually at “Dud’s” faro table. The
other, when he grew tired of working brought his “pardner” home on his
arm, installed him in the kitchen, and immediately went out to enjoy a
little recreation on his own account. As he took with him whatever dust
there was in the tomato-can, which served as their cash-box, we heard
frequent excuses for the absence of moose steak on the table because of
lack of funds to purchase it. Just as their business was beginning to
prosper they sold it for a song to a Cheechawko whom they met on the
river-front. A week in town sufficed to spend the song, and then they
put packs on their backs and started over the hills, whistling as they
went.
In one of the neighboring cabins the wife of a faro dealer had set
up a bakery. We paid her fifty cents apiece for pies and fifty cents
for loaves of bread, and had to order them beforehand to make sure of
getting them.
Our laundryman had staked a claim in which he placed great hopes; but
his invariable charge remained seventy-five cents a garment. He related
with a realism almost tragic the details of the processes by which he
had arrived at the original color of the khaki trousers that I had
worn on the trail. Jack Beltz, for his part, secured the loan of
an old tub and a washboard, and after a day’s labor surveyed bandanna
handkerchiefs and what not hung out on the line with the mien of a
conqueror.
[Illustration: Jack Beltz.]
[Illustration: “The Huskies.”]
Economy, however, was always a matter of necessity with him. On the
first night of his return from town he said, with some pride, that he
still had most of the dust which he had received in conclusion of our
contract. The next night before going to bed he built a fire in the
stove out of the driftwood which he snaked out of the river for fuel,
and sat for a long time in a reverie.
“Well, I’ll have to earn some more,” he said, finally, to himself, and
dropped upon his blankets.
In the morning, followed by his troop of dogs, who had regained their
spirits and their flesh, because he had fed them so bountifully, he
went up on the mountain side, where he picked a great bouquet of the
wild flowers which spring up in such profusion in summer. He never told
me of his losses, and I tried to avoid the appearance of suspecting the
truth, at the same time that I took practical measures to obviate an
effort to dispose of his robe for cash and to hypothecate his year’s
outfit, which was to be brought down the river by his “pardner,” Cliff.
Meanwhile, he revolved in his mind many schemes for making money. The
price of moose steak, $1.50 a pound, suggested to him that a fortune
might be made in moose hunting. Learning that Dawson had no bowling
alley, he so far arranged to start one as to find that balls and pins
could not be obtained nearer than Seattle. This scheme was succeeded
by the more alluring prospect of taking dogs, which are valueless in
summer, as they are valuable in winter, to an island in the river to
feed for so much a month. Always before his dream had taken definite
form he dismissed it by saying he was no city man. He recalled his
experience in keeping the restaurant in a British Columbia mining town,
and he reverted to a proposition that was to the liking of his love of
robust vagabondage:
“I’ll get a pardner and take the dogs and go up to the head-waters of
the Porcupine and cross over to the Mackenzie. It would be a rattling
trip!”
As if in excuse of his venture he would add that he was certain to find
gold in that region.
One day another dreamer, Kidd, came to join us. He was a protégé of
Jack, who had found him trying to put his outfit over the Pass. There
must have been such giants as Kidd, with such straight noses, curling
black hair and curling black beard, in the phalanxes that confounded
the Persians. But this type of the freshness and strength of country
life was quite modern. He slouched into the cabin with his hands in
his pockets, and included in the drawl with which he greeted us a
Missourian “Doggone it!” Like many other unfortunate fellows, Kidd had
been obliged to spend the whole winter in the neighborhood of the Pass.
Jack and his partner had made him a tent-mate in their camp on the
banks of Linderman, during the dreary period of waiting. Going on to
Le Barge after our departure from Linderman, he had arrived in Dawson
before Cliff.
“That boy comes from a good family,” said Jack; “and I’ll bet they’re
proud as anybody that ever had a grand-dad who owned a lot of niggers
and went stone broke after the war. He don’t say nothin’ about it, but
it sticks out all over him. He didn’t know how to hitch a pack on a
mule’s back when I first met him. But though he was green, he wasn’t
fresh; and when tenderfeet are that way they’ll learn and you like to
learn ’em. When they ain’t, you like nothin’ better than to give ’em
the worst bronch’ on the ranch and leave ’em to find out things for
themselves.”
It was not until after considerable urging that Kidd would consent to
share our cabin. His character was in sharp contrast to that of another
young stranger who entered and threw his blankets on the floor for
the night without any formalities. In the morning, picking up certain
articles of my kit which were lying beside my bed, he said:
“You’re goin’ out on the first steamer. Don’t suppose you want these,
do you? I’ll take ’em along. They’ll come in handy next winter.”
“He’ll get on,” quoth Jack, “but I’m ding-donged if he’ll get on with
my help.”
Jack now included Kidd in his schemes, which became more and more
attenuated. Kidd would walk back and forth for some time as if in deep
thought, and finally drawl:
“Gee-mo-nee! We must do something, Jack!”
And Jack, as he looked out upon the rapidly flowing river, would agree,
and relight his pipe. Kidd admitted that he was homesick, “doggoned
homesick.” He had a right to be, for he left home with a thousand
dollars and his mother’s blessing, instead of finishing his education
and studying for the country bar.
“Gee-mo-nee!” he exclaimed. “I was green, wasn’t I, Jack? I thought
you’d just pick the gold up once you got here. But doggoned if I’ll go
back broke. I’ll have as much as I had when I left or stay forever.
I’ve got three hundred of that thousand and I’ll make seven hundred and
my fare out some way this winter.”
One day the dreamers found employment on the log booms for the new
saw-mill that was to be built on the island in the Klondyke between
Dawson and Klondyke City. Jack was as much at home on a rolling log
as on the back of a broncho. Poor Kidd fell into the water often,
but showed great persistence until the rise in the river made work
impossible and left them idle again. So Jack sat by the cabin door
keeping a lookout for Cliff, the third giant of the trio, who arrived
one day, with a broad grin.
“Gosh!” he exclaimed, as he grasped Jack’s hand. “I was washed out of
the boat when we came through Five Finger Rapids, and blamed if I
wasn’t washed in again! How’s that for luck?”
There was something of the New England Yankee in him, though he had
been born in Colorado.
“I’ll bet you’ve give your money all away, ain’t you, Jack?” was his
next remark. “You wouldn’t be Jack if you hadn’t.”
“Weeks ago,” was the reply.
They secured a contract with one of the saw-mills to cut rafts of logs
sixty miles up the river. Here was a chance for Jack to swing an axe,
to build bonfires, and to do what he called an honest man’s work. With
his dogs around him on the day of his departure I said a regretful
good-by to the vagabond.
IX
PILGRIMS’ TRAILS AND TRIALS
ITINERARIES--ALLEGED UNIMPORTANCE OF EXPERIENCE--THE CASE OF
FATHER STANLEY--PRESS AGENTS AND PRIMERS OF WEALTH--THE SECRETARY
OF THE SEATTLE CHAMBER OF COMMERCE HIS OWN CONVERT--PARDNERS AND
PROMOTERS--OUTFITS--HOME COMFORTS FOR AN ARCTIC CLIMATE--HETEROGENEOUS
BOAT LOADS--THE NANCY G--TRAGEDIES OF THE PASSES.
Next to taking part in some event chronicled on the bulletin boards
your average pilgrim of fortune best enjoyed being near them. Least
of all he liked waiting in latitude 64 degrees for a month or more
for news of progress of the only war yet waged by his country in his
generation. When he left home the Klondyke was the ruling general topic
of the hour in the newspapers. When he reached his destination he was
quite forgotten, and public interest was entirely absorbed in the
invasion of Cuba.
Viewed in one light, there was good reason for the pique which he
naturally felt toward Shafter’s army. He might see many wars, for
instance, before he saw the like of this Dawson pilgrimage again.
Thirty-five thousand generals, each one his own quartermaster,
packing a thousand pounds of food apiece over a rugged coast range of
mountains, building a flotilla with axe and whipsaw out of the primeval
forest, and travelling six hundred miles into a country having an
arctic climate in winter and a tropical climate in summer and yielding
no food except a little game, presented a spectacle more romantic, if
not so exciting, as the massing of an army corps under one general, its
extension into a battle line, and the capture of the enemy’s outposts.
[Illustration: On the Pass.]
The old prospector from California, British Columbia, Australia, or
South Africa formed only a small percentage of those who entered, with
the enthusiasm of children, a world of effort quite new to them. The
village loafer and the ne’er-do-well son of the banker became partners
on the trail. Mechanics who had mortgaged homes bought with savings
from their wages to buy an outfit, rubbed elbows with broken-down
speculators and business men who hoped to recover all that they had
lost by finding a placer mine. The farmer, the clerk, the artisan,
and the city or the provincial day laborer of the Eastern States,
Eastern Canada, and England, were as confident of success as their
associates who had learned in the severe school of the plains, the
veldt, or the bush how to preserve life and health in a new country.
If they had not swung a lariat or a pioneer’s axe, they had at least
beaten someone in walking or rowing or had gone longer without eating
than any of their immediate friends.
Of the eighty thousand who left their homes for the Klondyke in the
winter of 1897-98 and the spring of 1898, some thirty-five thousand
arrived at Dawson. The battle was not always to the strong. More
important than physical strength were determination and cheerfulness.
Those who failed were as peculiarly Anglo-Saxon as those who succeeded;
for they had the restlessness which impels one to seek obstacles but
does not necessarily provide the force to overcome them. Most of those
who had endeavored to reach Dawson in the autumn of 1897 were stranded
on one side or the other of the passes, where they had to wait through
a dreary winter until the ice which had arrested their progress should
go out of the river. But only a small proportion of the whole number
of pilgrims made this attempt. The great majority planned to transport
their outfits over the passes in the early months of 1898 and build
their boats on Lakes Linderman and Bennett in the interval between good
travelling in a snow-bound country and the opening of navigation.
All pilgrims, whatsoever their itineraries, were grist for the mills of
the towns of the Pacific Coast States and of British Columbia, bringing
welcome relief from a period of commercial depression. Enterprising
merchants, chambers of commerce, and steamship companies scattered
broadcast throughout the United States (whence came seventy per cent.
of the pilgrimage, ninety per cent. of it being Anglo-Saxon) pamphlets,
well written for the purpose, telling “How to Get to the Klondyke.”
The career of “Father” Stanley, of Seattle, was used as a stock
illustration of the unimportance of experience to the prospector. This
lame old bookseller, having the enthusiasm of the fanatic in place of
real strength, had gone to the Klondyke in the spring of 1896. For a
time he worked on the bars of Stewart, taking out $10 a day. If he
had not been deformed he would have packed more food over the Pass.
Fortunately, his supply ran out in September, and on his way down
stream to Forty Mile, where he hoped to get more, he happened to arrive
at the mouth of the Klondyke just as the first miners from Forty Mile
were hurrying to the scene of Indian Charlie’s “strike.” As he could
not walk as fast as the others, they got all the claims on Bonanza, and
he had the good luck to get one of the best claims on Eldorado.
A year later, returning on the treasure ship that brought the news of
the great strike, when he entered his house with a small portion of
his fortune--a hundred thousand dollars in cash--his good wife, as the
story goes, was at the washboard, where she had spent a deal of her
time during her husband’s absence, earning a living for a large family.
Her customers coming to make inquiries about their clothes were told to
take whatever was in the tub which they could identify as their own. As
for herself, she was boarding at the hotel, sending such of her apparel
as she had not thrown away to the laundry, and, moreover, was too busy
with the dressmaker to attend to any trifling details which might have
concerned her past life.
“In the frozen fastnesses of the far North fortunes nestle in nuggets
of glittering gold for all”--but the press agents were too well
versed in human nature to say that these fortunes were to be had for
a pleasure trip. They mentioned hardships which put up a price of
success, thus making the nuggets more attractive, and, in a sense,
supporting the assertion of their existence. Anyone who would overcome
the hardships might have a competency for the trouble of thawing it out
of the frozen ground. No pilgrim felt himself to be less courageous
and vigorous than “Father” Stanley; and the wives of all pilgrims were
equally certain that, under similar circumstances, they could conduct
themselves with quite as much dignity as Mrs. Stanley.
As became a primer to wealth, the pamphlets told just how much it
would cost to reach Dawson with the all-necessary year’s outfit, going
to the trouble, in a spirit of solicitude and rectitude, of setting
down opposite each article of food and each utensil, whether spade
or gold-pan, or oakum or pitch, or nails for boat-building, its cost
in dollars and cents, and adding up a fascinatingly small total from
a very tall column of figures. With a receipted bill for this, and
having paid his fare to Dyea or Skaguay, where he would disembark on
the mainland of Alaska and begin the transportation of his outfit over
the passes, the pilgrim, although he was supposed to have expended only
$300, needed no more money to take him to his mine.
It was not to the credit of the calculations of the pamphlets, and
not testimony, in all if it was in some instances, to the success
of the numerous gambling establishments that sprang up at the point
of mobilization of the army of fortune-seekers, that the Seattle
post-office did an overwhelming business in money-orders in December,
1897, and January and February, 1898. The authors of the pamphlets
were not called to account for their errors. Rather, they received the
thanks of their employers. Once he was on the coast, it stood to reason
that while he was yet sleeping between sheets and eating meals cooked
by someone other than himself the pilgrim would not retreat because
he needed a few more dollars which were obtainable from friends or
relatives at home.
Seattle’s success beyond all other towns in attracting trade was due to
a university graduate and an author of works on art. Having to give up
journalism in the East and seek health in the West, after some severe
tests of versatility of earning a living, he became Secretary of the
Seattle Chamber of Commerce. Such were the results of his knowledge of
the peculiarities of the Easterner, the Westerner, the Canadian, and
the Englishman, which he incorporated in separate pamphlets, that his
employers continued to raise his salary from week to week until the
war broke out and he relieved them of the embarrassing consequences
of their transports of generosity by resigning and starting for the
Klondyke himself (regardless of his doctor’s advice) as a convert of
his own arguments.
The camp-followers of the host of individual quartermasters which
Seattle equipped and embarked, besides the gambler and the pickpocket,
included many men of elastic consciences and elastic schemes, who had
no capital but were ambitious to become capitalists. Those promising
large dividends on properties yet to be purchased or staked were
common; those proposing such grand things as running snow and ice
locomotives over the hummocks of the Yukon in winter were in some
measure distinguished. In the corridors of the crowded hotels you
overheard the consultations of “pardners” as well as the harangues of
promoters.
Sacks of flour, bacon, and beans, the chief constituents of the Yukon
outfit, were piled on the sidewalks. In the windows of the stores were
samples of various improved edibles and home comforts for an arctic
climate. Fakirs on the curbs proclaimed the merits of patent sleds,
portable boats, and devices for thawing frozen ground. In selecting his
outfit, the pilgrim experienced the same emotion as the young wife who
furnishes a flat. When he had settled on the kind of sled, the kind of
stove, and the kind of tent that he was going to take, he faced the
important question of buying dogs or of drawing his own supplies from
Dyea or Skaguay to the lakes. If he had money enough he usually fell
a victim to the speculators, who sold the house dogs that they had
shipped into Seattle, after a few days’ training in harness, for fifty
dollars apiece.
The last article of his outfit bought, he waited for his steamer to
sail, while his hotel bill grew apace. Liberal navigation laws, at
all times carelessly enforced, in these piping times of prosperity
became a dead letter. Every available sailing and steam craft in the
Pacific marine, which is comparatively small and is largely recruited
from the Atlantic seaboard, was called into service by the demands of
the pilgrimage. Fortunes were made in two or three trips of vessels,
which had been condemned as unseaworthy years before. To get all the
passengers they could carry they had only to offer transportation for
a pilgrim and a ton of supplies at a little less exorbitant price than
any of their rivals.
Inexperienced pilots steered many vessels on to rocks in the tortuous
and narrow channels between the barren and mountainous islands of
the Alexander Archipelago which skirt the coast of British Columbia
and the adjoining territory of southeastern Alaska. Pilgrims not
yet embarked were too anxious about their own departure to think of
the miseries of those who had suffered from exposure and lost their
outfits, if not their lives. Rarely did the best steamers leave within
less than a week of their appointed sailing time. In loading them
there was little discrimination or even classification. Quarters of
beef for the restaurants of Dyea and Skaguay, dogs in crates and in
leash, mules and bales of hay, were put on the decks after the hold
was filled. Considering the experiences of a volunteer army with a
single quartermaster, better things were scarcely to be expected of a
volunteer army composed entirely of quartermasters. The chaos had the
sole attraction of not bearing the stamp of officialdom.
[Illustration: Caches of Pilgrims’ Outfits at the Summit.]
As an example of what a pilgrim might suffer, there was the case of
the Nancy G. When I left Seattle on February 15th, on the Nancy G.’s
mast still fluttered the torn ends of a cloth sign with fast-fading red
letters: “This fine schooner in the tow of a powerful ocean tug, will
positively sail for Dyea on January 25th.” Every day the passengers
went down to the pier to see if their outfits were still on board and
to see how repairs were getting on. A man with a hammer in one hand and
some oakum in the other came out of the hold.
“You needn’t cuss me,” he said. “A schooner that’s been resurrected
after five years in the graveyard, ain’t what she was when she was new,
and you oughter know it. Every minute I lose caulkin’ up the old girl’s
corn out of your own crops.”
Afterward they went to see the owner, who received their complaints
with an air of disdain, refused to return the amount that they had
paid in fares for the good reason that he had their signatures to a
contract for January 25th or thereabouts, and warned them in their own
interests that “thereabouts” was a very elastic word.
“And I’ll tell you something else,” he said. “If you talk to me in this
way much more, I’ll have you up for riot. If you want to lose a gold
mine and go to jail, that’s your business and not mine.”
The owner was a small man--a small man who had spent his life in the
new towns of the West. The passengers were mostly hulking Swedes from
the lumber camps of Minnesota and Wisconsin. They longed to lay their
strong hands on him for just a moment. But it was hard to lose a gold
mine, and they hadn’t enough money to pay for passage on another
steamer. So they slouched out of the owner’s presence more in sorrow
than in anger. I heard afterward that the Nancy G. finally started on
February 20th. Fate was so kind to her passengers that she did not sink
until the return journey. They were more fortunate than two hundred of
their fellows, who saw their outfits burned on the vessel which had
reached Skaguay just in time to have disembarked them in safety.
To meet the demands of the migration to the interior, Dyea and Skaguay
had sprung up as quickly as a house of cards. When Indian Charlie found
his nugget there was no building at Skaguay and only a trading-store
at Dyea for bartering with the Indians and furnishing any supplies
to an old-time prospector which he had neglected to buy at Juneau.
The two towns are situated at the heads of either of two arms of the
Lynn Canal, which nature has cut through the rock as man cut that of
Corinth, upon sandy deposits at the mouths of the Dyea and Skaguay
Rivers, and separated by a distance of a mile in a straight line over a
mountain spur or of three miles around the point of the spur by water.
This spur, rising into high peaks as it reaches the summit of the main
range, is a barrier separating the two rivers and the two passes.
Dyea is the gateway to Chilcoot Pass, which leads to Lake Linderman,
and Skaguay is the gateway to the White Pass, which leads to Lake
Bennett. They were not, as it appeared to the superficial observer,
trying to excel each other in wickedness, but in the amount of
business that they could do. Anyone who had been a resident of either
town a single day considered it his duty to warn you as a friend
against the rival town and the rival pass. In a week he had become an
old citizen. The small proportion who were on hand for the rush of the
late summer and autumn of 1897 were as proud as Lord Mayors. Then,
thousands of pack-horses, earning as high as $50 apiece a day, died
from the exertions to which they were forced by their owners. In the
winter their bones sticking up through the snow were snags to catch
the sleds of the pilgrims. Instead of a series of steps, the packers
on Chilcoot had to walk around bowlders, slipping on the fragments
of crumbling rock, and possibly, after all their exertion, reaching
Linderman and building their boats only to have them blocked by ice
half way to Dawson, where they were effectually stranded with their
outfits.
Perhaps every fifth or sixth house in the main streets was not a
gambling hall or a dance hall. With these and a large idle population
it is easy to understand how men who had a few dollars in cash when
they arrived were obliged to sell their outfits and return home. The
enforcement of law was in the hands of a United States commissioner
and three or four deputy marshals. The commissioner was a gentle
optimist who spent most of his working-hours in an office with a window
looking out on the river and the mountain side, where he might see no
wrong-doing. “Soapy” Smith, gambler, by self-appointment, was Mayor
of Skaguay and General-in-chief of the Army of Disorder, composed
of characters from San Francisco and Seattle, who had no money left
after their fare to Alaska was paid and were looking for something
to turn up. When an atrocious murder was committed by one of his
followers, “Soapy” told a body of protesting citizens that they would
better mind their own business. As his army outnumbered theirs and was
better armed, they accepted his advice. The United States sent out
two companies of infantry, with instructions from the authorities at
Washington that they should not interfere with the affairs of the two
towns unless there was a riot. The Commissioner, seeming to regard
their presence as an intrusion on his rights, never asked for their
assistance. No murders or highway robberies were committed within sight
of his little window. In time, however, “Soapy” Smith met the death
that he deserved at the hands of one of his followers, and through the
efforts of the merchants and the better element the towns became more
orderly.
Not every pilgrim who returned home was the victim of gamblers and
other parasites. For two or three days he might stop at one of the
hotels until he selected the parcels of his outfit from the piles
which had been thrown indiscriminately on the shore by common carriers
in haste to have done with their contracts. Then, with his tent, his
stove, and a cook-book, which was the gift of a baking-powder company,
his journey began in earnest. The novelty of making his first flapjacks
wore off by the time he had washed his dishes the second or third
time. It was not long before he came to the conclusion that the fellow
whom he had chosen to share all of his sorrows and joys was lazy. He
blamed his own disinclination to rise in the morning and all his little
failures upon him, as some men do upon their wives. Whenever he had a
chance he solaced his wounded spirits by telling a stranger that he
had put up with doing all of the work of his party about as long as he
could.
Partnerships formed so gayly in Seattle by men who thought that being
a partner was being a playfellow, could not be expected to last
long at pulling sleds through the slush and going to bed in a robe
or a sleeping-bag which was cheap and inefficient, with a supper of
sandwiches made of sticky flapjacks and cold bacon. As he grew more
angry with his partner he grew fonder of his dog. Jim might beat his
poor Newfoundland, who was too nervous to pull even if he had ever been
taught how; he might put up with a poor dinner; but if Tom, who was
cooking, kicked the Newfoundland for stealing the bacon off the plate
or sticking his nose in the butter, it was the last straw. He demanded
a division of goods on the spot. But quarrels seldom resulted in blows,
because they occurred when the men were too tired to do more than join
in a contest of forcible language.
It was the man who leaves the door ajar at home who went to bed without
washing his dishes. The Easterner now learned that, while he might know
things that the Westerner did not, the Westerner knew better than he
how to take care of himself. The Westerner always cooked a warm supper,
and dried his footwear before going to work in the morning; while the
self-neglect of the Easterner made hundreds of doctors at Dyea and
Skaguay the busiest in the world. Spinal meningitis was often the
penalty of sitting down to rest when dripping with perspiration without
throwing a coat over the shoulders.
Even after their goods were on the summit of the Pass and the worst
of their labors were over, many pilgrims gave up the battle. One by
one they were thinned out until only thirty-five thousand were ready
with their boats when the ice broke in Bennett. This far I had shared
their experiences and then had gone on ahead. Mine was the privilege
of having been a Cheechawko and at the same time standing on the river
bank as an old-timer or among old-timers, to watch the arrival of the
pilgrimage in its unpainted, unique flotilla.
X
PROFITS AND LOSSES
NEWSPAPERS AS PROFIT-WINNERS--HEARING ABOUT DEWEY--A DROP IN
EGGS--MARKET ITEMS--LEMONS AGAINST SCURVY--THE MERCURY AT 110
DEGREES--AN AVERTED MOVING DAY--INDUSTRIOUS SCAVENGERS--THE KLONDYKE
ITSELF--ASPECTS OF SUMMER--BANDANNA HATS AND PINK LEMONADE--A
RESTAURANT TRUST--THE GRASSHOPPERS AND THE ANTS--DISILLUSIONS.
It was only to be expected that the first boat of the season to shoot
around the bend above Dawson and raise a shout which would bring all
the population to the shore would be manned by a resident of Seattle
with the name of his beloved town painted on a huge streamer flying
from the mast. Enterprising citizens of the far West such as he owned
the stores at Dyea and Skaguay, the pack-mules on the trail, the
restaurant tents which had sprung up in Sheep Camp, and then, following
the pilgrimage on to Linderman and Bennett, generally made money out
of the Klondyke without having to use a spade, because of their
knowledge of the life and necessities of new communities. This proud
Seattleite with the boat had two hundred dozen of nominally “fresh”
eggs to sell, for which he received $3,600 within less than an hour
after he had landed. Those of the crowd who could afford it hurried off
to the restaurant for a “squar’” composed entirely of “ham and”. The
others, having to bide their time until luxuries were cheaper, found
compensation in the items of news which were passed from tongue to
tongue--for it had not occurred to the Seattleite to bring a newspaper
with him.
“Thought there was more money in eggs,” was his aggravating
explanation. “’Sposed you fellers wanted to eat, not read.”
[Illustration: Bargaining for a Newly Arrived Boat-Load, Dawson.]
As he had heard it, within a week after the declaration of war with
Spain, the cruiser New York, Captain Evans in command, had reduced
the fortifications of Havana in three hours. The second Cheechawko to
arrive assured us that this was quite untrue, and that two of Admiral
Sampson’s squadron had been sunk and the Spaniards were winning on
every hand. The crowd refused to believe anything of the kind, and the
second Cheechawko received only $14 a dozen for his eggs.
With the next boat came a single newspaper, soiled with bacon grease.
A curbstone speculator bought it for $15, stuffed it instantly into his
inside coat pocket, and a few minutes later was posting signs to the
effect that all might hear the news of Admiral Dewey’s victory read
by paying a dollar a piece that evening. His entertainment would have
netted him twice as much as it did if more than three hundred and fifty
people could have been packed in the hall in which it was held. Some
of the wealthy men considered this proceeding an outrage on personal
liberty and made it a point to buy between them any single copy of a
paper later than any others that had arrived and have it read at once
in the streets.
Never did contrast better illustrate the comparative reliability of
even the most unreliable of modern newspapers. All winter the camp had
not had so much as a small hand printing-press, and news was carried
solely by word of mouth. Most miners have the weakness of exaggeration.
With some it is unconscious. Others enjoy testing a hearer’s credulity.
Twice, up the creeks, I heard that the Continent had declared war
against England and the United States; in the second instance, the
detail of an Anglo-American naval victory off the coast of Bohemia
perhaps was supplied. Such rumors were the natural fruit of the desire
of Americans and Englishmen to pay compliments to one another at a
juncture when the Anglo-Saxon alliance of the Klondyke was quite ready,
without any assistance from London or Washington, to stand in arms
against the whole world.
Within a week some thirty boats all bringing merchandise had arrived.
In momentary anxiety of being lodged on a sandbar, without stopping
to make camps, their crews bending to the oars night and day, they
had raced with one another to the goal of high prices. Too many had
placed their speculative trust in eggs. After all, there were only four
hundred working claims, and the stomachs of each of their owners, and
of the chief gamblers and business men, were little if any larger than
that of the average human being. Eggs fell in five days from $18 to $4
a dozen and finally to $3.
A stock of fine millinery and ladies’ apparel, sold to the women of
the town, gave to one fellow a profit of $5,000. The first condensed
milk to arrive brought $1 a can; the first butter, $2.50 a pound; the
first ham, $1.25 a pound, and the first sugar, $1.50 a pound. Lemons
were more in demand in a scurvy-ridden country than oranges and bananas
and sold for double their price, which was seventy-five cents apiece.
But the happiest of all the newcomers was the one who had the only
boat-load of boots for a community which was miserable in moccasins in
warm weather. He received $15 a pair for fifteen hundred pairs which
had cost him $1.75 a pair in Montreal. A five-cent bottle of ink cost
$1; a fifteen-cent golf cap, $2.50; a pen-holder, fifty cents--the
smallest amount of dust that anyone cared to weigh out; socks $2 a
pair; a broad-brimmed summer hat, $20 to $40; a small whisk broom,
$2.50; a ready-made suit of clothes, from $50 to $200; canned roast
beef, $2.50 a can; canned oysters, a great luxury, $5 for a pound or
pint can, and cigars, fifty cents to $1 apiece.
Against the profits which such prices represented the speculator had
to set the original cost of the articles, the expense of transporting
them to Dyea or Skaguay and over the one hundred and seventy-five miles
to the foot of Lake Le Barge, his own fare on a steamer out of the
country, and the loss of from three to six months’ time.
During the lull between the arrivals of the few speculators from Le
Barge and the main body of the pilgrims from Linderman and Bennett,
it seemed at one time not unlikely that Dawson might be carried down
the river and a new town established on some sandbar. But there was
not enough snow left on the mountain sides to allow the tropical sun,
shining eighteen hours out of the twenty-four and raising the mercury
to 110 degrees, to accomplish its apparent purpose. Never had the
old-timers known it to be so warm so early in May, and never had they
known the river to be so high. They held that the Lord was displeased
with the prospective defilement of the country by an army of “clerks,
farmers, and dudes.” The Indians knew better. White man might be very
cunning in making a boat go up stream by burning wood in an iron box,
but Indian could tell him some things besides how to kill moose. Old
Indian could count off on his fingers some twenty years ago when the
canoeing was good on the whole town-site of Dawson. That was why Indian
never lived in Dawson but at Klondyke City.
Day by day we saw the water approaching a few inches nearer to our
door-sill. It began to fall just as we were thinking of putting up
our tent on the mountain side. Only the roofs of some cabins in Dawson
were above the level of the stream. The suspension bridge between
Dawson and Klondyke City, whose woven wire cables were earning two or
three hundred fifty-cent tolls a day for their owners, was carried away
along with a great pile of débris that it had collected. You paid fifty
cents for being ferried from one island to another in the main street.
Along the bank, standing in their boats, pike poles in hand, were those
easy-going ones of the inhabitants who raised husky dogs for sale, did
a little freighting in the winter, and took naturally to odd jobs--and
I might say to squaw wives--now, in the heyday of importance, as they
rowed out in the strong current and brought in a tree which had been
uprooted by the flood. If the tree was suitable only for firewood it
was probably worth a quarter of an ounce, or four dollars; if large
enough for sawing, half an ounce. The average Klondyker’s dislike for
such work being quite as strong as that of the average man at home for
scavenging, the easy-going had a free field and earned enough in a few
days to buy winter outfits for themselves and their families. A few
had even better luck. They caught portions of rafts--in two instances
whole rafts--which had slipped their moorings up the river, and
steering the sum of two or three months’ labor of men probably unknown
to them up to the bank, let the owners of the saw-mill have it at a
bargain.
A source of amusement if not of income was a ditch in one of the back
streets, hidden under three or four inches of water. As you stepped
into it up to your thighs you heard a roar of laughter from several men
sitting on a prominence near by.
“If you don’t tell your friends, pardner,” said one of them, “there’s
room up here for another, and you can enjoy yourself watchin’ the
others tumble in.”
With all the snow gone and no rainfall, the Yukon fell as rapidly as
it had risen. The thawing and crumbling soft earth of the embankments
of the upper reaches made it muddier than the Missouri at its worst.
For drinking water one had either to resort to the rivulets on the
hill-side, amber-colored from the moss, or go to the Klondyke, which,
once sluicing was nearly finished, became so clear that the bottom
was visible at a depth of ten or twelve feet, while the eddies and
rapids of its current as seen from the mountain tops, left a dark,
comet-like streak, stretching from its mouth for a distance of two or
three miles on the café-au-lait surface of the mother stream.
[Illustration: In the Camps of the Cheechawkos.]
By the fifteenth of June the river-bank was lined with the boats of
the pilgrims, two or three deep. A city of canvas, with the old cabins
and buildings as its heart, extended until the neighboring heights
were dotted with tents. Knowledge of boat-building had turned out to
be a misfortune, if anything, for the scows moved just as fast with
the current and proved quite as easy to manage, I was told, as smaller
craft pointed at both ends. The bow of each vessel bore the number
which had been put on by the Mounted Police when they examined outfits
for a second time for custom purposes at Le Barge or Tagish. Beside it
was the name of the pilgrim’s home town, of his sweetheart, his wife,
or his daughter, put on with coal if he had no paint. From the mast
fluttered a red bandanna, a towel, or possibly some absurdly elaborate
flag which had been made in the idle hour between the completion of the
boat and his embarkation. If there were three in a boat, which is the
best working number for a Klondyke party, one was in the bow on the
watchout for sandbars, the second was at the oars, and the third in the
stern with a sweep. Navigation had its perils, too. The river as well
as the Pass had claimed its victims. You heard on every hand tales of
wrecks in White Horse Rapids and in Thirty Mile River, whose hidden
rocks had proven even more dangerous than the White Horse Rapids. Many
a scow with merchandise which had cost its owner his last cent was
split in two, and those on board were thankful to find themselves on
shore alive.
In their camps, the pilgrims found the mosquitoes of summer worse than
the cold of winter. Fevers and headaches upon their arrival in Dawson
were the consequences of exposure under the sun. It was even the fate
of a few to be taken at once to the big log hospital on the hill-side
which already had more patients than it could accommodate; and of a
part of these to be buried in the little cemetery beyond the hospital,
which gives to relatives of the deceased the sombre satisfaction of
knowing that its inmates, lying at a depth where the earth never thaws,
are preserved for all time--unless the town-site itself one day is
marked by hydraulics.
Between the pilgrims when I met them in Seattle and when I met them
again in Dawson there was all the difference of volunteers in new
uniforms going forth to war and the dust-stained men who return. Their
tents, so white and new in Dyea, had patches where holes had been
burned by sparks or by carelessly hung candles. Their canvas bags of
provender were the color of the Yukon. Their cheap sheet-iron stoves
were so badly warped that the oven had ceased to bake well. Their
beards were unkempt, their faces tanned. The knees of their trousers
proved again how helpless a man is when alone with a needle. Many
were still wearing caps. A few had made substitutes for summer hats
out of wire, straw, fir twigs, and a bandanna. If the Seattle and the
Vancouver merchants could have seen the outfits which they had sold
after three or four months’ usage, they themselves might have wondered
at the skill of the manufacturers in making little seem a great deal by
the use of varnish.
Very wisely the Canadian Government had provided that every pilgrim
entering Canadian territory must have eleven hundred pounds, or a
year’s supply of food. Flour was the cheapest thing to bring an outfit
that lacked two or three hundred pounds up to the requirements. Almost
without exception the pilgrims had failed to realize the importance
of luxuries in contributing a healthful and sustaining diet in the
North. Flour sold on July 1st, after the commercial companies began
to receive supplies, for $6 a sack, but white sugar sold for fifty
cents a pound. Everybody had enough of staples, but many had eaten all
their sugar--the larger part of their dried fruits, soup preparations,
and canned delicacies and smoked or chewed all of their tobacco. It
was easy to promise themselves on the trail that if they indulged
themselves in “something good” after a hard day’s work they could buy
more of the same article in Dawson. For they were certain that a great
many of their comrades intended to sell their outfits and leave the
country at once--so many of their comrades did. But they, too, had
eaten all their butter and evaporated eggs and kept any tobacco they
had lest they should run out of it on the way home.
Pilgrims who had goods to sell hastened to find a niche for a booth on
the busy main street, where you could buy peanuts and pink lemonade, or
the substantials of eating; patent leather shoes, yellow-backed novels,
and cheap jewelry, or the substantials of wearing apparel. The six
restaurants formed a trust and kept the price of a meal up to $2.50.
In furnishing them with meat, the men who had used oxen for drawing
their outfits up to the Scales and again to draw them over the lakes,
now had reason to laugh back at the friends who had scoffed at them for
thinking that any animal except a dog or a mule was useful in Alaska.
An ox sold for $700 or $800 and was butchered at once before it had a
chance to eat any more hay--which was worth $100 a ton--while the rich
men stood by to see that they got the tenderloin. Besides beefsteak,
we had moose-steak. One moose, who had possibly come back to his old
pastures out of curiosity, was shot with a revolver only a mile out of
town. His slayer, who met him ambling along the white man’s trail as if
he were on a stampede to some new creek, sold his carcass for $500.
Carpenters got employment at $15 a day on some one of the new dance
halls, saloons, and stores which were being built as fast as green
lumber for their construction could be obtained. Pilgrims without
any trade, if they were wise, immediately secured logs and built a
cabin, which served them at once as a temporary home, a storehouse
for their supplies, and assured them warmth and shelter when winter
should come. But the grasshoppers were far more numerous than the
ants. The debilitating climate of summer, joined with the indecision
of whether to leave the country or to remain, of whether to go down
the river to the American side or up the river to Stewart if they
did remain, supplied the majority with a good excuse for idleness.
Some did not even put up tents on the shore, but kept house in their
boats which they had moored to the bank. They sat on logs discussing
their experiences in shooting the rapids, and they kept watch of the
new arrivals for the purpose of guying anyone who had started before
themselves but had arrived later.
There was something pitiful as well as ridiculous in the disappointment
of the pilgrim who had believed everything that he read in the
press-agents’ pamphlets, to find that a rich claim was not to be had
for working it. When he put his new gold-pan and a pack on his back
and went up the trail to the creeks, where possibly he found a few
colors in a rivulet, the old-timers laughed at him and asked him if
he liked prospecting well enough to pan ground that was staked two
years ago. If he carried a revolver they begged him, please not to
shoot them. Wearily, and with all his visions dispelled, he returned
to Dawson. His tent was no protection from the sun of midday. At night
the light made it difficult for him to sleep. As he fried his fat bacon
he could not help thinking that it was just strawberry time on the
“outside.”
Few pilgrims had any money and those who had were inclined to spend
it on the luxuries which their palates craved. They walked up and
down the main street like the crowd at a country fair; looked on at
the drinking and gambling of the successful miners and marvelled at
the amount of dust that passed over the saloon-keeper’s scales; and
slouched in and out of the stores of the two commercial companies to
see the bulletin board, which had the list of names of men for whom
letters had been received. If they might not visit the new variety
theatre, with gambling hall and bar attached, where actresses from
’Frisco and Seattle sang the songs of a local poet containing spirited
references to the rich claim-owners--who, in return for the compliment,
opened champagne at $30 a bottle between the “turns,”--they could at
least enjoy the sights of the river bank. In the absence of so great
an event as the arrival of a scow with mules or the latest papers
on board, some “pardners” were either quarrelling or dividing their
outfits preparatory to selling them. With the first steamer from down
the river came the news from Circle City, which meant a great deal to
the old-timers. The Cheechawkos could not understand it, but, as became
a crowd which gets only a glimpse into the inside world, they made the
most of the peeps and simulated intense interest.
One day a midget of a steamer, the first to shoot White Horse
Rapids--her parts had been packed over the Pass and put together on
Bennett--ran in between two scows and tied up so quietly that not more
than three or four hundred men saw it. Their pride was no greater than
the disappointment of the multitude, who refused to forgive the captain
until they learned that his whistle was out of gear.
Next to knowing them personally, the Cheechawkos enjoyed having the
leading citizens and the foremost gamblers pointed out to them. They
knew the story of how the Eldorado kings had made their fortunes, and
how Jack Smith had once bet $7,000 on the turn of a card. Now and then
they caught a glimpse of the tall, raw-boned Scotchman who was the
richest man in the country. Two years before he had been a day laborer
at Circle City. When the value of Eldorado claims was an uncertain
quantity he bought one of the best for $800. He spent all the first
year’s output in buying undeveloped properties, and then bought still
others upon his promise to pay, which the miners accepted without any
written word. The clean-up had vindicated his judgment. Now the fact
that he had stopped on a trail to look at a claim was supposed to
increase its speculative value.
And speculation still continued in both mining property and real
estate. A French-Canadian who had paid $5 for a front lot just after
the town-site was staked still held out persistently for $20,000, with
slight prospect of getting it. The “bottom” was out of the “boom,”
as every man who supported himself by gambling or speculation well
knew. No new strikes were made except on a few benches. None could be
made on the creeks at a season of the year when the seepage from the
thawing earth would fill a prospect-hole as fast as it was dug. Autumn
and winter have ever been the time for prospecting in the Klondyke,
and summer the time for cabin building or for taking provisions to
the heads of some of the tributaries in poling-boats preparatory to
prospecting.
Roughly but surely the lesson was forced home to the pilgrim that a
fortune cannot be made in the Klondyke in a hurry. If he would have a
claim he must find it. Even after he has found it, he must spend two
or three years, unless he sells it, taking out its treasure. If it
were not for the humiliation of facing their friends from whom they
had parted with merry good-bys, nine out of every ten of the pilgrims
would have returned home at once. Thirty per cent. of them did, as it
was. Two-thirds would have gone if many had not loitered on in their
tents until it was too late to go except over the ice. The tenth man
developed those characteristics of patience and nonchalance in dealing
with obstacles which the veteran prospector possesses by experience and
by nature. For such as lacked this spirit and remained in the country
there was the prospect of loitering in their cabins until their
supplies were eaten, in the hope of getting a good claim on a stampede,
or of going to work for wages.
[Illustration: A Yukon Steamer.]
In all, the pilgrims must have spent $30,000,000, or $40,000,000, on
outfits and transportation. (The output of gold in the Klondyke for the
year was $11,000,000.) But they have paved the way with their failures
for the development of a vast expanse of country whose abounding wealth
is unquestioned. The hardships of a journey to Dawson are of the past.
An aërial tramway, without groans or perspiration, does the work of
the packers at one-fifth of the expense on Chilcoot, and a railroad
carries passengers as well as freight over the whole Pass. Steamers ply
on both the upper and lower branches of the river connecting at White
Horse Rapids with others plying on the lakes. Hereafter, the mines of
the Klondyke will be an established institution, like the mines of
California, and the prospectors who go there, better fitted for their
tasks.
XI
GOVERNMENT
THE CANADIAN POLICY IN THE YUKON PROVINCE--TAXES AND FEES--THE GOLD
COMMISSIONER’S OFFICE--CONFLICTS BETWEEN TERRITORIAL AND DOMINION
GOVERNMENTS--TIMBER GRANTS--THE VALUE OF THE MOUNTED POLICE--THE NEWLY
RICH AT DAWSON--THE ORDER OF THE YUKON PIONEERS--MRS. CONSTANTINE.
In its policy the Dominion Government, which took matters out of
the hands of the Territorial Government after the Klondyke “boom”
began, has apparently been largely influenced by the predominance
of aliens in the Klondyke. At least three-fourths of the 2,000 men
in and around Dawson in the winter of 1897-98 and of the 35,000
pilgrims of the spring of 1898, were citizens of the United States.
Naturally, the members of the Canadian Parliament regarded with dismay
the prospect that the new-found wealth of a portion of their domain
hitherto considered valueless was going to American mints, and that
their constituents would be paying the expenses of administration,
which, owing to the isolation of the region to be governed, must be
comparatively expensive, for the benefit of another country.
Accordingly, the placer regions of the Yukon Valley lying in British
territory were created a special province called the Yukon District,
under the jurisdiction of the Dominion Parliament. A Commissioner,
with the powers of a dictator, was appointed for the District, the
Judge of the district alone being responsible to Ottawa and not subject
to the Commissioner’s orders. The other civil officials were a Gold
Commissioner, who had charge of the recording of claims, a Crown
Attorney, and two Mining Inspectors for collecting the royalties.
The opportunities of the officials for their own aggrandizement were
exceptional by reason of the system of taxation devised. On the output
of all claims a royalty of ten per cent. was collected. Every pilgrim
had to take out a mining license at a cost of $10. For having a claim
recorded a fee of $15 was charged. Every alternate claim on all new
discoveries was reserved to the Crown, thus depriving the community of
half the reward of enterprise. These restrictions drove a great many
experienced American prospectors to the other side of the boundary
line and at the same time served the inexperienced as an excuse for
returning home.
Major J. M. Walsh, who was chosen Commissioner, did not go to Dawson
in the autumn of 1897. His corps of civil officials preceded him while
he remained behind in camp on the Lewes Lakes, with a considerable
force of police, in order to escort to Dawson the United States Relief
Expedition.
Among the foremost charges of maladministration made against the civil
officials was the one in connection with the water front, data of which
were given to me by several leading men. The Canadian law provides
that the main street of a new town shall be at all points a certain
distance from the bank of the river. In order not to have a crooked
main street, the men who staked the town-site of Dawson agreed to
follow this measurement, from the greatest indentation of the bank, in
a straight line. Those who bought lots on the main street supposed that
they were securing river frontage, which is invaluable. The spring of
1898 however, saw a long row of buildings whose back-doors were toward
the river and which faced the original row. The officials had let
the water-front to an individual for a nominal sum in the name of the
Government. The sub-lessees said, with a shrug of their shoulders, that
they did not care to say to whom they paid their heavy rents, and that
they were satisfied as long as they were left undisturbed.
Captain Constantine, who had been transferred from the charge of
the police at Forty Mile to the same position at Dawson, was an old
fashioned executive. His departure in the summer of 1898 was agreeable
to him as well as to the other officials, because he was alone among
uncongenial company. He understood the miners; and they knew that,
though gruff, he was honest and incorruptible. Even the lawless ones
admitted this much; for in no community is simple integrity enforced
by a strong will better appreciated than in a mining-camp. Had he
been retained as administrator of the whole district, with the power
to choose his own assistants, Dawson would have been a phenomenally
well-governed settlement from the start, and the development of the
great wealth of the region would have been less retarded. Instead
of men who had spent their lives among pioneers, the Dominion
Government sent, as the reward for party service, men whose experience
was limited to local politics at home. With hundreds of experts to
choose from in British Columbia, an ex-captain of a whaler and an
ex-livery-stable-keeper were made inspectors to collect the royalty of
10 per cent. on an output of eleven millions of gold.
Considering the expense of recording a claim, the owners of claims
and the prospectors had at least the right to expect from the Gold
Commissioner’s Office reasonable attention to duty. To have posted in
a public place a detailed map of the district, with all claims and the
names of their owners recorded, would have required little labor and
no expense; but it would have ruined the business of the clerks in
furnishing information. Considering the number of policemen with idle
hands, mail received in the summer might have been sorted with dispatch
and distributed at different windows under different heads. But a delay
of two or three days, and the prospect of waiting in line for several
hours before one could even ask if there was a letter for him, were
strong incentives, to miners who wished to hurry back to their claims,
to put a few dollars into an itching palm, and in return to receive
immediate attention at the side-door of the Post-Office.
Unfortunately the arrival of Major Walsh in Dawson in the spring was
not productive of the reforms which an oppressed population had hoped
for. The acts of the officials, except that of a representative of the
Northwest Territory in placing a tax of $2,000 each on saloons and
gambling-halls, seemed to meet with the favor of the Commissioner.
He maintained that the Territorial Government was infringing on the
special powers granted to him by the Dominion Government; and he issued
an order that anyone who chose might sell liquor without any form of
license.
The buildings on the water-front stood in the way of even a primitive
system of sewerage. Simple sanitary rules were not promulgated, much
less enforced. Absolutely no precautions were taken against the
epidemic of fever, which was responsible for so many deaths. Private
beneficence built the two hospitals, and it now maintains them and
carries on all charitable undertakings. Whatever has been done in the
way of improvements has been paid for by public subscriptions. The full
measure of the Government’s public spirit was the construction of the
barracks and stockade for the Police on the Government Reserve. Had
some of the money collected from the claim-owners and the prospectors
been expended on constructing trails and on a system of sanitation,
there would have been less ground for complaint. Doing nothing itself,
the Government often took the position of the dog in the manger. The
exorbitant price demanded for a charter forced capitalists to give up
the plan of building a railroad from Dawson to the mines, which would
have been invaluable in cheapening the cost of mining. After paying
for timber privileges in their licenses, the pilgrims found, to their
dismay, that the Government, or the officials, had given enormous
timber grants in the neighborhood of Dawson to individuals, thus
putting an artificial value on logs for firewood and building purposes.
Very properly the loudest complaints arose from Englishmen,
Australians, and South Africans. If the new laws were directed against
Americans, they injured Canadians and other British subjects equally
as much, if not more. From the first, London regarded the Klondyke as
a great field for exploration, and most of the capital represented
there last spring was British. The royalty of 10 per cent. and the
failure to use the money so collected in constructing trails have been,
however, more injurious to capitalistic enterprise, which is largely
British, than to individual enterprise, which is largely American. A
poor man who takes from $5,000 to $50,000 out of a bench-claim with his
own hands will not be deterred from his labors by the royalty. But 10
per cent. on the gross output makes a majority of company propositions
impracticable. Often it will wipe out a goodly profit, and put a
balance on the wrong side of the ledger. As soon as it was known that
the Dominion Government would not heed the appeals for the abolition of
the royalty, the reaction from the “boom” was complete. The appointment
of Mr. Ogilvie, the new Commissioner, who has a reputation for probity,
was as welcome to the aliens as to the other residents. He at once set
about the work of making reforms.
Too much cannot be said in praise of the personnel of the Northwest
Mounted Police--mounted only in name, for they have not a single horse
in the Klondyke--which is largely drawn from the ranks of the young
Englishmen who enjoy “roughing it.” In preserving order they are
good-natured but severe. Malefactors are punished with the commendable
promptness of British justice; and no murderer in Dawson can snap his
fingers in the face of the law as one did at Skaguay. At Skaguay there
was no order; at Dawson too much civil government.
For the first winter, being populated entirely by men from the old
camps, Dawson was, of course, largely a sociological counterpart
of Forty Mile and Circle City, except that the excitement and the
feverish optimism, which increased as the new discoveries continued
to surpass expectations, had hitherto been unknown in the valley.
The contamination of the old customs began with the arrival of the
fifteen hundred madly hastening pilgrims who succeeded in reaching
Dawson before navigation was closed in the autumn of 1897. It was
complete with the arrival of the great pilgrimage with its element
of toughs, gamblers, and other parasites. The time had passed when
every man nodded to whomsoever he met. Dawson had become a settlement
not of neighbors, but, like Mecca, of strangers. The old-timers were
developing those human weaknesses which are brought out in sharp relief
by the sometimes doubtful blessing of great and unexpected success.
Practical communism was easier for a man when he and his comrade were
equally poor than after chance had made him the owner of a plot of
creek bed worth from $500,000 to $1,000,000, while his comrade, who had
been too late in the stampede to stake a claim on Eldorado, was among
his employees.
[Illustration: The Main Street of Dawson.]
There sprang up as a consequence an aristocratic social circle called
the Eldorado Kings, suffering, in a measure, from the affliction of
the _nouveaux riches_ of old communities who live miserably under the
suspicion that whoever approaches them has an axe to grind. Yet they
did not forget their duties to their less fortunate fellows. They
gave bountifully to the churches, to the hospitals, and for the care
of those poor Cheechawkos who lay ill in their tents. Upon a special
occasion, the Order of the Yukon Pioneers--perhaps the death of a
comrade or perhaps a church sociable, where you bought ice-cream made
from condensed milk for $2.50 a plate--appeared together wearing broad
blue ribands. Foremost among them was Jack McQuestion. He was keeping a
trading post when the first prospectors entered the Yukon Valley. The
old miners came to him to settle disputes, and the poorest of them
asked him for the loan of an ounce of dust.
On the day before the departure of our steamer for the outside, attired
in their best clothes and wearing their ribands, the old-timers
presented to Captain Constantine an address of appreciation and a
peck of nuggets. Then Jack McQuestion went over to the barracks and
asked that Mrs. Constantine should share with her husband the central
position in a photographic group of all the pioneers. She consented.
The Captain’s wife had been her husband’s companion during his service
on the Yukon. When she was quite ill one winter and had to remain
in her cabin from one short day’s end to another--with long, dark,
monotonous nights between them--the kindnesses shown to her were not
limited to the devotion of her stalwart husband or the attention of
ruddy-faced privates, whose Cockney accent told how far they were
from the motherland of commonplaces and restraints. The miners who
came to the door to inquire how she was getting on, devised means
of entertaining her over their pipes and cabin fires, and then were
sometimes too bashful to put them into execution. For one thing they
learned by heart the contents of some old humorous journals in camp.
Though she had been the first person to receive the journals when they
had been brought down the river the preceding summer, she did not say
so, and listened with gentle patience to their jokes being retold again
and again.
“Mrs. Constantine,” said one old-timer, as he bade her good-by, “we
ain’t much on manners, but we do know a lady when we see one.”
XII
DOWN THE YUKON AND HOME.
GOOD-BY TO DAWSON--THE EXTINCTION OF THE UNFIT--STEAMBOATING TO
ST. MICHAELS--MOSQUITOES AND SANDBARS--PILGRIMS BY THE ALL-WATER
ROUTE--BEHRING SEA--CIVILIZATION ONCE MORE.
Despite the diet, the isolation, and the inhospitable nature of the
country, many of the old-timers who had now realized the material
ambition which had brought them to Alaska and were going home, saw
the great crowd which gathered on the river bank to bid our steamer a
pleasant voyage, disappear in the distance with a feeling of regret
amounting to more than a momentary pang. From two to ten years had
passed since many of them had seen a paved street.
“You’ll wish you’re back,” and, “You won’t feel natcheral,” their
departing friends called out to them.
Out of deference to civilization everyone had bought certain of its
habiliments. New red ties stood out on the background of black
sweaters, and crumpled overalls drooped over patent leather shoes. Some
had taken whatever they could find to fit them, regardless of cost
and incongruity. Others had halted half way in making out a wardrobe
because they feared that they might not be getting the right styles
or because they got indignant at the prices charged by the Dawson
speculators compared with those on the outside.
The dying woman who was the mother of the first white baby born in
Dawson, the sallow men who had limped down from the hospital just
before the steamer sailed, and the Cheechawkos who had sold their
outfits for just enough to pay for passage to Seattle, where they
would have to telegraph home for railway fare--these had no regrets.
We buried the woman half way down the river, two of the men before
we reached St. Michaels, and a third at sea when only two days from
Seattle.
With good accommodations, the journey of eighteen hundred miles
from Dawson to St. Michaels would have been a pleasure trip. It
was far from that with us, owing to the Spanish-American war and
certain other reasons. The commercial company which charged us $300
for transportation had two steamers at Dawson. It held them there
long enough to give us the questionable satisfaction of seeing the
steamer of the rival company, which had been delayed in coming up
the river from its winter quarters, arrive and cut prices before our
steamer, having room for seventy-five passengers, and one hundred and
seventy-five on board, started on ahead of her sister steamer. We were
to act as a reconnoitering force or a buffer, or whatever you choose,
for the sister steamer, which had a dozen lonely, armed passengers and
$2,500,000 in dust on board, with a view to saving her treasure from a
Spanish privateer if one were waiting for us at the mouth of the river,
as rumor from the outside said. Therefore, one hundred passengers had
to sleep on the floor of the dining-room or on the lower deck among the
Indians and the piles of firewood.
[Illustration: A Dawson Good-by.]
Except when we ate, and when the steamer poked its bow into the sand
in front of some piles of fire-wood on the bank, we could be fairly
comfortable lounging on the decks. For the eleven days which the
journey occupied, we had one tablecloth for three sittings at each
meal. As the miners had a general disregard for the utility of
dishes for holding things, the cloth did not preserve its original
color, even in spots, for more than two days. Our food was bad rice,
bad bacon and bread, and old canned roast beef, which, however, did
not count, as we could not eat it. If the company had only allowed
us to use our fingers instead of forks and knives which men who were
“working their fare” out as waiters washed indifferently, I should have
been much happier. By July, moreover, the little mosquitoes were out.
They, and not the big ones which come early in the season, understand
flying straight to the mark with rigid lance. They bit the Indians as
well as the white men, but to no purpose so far as making them hurry
in bringing on the wood. As soon as the steamer was in midstream, the
buzzing mists, which could be resisted only by the finest netting drawn
over the head, disappeared.
Our principal stops in the eighteen hundred miles were at Forty Mile
and Circle City, where the deserted cabins were being once more
occupied and there was a chance that the old claims, which were good
for their day, would be worked again, and of a recrudescence of the
boom; and at Minook, where important discoveries had been made in the
past winter. But we stopped also at every little Indian village--to
please the Indians, one presumed--where the inhabitants came out to
meet us in their light canoes and wanted to sell furs and trinkets. At
many of these villages there were mission houses. We had on board a
Russian priest, who had come up on the steamer from Anvik and was now
returning. He was bold enough to say that he thought he needed this
little recreation after having been two years alone among the Indians.
We had left behind the great mountains below Dawson, we had seen the
midnight sun across the vast stretches of flats below Circle City, and
were just congratulating ourselves that our Indian pilot had led us
through the last of the many shallow channels in the flats, when we
ran on a sandbar. Our mate and his Indian crew labored for twenty-four
hours before we were off. The next day a hog chain broke and our
engines were helpless. For the rest of the distance to St. Michaels we
were towed by the steamer which carried the treasure and had the misery
of seeing the fellows who had started two days after us and paid less
fare pass us on the steamer of the rival company.
At St. Michaels we met three or four thousand pilgrims who were
going into the Klondyke by the all-water route. They had bought
transportation for themselves and outfits of new companies which had
attempted to tow flotillas of river steamers built in Seattle to St.
Michaels. Almost invariably the river steamers had been lost at sea
between Seattle and Unalaska, and those who depended upon them for
transportation to Dawson were only better off than others who had
attempted the journey on decrepit sailing vessels that had gone to
the bottom. It was a little unkind of our passengers, while we waited
for transfer to an ocean steamer, to enjoy setting before them in the
bluntest phrase an exaggerated account of the desperate condition of
all the newcomers in Dawson.
Behring Sea was placid as a lake when we crossed it. After two days
for coaling at Unalaska and after five days on the Pacific, we entered
Puget Sound on the morning of July 19th. Everyone on board was thinking
of the steaks and the fruit that he would eat that evening for dinner.
The old-timers, who had heretofore resented the steward’s requests that
they should not expectorate on the decks, were a little ill at ease
at the prospect of the social restraint of civilization. Civilization
offers many advantages over Dawson or Circle City for spending a
fortune, to be sure, but such of the old-timers as were destined to
become poor again--and the majority were, I think--would no doubt
return to the pick and the pan as a wanderer returns home.
THE END.
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Transcriber's Notes:
Italics are shown thus: _sloping_.
Variations in spelling and hyphenation are retained.
Perceived typographical errors have been changed.
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