"Where the Northern Lights come down a' nights to dance on the
houseless snow."
"Ivan, I forbid you to go farther in this undertaking. Not a word about
this, or we are all undone. Let the Americans and the English know that
we have gold in these mountains, then we are ruined. They will rush in
on us by thousands, and crowd us to the wall--to the death."
So spoke the old Russian governor, Baranov, at Sitka, in 1804, to one of
his Slavonian hunters, who had just drawn from his pocket a handful of
golden nuggets. Full well Baranov, fur trader and autocrat, understood
and feared the coming of the sturdy, indomitable gold hunters of
Anglo-Saxon stock. And thus he suppressed the news, as did the governors
that followed him, so that when the United States bought Alaska in 1867,
she bought it for its furs and fisheries, without a thought of its
treasures underground.
No sooner, however, had Alaska become American soil than thousands of our
adventurers were afoot and afloat for the north. They were the men of
"the days of gold," the men of California, Fraser, Cassiar, and Cariboo.
With the mysterious, infinite faith of the prospector, they believed that
the gold streak, which ran through the Americas from Cape Horn to
California, did not "peter out" in British Columbia. That it extended
farther north, was their creed, and "Farther North" became their cry. No
time was lost, and in the early seventies, leaving the Treadwell and the
Silver Bow Basin to be discovered by those who came after, they went
plunging on into the white unknown. North, farther north, they
struggled, till their picks rang in the frozen beaches of the Arctic
Ocean, and they shivered by driftwood fires on the ruby sands of Nome.
But first, in order that this colossal adventure may be fully grasped,
the recentness and the remoteness of Alaska must be emphasized. The
interior of Alaska and the contiguous Canadian territory was a vast
wilderness. Its hundreds of thousands of square miles were as dark and
chartless as Darkest Africa. In 1847, when the first Hudson Bay Company
agents crossed over the Rockies from the Mackenzie to poach on the
preserves of the Russian Bear, they thought that the Yukon flowed north
and emptied into the Arctic Ocean. Hundreds of miles below, however,
were the outposts of the Russian traders. They, in turn, did not know
where the Yukon had its source, and it was not till later that Russ and
Saxon learned that it was the same mighty stream they were occupying.
And a little over ten years later, Frederick Whymper voyaged up the Great
Bend to Fort Yukon under the Arctic Circle.
From fort to fort, from York Factory on Hudson's Bay to Fort Yukon in
Alaska, the English traders transported their goods--a round trip
requiring from a year to a year and a half. It was one of their
deserters, in 1867, escaping down the Yukon to Bering Sea, who was the
first white man to make the North-west Passage by land from the Atlantic
to the Pacific. It was at this time that the first accurate description
of a fair portion of the Yukon was given by Dr. W. H. Ball, of the
Smithsonian Institution. But even he had never seen its source, and it
was not given him to appreciate the marvel of that great natural highway.
No more remarkable river in this one particular is there in the world;
taking its rise in Crater Lake, thirty miles from the ocean, the Yukon
flows for twenty-five hundred miles, through the heart of the continent,
ere it empties into the sea. A portage of thirty miles, and then a
highway for traffic one tenth the girth of the earth!
As late as 1869, Frederick Whymper, fellow of the Royal Geographical
Society, stated on hearsay that the Chilcat Indians were believed
occasionally to make a short portage across the Coast Range from salt
water to the head-reaches of the Yukon. But it remained for a gold
hunter, questing north, ever north, to be first of all white men to cross
the terrible Chilcoot Pass, and tap the Yukon at its head. This happened
only the other day, but the man has become a dim legendary hero. Holt
was his name, and already the mists of antiquity have wrapped about the
time of his passage. 1872, 1874, and 1878 are the dates variously
given--a confusion which time will never clear.
Holt penetrated as far as the Hootalinqua, and on his return to the coast
reported coarse gold. The next recorded adventurer is one Edward Bean,
who in 1880 headed a party of twenty-five miners from Sitka into the
uncharted land. And in the same year, other parties (now forgotten, for
who remembers or ever hears the wanderings of the gold hunters?) crossed
the Pass, built boats out of the standing timber, and drifted down the
Yukon and farther north.
And then, for a quarter of a century, the unknown and unsung heroes
grappled with the frost, and groped for the gold they were sure lay
somewhere among the shadows of the Pole. In the struggle with the
terrifying and pitiless natural forces, they returned to the primitive,
garmenting themselves in the skins of wild beasts, and covering their
feet with the walrus _mucluc_ and the moosehide moccasin. They forgot
the world and its ways, as the world had forgotten them; killed their
meat as they found it; feasted in plenty and starved in famine, and
searched unceasingly for the yellow lure. They crisscrossed the land in
every direction, threaded countless unmapped rivers in precarious
birch-bark canoes, and with snowshoes and dogs broke trail through
thousands of miles of silent white, where man had never been. They
struggled on, under the aurora borealis or the midnight sun, through
temperatures that ranged from one hundred degrees above zero to eighty
degrees below, living, in the grim humour of the land, on "rabbit tracks
and salmon bellies."
To-day, a man may wander away from the trail for a hundred days, and just
as he is congratulating himself that at last he is treading virgin soil,
he will come upon some ancient and dilapidated cabin, and forget his
disappointment in wonder at the man who reared the logs. Still, if one
wanders from the trail far enough and deviously enough, he may chance
upon a few thousand square miles which he may have all to himself. On
the other hand, no matter how far and how deviously he may wander, the
possibility always remains that he may stumble, not alone upon a deserted
cabin, but upon an occupied one.
As an instance of this, and of the vastness of the land, no better case
need be cited than that of Harry Maxwell. An able seaman, hailing from
New Bedford, Massachusetts, his ship, the brig _Fannie E. Lee_, was
pinched in the Arctic ice. Passing from whaleship to whaleship, he
eventually turned up at Point Barrow in the summer of 1880. He was
_north_ of the Northland, and from this point of vantage he determined to
pull south of the interior in search of gold. Across the mountains from
Fort Macpherson, and a couple of hundred miles eastward from the
Mackenzie, he built a cabin and established his headquarters. And here,
for nineteen continuous years, he hunted his living and prospected. He
ranged from the never opening ice to the north as far south as the Great
Slave Lake. Here he met Warburton Pike, the author and explorer--an
incident he now looks back upon as chief among the few incidents of his
solitary life.
When this sailor-miner had accumulated $20,000 worth of dust he concluded
that civilization was good enough for him, and proceeded "to pull for the
outside." From the Mackenzie he went up the Little Peel to its
headwaters, found a pass through the mountains, nearly starved to death
on his way across to the Porcupine Hills, and eventually came out on the
Yukon River, where he learned for the first time of the Yukon gold
hunters and their discoveries. Yet for twenty years they had been
working there, his next-door neighbours, virtually, in a land of such
great spaces. At Victoria, British Columbia, previous to his going east
over the Canadian Pacific (the existence of which he had just learned),
he pregnantly remarked that he had faith in the Mackenzie watershed, and
that he was going back after he had taken in the World's Fair and got a
whiff or two of civilization.
Faith! It may or may not remove mountains, but it has certainly made the
Northland. No Christian martyr ever possessed greater faith than did the
pioneers of Alaska. They never doubted the bleak and barren land. Those
who came remained, and more ever came. They could not leave. They
"knew" the gold was there, and they persisted. Somehow, the romance of
the land and the quest entered into their blood, the spell of it gripped
hold of them and would not let them go. Man after man of them, after the
most terrible privation and suffering, shook the muck of the country from
his moccasins and departed for good. But the following spring always
found him drifting down the Yukon on the tail of the ice jams.
Jack McQuestion aptly vindicates the grip of the North. After a
residence of thirty years he insists that the climate is delightful, and
declares that whenever he makes a trip to the States he is afflicted with
home-sickness. Needless to say, the North still has him and will keep
tight hold of him until he dies. In fact, for him to die elsewhere would
be inartistic and insincere. Of three of the "pioneer" pioneers, Jack
McQuestion alone survives. In 1871, from one to seven years before Holt
went over Chilcoot, in the company of Al Mayo and Arthur Harper,
McQuestion came into the Yukon from the North-west over the Hudson Bay
Company route from the Mackenzie to Fort Yukon. The names of these three
men, as their lives, are bound up in the history of the country, and so
long as there be histories and charts, that long will the Mayo and
McQuestion rivers and the Harper and Ladue town site of Dawson be
remembered. As an agent of the Alaska Commercial Company, in 1873,
McQuestion built Fort Reliance, six miles below the Klondike River. In
1898 the writer met Jack McQuestion at Minook, on the Lower Yukon. The
old pioneer, though grizzled, was hale and hearty, and as optimistic as
when he first journeyed into the land along the path of the Circle. And
no man more beloved is there in all the North. There will be great
sadness there when his soul goes questing on over the Last
Divide--"farther north," perhaps--who can tell?
Frank Dinsmore is a fair sample of the men who made the Yukon country. A
Yankee, born, in Auburn, Maine, the _Wanderlust_ early laid him by the
heels, and at sixteen he was heading west on the trail that led "farther
north." He prospected in the Black Hills, Montana, and in the Coeur
d'Alene, then heard a whisper of the North, and went up to Juneau on the
Alaskan Panhandle. But the North still whispered, and more insistently,
and he could not rest till he went over Chilcoot, and down into the
mysterious Silent Land. This was in 1882, and he went down the chain of
lakes, down the Yukon, up the Pelly, and tried his luck on the bars of
McMillan River. In the fall, a perambulating skeleton, he came back over
the Pass in a blizzard, with a rag of shirt, tattered overalls, and a
handful of raw flour.
But he was unafraid. That winter he worked for a grubstake in Juneau,
and the next spring found the heels of his moccasins turned towards salt
water and his face toward Chilcoot. This was repeated the next spring,
and the following spring, and the spring after that, until, in 1885, he
went over the Pass for good. There was to be no return for him until he
found the gold he sought.
The years came and went, but he remained true to his resolve. For eleven
long years, with snow-shoe and canoe, pickaxe and gold-pan, he wrote out
his life on the face of the land. Upper Yukon, Middle Yukon, Lower
Yukon--he prospected faithfully and well. His bed was anywhere. Winter
or summer he carried neither tent nor stove, and his six-pound
sleeping-robe of Arctic hare was the warmest covering he was ever known
to possess. Rabbit tracks and salmon bellies were his diet with a
vengeance, for he depended largely on his rifle and fishing-tackle. His
endurance equalled his courage. On a wager he lifted thirteen
fifty-pound sacks of flour and walked off with them. Winding up a
seven-hundred-mile trip on the ice with a forty-mile run, he came into
camp at six o'clock in the evening and found a "squaw dance" under way.
He should have been exhausted. Anyway, his _muclucs_ were frozen stiff.
But he kicked them off and danced all night in stocking-feet.
At the last fortune came to him. The quest was ended, and he gathered up
his gold and pulled for the outside. And his own end was as fitting as
that of his quest. Illness came upon him down in San Francisco, and his
splendid life ebbed slowly out as he sat in his big easy-chair, in the
Commercial Hotel, the "Yukoner's home." The doctors came, discussed,
consulted, the while he matured more plans of Northland adventure; for
the North still gripped him and would not let him go. He grew weaker day
by day, but each day he said, "To-morrow I'll be all right." Other
old-timers, "out on furlough,", came to see him. They wiped their eyes
and swore under their breaths, then entered and talked largely and
jovially about going in with him over the trail when spring came. But
there in the big easy-chair it was that his Long Trail ended, and the
life passed out of him still fixed on "farther north."
From the time of the first white man, famine loomed black and gloomy over
the land. It was chronic with the Indians and Eskimos; it became chronic
with the gold hunters. It was ever present, and so it came about that
life was commonly expressed in terms of "grub"--was measured by cups of
flour. Each winter, eight months long, the heroes of the frost faced
starvation. It became the custom, as fall drew on, for partners to cut
the cards or draw straws to determine which should hit the hazardous
trail for salt water, and which should remain and endure the hazardous
darkness of the Arctic night.
There was never food enough to winter the whole population. The A. C.
Company worked hard to freight up the grub, but the gold hunters came
faster and dared more audaciously. When the A. C. Company added a new
stern-wheeler to its fleet, men said, "Now we shall have plenty." But
more gold hunters poured in over the passes to the south, more
_voyageurs_ and fur traders forced a way through the Rockies from the
east, more seal hunters and coast adventurers poled up from Bering Sea on
the west, more sailors deserted from the whale-ships to the north, and
they all starved together in right brotherly fashion. More steamers were
added, but the tide of prospectors welled always in advance. Then the N.
A. T. & T. Company came upon the scene, and both companies added
steadily to their fleets. But it was the same old story; famine would
not depart. In fact, famine grew with the population, till, in the
winter of 1897-1898, the United States government was forced to equip a
reindeer relief expedition. As of old, that winter partners cut the
cards and drew straws, and remained or pulled for salt water as chance
decided. They were wise of old time, and had learned never to figure on
relief expeditions. They had heard of such things, but no mortal man of
them had ever laid eyes on one.
The hard luck of other mining countries pales into insignificance before
the hard luck of the North. And as for the hardship, it cannot be
conveyed by printed page or word of mouth. No man may know who has not
undergone. And those who have undergone, out of their knowledge, claim
that in the making of the world God grew tired, and when He came to the
last barrowload, "just dumped it anyhow," and that was how Alaska
happened to be. While no adequate conception of the life can be given to
the stay-at-home, yet the men themselves sometimes give a clue to its
rigours. One old Minook miner testified thus: "Haven't you noticed the
expression on the faces of us fellows? You can tell a new-comer the
minute you see him; he looks alive, enthusiastic, perhaps jolly. We old
miners are always grave, unless were drinking."
Another old-timer, out of the bitterness of a "home-mood," imagined
himself a Martian astronomer explaining to a friend, with the aid of a
powerful telescope, the institutions of the earth. "There are the
continents," he indicated; "and up there near the polar cap is a country,
frigid and burning and lonely and apart, called Alaska. Now, in other
countries and states there are great insane asylums, but, though crowded,
they are insufficient; so there is Alaska given over to the worst cases.
Now and then some poor insane creature comes to his senses in those awful
solitudes, and, in wondering joy, escapes from the land and hastens back
to his home. But most cases are incurable. They just suffer along, poor
devils, forgetting their former life quite, or recalling it like a
dream." Again the grip of the North, which will not let one go--for
"_most cases are incurable_."
For a quarter of a century the battle with frost and famine went on. The
very severity of the struggle with Nature seemed to make the gold hunters
kindly toward one another. The latch-string was always out, and the open
hand was the order of the day. Distrust was unknown, and it was no
hyperbole for a man to take the last shirt off his back for a comrade.
Most significant of all, perhaps, in this connection, was the custom of
the old days, that when August the first came around, the prospectors who
had failed to locate "pay dirt" were permitted to go upon the ground of
their more fortunate comrades and take out enough for the next year's
grub-stake.
In 1885 rich bar-washing was done on the Stewart River, and in 1886
Cassiar Bar was struck just below the mouth of the Hootalinqua. It was
at this time that the first moderate strike was made on Forty Mile Creek,
so called because it was judged to be that distance below Fort Reliance
of Jack McQuestion fame. A prospector named Williams started for the
outside with dogs and Indians to carry the news, but suffered such
hardship on the summit of Chilcoot that he was carried dying into the
store of Captain John Healy at Dyea. But he had brought the news
through--_coarse gold_! Within three months more than two hundred miners
had passed in over Chilcoot, stampeding for Forty Mile. Find followed
find--Sixty Mile, Miller, Glacier, Birch, Franklin, and the Koyokuk. But
they were all moderate discoveries, and the miners still dreamed and
searched for the fabled stream, "Too Much Gold," where gold was so
plentiful that gravel had to be shovelled into the sluice-boxes in order
to wash it.
And all the time the Northland was preparing to play its own huge joke.
It was a great joke, albeit an exceeding bitter one, and it has led the
old-timers to believe that the land is left in darkness the better part
of the year because God goes away and leaves it to itself. After all the
risk and toil and faithful endeavour, it was destined that few of the
heroes should be in at the finish when Too Much Gold turned its
yellow-treasure to the stars.
First, there was Robert Henderson--and this is true history. Henderson
had faith in the Indian River district. For three years, by himself,
depending mainly on his rifle, living on straight meat a large portion of
the time, he prospected many of the Indian River tributaries, just missed
finding the rich creeks, Sulphur and Dominion, and managed to make grub
(poor grub) out of Quartz Creek and Australia Creek. Then he crossed the
divide between Indian River and the Klondike, and on one of the "feeders"
of the latter found eight cents to the pan. This was considered
excellent in those simple days. Naming the creek "Gold Bottom," he
recrossed the divide and got three men, Munson, Dalton, and Swanson, to
return with him. The four took out $750. And be it emphasized, and
emphasized again, _that this was the first Klondike gold ever shovelled
in and washed out_. And be it also emphasized, _that Robert Henderson
was the discoverer of Klondike_, _all lies and hearsay tales to the
contrary_.
Running out of grub, Henderson again recrossed the divide, and went down
the Indian River and up the Yukon to Sixty Mile. Here Joe Ladue ran the
trading post, and here Joe Ladue had originally grub-staked Henderson.
Henderson told his tale, and a dozen men (all it contained) deserted the
Post for the scene of his find. Also, Henderson persuaded a party of
prospectors bound for Stewart River, to forgo their trip and go down and
locate with him. He loaded his boat with supplies, drifted down the
Yukon to the mouth of the Klondike, and towed and poled up the Klondike
to Gold Bottom. But at the mouth of the Klondike he met George Carmack,
and thereby hangs the tale.
Carmack was a squawman. He was familiarly known as "Siwash" George--a
derogatory term which had arisen out of his affinity for the Indians. At
the time Henderson encountered him he was catching salmon with his Indian
wife and relatives on the site of what was to become Dawson, the Golden
City of the Snows. Henderson, bubbling over with good-will, open-handed,
told Carmack of his discovery. But Carmack was satisfied where he was.
He was possessed by no overweening desire for the strenuous life. Salmon
were good enough for him. But Henderson urged him to come on and locate,
until, when he yielded, he wanted to take the whole tribe along.
Henderson refused to stand for this, said that he must give the
preference over Siwashes to his old Sixty Mile friends, and, it is
rumoured, said some things about Siwashes that were not nice.
The next morning Henderson went on alone up the Klondike to Gold Bottom.
Carmack, by this time aroused, took a short cut afoot for the same place.
Accompanied by his two Indian brothers-in-law, Skookum Jim and Tagish
Charley, he went up Rabbit Creek (now Bonanza), crossed into Gold Bottom,
and staked near Henderson's discovery. On the way up he had panned a few
shovels on Rabbit Creek, and he showed Henderson "colours" he had
obtained. Henderson made him promise, if he found anything on the way
back, that he would send up one of the Indians with the news. Henderson
also agreed to pay for his service, for he seemed to feel that they were
on the verge of something big, and he wanted to make sure.
Carmack returned down Rabbit Creek. While he was taking a sleep on the
bank about half a mile below the mouth of what was to be known as
Eldorado, Skookum Jim tried his luck, and from surface prospects got from
ten cents to a dollar to the pan. Carmack and his brother-in-law staked
and hit "the high places" for Forty Mile, where they filed on the claims
before Captain Constantine, and renamed the creek Bonanza. And Henderson
was forgotten. No word of it reached him. Carmack broke his promise.
Weeks afterward, when Bonanza and Eldorado were staked from end to end
and there was no more room, a party of late comers pushed over the divide
and down to Gold Bottom, where they found Henderson still at work. When
they told him they were from Bonanza, he was nonplussed. He had never
heard of such a place. But when they described it, he recognized it as
Rabbit Creek. Then they told him of its marvellous richness, and, as
Tappan Adney relates, when Henderson realized what he had lost through
Carmack's treachery, "he threw down his shovel and went and sat on the
bank, so sick at heart that it was some time before he could speak."
Then there were the rest of the old-timers, the men of Forty Mile and
Circle City. At the time of the discovery, nearly all of them were over
to the west at work in the old diggings or prospecting for new ones. As
they said of themselves, they were the kind of men who are always caught
out with forks when it rains soup. In the stampede that followed the
news of Carmack's strike very few old miners took part. They were not
there to take part. But the men who did go on the stampede were mainly
the worthless ones, the new-comers, and the camp hangers on. And while
Bob Henderson plugged away to the east, and the heroes plugged away to
the west, the greenhorns and rounders went up and staked Bonanza.
But the Northland was not yet done with its joke. When fall came on and
the heroes returned to Forty Mile and to Circle City, they listened
calmly to the up-river tales of Siwash discoveries and loafers'
prospects, and shook their heads. They judged by the calibre of the men
interested, and branded it a bunco game. But glowing reports continued
to trickle down the Yukon, and a few of the old-timers went up to see.
They looked over the ground--the unlikeliest place for gold in all their
experience--and they went down the river again, "leaving it to the
Swedes."
Again the Northland turned the tables. The Alaskan gold hunter is
proverbial, not so much for his unveracity, as for his inability to tell
the precise truth. In a country of exaggerations, he likewise is prone
to hyperbolic description of things actual. But when it came to
Klondike, he could not stretch the truth as fast as the truth itself
stretched. Carmack first got a dollar pan. He lied when he said it was
two dollars and a half. And when those who doubted him did get
two-and-a-half pans, they said they were getting an ounce, and lo! ere
the lie had fairly started on its way, they were getting, not one ounce,
but five ounces. This they claimed was six ounces; but when they filled
a pan of dirt to prove the lie, they washed out twelve ounces. And so it
went. They continued valiantly to lie, but the truth continued to outrun
them.
But the Northland's hyperborean laugh was not yet ended. When Bonanza
was staked from mouth to source, those who had failed to "get in,"
disgruntled and sore, went up the "pups" and feeders. Eldorado was one
of these feeders, and many men, after locating on it, turned their backs
upon their claims and never gave them a second thought. One man sold a
half-interest in five hundred feet of it for a sack of flour. Other
owners wandered around trying to bunco men into buying them out for a
song. And then Eldorado "showed up." It was far, far richer than
Bonanza, with an average value of a thousand dollars a foot to every foot
of it.
A Swede named Charley Anderson had been at work on Miller Creek the year
of the strike, and arrived in Dawson with a few hundred dollars. Two
miners, who had staked No. 29 Eldorado, decided that he was the proper
man upon whom to "unload." He was too canny to approach sober, so at
considerable expense they got him drunk. Even then it was hard work, but
they kept him befuddled for several days, and finally, inveigled him into
buying No. 29 for $750. When Anderson sobered up, he wept at his folly,
and pleaded to have his money back. But the men who had duped him were
hard-hearted. They laughed at him, and kicked themselves for not having
tapped him for a couple of hundred more. Nothing remained for Anderson
but to work the worthless ground. This he did, and out of it he took
over three-quarters of a million of dollars.
It was not till Frank Dinsmore, who already had big holdings on Birch
Creek, took a hand, that the old-timers developed faith in the new
diggings. Dinsmore received a letter from a man on the spot, calling it
"the biggest thing in the world," and harnessed his dogs and went up to
investigate. And when he sent a letter back, saying that he had never
seen "anything like it," Circle City for the first time believed, and at
once was precipitated one of the wildest stampedes the country had ever
seen or ever will see. Every dog was taken, many went without dogs, and
even the women and children and weaklings hit the three hundred miles of
ice through the long Arctic night for the biggest thing in the world. It
is related that but twenty people, mostly cripples and unable to travel,
were left in Circle City when the smoke of the last sled disappeared up
the Yukon.
Since that time gold has been discovered in all manner of places, under
the grass roots of the hill-side benches, in the bottom of Monte Cristo
Island, and in the sands of the sea at Nome. And now the gold hunter who
knows his business shuns the "favourable looking" spots, confident in his
hard-won knowledge that he will find the most gold in the least likely
place. This is sometimes adduced to support the theory that the gold
hunters, rather than the explorers, are the men who will ultimately win
to the Pole. Who knows? It is in their blood, and they are capable of
it.
PIEDMONT, CALIFORNIA.
_February_ 1902.