[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.