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.