BY MOTOR CAR THROUGH THE WILDERNESS
I have come into the Yukon Territory from Alaska. The trip from the
land of Uncle Sam to that of John Bull was made over the route followed
by thousands of gold seekers in the first great Klondike rush in the
winter of 1897, when the prospectors made their way on foot over that
frozen pass. It is now summer, and I have come from Skagway to White
Horse, where I am now writing, on the White Pass Railway.
My first journey into the interior of the Yukon has been a motor trip
of a hundred miles on the overland trail that runs from here to Dawson.
The car was of American make, the chauffeur was “Caterpillar Ike,”
and the time was yesterday from midday to midnight. We dashed through
virgin forests, climbed mountains, flew around dizzying curves, and
skidded along narrow cliffs until my heart was in my throat but my soul
was full of thrills.
The overland trail begins at White Horse and runs through the
wilderness for a distance of three hundred and fifty miles to Dawson at
the mouth of the Klondike. It is more than one hundred miles shorter
than the river trip to the gold mines, and it is used to carry mail,
passengers, and freight during the cold winter months when everything
in this region is locked tight by Jack Frost.
The road through the forest climbs over ranges of mountains, winds its
way through the valleys, and crosses swamps, bogs, and sloughs of mud
that sticks like cement. In many parts of its course it twists about
like a corkscrew, as though the surveyors had laid their lines along
the trail of a rabbit, and a drunken rabbit at that. Here it is bedded
on rock, and there it half floats on a quicksand covered with corduroy
logs. In the spring of the year the six-horse teams of the mail stage
are often mired to their bellies, and have to be lifted from the waxy
clay by a block and tackle attached to the trees.
My ride over the trail took me as far as the crest of the range beyond
Little River, whence I returned to White Horse to go down the Yukon by
steamer. The motor trip was a moving picture of the wonders of nature.
On each side of the roadway the country is the same as it was when
Columbus discovered America; it is the same as when the Scandinavian
navigators drifted down our coast about 1000 A. D.--yes, I venture, the
same as it was when old Cheops built his great pyramid on the banks of
the Nile. With the exception of several log huts where meals are served
to travellers, there were no signs of human habitation, and aside from
the roads, old and new, not one mark of human labour. We were in no
danger of meeting other machines or farm wagons, although we might have
run down a covey of birds instead of the usual chicken, or a fox or a
bear in place of a dog. At one time a lynx leaped across the trail in
front of our machine, and later a great flock of grouse passed over our
heads with a whirr. I am told that hunters sometimes bag a good lot of
birds on this route by shooting them from automobiles.
All sorts of animal tracks were to be seen as we rode over the trail.
The woods are full of bears, brown and black, caribou in great numbers,
and wide-antlered moose. There are foxes and lynx and millions of
rabbits. We passed groves of small trees, every one of which had been
killed by the rabbits. They had eaten the bark off during the winter,
beginning when the snow was two or three feet in depth and biting it
away inch by inch as the snow melted, until a belt of white a yard wide
girdled each tree. The bark above and below was dark green or brown,
and the white shone out like ivory. Beavers and muskrats abound in the
streams, and there are many kinds of squirrels, as well as gophers,
that burrow like moles under the roadway. We crossed many such burrows,
our motor car hitting them with a bump that shot us from our seats, so
that our heads struck the top.
Upon starting from White Horse we were told of a narrow escape from a
bear that one of the railroad clerks had had only the night before.
This man had gone out to a lake in the woods about five miles away and
made a good catch of fish. He was riding home on his bicycle when a
big black bear rushed out of the forest and upset him. Fortunately,
he fell near a dead root. He seized this as he jumped up, and hit old
Bruin a blow on the snout. Then, before the bear had time to recover,
he mounted his bicycle and sped away. But the bear got the fish.
Our first stop was twenty-two miles from White Horse, at the Tahkeena
road house, on the Tahkeena River, where there is a famous Irish cook,
Jimmy. The road house is built of logs and heated by a stove made of
a hundred-gallon gasoline tank. The tank lies on its side, resting on
four legs made of iron pipe. A stovepipe is fitted into the top and a
door is cut in one end. The result is an excellent heating device, and
one that is common in many parts of Alaska and the Klondike. We got a
snack at this road house on our first stop and had an excellent dinner
there on our return.
We crossed the Tahkeena River on a ferry boat attached to a cable
worked by the current. We then rode on through a parklike country,
spotted with groves of pine trees, each as high as a three-story house,
as straight as an arrow, and, branches and all, no bigger around than a
nail keg. I cannot describe the beauty of these trees. Where they were
thick we rode for miles through walls of green twenty or thirty feet
high, and in places where the trees had been burned by forest fires the
walls were of silver, the dead branches having been turned to the most
exquisite filigree.
The trees here are like those of most parts of interior Alaska. They
grow in the thin soil, nowhere more than six inches or so deep, which
is underlaid by strata of earth that have been frozen for thousands of
years. The moss on the top of the soil acts as an insulator and keeps
the ice from melting except on the surface. The roots go down to the
ice and then spread out. When a tree dies one can easily pull the stump
out, roots and all, and throw it aside. The overland trail was cleared
in this way, and the sides of it are fenced with piles of such trees.
We are accustomed to think of this part of the world as all snow and
ice. That is so in winter, but in summer the whole country is as
spotted with flowers as a botanical garden. During our ride we passed
great beds of fireweed and motored for miles between hedges of pink
flowers, higher than the wheels of our automobile. The woods that had
been swept by forest fires were dusted with pink blossoms, and in the
open spaces there was so much colour that it seemed as though Mother
Nature had gone on a spree and painted the whole country red. In one
open place where we stopped to put on a new tire, I picked nineteen
varieties of wild flowers. Among them were roses of bright red, and
white flowers with petals like those of a forget-me-not. There were
also blue flowers the names of which I do not know, and daisies with
petals of pink and centres as yellow as bricks of Klondike gold.
The mosses were especially wonderful. One that looked like old ivory
grew close to the ground in great patches. It reminded me of the
exquisite coral of Samoa and the Fijis. I am told that this moss is
the favourite food of the reindeer, and that the caribou paw their way
down through the snow to get it. Another curiosity found here is the
air plant. I have always thought of orchids as confined to the tropics,
but in this part of the world are polar orchids, great bunches of green
that hang high up in the trees.
The character of the country varied as we went onward. Now our way was
across a rolling plain, now the road climbed the hills, and again it
cut its way through the mountains. At one break in the hills we could
see the Ibex Range, with glaciers marking its slopes, and its peaks
capped with perpetual snow. In other places the mountains were as green
as the hills of the Alleghanies, and they had the same royal mantle of
purple. Just beyond the Tahkeena River we rode through a valley walled
with mountains from which the earth had been torn by a cloudburst
a few years before. The faces of the green hills were covered with
clay-coloured blotches and they looked as though they had been blasted
by leprosy or some earthy plague.
We crossed one little glacial river after another, and rode through
valleys that are covered with ice in the winter and become soup sloughs
in the spring. A great part of the way was over what is known as
glacial clay. This clay is solid when dry, but when moist it has the
consistency of shoemakers’ wax and, like a quicksand, sucks in anything
that goes over it. A railroad track built on it and not well protected
by drainage may disappear during a long rainy season.
The labour of keeping the overland trail in order reminds one of that
of Hercules cleaning the Augean stables. The road bed has had to be
filled in and remade again and again. The route is changed from year to
year. Now and then we passed an old roadway that had become so filled
with boulders that a man could hardly crawl over it. This region had
no rain for three months until day before yesterday, when enough fell
to change the whole face of Nature, and make this glacial clay like so
much putty. Our automobile weighed more than two tons, and we had to go
carefully where there was any doubt as to the condition of the clay.
At one wet spot we found ourselves down to the axles, with the wheels
held fast in the mud. We had brought with us an axe and a long-handled
shovel for use in just such an emergency. We cut down trees and made
a bed of branches in front of the car. A pine track was put under the
wheels and a pine tree used as a lever to aid the jack in getting the
car out of the mud. It took us about two hours to dig the machine from
the clay and get it on the firm road bed. After that when we came to
soft clay we turned out and sought new roads through the grass or
rushed over the wet spots to prevent the car from sinking.
The overland trail is used almost altogether during winter, although
the Canadian government keeps it in such a condition that it is fit for
travel in summer. It is, on the whole, better than most of Uncle Sam’s
roads in Alaska, and in the winter makes possibles regular mail service
into the Klondike. The freight and the mail are carried on great sleds
hauled by six horses, with relays at the various road houses. Each
house has stables for the horses and at some of them there are sleeping
accommodations for passengers.
At the Tahkeena road house I saw a great stack of horse feed that had
been brought up the Tahkeena and cached there for the winter, and at
the Little River road house I saw one of the sleds used for carrying
foodstuffs and other perishables into the Klondike during the cold
season, when the thermometer may fall to seventy degrees below zero.
The sled was a covered one, large enough to carry three or four tons.
It was so arranged that carbon heaters could be placed in troughs
around its bed. These heaters keep the tightly covered load from
freezing. Such sleds are drawn by four or six horses, according to the
state of the roads.
The Canadian government has already spent a great deal on this road,
and its upkeep costs thousands of dollars a year. Within the last few
years the trail has been much improved for the use of automobiles. The
first time an automobile road was proposed many people scoffed at the
idea and said that it could not be done. The matter came up before the
Parliament at Ottawa and was discussed pro and con. An appropriation of
fifty thousand dollars had been asked. The objections made were that
automobiles could not be run in the low temperature of the Yukon, and
that the road was so rough that the machines could never make their way
over it.
[Illustration: Built at the height of the Klondike gold rush, the White
Pass Railway transported thousands of prospectors and millions of
dollars’ worth of gold during the first few years of its existence. It
is one hundred and eleven miles long and connects Skagway with White
Horse.]
[Illustration: For more than half the year the Yukon River is covered
with ice, and then mail, freight, and passengers for the interior are
carried on sleds by way of the Overland Trail from White Horse to
Dawson.]
[Illustration: “Our first stop was at the Tahkeena roadhouse, famous
for its Irish cook. It stands on the banks of the Tahkeena River, which
we crossed on a ferry.”]
This discussion occurred in the midst of the winter, and while it
was going on the Honourable George Black, who was then Commissioner
of Yukon Territory, decided to show parliament that the undertaking
was practicable. He made an arrangement with C. A. Thomas, the
resident manager of the Yukon Gold Company at Dawson, to take a
forty-horse-power automobile over the trail. With a chauffeur, the two
men left Dawson when the road was covered with snow and the thermometer
far below zero. The long winter nights were at hand and the sun shone
only an hour or so every day. The darkness was conquered in part by a
locomotive headlight on the front of the car.
The trip to White Horse and return was made within fifty-six hours,
of which thirty-six hours was actual running. The distance of seven
hundred and twenty miles was covered at an average speed of twenty
miles an hour for the running time of the round trip. During the
journey the thermometer fell to fifty-six degrees below zero, but the
air was dead still, and wrapped up as they were in furs, the men did
not realize how cold it was until they came to a road house and read
the thermometer.
It was necessary to keep the machine going continuously, for during a
stop of even a few minutes the engine would freeze and the oil congeal.
At one time their gasoline gave out and they had to stop twenty miles
away from a road house they had expected to reach. A dog team was found
and sent on to the road house, but while they waited the engine froze
and the oil became stiff, and they had to build a fire under the car
with wood from the forest before they could start off again. When they
had completed the journey and returned to Dawson the bill for the road
appropriation was just coming up for action. The news of their trip was
telegraphed to Ottawa and the bill was passed.