Gold Diggers_Striking It Rich in the Klondike Read online

  At Sheep Camp, the two men had repacked all their provisions into smaller bundles they could carry up on their backs, then waited for two long weeks while a snowstorm imprisoned them in their tent. How did they pass the time, as they huddled together in their canvas shelter, listening to the wind? “It was a very dreary camp during those two weeks,” Bill recalled. Difficult as it was to climb the mountains, dread of the coming ordeal was worse. “There is nothing so hard as to keep still in these regions, especially when the mercury is far below zero.” Finally, once the blizzard abated, they set off. Often they found themselves clinging perilously to loose rocks as they pushed upward on hands and knees. The wind howled, and the rumble of avalanches was often disturbingly close. Bill did not dare look behind him. Both men suffered searing sunburns as they sweated up the rocky terrain. “My face became so swollen,” recalled Bill, “that I could hardly see out of my eyes.” For protection, they blackened their faces with burnt cork or charcoal. “We were gruesome objects with our black faces and goggles.”

  The Trail of ’98

  Finally, Bill Haskell collapsed on the bleak, windswept summit of the Chilkoot Pass, 3,500 feet above sea level, with his last bundle. He was suffused with a sense of victory after such superhuman efforts. The seventeen-mile journey from Dyea to the top of the pass had taken twenty-three days. His back ached and his legs were weak with effort, but if he could hack that trail, he could take on anything. The landscape ahead was dazzling in its sparsely populated magnificence. “What a picture! It seems not of this world: it is so strange, so unique. Snow peaks and their shining glaciers!” He flung an arm round Joe’s shoulders and told him that the tramp was nothing but “a rather long and at times agreeable method of premeditated suicide.” His flippancy hid the sense of awe at the harshness of the climb they had made and the journey ahead. He decided that anybody who actually made it into the Yukon basin was going to be a pretty good fellow.

  On the other side of the Chilkoot Pass was a steep, 500-foot drop to the frozen lakes below. The contrast between the partners was evident as they started downhill. Joe carefully checked their outfit and prepared to take the sled down in a controlled slide. Bill perched himself astride a bundle of their supplies, kicked off, and skidded down the slope at terrific speed, whooping as he went.

  Bill Haskell took the rigors of the journey cheerfully in stride, but another side of his character emerged in his encounters with Tlingit porters. The Tlingit were an aggressive, proud, coastal people who had guarded the routes across the St. Elias Mountains for hundreds of years and prevented Russians from moving inland in the early nineteenth century. In 1880, Washington had sent a U.S. Navy warship under the command of Captain Lester A. Beardslee into the region because the American government considered Tlingit actions a threat to national interests. Beardslee had escorted a group of miners up the Lynn Canal and warned that he would turn his guns on Tlingit chiefs unless they opened the passes to American prospectors. In exchange, he agreed that the Tlingit would be engaged as local packers and that no trading would take place. The agreement enabled miners to cross the mountains to the headwaters of the Yukon, then fan out in search of gold.

  It was not an altogether happy bargain. Over the previous decade, traders and prospectors had encroached on Tlingit territories, despoiled their coastal villages and fishing grounds, and disrupted their communities by taking Tlingit wives. The newcomers were a source of wealth, since they needed packers. As porters, the Tlingit displayed extraordinary strength: while southerners struggled with eighty-pound loads, the men and women who had grown up in these mountains shouldered packs weighing more than a hundred pounds. Moreover, they understood the coastal range’s weather systems, and refused to break trail when they knew a blizzard was on its way or an avalanche threatened. But the incoming miners were deaf to Tlingit wisdom because they were steeped in the assumptions of racial superiority that prevailed among non-native North Americans back then. Bill was typical in his ignorant dismissal of the porters. “These people may be interesting to ethnologists,” he declared, “and they may seem promising material for devout missionaries, but for the man who is in a hurry to get to the gold regions they are more often a hindrance than a help.”

  Once over the St. Elias range, Bill and Joe had to traverse four lakes. Crater Lake and Lake Lindeman, on the far side of the Chilkoot Pass, were both still frozen, so the two men pressed north on foot, pulling heavily laden sleds. They discovered that the way to keep the wooden runners sliding easily over ice was to freeze water on them before starting. An icy wind blew down Lake Lindeman’s six-mile length, so Bill rigged up a canvas sail and off they sped, with Bill shouting, “This is sport!” More hard work lay ahead—a portage to Bennett Lake, then a thirty-four-mile tramp across the lake’s frozen surface until they reached the far shore, then across Caribou Crossing to Tagish Lake. By now it was May 1, and the big melt had begun. “I guess the worst is over for a time,” announced Joe, who decreed they would spend the next couple of weeks building a boat to take them the rest of the journey.

  Several other parties had decided to do the same thing, so there was a jolly community camped by the lakeside. “We did not lack for company.” At first, Bill tried to help Joe work on their vessel, but Joe lost patience with Bill’s clumsy carpentry and happy chatter. He preferred working by himself. For the next ten days, Bill teamed up with some of the other prospectors to hunt for ptarmigan and rabbit. He tramped across spongy muskeg and over icy streams, chasing birds that were still in their winter white plumage and rabbits stringy from lack of food. “We would have lived like epicures,” he liked to joke, “if I [had] made fewer disastrous experiments in cooking.” Soon, the hairy stems of purple pasqueflowers were poking through the snow, and mountainsides were covered in forget-me-nots, Dutchman’s breeches, alpine geraniums, and harebells. The temperature rose and the days grew longer. The honking of geese heading north filled the air, and water gurgled under the moss and fell in lacy cascades from bare peaks. Joe hammered away at a sturdy, sharp-nosed, blunt-sterned little vessel, paying little heed to Bill’s exuberant tales of encounters with moose and bears. Soon it was time to move on.

  The churning waters of White Horse Rapids claimed dozens of lives during the Klondike Gold Rush.

  There was still a long way to go. The men’s destination was Circle City, Alaska, 600 miles farther north, just below the point where the surging Yukon River crossed the Arctic Circle. Circle City, in the spring of 1896, was the center of the gold diggings. The men floated down the upper reaches of the Yukon River in their Tar Stater. (In a flash of patriotism, Joe had named their boat after his home state of North Carolina, a major producer of tar.) The first of many obstacles was Miles Canyon, where the river squeezed between looming granite cliffs and water poured through the rapids with a roar that could be heard for miles. Next came the notorious White Horse Rapids, where the white foam on towering waves curled like a horse’s mane. The Tar Stater was nearly swamped at several points here, and the partners then lost a large part of their supplies farther downriver, in Squaw Rapids. Even Bill’s nerve faltered as they were swept along in the heaving torrent. “Joe, we’re goners sure,” he screamed at his partner as the waters suddenly dropped nine feet, and the men shot through standing waves and dense spray. Somehow, they survived—unlike many others. Once through, the partners hugged each other silently, in feverish relief. Then, with the resilience of youth, Bill forgot his terror. “Standing on the bank in safety, the eye is charmed by the waters that leap and foam around the highly-colored rocks. You may watch it for hours and turn away with regret.”

  The river was in spring flood and Joe and Bill made rapid progress across the thirty-one-mile length of Lake Laberge, then past the mouths of numerous salmon rivers, through the surging Five Finger Rapids and the churning Rink Rapids. Where the Pelly River joined the Yukon River, they saw the tumbledown traces of Fort Selkirk, an old Hudson’s Bay Company post. By now the river was racing: it took them only a
day to travel over a hundred miles to the mouth of the Stewart River, where they saw a dilapidated trading post on an island, and farther on, at Sixtymile River, a lumber mill. A few miles beyond that, they noticed on the right the big rock slide and the river they had learned was called the Tr’ondëk. Ignoring the Hān fishing village at the mouth of the Tr’ondëk, they paddled on toward Forty Mile, a trading post on the Canadian side of the Alaska-Yukon border that served trappers, prospectors, and the native communities. It had acquired its name because it was forty miles north of Fort Reliance, an abandoned trading post about six miles downriver from the mouth of the Tr’ondëk River.

  For weeks, the only human habitations that Joe and Bill had seen were a scattering of wooden huts and grubby tents. Bill expected Forty Mile to be little better than Fort Selkirk—a handful of ramshackle wooden buildings with a few greasy-hatted prospectors smoking their pipes on the bench outside the store. So when the Tar Stater rounded a bend in the river and the trading post came into view, he was astonished. There had been a settlement here since coarse gold had been panned on the Fortymile River in 1886, and by now it boasted nearly a hundred log buildings, including a sawmill, a couple of bakeries, and several black-smiths’ forges, restaurants, billiard halls, saloons, dance halls, and even a large, false-fronted barn of a building that declared itself to be the Opera House. Bill’s heart leaped. This, in his view, was “the vortex of white civilization on the Yukon.”

  Forty Mile gave Bill his first taste of mining culture in the North. Some of its aspects were familiar—Colorado mining camps had boasted muddy streets lined with false-fronted saloons and bars, resounding with the squeal of fiddles and plonking notes of honky-tonk pianos. But most of Forty Mile’s residents had left the Outside, as lands to the south were known, months if not years ago, and they were much, much rougher. In the Opera House, Bill watched haggard women in grubby satin gowns perform their tired routines. The bristle-chinned miners, who had spent months in isolated mining camps near Forty Mile, loved them—and paid dearly for female company. “It is one of the peculiarities of mining regions,” mused Bill, “that much of the gold goes to those who do not dig it.”

  Behind the Opera House, Bill was even more surprised to discover a small wooden chapel. At its door stood a tall, stooped, older man with little wire-framed glasses, a clean-shaven face, and a wooden cross hanging round his neck outside his thick “parky” jacket. This curious character in sealskin boots and a fur-trimmed hood was far too frail to be a prospector. A fellow miner told Bill that this was Father Judge, a Jesuit priest who had been in the North for years. The priest rarely smiled, yet he radiated a gentle benevolence that was a startling contrast to the grim resolve on the faces of most Arctic veterans. Bill, who had inherited his parents’ Presbyterian distrust of Papists, gave a polite nod to Father Judge, then quickly walked on.

  It was now late June, and the creeks around Forty Mile overflowed with miners. Joe had heard rumors of new strikes near Circle City in Alaska, 170 miles farther north. Prospectors were converging on the remote trading station downstream like crows round carrion. Joe wanted to join the rush. So the two men quickly replaced the provisions they had lost in the rapids, pushed off from Forty Mile’s muddy wharf, and paddled the Tar Stater back into the Yukon’s fast-flowing current.

  Circle City was an even bigger surprise than Forty Mile. The largest log city in the world, in 1896 its residents claimed that it was the Paris of the North. Its twenty-eight saloons and eight dance halls made Forty Mile look like a village. When Bill and Joe approached the Circle City wharf, they were greeted by “a cosmopolitan crowd of men and women from everywhere in North America, a sprinkling of dirty Indians, and a crowd of howling dogs.” Under the midnight sun, men hung around telling stories, playing cards, or drifting into the saloons to watch one of the burlesque shows. In the most remote region of North America was a thriving community of over a thousand people including, to Bill’s astonishment, “respectable families . . . People talked glibly of the coming metropolis of the Yukon.”

  Two years later, Bill would recall Circle City with nostalgia. “No one could have imagined a livelier place of its size. Neither could anyone in the busy place anticipate that within a year it would be as dead as a door post—almost a silent city.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Mob Justice and Wild Dogs, June-September 1896

  DURING HIS FIRST SUMMER in the North, Bill Haskell quickly learned that life there was different—very different from the humdrum predictability of his existence up to now. This was a region through which were scattered uncounted aboriginal people, about a thousand ornery prospectors scrabbling for gold and, as yet, no police forces, courts, or lawyers.

  Bill’s first taste of this came when he observed a “miners’ meeting,” the informal institution through which justice was dispensed. For years, prospectors in Alaskan mining camps had organized these get-togethers when squabbles erupted. Such meetings, in this remote corner of North America, were captured in phrases the miners loved, such as “rough justice” and “brotherhood of the North.” Everybody could attend, hear each side of the story, and then vote on the outcome. But a miners’ meeting was accorded fearsome powers: it could hang a man, give him a divorce, imprison, banish, or lash him.

  Bill had blundered into a miners’ meeting in Forty Mile. In his book, he vividly describes the ill-lit saloon in which it took place, and the brutal way the men spoke to each other. Most of the participants were swilling back rotgut whiskey that tasted like carbolic acid, and the air was thick with tobacco smoke and male sweat. The case involved a French Canadian known as French Joe. En route from his claim on a remote creek to the trading station, Joe had agreed to a neighbor’s request to deliver some gold dust to a man called Dick Robinson. But when French Joe arrived in Forty Mile and presented Robinson with two ounces of gold dust, Robinson had objected that he was owed three ounces. French Joe indignantly replied, “I don’t know for dat. He gif me two hounce—der she was. Dat’s all I know.” (With his novelist’s ear, Bill delighted in catching the accents and slang his fellow prospectors used when he recorded events like this.) Robinson demanded a miners’ meeting, knowing that his burly fellow Americans would easily outnumber everybody else. Sure enough, the majority decided that French Joe probably stole the third ounce, and should therefore make it up himself, pay the costs of the meeting, and buy a round of drinks for everybody present.

  Was French Joe lying? Had he stolen an ounce of gold? Bill Haskell had an innate sense of fairness and an instinctive revulsion for mob rule. The Forty Mile residents had already hanged at least two Indians, on suspicion that they had committed a murder. As the dejected and impoverished French Canadian miner left the saloon, Bill hurried to catch up with him and hear his side of the story again. It seemed to him that French Joe was a pretty straight fellow who had just tried to do a friend a favor. Their chat confirmed Bill’s suspicions and left a sour taste in his mouth. Miners’ meetings, he decided, were too easily manipulated by men who depended “less on their hands and muscles than their wits.”

  Bill’s next lesson in northern living came a few days later, when he and Joe moored the Tar Stater close to the wharf at Circle City. He had already noted the packs of short-haired, ravenous dogs that roamed through northern mining camps, barking and howling: he wondered why nobody shot them. Now he learned how cunning they were. After a long night in the saloons picking up gossip about the creeks, Joe and he made their way back to their vessel. “While we were away the dogs had swum out to our boat, chewed off the rope by which it was held, and dragged it ashore. There they tore open every sack of provisions we had . . . They had even chewed up some of the flour sacks and the dishrag, the flavor of which was undoubtedly agreeable to them.” The two men groaned as they surveyed the ransacked remnants of their supplies and calculated their losses.

  Yukon old-timers had no sympathy for the mess the dogs had made of Joe’s and Bill’s outfit. It was the newcomers’ fault for not being
smarter. They should have done what everybody else did—put their provisions in a cache and suspended it out of reach of the snapping jaws of the dogs. Everyone knew that a sled dog, which would generally be fed dried fish only once a day, would steal anything edible it could reach: its own leather harness, a piece of bacon out of a boiling pot of beans, a man’s hat. Sled dogs’ thievery was never held against them. Two good dogs could haul up to 600 pounds on a trail and run twenty-five miles in six hours. They might howl all night and steal food, but they could save your life. They were so precious that many owners provided their faithful animals with buckskin moccasins to prevent their paws from being ripped raw by ice. “Everyone who gets along well in Alaska,” Bill noted grimly, “must have a proper understanding of dogs.”

  Joe Meeker did not want to waste a moment hanging around Circle City’s saloons. Birch Creek and its tributaries, some distance from town, were full of possibilities; Joe told Bill “that the creeks will continue to pay well for five years.” But Bill was intrigued by this booming settlement and decided to stick around and earn some money, building log cabins. Privately, he thought a few weeks away from Joe would be a relief: his partner was a fine fellow, but he was so goddamn serious. And Circle City was fun, with its lively mix of Norwegians, Swiss, French and English Canadians, Germans, Irish, Scots, French, Russians, and Americans. Despite their different backgrounds, these men shared particular characteristics—restlessness, independence, a trust in luck, and an incurable credulity. Hope and privation glued them together, and although Bill recognized they were a tough crowd, he felt at home among them.