Gold Diggers_Striking It Rich in the Klondike Read online

  A log cabin was a palace for a man who had lived in a tent for months, struggling to stay fairly clean despite the mud and dirt.

  So the partners separated. Joe packed up his tent, gun, and provisions and headed out of town. Bill started work for the sawmill owner and learned how to construct a log dwelling that would keep the cold out in the winter and the mosquitoes out in the summer. Soon he was stripping and notching logs, laying beams to make walls to the height of six feet, hammering wooden pegs into roof logs to support a gable four feet high, constructing a roof of split poles, and finally, covering the poles with a thick layer of earth for insulation. A cabin like this required forty-eight logs plus several sacks of moss for chinking. Properly finished, Bill liked to boast, “such a dwelling is a palace on the Yukon.” In late August, Bill Haskell decided to see how his partner was doing and take him some provisions. He had to walk close to a hundred miles, asking miners along the way if they knew where Joe Meeker had claimed, before he found the remote creek on which Joe had pitched his tent. Along the way, he passed gurgling creeks with names like Birch, Deadwood Gulch, Miller, Eagle, Greenhorn, Preacher, and (thanks to the bones found near it) Mastodon Creek. It was hard going: the ground was either squelchy with mud or dusty with rocky boulders. The scenery was some of the least interesting of the whole river course: swampy, flat, and featureless. Bill struggled through muskeg, swatting away the whining clouds of mosquitoes that settled on his mouth, up his nose, in his hair. Relentlessly upbeat, he bragged, “I made fair time over the rough trail.”

  Along the way, Bill realized that these Arctic regions had spawned a new kind of placer mining. Up here, creeks and rivers were solid ice at least half the year, and under the surface of the ground soil there was a layer of permafrost, or permanently frozen soil. The paydirt, where you might find gold, was buried deep below frozen layers of moss, decayed vegetation, clay, sand, and other muck. How could a prospector even begin to pan for gold when the ground was, in Bill’s words, “a solid, compact, adamantine mass”?

  The first prospectors to reach the Yukon valley had tried to break up the ground with pickaxes, and then with dynamite. Their efforts didn’t budge the frozen earth. Then they tried lighting fires to thaw the ground, shoveling off the ashes and any melted gravel when the fire was spent, then waiting for the sun to melt the next layer. But this was still irritatingly slow, and even during the brief arctic summer, the sun’s warmth rarely penetrated much below the earth’s surface. Undeterred, the miners continued to experiment. By the time Bill strode through the diggings surrounding Circle City, they had developed open fires into a year-round process. They would pile logs where they wanted to sink shafts, light bonfires, and allow them to burn all night. The following day, prospectors could shovel out the ashes and almost a foot of thawed muck. Over each shaft, a windlass was erected with which to pull buckets of muck and gravel to the surface. Eventually, a prospector’s shaft might reach a layer of loose stones that he hoped was paydirt. He would pan a couple of shovel-loads, looking for nuggets or gold dust. If there was nothing but gravel, he would have to start all over again on some other spot. But if there was gold, he would start digging, or “drifting,” horizontally underground, in the direction in which he hoped the pay streak went. Most men worked in pairs, with one partner below ground and one above.

  In Yukon mines, shafts did not have to be cribbed with beams and pillars because the frozen muck was hard as granite.

  If the miner was lucky, as winter progressed, two large piles would slowly grow next to his shaft. One would be useless muck. The other would be the paydirt that contained gold. It was unbelievably hard, dangerous work, involving far more digging than panning. Men fell down shafts, breaking limbs, or wrecked their backs lifting heavy loads. Men working at the top of shafts, hauling up buckets of muck, were exposed to wind, snow, and cold, and risked snow blindness and frostbite. Below the surface, if a tunnel collapsed when a miner was “drifting,” he would be buried alive. There was the constant risk of asphyxiation by smoke or methane gas in the tunnels. And during the long winters, the miners suffered all the ailments triggered by bitter cold and malnutrition—bronchitis, pneumonia, stomach flu, scurvy, diarrhea, toothache, fever, and pleurisy.

  Throughout the winter, a thick pall of smoke hung in the frigid air. When miners weren’t burrowing underground or hauling up buckets, they were cutting trees for firewood. Once spring came and streams began to flow, miners would start washing out the piles of paydirt dumped to the sides of their shafts. Like hawks, they would watch for nuggets or dust, desperately hoping that the payoff would make them rich. It was an uncertain future if no gold emerged.

  At Birch Creek, Bill stopped to watch some of the miners washing their paydirt. Some used rockers: wooden boxes with two filters at the bottom. The first filter, made of sheet metal, had quarter-inch holes in it; this filter separated out all but the nuggets, gold dust, and tiniest pieces of gravel. The second filter was a heavy wool blanket, which caught the gold but let the water drain. “Having put some paydirt in, with one hand the miner rocks the cradle,” explained Bill, “and with the other he pours in water . . . At intervals the blanket is taken out and washed” so the gold could be collected. This technique, Bill realized, was the cheapest method of harvesting the gold, but it was also the slowest and most labor intensive.

  There was a second, faster method. Miners who could afford to buy milled lumber would build sluice boxes—a series of wooden boxes that slotted into each other like the joints of a telescope. Strips of wood known as riffle bars were placed across the bottom of the boxes, and then the sluice boxes were positioned so that the streams that came rushing down the hillsides, fed by melting snow, flowed through them. This could happen only from late June to mid-September on the Yukon, but Bill saw plenty of action as he hiked along. Miners were dumping shovel-loads of gravel into the sluice boxes, so that the water would carry away the muck while any particles of gold would sink and collect between the riffle bars.

  Once built, sluice boxes required less labor than panning or rocking, but tending them was still backbreaking work.

  Once there was a pile-up of material behind the riffle bars, the miners would stop the flow of water for the “clean-up.” A couple of old guys had struck lucky: they bragged that they were cleaning up $1,000 of gold dust every day. They made it all sound so easy—but Bill looked at their lined faces, bloodshot eyes, and bent backs, and he knew that it wasn’t. They had only ten weeks to collect this valuable harvest, after nine harsh winter months of burning, digging, shoveling, hauling, and dumping. For years before that, these two miners had just scraped a living from one poorly producing claim after another. Now they were going to take their newfound wealth to the saloons and gaming tables of Circle City and get themselves a good time. And chances were, mused Bill, that they would be poor men again before the onset of the next winter.

  Bill delivered the provisions to Joe, who had cleared the brush off his claim and was now hell-bent on digging throughout the winter. By the spring of 1897, Joe told Bill, he, too, would have a pile of paydirt speckled with gold dust. But Bill had a hard time getting excited about the prospect. All that Joe could talk about was digging, drifting, and dirt. Bill’s spirit faltered as he noticed how Joe’s shoulders were already slumped with fatigue and the lines in his face were etched with dust. He looked at Joe’s campsite a few yards from the creek—the cramped little tent, cache of dried food hanging in a tree, litter of empty tin cans, ash-filled firepit. From where he stood, he could see only one other tent; otherwise, he thought, there was no one between him and the North Pole. In the clear, late summer air, the surrounding hills glowed green and gold with spruce and birch. All too soon, frosts would leach the color out of the scenery.

  The partners couldn’t do much until the land froze again—if they started digging any earlier, the holes would just fill with water. And much as he lusted after gold, Bill still yearned to see more of this vast, mysterious terrain, which dwarf
ed the scattered trading posts and Indian villages. He wasn’t ready to settle down just yet. Instead, he decided to work as a deckhand on one of the handful of shallow-bottomed steam paddle-wheelers that spent each summer on the Yukon River. In the spring, the vessels started their voyage at the desolate little port of St. Michael, just north of the mouth of the Yukon River on the Bering Sea, with its stink of rotting fish and its rusty Russian cannon. The steamers carried booze, provisions, traders, and rookie miners upstream to the mining camps, and then turned round and delivered exhausted prospectors and any gold they had accumulated to the coast. The season was so short that most boats completed only two or three round trips each year.

  Bill Haskell made the 2,000-mile round trip from Circle City to St. Michael and back again, and decided to stay on the paddle-steamer as it continued upstream to Forty Mile. He arrived there in mid-September, and was taken aback. Instead of dozens of boats jostling for space to tie up at the riverbank, as there had been when he visited ten weeks earlier, there were only a couple of old wooden rafts. Nobody rushed out to greet the new arrivals. No smoke rose out of the log saloon chimneys, no music spilled out of the dance hall doors. The almost abandoned settlement looked particularly depressing under a gray sky and intermittent drizzle. There was already a chill in the air, and nighttime frosts had turned the handful of vegetable gardens into clusters of drooping, blackened plants. Most of the cabins were not just deserted: they were missing doors and walls as though they had been hastily torn apart. The settlement he had called the “vortex of white civilization on the Yukon” had become a ghost town.

  Bill and the steamer captain scanned the scene and noticed one saloon where an oil lamp in the grimy window and a wisp of chimney smoke hinted at life inside. They disembarked from the steamer, walked over to it, pulled open the door, and stared at the handful of surly, red-cheeked drinkers inside the smoky room. This was not the cream of the prospecting crop. Many had homemade crutches lying on the floor next to them, others were bleary eyed, and all displayed the grim exhaustion of miners who had lost faith in Lady Luck. Harry Ash, the proprietor, greeted them laconically. “What happened?” asked Bill. Harry was soon launched on a story that centered on an intense Canadian loner called Robert Henderson and an amiable Californian called George Carmack.

  Although Bill had never met Robert Henderson, he had often heard stories about the tall, lean figure with a hawk nose and burning eyes. The son of a Nova Scotian lighthouse keeper, Henderson had drifted into Alaska in 1894, after years of unsuccessful gold digging in both the southern and northern hemispheres. He spent the next two years combing the Yukon River and its tributaries for nuggets. While Bill Haskell was getting to know Alaska’s Circle City in the summer of 1896, Henderson had been exploring a series of tributaries that flowed into the Yukon closer to its source. Henderson’s prospecting activities were financed, or “grubstaked,” as it was known in northern lingo, by another well-known figure in the North: a trader called Joseph Ladue. Bill Haskell immediately recognized Joe Ladue’s name when he heard it, and remembered his reputation for being “full of grit, industry, honesty and determination.” Ladue was a canny entrepreneur who ran the lumber mill at Sixtymile River, where he sold the staples of a miners’ life—sluice box lumber, picks and pans, and provisions. His fortune would be made if anybody found gold near his sawmill, so he was eager to see the river’s upper reaches opened up. Grubstaking Henderson could pay off for him.

  With Ladue’s help, Henderson had spent months beating paths through the swamps, tangled moose pastures, rank grasses, and rock falls of the region around Indian River. He had stumbled across streams, waded through creeks, poled himself along rivers, and scrambled up and down gulches. He had endured in drafty cabins for two winters, and covered himself in bear grease against the blackfly for two springs. Indian River yielded nothing much; a tributary named Dominion Creek was equally disappointing. Looming over the area was a big hill, known as King Solomon’s Dome. One day, Henderson climbed it and just beyond the peak found an uncharted creek flowing in the opposite direction. He walked a little way along it, then bent down and collected a panful of water, swirled it, and saw color. This looked like such a good prospect that Henderson named the creek “Gold Bottom” because, he said later, “I had a daydream that when I got my shaft down to bedrock it might be like the streets of the New Jerusalem.” Within a few weeks, he had taken out $750 worth of gold—a small fortune.

  Sitting in the Forty Mile bar, Bill Haskell gasped at these figures, and leaned forward to hear what came next. By late July, Harry Ash continued, Henderson’s provisions were running short. So he set off to restock in Forty Mile. Once he reached the Yukon River, Henderson had drifted along in the rapid current, rounded a bend and seen the Hān fishing camp on the mudflat where the Tr’ondëk emptied into the river. Henderson called into the camp and found an old comrade from Californian mining days: George Washington Carmack. Carmack was what American prospectors called a “squawman.” He had taken up with a woman from the Tagish people, and spent more time with her family than with his fellow Americans. At the mouth of the Tr’ondëk, Carmack was fishing for salmon with his wife, Shaaw Tláa, known as Kate to Carmack; Kate’s brother, Keish, whom Carmack liked to call Skookum Jim; and Keish’s nephew, Káa Goox, nicknamed Tagish Charlie. They had hung their catch to dry over a smoldering fire, and the smell of dried fish, destined to be dog food, hit Henderson as he pulled up to shore.

  It was tough to spend a winter digging out paydirt, and even tougher if no color showed at the bottom of the pan.

  The version of the Tr’ondëk strike story that Bill heard in the Forty Mile bar was the one that quickly became a Klondike legend. “It is one of the articles of the miner’s code that he shall proclaim all discoveries made by him as soon as possible,” Bill wrote later in his memoir. Collaboration between miners was often the only way they could survive, and it might also guarantee you company on a creek. So Henderson told Carmack that he thought Gold Bottom Creek had potential. Then, with a dismissive comment to Carmack’s Tagish companions, he carried on downriver to Forty Mile. Carmack and his party decided to test out Henderson’s tip because the fishing was slow. They struggled up one of the creeks that flowed into the Tr’ondëk, then branched off across a ridge that, they assumed, divided the creek from Henderson’s Gold Bottom. There was no trail. The group forced its way across fallen trees and through impenetrable underbrush and thickets of wild raspberry bushes. “It was a rough, agonizing journey,” according to Bill’s account, “but Carmack and his Indians were hardened to such conditions.” They didn’t mind the mosquitoes or the steep climbs; they were used to having to wade up to their thighs in rushing, ice-cold water. But Carmack was not impressed by Gold Bottom, and decided to return to fishing.

  On the way home, Carmack’s party passed a stream known as Rabbit Creek. As Bill heard the story, Carmack pulled out his pan and got to work on the exposed bedrock. Carmack hoped for perhaps ten cents’ worth of gold. The first panful yielded an incredible four dollars’ worth, or close to a quarter of an ounce. The find was not just miraculously rich. It was also amazingly easy to reach: a thick layer of raw gold lay between flaky slabs of schist rock, like cheese in a sandwich. “In a few moments,” Bill was told, Carmack had “panned out twelve dollars and seventy-five cents worth of gold,” including a couple of fine nuggets. Carmack had carefully tipped the nuggets and gold dust into an empty cartridge shell and whittled a piece of wood down to fit as a cork. Then he staked his claim according to the mining rules that every prospector had committed to memory. He hammered stakes into a rectangle of land 500 feet by 500 feet, then attached to one of the stakes a notice stating his name, the number of the claim, and the date of the notice: August 10, 1896. Carmack’s claim, as the first on the creek, became the “Discovery Claim.” As the discoverer, he was entitled to another claim for himself, so he staked “No. 1 below” in his own name and “No. 2 below” for Charlie. The first claim upstream, “No. 1 abov
e,” he gave to Jim. To ensure that they all secured their claims, they now had to get to the nearest mining recorder’s office—in this case, a new police post at Forty Mile—as fast as possible and pay $2.50 for each one.

  Sitting in the dingy, half-deserted bar at Forty Mile only two months later, Bill Haskell heard how Carmack and his pals had burst into the trading post and gleefully displayed the contents of his cartridge shell. At first, they met a wall of skepticism: Carmack did not have a great reputation as a prospector, and many of the Americans distrusted a man who had “gone native,” as they called it. But the nuggets were real enough: a couple of the men described to Bill the size and weight of them. Moreover, old-timers could look at a nugget and know from its shape, color, and purity which creek it came from. Carmack’s gold came from no source they recognized. The audience stopped jeering and agreed that he had to have found them somewhere.

  Was this really how the great Yukon Gold Rush started? Was George Carmack the first person to find gold on a tributary of the Klondike River? Different stories have emerged in the years since Bill Haskell sat in that Forty Mile bar and heard the account that was rapidly enshrined in Yukon folklore. Most versions propose that George Carmack was asleep when the gold was found. One aboriginal account suggests that Carmack’s Tagish relatives killed a moose in the area and saw gold glinting in a stream near the carcass. Then there is the version spread by Patsy Henderson, younger brother of Káa Goox, who years after the event told an interviewer that Skookum Jim had gone to the creek to get a drink of water, seen gold there, and called out, “George! Come down here. Bring down gold-pan and shovel.” Yet another version suggests that Carmack’s wife, Shaaw Tláa, probably made the discovery while she was rinsing dishes in the creek. The common theme to these stories is that Carmack was too lazy a fellow to have panned himself, but he took the credit because, as he told his brother-in-law, nobody would believe a Tagish man. Shaaw Tláa, doubly disadvantaged by being both Tagish and a woman, was quickly written out of the tale. Carmack’s party had then failed to send a message to Henderson about the find because, the story went, the surly Nova Scotian had treated the Tagish people rudely.