The Klondike Fever: The Life And Death Of The Last Great Gold Rush

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Text originally published in 1958 under the same title.

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Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

THE KLONDIKE FEVER: THE LIFE AND DEATH OF THE LAST GREAT GOLD RUSH

BY

PIERRE BERTON

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 7

DEDICATION 8

PRELUDE 11

1 11

2 12

3 17

4 20

5 27

CHAPTER ONE 32

1 32

2 38

3 43

4 45

5 50

CHAPTER TWO 53

1 53

2 56

3 58

4 60

5 64

6 69

CHAPTER THREE 73

1 73

2 75

3 77

4 81

5 89

6 92

7 99

CHAPTER FOUR 106

1 106

2 108

3 109

4 113

5 118

CHAPTER FIVE 123

1 123

2 127

3 132

4 134

5 136

6 139

CHAPTER SIX 143

1 143

2 145

3 149

4 158

5 162

6 167

CHAPTER SEVEN 171

1 171

2 174

3 178

4 182

CHAPTER EIGHT 187

1 187

2 189

3 192

4 194

CHAPTER NINE 200

1 200

2 205

3 207

4 212

5 220

6 224

CHAPTER TEN 230

1 230

2 233

3 235

4 238

5 243

6 248

CHAPTER ELEVEN 252

1 252

2 253

3 256

4 262

5 265

6 269

7 273

8 277

CODA 284

1 284

2 292

3 296

A NOTE ON SOURCES 299

BIBLIOGRAPHY 306

UNPUBLISHED MATERIAL 306

GOVERNMENT DOCUMENTS, CANADA 306

Canadian Sessional Papers 306

GOVERNMENT DOCUMENTS, UNITED STATES 307

Books 307

PAMPHLETS 314

NEWSPAPERS 314

PERIODICALS 315

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 317

DEDICATION

To my father,

Who crossed his Chilkoot in 1898,

and to my son,

who has yet to cross his

All the names mentioned in this narrative are real names.

All the events here listed actually occurred; nothing has been invented. All the speech is reproduced, to the best of the author’s knowledge, as it was actually spoken.

All my life, he said, "I have searched

for the treasure. I have sought it in the high

places, and in the narrow. I have

sought it in deep jungles, and at the ends

of rivers, and in dark caverns—and

yet have not found it.

"Instead, at the end of every trail,

I have found you awaiting me. And now

You have become familiar to

me, though I cannot say I know you

well. Who are you?:

And the stranger answered: Thyself.

—From an old tale

PRELUDE

We are the Pilgrims, master; we shall go

Always a little further: it may be

Beyond that last blue mountain barred with snow,

Across that angry or that glimmering sea.

White on a throne or guarded in a cave

There lives a prophet who can understand

Why men were born: but surely we are brave

Who take the Golden Road to Samarkand.

—James Elroy Flecker: Hassan

1

It was the river that fashioned the land, and the river that ground down the gold.

Long before natives or white men saw it, the river was there, flowing for two thousand miles from mountain to seacoast, working its slow sculpture on valley and hillside, nibbling away at the flat tableland heaved up by the earth’s inner turmoils before the dawn of history.

The main stream had a thousand tentacles, and these reached back to the very spine of the continent, honing down the mountainsides into gullies and clefts—boulder grating on boulder, gravel grinding against gravel, sand scouring sand, until the river was glutted with silt and the whole Alaska-Yukon peninsula was pitted and grooved by the action of running water.

No mass could withstand this ceaseless abrasion, which lasted for more than five million years. The rocks and metals that had boiled up through fissures in the earth’s crust succumbed to it and were shaved and chiseled away. Quartz and feldspar, granite and limestone were reduced to muds and clays to be borne off with the current toward the sea, and even the veins of gold that streaked the mountain cores were sandpapered into dust and flour.

But the gold did not reach the sea, for its specific gravity is nineteen times that of water. The finest gold was carried lightly on the crest of the mountain torrents until it reached the more leisurely river, where it sank and was caught in the sandbars at the mouths of the tributary streams. The coarser gold moved for lesser distances: as soon as the pace of the current began to slacken, it was trapped in the crevices of bedrock where nothing could dislodge it. There it remained over the eons, concealed by a deepening blanket of muck, while the centuries rolled on and more gold was ground to dust, while the watercourses shifted and new gorges formed in the flat bottoms of old valleys, while the water gnawed deeper and deeper, and the pathways left by ancient streams turned the hillsides into graceful terraces.

Thus the gold lay scattered for the full length of the great Yukon River, on the hills and in the sandbars, in steep ravines and broad valleys, in subterranean channels of white gravel and glistening beds of black sand, in clefts thirty feet beneath the mosses and on outcroppings poking from the grasses high up on the benchland.

There was gold on a dozen tributary rivers and a hundred creeks which would remain nameless and unexplored until the gold was found; taken together, they drained three hundred and thirty thousand miles, stretching from British Columbia to the Bering Sea. There was gold on Atlin Lake at the very head of the Yukon River, and there was gold more than two thousand miles to the northwest in the glittering sands of the beach on Norton Sound into which the same river empties. There was gold on the Pelly and the Big Salmon and the Stewart, majestic watercourses that spill down from the Mackenzie Mountains of Canada to the east, and there was gold on the great Tanana, which rises in the Alaska Range on the southwest. There was gold in between these points at Minook and at Birch Creek and on the frothing Fortymile.

Yet, compared with a wretched little salmon stream and its handful of scrawny creeks, these noble rivers meant little. For in the Klondike Valley gold lay more thickly than on any other creek, river, pup, or sandbar in the whole of the Yukon watershed—so thickly, indeed, that a single shovelful of paydirt could yield eight hundred dollars’ worth of dust and nuggets. But white men sought gold along the Yukon for a generation before they found it.

2

The Russians were the first on the river, in 1834, but they cared not a hoot for gold; no more than the natives who had given the river its name of Yukon, meaning The Greatest. Even before the river was discovered, whispers of gold in Russian America had reached the ears of Alexander Baranov, the rum-swilling Lord of Alaska, who ruled the peninsula from the island bastion of Sitka. But Baranov, garnering a fortune in furs for his Czarist masters against an incongruous background of fine books, costly paintings, and brilliantly plumaged officers and women, was not anxious for a gold rush. When one of the Russians babbled drunkenly of gold, so legend has it, the Lord of Alaska ordered him shot.

The Hudson’s Bay Company traders heard tales of gold, too, when they invaded the Yukon valley at mid-century, but paid them no heed, for furs to them were richer treasure. They built Fort Yukon at the mouth of the Porcupine, where the great river makes its majestic curve across the Arctic Circle, and they built Fort Selkirk some six hundred miles upstream at the point where it is joined by the somber Pelly, and they did not know that both forts were on the same watercourse. Nor did they know, at the time, that their Union Jack, flying over Fort Yukon, was deep in foreign territory; the land was remote, the boundaries hazy, and the geography uncertain.

But they knew of the gold and did nothing. Robert Campbell, one of the company’s most industrious explorers, found traces of it at Fort Selkirk, but the discovery intrigued him not at all. And sixteen years later another clerk, stationed at Fort Yukon, wrote laconically of gold in a letter home to Toronto: On one small river not far from here the Rev. McDonald saw so much gold that he could have gathered it with a spoon. But Archdeacon McDonald was intent only on translating prayerbooks for the Crooked-Eye Indians, and, as for the Hudson’s Bay clerk, he had often wished to go but can never find the time.

Nor was he ever to find time, for the great company, driven from Fort Yukon by the Americans and from Fort Selkirk by the Chilkoot Indians, packed up and retreated behind the rampart of the Mackenzie Mountains. There were others, nonetheless, who had the time and the burning inclination to look for gold. Alaska was purchased by the United States from Russia in 1869, and there were many who saw the new territory not only as a virgin land to conquer but also as a wilderness to which a man could flee. The newly acquired frontier was shaped like a kitchen pot: a long strip of coastal land, aptly named The Panhandle, attached to the main body of the peninsula, bordered the Pacific territories of British Columbia. In 1880, at a point midway down this Panhandle, hardrock gold was discovered and the mining town of Juneau sprang up. And to Juneau came the wanderers and the adventurers, the Indian-fighters and the frontiersmen, men from all over the American west who could not sit still. Juneau, in its turn, served as a springboard to Alaska and the Canadian Yukon. Thus was completed a northward osmosis that had been going on since the rush to California, a kind of capillary action that saw restless men with pans and picks slowly inching their way along the mountain backbone of North America from the Sierras to the Stikines, up through Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, and Idaho, leaving behind names like Leadville, Deadwood, Pike’s Peak, Virginia City, Cripple Creek, Creede, and Tombstone; up through the wrinkled hide of British Columbia, through the somber canyons of the Fraser and the rolling grasslands of the Cariboo to the snowfields of the Cassiars, at the threshold of the sub-Arctic.

The prospectors came first in twos and threes with little more than a rucksack, a gold-pan, a short-stemmed shovel, and a phial of mercury, living on beans and tea and bacon, men fleeing ahead of civilization. Whenever they struck it rich a circus parade of camp-followers crowded in upon them, saloon-keepers and hurdy-gurdy girls, tinhorn gamblers and three-card monte men, road agents, prostitutes, vigilantes, and tenderfeet. Sylvan valleys became industrial bees’ nests, meadows were transformed into brawling shacktowns; the sighing of the wind and the roaring of the river were drowned by the tuneless scraping of dance-hall violins and the crash of butchered timber, until it came time to move on to the next divide and to seek new valleys beyond unnamed mountains. And so, like the forward patrols of a mighty army, the first prospectors reached the last frontier and began, in the seventies and eighties, to infiltrate the Yukon Valley.

The Yukon is unique among rivers in that it rises fifteen miles from the Pacific Ocean and then meanders for more than two thousand miles across the face of the north, seeking that same salt Pacific water. Starting as a trickle in the mountain snowfields that feed the green alpine lakes, it pushes insistently through barriers of basalt and conglomerate on its long northwestern quest. On it flows, now confidently, now hesitantly, until it attains the rim of the Arctic. Here it falters, as if unsure of itself, vacillates momentarily on the Circle’s edge, changes its mind, turns in its tracks, and, with new-found assurance, plunges southwestward, defying every obstacle until, with the goal in sight, it spreads itself wide in a mighty delta and spends itself at last on the cold waters of Norton Sound across from the easternmost tip of Siberia. It seems an awkward, roundabout way for water to travel, but without the odd tilting of the interior plateau, which produces this phenomenon, without the long and seemingly aimless coil of the great river, there would be no highway into the heart of Alaska.

So with the river, so with the men who sought her gold. They too arrived by circuitous routes, sometimes with faltering pace, sometimes with cocksure step, on a quest that often seemed as fruitless as the river’s but which, in the final assessment, was crowned with unexpected fulfillment.

They crept in upon it from three sides, these first gold-seekers:

In 1873 Arthur Harper came in from the interior of northern Canada traveling north and west from the Peace and Mackenzie river valleys in a wide flanking movement.

In 1878 George Holt pushed directly in from the seacoast through the Chilkoot Pass, the only known gap in the armored underbelly of Alaska.

In 1882 Ed Schieffelin went around to the Bering Sea opposite Siberia and moved up the long water highway of the Yukon River itself.

Harper was the first of this trio, an Irishman with a square face, shrewd eyes, and a great beard that later turned snow-white and gave him the look of a frontier Charles Evans Hughes. Gold had drawn him north on the stampedes to the Fraser and the Cariboo in the fifties and sixties. Here, staring at his Arrow-smith’s map of British North America, Harper asked himself why, if the run of gold stretched from Mexico to British Columbia, it should not continue north beyond the horizon. Beyond the horizon he went, with five gallons of strong rum and five cronies, pushing down the Peace River in canoes hacked out of cottonwood poplar trunks, following the line of the mountains on their great northward curve across the Arctic Circle and into Alaska. Twenty-five years later thousands would follow in his wake, on the same vain errand.

For two thousand miles Harper and his companions paddled and prospected, tracking their boats across the mountain divides, until at last, in 1873, they reached the Yukon River at its midpoint, where it curves across the Circle. For the next quarter-century the river was Harper’s highway; he roamed it, seeking the will-o’-the-wisp in every tributary stream, testing the gravels, panning the sandbars, always hoping to find the treasure, yet never succeeding. The gold was under his nose, but he missed it. He explored four rivers that later yielded fortunes—the Stewart, the Fortymile, the Tanana, and the Klondike—but he did not make the longed-for discovery. When he died, in 1897, it was too late. The stampede had started and there was gold to be had by the shovelful, but Arthur Harper was an old man by then, worn out from tuberculosis, slowly expiring in the Arizona sunlight.

Nor did George Holt, the first man through the coastal mountains, find gold on the Yukon, though he sought it as fiercely as Harper. He is a vague and shadowy figure, scarcely more than a name in the early annals of Alaska, but he is remembered for a remarkable feat: he was the first white man to penetrate the massive wall of scalloped peaks that seals off the Yukon Valley from the North Pacific Ocean. These mountains were guarded by three thousand Indian sentinels, and how he got past them no man knows.

In the alpine rampart that Holt conquered, the shrieking winds had chiseled a tiny notch. It could be reached only after a thousand-foot climb up a thirty-five-degree slope strewn with immense boulders and caked, for eight months out of twelve, with solid ice. Glaciers of bottle green overhung it like prodigious icicles ready to burst at summer’s end; avalanches thundered from the mountains in the spring; and in the winter the snow fell so thickly that it could reach a depth of seventy feet. This forbidding gap was called the Chilkoot Pass, and Holt was the first white man to set eyes upon it. Because it was the gateway to the Yukon Valley, the Chilkoot Indians guarded it with a jealousy bordering on fanaticism.

They were men of immense cunning and avarice, these Indians, squat and sturdy and heavy-shouldered and able to lug a two-hundred-pound pack across the mountains without rest. They were a crude, cruel race with Mongolian features and drooping Fu Manchu mustaches, who existed on a diet of dried salmon, a pungent concoction that one explorer described as tasting like a cross between Limburger cheese and walrus hide. They reserved for themselves all trade with the Stick Indians of the interior, whom they held in virtual bondage; and they had even driven the powerful Hudson’s Bay Company from the upper river by burning Robert Campbell’s Fort Selkirk in 1852.

Yet Holt somehow ran the gantlet of this tribe, scaled the pass, and penetrated into that dark land where the Yukon had its beginning. In 1878 he emerged with two small nuggets which an Indian from Alaska had given him, and his tales, embroidered by his own imagination, excited the interest of the men at Sitka, the Panhandle capital, which was teeming with the backwash of the Cassiar rush. Twenty prospectors, protected by a U.S. gunboat, debarked at Dyea Inlet not far from the foot of the Chilkoot, and here, after firing a few blank rounds from a Gatling gun, they convinced Chief Hole-in-the-Face that the pass should be opened.

In this summary fashion was the dam broken; each year, from 1880 onward, the trickle of men crossing the divide increased. The Indians did not suffer by this invasion, for they charged a fee to pack the white men’s outfits across the mountains, and they always exacted what the traffic would bear, so that by the time of the Klondike stampede the price had reached a dollar a pound. Thus, without ever sinking a pan into the creekbeds of the Yukon, the canny Chilkoots became rich men.

Holt, having breached one barrier, moved west to wilder land and tried to add to his exploits by invading the copper country of the Chettyna. The Indians there had three murders to their credit when Holt tried to slip through. Poor Holt made the fourth.

Meanwhile, those who had followed in his wake had begun to find the flour gold that lay in the sandbars of the Yukon, and rumors of these discoveries filtered down through the Rocky Mountain mining camps of the western United States until in 1882 the stories reached the ears of a gaunt scarecrow of a prospector named Ed Schieffelin.

This was no penniless gold-seeker. In the Apache country of Arizona, Schieffelin had discovered a mountain of silver and founded the town of Tombstone, where Wyatt Earp had already completed his bloody tryst with the Clanton brothers at the O.K. Corral. He was worth one million dollars, but his appearance belied his wealth, for his beard and his glossy black hair hung long and ringleted and his gray ghost-eyes had the faraway look of the longtime prospector. He had panned gold as a toddler in Oregon, and had run off at the age of twelve to join a stampede, and in the ensuing generation had been in almost every boom camp in the west. Now he was intent on repeating his Arizona success in Alaska. He, too, had studied the maps and arrived at an enchanting theory: a great mineral belt, he thought, must girdle the world from Cape Horn to Asia and down through the continental divide of North America to the Andes. Somewhere in Alaska this golden highway should cross the Yukon Valley, and Schieffelin meant to find it. The spring of 1883 found him and a small party at St. Michael, the old Russian port on the Bering Sea just north of the Yukon’s mouth, aboard a tiny steamboat especially built to penetrate the hinterland.

The expedition puffed slowly around the coast of Norton Sound and into the maze of the great delta, where the channels fanned out for sixty-five miles and the banks were gray with alluvial silt; where long-legged cranes stalked the marshes; where the islands had never been counted; where a man could lose himself forever in half a hundred twisting channels. At this point they were more than two thousand miles from the Chilkoot Pass, which Holt had crossed five years before.

Out into the river proper the little boat chugged—into a land of terraced valleys, sleeping glaciers, and high clay banks pocked by swallows’ nests and bright with brier rose and bluebell. Here was an empty domain of legend and mystery. In London, globes of the world were still being issued showing the Yukon River flowing north into the Arctic Ocean instead of west into the Bering Sea. And there were stories told—and believed—of prehistoric mammoths that roamed the hills with jets of live steam issuing from their nostrils, and of immense bears that prowled the mountain peaks in endless circles because their limbs were longer on one side than on the other.

To Schieffelin, the broad Yukon seemed to wind on endlessly, tawny and cold, gnawing through walls of granite and wriggling past mountain ranges, spilling out over miles of flatland at one point, trapped between black pillars of basalt at another. Occasionally a pinpoint of civilization broke the monotony of the gray-green forestland—the old Russian missions at Andreifski, Holy Cross, and Nulato, or the solitary totemic figures on the riverbank that marked the Indian graves. For a thousand miles the steamer struggled against the current, penetrating deeper and deeper into unknown country, past Burning Mountain, a perpetually smoking seam of coal; past the Palisades, fortress-like cliffs of rock that guard the Tanana’s mouth; and finally into the brooding hills known as the Lower Ramparts, where the river channels were gathered into a single rustling gorge.

Here, poking about among the mosses and the rocks, Schieffelin found some specks of gold and was convinced that he had stumbled upon the mineral belt he believed encircled the earth. But already there was frost in the air, and the prospector, accustomed to the fierce Arizona sun, became discouraged by the bleakness of the Arctic summer. He concluded that mining could never pay along the Yukon, and he retraced his course without exploring the remainder of the long waterway, which drifted back for another thousand miles to the gateway of the Chilkoot. And so, as it had eluded Harper and Holt, the gold of the Yukon eluded the gaunt Schieffelin, who for all the remainder of his life never ceased to prospect and was, indeed, still seeking a new mine when he died of a heart attack in front of his cabin in the forests of Oregon. The year, by then, was 1897, and the world was buzzing with tales of a fortune to be found in that inhospitable land he had dismissed as frozen waste.

3

For five years after Schieffelin’s departure the Yukon Valley maintained a primeval silence. Small groups of prospectors continued to dribble over the Chilkoot Pass to test the bars along the headwaters, but the main river was virtually untraveled for eighteen hundred miles. The only boats upon its surface were those of the natives and of the occasional free trader working on a commission for the Alaska Commercial Company, the lineal descendant of the old Russian-American Fur Company.

Arthur Harper was one of these. Frustrated in his attempts to find his fortune in the shifting sands of the tributary creeks, he had taken to bartering tea and flour for furs. Thus his memory endures in the north, for he was one of a trio of traders who helped to open up the Yukon Valley for the prospectors who followed.

The two men who joined forces with Harper had arrived the same year that he did, in 1873, but by a different route. They were a Mutt-and-Jeff combination, one a lean, wiry little thong of a man, the other a six-foot giant with a barrel chest. The little man’s name was Al Mayo; he was a onetime circus acrobat driven north by wanderlust, given to practical jokes and blessed with a dry wit. In his later years he used to remark that he had been in the country so long that when he first arrived the Yukon was a small creek and the Chilkoot Pass a hole in the ground.

The big man’s name was LeRoy Napoleon McQuesten, but everybody called him Jack. His florid features were marked by a flowing blond mustache and his temperament by that same restlessness which was a quality of almost every man who made his way north in the days before the Klondike strike. He had been a farmer in Maine and an Indian-fighter in the west and a gold-hunter on the Fraser, but, just as Harper was a frustrated prospector, McQuesten was a frustrated voyageur. He had wanted so badly to be one of these strange forest creatures that he gave himself a course in physical training so he might perform the incredible feats of strength and endurance for which the voyageurs were noted. Then he had signed on with the Hudson’s Bay Company in the Athabasca country, only to discover, to his chagrin, that he could not sustain the crushing two-hundred-pound loads his French-Canadian companions hoisted so easily on their backs. So he had moved on, drifting across the mountains into the Yukon Valley, where he and Harper and Mayo became partners.

For more than fifteen years these three were alone with the land, the river their private thoroughfare. They could roam for a thousand miles without seeing another white face, and, indeed, McQuesten once recalled that he went for six years without tasting flour. They took Indian wives, but in no sense did they resemble the squawmen, who were looked down upon by their fellows. The traders did not live like Indians; their wives and families lived like whites in handsome homes of square-cut logs, with neat vegetable gardens at the rear. The wives were partners in the true sense, and the dusky children were sent out to be educated in private schools in the United States. Years later, when McQuesten retired, he took his Indian wife to California, where she became the mistress of a big home in Berkeley; and when he died, she managed his estate and became the head of the family.

The country changed these men. Restless they had been, but over the long decades they developed a serenity of temperament that became the envy of all who encountered them. Frederick Schwatka, a U.S. cavalry officer who was the first man to explore the Yukon River for its full length, came upon McQuesten in 1883 and watched in admiration as the trader bargained for hours with Indians, unruffled through the endless palaver that would have put Job in a frenzy. McQuesten and his colleagues never presented a bill for an outfit, and they were seldom short-changed. Once when a cargo of goods arrived and a group of miners became impatient for provisions, Harper told them simply to help themselves, keep their own accounts, and hand them in at their leisure. The only discrepancy was six cans of condensed milk.

The trio’s first post of Fort Reliance became the focus for future river settlements. Several neighboring tributaries took their names from the distance that separated them from the post. Thus the Fortymile River and the Twelvemile were named because they joined the Yukon that distance downstream from Fort Reliance, and the Sixtymile was so called because it was sixty miles upstream from the fort. Later on, the towns established at the mouths of these rivers took the same names. It is curious that this first river settlement should have been established a scant six miles from the mouth of that stream which came to be called Klondike, for, although they hunted and prospected along its valley, none of the partners was destined to grow wealthy on Klondike gold. Nor, on the other hand, did they die in poverty as others were to do. When the madness struck they kept their heads, and when they died it was with the respect of every man who had known them.

Without these three men and a fourth named Joseph Ladue, who arrived a decade later, the series of events that led to the Klondike discovery would not have been possible. Without the string of posts they set up along the Yukon, the systematic exploration of the river country could not have taken place. They guided the hands of the prospectors, extending almost unlimited credit, sending them off to promising sections of the country, and following up each discovery by laying out a townsite and erecting a general store. Their little steamboat, the New Racket, which they had purchased from Schieffelin, was their lifeline to the outside world. Their arrangement with the great Alaska Commercial Company in San Francisco was a casual one. In the early years they were on its payroll, but remained free to prospect if they wished. Later they operated as independent contractors, buying their goods from the company but trading on their own.

Sometimes they worked together, as partners; sometimes separately. There were other traders scattered along the river working under similar arrangements with the A.C. Company—but it was Harper, McQuesten, and Mayo, far more than the others, who were responsible for the mining development of the Yukon.

It is not always realized that a series of smaller gold rushes into the Yukon Valley took place before the Klondike stampede, and that Dawson City was preceded by several mining camps that sprang up along the river in the ten years before the great strike. The gold along the Yukon was placer gold, or free gold—gold that had long since been ground into dust and nuggets and so could be mined by any man with a shovel and a pan and a strong back. It is more immediately rewarding than hardrock or vein gold since it requires no large resources of money and machinery to wrest it from the earth.

By 1886 some two hundred miners had crossed over the Chilkoot Pass and gradually worked their way three hundred miles down the Yukon to the mouth of the Stewart River, on whose sandbars they panned out, in a single year, one hundred thousand dollars’ worth of fine placer gold. At once McQuesten and his colleagues built a trading post at the Stewarts mouth, and, sensing that the human flow would increase, McQuesten left for San Francisco to order more supplies from the Alaska Commercial Company.

That winter Harper persuaded two prospectors to try the waters of the Fortymile River, which joined the Yukon another hundred miles farther downstream. Here they found the gold that had eluded Harper, and it was good coarse gold that rattled in the pan, the kind that every miner seeks. With a fickleness that distinguishes the true gold-seeker, the men along the Stewart deserted their diggings and flocked to the new strike. Harper, in a panic, saw what was coming: as soon as the news leaked back up the river and across the mountain barricade to the outside world, men by the hundreds would tumble over the peaks and pour down to the new diggings on the crest of the spring torrents. But there was not food enough in the land to supply this horde; he must get word out to McQuesten to increase his order or there would be starvation along the Yukon.

Harper felt like a man in a soundproof prison. To all intents, the interior of the northwest was sealed off from the world by winter. The nearest point of civilization was John Healy’s trading post on Dyea Inlet on the far side of the Chilkoot. In between lay an untraveled wilderness which few men had negotiated in winter. Who would carry Harper’s message?

The volunteer was no hardened musher, but a steamboat man named George Williams, who with an Indian companion set off on a terrifying journey. On the two men plunged for five hundred miles, over the hummocks of river ice and the corpses of fallen trees, through the cold jungles of the Yukon forests, and up the slippery flanks of the mountains. By the time they reached the Chilkoot their rations had petered out and their dogs were dead of cold, hunger, and fatigue. At the summit of the pass a blizzard was raging, and travel became impossible. They clawed a cave out of the snow and crouched in it, their faces, fingers, and feet blackened by frostbite, their only sustenance a few mouthfuls of dry flour. When this ran out, the Indian hoisted the exhausted Williams onto his back and stumbled down the slope of the pass until he could carry him no farther. Then he dropped him into the snow and staggered on until he reached Sheep Camp, a longtime halting-point on the edge of the tree line. It was March 1887 by this time, and a group of prospectors, camped in the lee of the mountains waiting for the storm to abate, watched in astonishment as the figure of the Indian loomed out of the swirling snow. They followed him back up the mountainside and helped bring Williams down and revive him with hot soup. The Indian borrowed a sled and dragged his companion twenty-six miles down the trail to Dyea Inlet. Here the two finally reached the shelter of the trading post run by a onetime Montana sheriff named John J. Healy. Williams lived two days, and the men who crowded around his deathbed had only one question: why had he made the trip?

The Indians answer electrified them. He reached into a sack of beans on Healy’s counter and flung a handful on the floor. Gold, he said. All same like this!

4

Along the high bank at the point where the Fortymile River joins the Yukon, a weird and lonely village straggled into being as a result of George Williams’s dying message. It was named Fortymile after the river, and its remoteness from the world can scarcely be comprehended today, for it existed eight months out of twelve as if in a vacuum, its residents sealed off from the world. The nearest outfitting port was San Francisco, almost five thousand water miles distant, and the only links with the sea were two cockleshell sternwheelers, the New Racket and the Alaska Commercial Company’s Arctic, built in 1889. These boats seldom had time to make more than one summer trip upstream from the old Russian seaport of St. Michael, near the river’s mouth on the Bering Sea. On her maiden voyage the Arctic was damaged and unable to bring supplies to Fortymile. The A.C. Company sent Indian runners sixteen hundred miles to the settlement to warn the miners that no supplies would be forthcoming, and that they must escape from the Yukon Valley or starve. As the October snows drifted down from the dark skies, the Fortymilers pressed aboard the New Racket, and the little vessel made a brave attempt to reach St. Michael before the river froze. She was caught in the ice floes one hundred and ninety miles short of her goal, and the starving passengers had to continue the journey on foot. Those who remained at the community of Fortymile spent a hungry winter: indeed, one lived for nine months on a steady diet of flapjacks.

The only winter route to the outside world was the grueling trek upstream to the Chilkoot, more than six hundred miles distant. After Williams’s death it was seldom attempted. Four men who tried it in 1893 were forced to abandon fifteen thousand dollars in gold dust on the mountain slopes and were so badly crippled by the elements that one died and another was incapacitated for life.

Who were these men who had chosen to wall themselves off from the madding crowd in a village of logs deep in the sub-Arctic wilderness? On the face of it, they were men chasing the will-o’-the-wisp of fortune—chasing it with an intensity and a singleness of purpose that had brought them to the ends of the earth. But the evidence suggests the opposite. They seemed more like men pursued than men pursuing, and if they sought anything, it was the right to be left alone.

Father William Judge, a Jesuit missionary in Alaska, described them as men running away from civilization as it advanced westward—until now they have no farther to go and so have to stop. One of them, he discovered, had been born in the United States, but had never seen a railroad: he had kept moving ahead of the rails until he reached the banks of the Yukon. They were Civil War veterans and Indian-fighters, remittance men from England and prospectors from the far west. Many of them had known each other before in the Black Hills, or the Coeur d’Alene country of Idaho, or in the camps of Colorado. They were nomads all, stirred by an uncontrollable wanderlust, which seized them at the slightest whisper of a new strike, however preposterous. They were men whose natures craved the widest possible freedom of action; yet each was disciplined by a code of comradeship whose unwritten rules were strict as any law.

They were all individuals, as their nicknames (far commoner than formal names) indicated: Salt Water Jack, Big Dick, Squaw Cameron, Jimmy the Pirate, Buckskin Miller, Pete the Pig. Eccentricities of character were the rule rather than the exception. There was one, known as the Old Maiden, who carried fifty pounds of ancient newspapers about with him wherever he went, for, he said, they’re handy to refer to when you get into an argument. There was another called Cannibal Ike because of his habit of hacking off great slabs of moose meat with his knife and stuffing them into his mouth raw. One cabin had walls as thin as matchwood because its owner kept chopping away at the logs to feed his fire; he said he did it to let in the light. Another contained three partners and a tame moose which was treated as a house pet. Out in the river lay Liar’s Island, where a group of exiles whiled away the long winters telling tales of great ingenuity and implausibility.

Fortymile, in short, was a community of hermits whose one common bond was their mutual isolation.

I feel so long dead and buried that I cannot think a short visit home, as if from the grave, would be of much use, wrote William Bompas, a Church of England bishop who found himself in Fortymile. A Cambridge graduate who could read his Bible in Greek, Hebrew, and Syriac, he was the fourth son of that same London advocate on whom Dickens had modeled his Serjeant Buzfuz in Pickwick Papers. His predecessor had been driven to literal madness by the practical jokes of the miners, but Bompas was far too tough for that—a giant of a man with a high dome, a hawk nose, piercing eyes, and the flowing beard of a Moses. He baked his own bread, eschewed all dainties, drank his sugarless coffee from an iron cup, ate from a tin plate with a knife his only utensil, slept in the corner of a boat or a hole in the snow or on the floor of a log hut, and allowed himself no holidays. His only furniture was a box which he used for a seat; he had torn down shelves, cupboard, and table to make a coffin for a dead Indian because lumber was so scarce. And he thought nothing of making a present of his trousers to a pantless native and mushing home in his red flannels.

For almost half a century he lived in isolation, and he was resigned to it. When his wife joined him at Fortymile in 1892, they had not seen each other for five years. She was the daughter of a fashionable London doctor, and had been brought up in Italy. On those dark winter afternoons when she was not on the trail with her husband, she sat quietly in the mission hall with its cotton-drill walls, reading her Dante in the original or—if the keys were not frozen stiff—playing her little harmonium.

This ecclesiastical existence was no more primitive than that of the miners at Fortymile. Each man lived with his partner in a murky, airless cabin whose windowpanes were made from untanned deerhide, white cotton canvas, or a row of empty pickle jars chinked with moss. Cutlery was fashioned from pieces of tin, furniture constructed from the stumps of trees. Four men often lived year in and year out in a space about eighteen feet square. Above the red-hot sheet-iron stove there always hung a tin full of fermented dough, used in place of yeast to make bread, biscuits, and flapjacks rise. This was the origin of the name sourdough which was applied to the pioneers of the Yukon to distinguish them from tenderfeet or cheechakos, as the Indians called them.

Men moved from their fetid cabins by night into murky, constricted mine shafts by day. Mining in the sub-Arctic is unique because the permanently frozen ground must be thawed before the bedrock can be reached; it is this bedrock, ten, twenty, and even fifty feet below the surface, that contains the gold. At first the miners let the sun do the work. This was a long, laborious process: a few inches of thawed earth were scraped away each day, and an entire summer might pass by before the goal was attained. Soon, however, wood fires replaced the sun. The goldseekers lit them by night, removed the ashes and the thawed earth in the morning, then lit a new fire, burning their way slowly down to form a shaft whose sides remained frozen as hard as granite. This method allowed miners to work all winter, choking and wheezing in their smoky dungeons far below the snow-covered surface of the ground as they tunneled this way and that seeking the pay streak which marked an erstwhile creek channel. The paydirt thus obtained was hoisted up the shaft and piled in a mound, known as a dump. In the spring, when the ice broke on the creeks and water gushed down the hillsides, the miners built long spillways or sluiceboxes to counterfeit the ancient action of nature. The gravel was shoveled into these boxes and, as the water rushed through, was swept away. But the heavier gold was caught in the crossbars and in the matting on the bottom, as it had once been caught in the crevices of the streambeds. Every two or three days the water was diverted from the sluicebox as each miner panned the residue at the bottom in what came to be known as a clean-up. The various stages in this process had been arrived at by trial and error over the years, since the days of ‘49 in California; in the Yukon Valley they reached their greatest refinement.

The entertainments that lightened this monotony were scanty and primitive. One of the main amusements, apart from the saloons, was a folk rite known as the squaw dance. Josiah Edward Spurr, a U.S. government geologist who visited Fortymile in the nineties, has left a description of one of these affairs:

"We were attracted by a row of miners who were lined up in front of the saloon engaged in watching the door of a very large log cabin opposite, rather dilapidated with the windows broken in....They said there was going to be a dance, but when or how they did not seem to know....

"The evening wore on until ten o’clock, when in the dusk a stolid Indian woman with a baby in the blanket on her back, came cautiously around the corner, and with the peculiar long slouchy step of her kind, made for the cabin door, looking neither to the right nor to the left....She was followed by a dozen others, one far behind another, each silent and unconcerned, and each with a baby upon her back. They sidled into the log cabin and sat down on the benches, where they also deposited their babies in a row: the little red people lay there very still, with wide eyes shut or staring, but never crying....

"The mothers sat awhile looking at the ground on some one spot, then slowly lifted their heads to look at the miners who had slouched into the cabin after them—men fresh from the diggings, spoiling for excitement of any kind. Then a man with a dilapidated fiddle struck up a swinging, sawing melody and in the intoxication of the moment some of the most reckless of the miners grabbed an Indian woman and began furiously swinging her around in a sort of waltz while the others crowded and looked on.

"Little by little the dusk grew deeper, but candles were scarce and could not be afforded. The figures of the dancing couples grew more and more indistinct and their faces became lost to view, while the sawing of the fiddle grew more and more rapid, and the dancing more excited. There was no noise, however; scarcely a sound save the fiddle and the shuffling of the feet over the floor of roughhewn logs; for the Indian women were as stolid as ever and the miners could not speak the language of their partners. Even the lookers on said nothing, so that these silent dancing figures in the dusk made an almost weird effect.

One by one, however, the women dropped out, tired, picked up their babies and slouched off home, and the men slipped over to the saloon to have a drink before going to their cabins. Surely this squaw-dance, as they call it, was one of the most peculiar balls ever seen....

This aboriginal background appeared all the more bizarre behind the thin varnish of civilization that began to spread over the community as the years passed. There were saloons that contained Chippendale chairs; and stores that, when they sold anything, dispensed such delicacies as pâté de foie gras and tinned plum pudding. There were Shakespeare clubs formed to give play-readings, and a library whose shelves contained books on science and philosophy. There was a dressmaker with the latest Paris fashions, and an opera house with a troupe of San Francisco dance-hall girls, and even a cigar factory, all housed in log buildings strewn helter-skelter along the mudbank above the Yukon and surrounded by intervening marshland littered with stumps, wood shavings, and tin cans.

The social life of the camp revolved around ten saloons, which at steamboat time served whisky at fifty cents a drink (heavily watered to make it last) and the rest of the year peddled hootchinoo, a vile concoction compounded of molasses, sugar, and dried fruit, fermented with sourdough, flavored with anything handy, distilled in an empty coal-oil can, and served hot at fifty cents a drink. It was sometimes referred to as Forty-Rod Whisky because it was supposed to kill a man at that distance. By the peculiar etiquette of the mining camp, a